Literary Haunts
Literary Haunts
Sean O’Hare
On Formative Texts and the Memory of Place
The date is nowhere near the Bloomsday celebrations of June 16th (we’re well into crisp days by now)—still, I purchase my €1.90 Metro ticket, descend the steps to the labyrinth below Parisian streets and begin my odyssey across town. The train rocks me back and forth while I scan the article detailing the story of a treasured novel’s publication, how it almost simmered into literary oblivion, how it was revived again in the very place to which I’m making my pilgrimage. I stayed in the neighborhood on previous trips but was ignorant of the literary ghosts that stalked those streets. Now, I know what I’m looking out for—or at least I think I do.
After my aboveground transfer to a bus that takes me the final leg, I alight along Boulevard Saint-Germain beneath a gesturing Danton and turn left into the familiar network of estuary streets—this time continuing where I’d normally have turned off, straight up Rue de L’Odéon to number 12. Finally, at the holy site, I’m greeted with some garbage bins and a work van blocking the view. I’m turned around at first, uncertain of which address precisely is the one I’m searching for. There’s no tourist pomp or signage here to tell the pilgrim, emphatically, “here is your shrine, here is where the thing took place.”
The only person around to assure me that I’ve arrived where Sylvia Beach held court in 1920s Paris, where the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce loafed and chatted or borrowed books, is the workman who looks bemusedly at me, points to the number that hovers high above the street, and promptly stalks away. The window display doesn’t give me any indication that here, in this very building one hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses first found its way into the world as a unified, singular book. I sit down on the outside ledge of the window and scan through the pdf copy on my phone. A few feet from where the novel first came to life, I read the opening paragraphs, portions from the middle, and finally settle into the closing pages of Molly Bloom’s remarkable stream-of-consciousness recital.
*
There are three words that conclude Joyce’s novel. They have, nothing whatsoever to do with the narrative concerns of the novel, or at least that’s how it seems. They are simply three place-names: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris" followed by the dates “1914-1921.” Here, Joyce grounds the text’s creation in specific places at a unique period of historical time. (He does this too in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) What is the reader to make of this, if they even note it after the mountainous heap of words they have just encountered? Is one supposed to simply ignore it, to treat it as a meaningless sign-off tacked on to the main literary event? Or, alternatively, is the decision to conclude on such a geographical note—hiding in plain sight—more than just a flourish? What does this tell us about the text’s original production, and, perhaps more importantly, how we are to approach it now that we are aware it has made its way to us from Trieste, from Zurich, and from Paris? Should this change our perception of the artistic object in our hands?
Joyce is explicitly preoccupied, after all, with informing us that it was these three places, at this specific time in history, from which the novel sprang into the world. Knowing this fact does not grant a comprehensive knowledge of the text, of course; still, perhaps neglecting the imprints of these places on the text blinds us to something fundamental about what they are, and what they are trying to say to us, inhabiting other places and other times.
This geographical/textual relationship becomes all the more fascinating when one notes the place-name Joyce leaves out: “Dublin.” Indeed, not a single word of the novel—obsessed as it is with rendering the Irish city on June 16th, 1904 as accurately and comprehensively as possible—was written within its borders. The “exile” that Joyce’s literary alter ego Stephen Dedalus has spoken of at the end of Portrait has come true, and has had a major hand in shaping the production of this novel about Dublin, away from Dublin. From this arises a simple, profound realization: the entire novel expresses nothing less than a complex and sustained Herculean effort of memory. Joyce did not peer out his window to write “wheels rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway,” but drew from his own deeply ingrained recollections of Dublin’s streets, buildings and people for such textured reminiscences of the city which shaped and made him who he was.
If it is possible to hold the memory of places within us, such that we can reproduce them and render them anew as an aesthetic object, is it not possible that these places themselves hold memories of us? That, as they pour something of themselves into us, we leave behind something of ourselves as well? Is this why pilgrims like me come to long neglected, long forgotten bookshops to sit awkwardly on window ledges and read place-names at the end of novels—to catch something of the word’s truest nature that we missed in the text but might find in the street?
*
In one sense, I’m trying to say something quite simple: often, we find ourselves standing in these places of literary, artistic or spiritual genesis, not quite knowing exactly why we have arrived there. I have felt this pull quite strongly over the years and suspect that I’m not the only one. Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, presents pilgrimage not as a matter of conscious deliberation, but as bound up naturally with the processes of springtime, the generative forces which simply arise from the motions of the world: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote… Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth… Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” The pilgrimage and the new year are two expressions of the same thing for Chaucer. Still, today, spring makes its appearance every year and human creatures migrate to these artistic, historical sites.
Take a more modern instance: one grumpy reviewer gives Abbey Road one star on Trip Advisor, claiming it is “the most dangerous piece of the road.” “The tourists,” they write, “are desperate to recreate the Beatles cover and disrupt the traffic to the point where someone is going to get killed.” Irate local griping aside, there is actually something quite serious and quite metaphysical playing out every day on that famous crosswalk. These tourists are quite literally risking their lives, not simply to take a photo, but to place themselves inside an aesthetic frame and hope that they come into focus. The site is a palimpsest of memory, from which they draw some lingering experience outward, into which they attempt to pour something of themselves.
*
Sometimes, like unwittingly visiting Parisian neighborhoods near the old Shakespeare and Co., you live and move in a place, make and map it as your own, only to later discover its literary, historical substrates. You have been inhabiting a text or a whole network of texts unawares.
In the spring of 2018, I moved to the South Wedge neighborhood of Rochester, New York after having grown up just outside the city limits. Over the months that followed, as I walked and drove the local streets, I began noticing memorials, plaques and statues commemorating and representing the Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. I had always vaguely known about his connection to my city growing up, but never paid it the attention it deserved. Now that I was living there, seeing firsthand the impressions he had left, I discovered that this same neighborhood was where he had lived for many years. Soon I began to read his earliest memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. His gravesite lay in Mt. Hope Cemetery a few blocks from my house, a site which I began to visit on many occasions. Here, I would bring up some passage from his Narrative; passages about his desire for escape from the things that kept him captive where he was in Maryland and about his desire to be somewhere else, somewhere North of the Chesapeake Bay.
One day, while listening to David Blight’s recently published biography of Douglass’s life, I heard how people up North had also betrayed him because of the color of his skin. That day, as I walked by the very place that Douglass had once lived with his family, hosted the likes of John Brown before his raid on Harper’s Ferry, and conducted escaped slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, Blight described how that same home was burned in a racist attack. I listened with shame how my city had pushed him out with their hatred and destroyed the life he and his wife Anna Murray Douglass built. These texts did not provide me with an easy answer: the site of the ravaged house was a mere few blocks from the very site where Douglass chose to be buried. Both physical locations were within a few minute’s walk of each other, both told a remarkable, complicated story of racism, hatred, Black resilience and support. It was a story I was learning to read more closely by inhabiting, with a particular attention to my own ongoing implication in its outcomes.
*
Other times the memories encoded in a text lead us to seek out the physical locations they are concerned with. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, looking back as an old man, wrote about his childhood in Portland, Maine in the poem “My Lost Youth.” Years ago, I had felt drawn to the poem and committed it to memory. In doing so, I felt a kindred connection forming with the place. I had never visited before, but it also wasn’t entirely true that I’d never been. The poem existed in Portland and the poem was in me.
Finally, in 2020, my partner and I drove up northeast to Portland to spend a few days exploring the city with the poem as our guide. We identified the places that it spoke of, the “black wharves and the slips,” the “fort upon the hill,” the “shadowy lines of its trees;” enjoying these realities through the poem’s prism. Sometimes, the evolution of the land jarred with its literary memory, pushed back against this outdated text: we found that the “fresh and fair” “Deering’s Woods” which Longfellow spoke of with a kind of sacred hush had become run down, overrun with birds and their defecation. The grass and the groves were largely untended. Although we could get close to it in some ways, imagining Deering’s Woods to be lovely some time ago, we could not fully inhabit its textual environs.
This half-overlapping, this simultaneous disparity and similarity, and this negative space between text and its physical memory is, in part, what keeps us coming back to these places. After all, the place where one of the most important books written in the last hundred years was published sits largely unnoticed on a quiet Parisian street, marked by a dilapidated wooden facade and bins on the pavement.
*
Earlier in the springtime of the same year as my later Joycean odyssey, I made another trip, this time to the Pantheon in Paris. Deep in the catacombs under its imposing dome, I’d taken an English copy of Les Misérables off the bookshelf provided for curious tourists and snuck it into the vault where Victor Hugo was buried. With tourists incessantly ducking in and out, I spent an hour reading one of my favorite novels beside the resting place of its author. I thought it fitting, sat as I was next to his coffin, to read from the scene in which Jean Valjean is nearly buried alive in the Père Lachaise Cemetery during his attempt to escape from the convent of the Petit-Picpus.
The next day I found myself in the same cemetery, to see and to feel how Hugo had brought this particular chapter to life from the brink of death. The entire time walking the lovely grounds—bursting with spring, wonderfully overgrown in places and brimming with stunning trees, vines, bushes and flowers—I recalled the events of the novel that took place here. I remembered the experience of reading beside Hugo’s resting place just the day before; imagined the writer walking the same paths that I was at that moment, envisioning to himself the dramatic moment of Jean Valjean’s burial and unburial, the one I’d read in that vault next to Hugo’s corpse. There were layers here—of text, of experience, of moving memory—that I could not quite unravel, that I have still not untangled even in the writing of them.
*
What I have perhaps been attempting to express through my kaleidoscopic anecdotes is a sense of the entanglement between places and texts, of the place’s existence as a physical monument of the words on the page, and alternatively the words as printed manifestations of the physical places they contain. When writer and place collide, both are changed indelibly. And it may be the case that pilgrims, like myself, looking in on this alchemical process, suspect that these places hold something within themselves that gave rise to the shape and the heft of the text itself, as if those locations are the site of some kind of rift between the physical and the metaphysical. Our journeys can be seen, then, as an attempt to uncover those fissures with our own eyes, to see if they are still there to compel us.
We arrive at these places not only to conjure their ghosts, but to also be conjured by them. I mean this word in the truest form of its use: to conjure is to draw or to call forth, to awaken, to ennoble the physical with an infusion of the metaphysical. Why else do we make these pilgrimages, if not to be acted upon in some way by these places, to see something in the words and in ourselves we’d never previously had the capacity for feeling? If we could account for their nature from afar, we would not wander close to fall under their sway. Instead, we draw close to inhabit the place through the text, and the text through the place, and to be inhabited more fully by both.
Sean O’Hare
Writer & Poet
Sean is studying English literature at the University of Cambridge. His essays have appeared online at Mere Orthodoxy, and his poetry in The Mays Anthology. He is interested in unearthing the best from the sometimes flawed traditions left to us.
Photography by Kayra Sercan