Chapter 2 - Urban Environs: James Joyce and the Politics of Shared Atmosphere

Summary

Chapter 2 follows the coal extracted from the countryside of rural England to arrive in the humming, phosphorescent, non-stop pulsation of the metropolis. Virginia Woolf’s argument for a writer’s need to control her own rest and living space in A Room of One’s Own provides a basis for analyzing how social action determines the built environment. In order to articulate the growing relation between industrial “exhaust” and physical “exhaustion,” the chapter turns to a discussion of “atmosphere” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Surveying the trajectory of environmental groups such as the Smoke Abatement League of Great Britain, I consider both the benefits and limitations to the primarily visual aesthetics that surrounded discussions of pollution. The rise of gasworks to create “clean,” smokeless fuels removed soot from the air but often poisoned workers and waterways. I outline a modernist aesthetics of atmosphere that is not primarily visual but proprioceptive. Atmosphere in its local and global, visible and invisible manifestations reveals the subtle interactions between personal and public spaces in the metropolis.