Benjamin, Joyce, and the Disappearance of the Dead

The idea of eternity has always had its strongest support in death. If this idea declines [. . . then] the face of death must have changed. It turns out that this change is identical with another - the one that has diminished the communicability of experience to the same extent as the art of storytelling has declined.-Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (1936)IIn Ulysses death is everywhere, immured in the present as memory, mourning, ritual, tradition, allusion, etymology, or simply the iterability that is the necessary condition of meaning. Indeed, consciousness seems to exist only as the fraught and ultimately futile attempt to hold back the impatient and ineluctable return of the dead - the "nightmare" of history from which Stephen is trying to awake. And when the guard of consciousness is down, as in Nighttown, the text stages a Judgment Day where "the dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many"([/ 526)However, if death pervades the text, it does not function to mark, as in T.S. Eliot, an immutable chthonic to set against the vagaries of historical time. It is important not to underestimate Joyce's figuring of death, for if the appearance of the dead invokes traditional modes of belief, the conditions of appearance are fundamentally modem. This modernity is perhaps nowhere so striking as in the Hades episode, where Bloom's profane imagination undercuts both the Catholic Latin of the Requiem mass and the Protestant English preferred by Tom Kernan. For Bloom, the promise of eternal life collapses in a heap of bones and scattered organs, at whose center sits the desacralized heart:A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood everyday. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. The last day idea. Knocking them all out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. (U 107)For all its comical ghoulishness, Bloom's outlook is not without pathos - as evidenced by his concern for Paddy Dignam's bereaved son ("Poor boy! Was he there when the father?") (U 104). Indeed, both empathy and irreverence can be understood as functions of that wider historical condition we have come to associate with the secularization of death, a condition which underlies Bloom's practical turn of mind. The same practical outlook that renders the heart a "rusty pump" pumping thousands of gallons a day ultimately finds its corollary in the technical description of the Ithaca episode:Did it flow?Yes. From the Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of £5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles. (U 591)Here we find those myriad tendencies that have come to define modernity: as the disenchantment of the world; as the subsumption of nature under the rule of equivalence in commodity production; as the age of the world picture and the advent of technology.The practical turn of mind fixes the visible and, by extension, the invisible within uniform spatio-temporal co-ordinates. Thus Bloom imagines an underground world "all honeycombed" with "oblong cells", muses on the fertility of "the soil [...] quite fat with corpse manure", and speculates that there would be "more room if they buried them standing up" (U 110). To the practical mind, the invisible is subject to the same laws that govern the visible, and in a sense we might identify a similar extrapolation from the sensory world to the supersensible in modernity. …