“The spirit moving him” (U 16.1456): Joyce’s Kardec

Joyce’s fascination with the dead and buried whom in his works he brings back to life so vividly is well known. His well-documented interest in the supernatural had clear backgrounds in his life in Dublin as a young man. At the same time, it can be seen as something he shared with many of his contemporaries. Arthur Conan Doyle and Yeats come to mind, but many others could be mentioned. Séances, ghost photography, plasmic communication: all were generally regarded as scientifically proven phenomena. Add to this the impact of famine memory on Irish writing as well as the whole-scale “dis-membering” of the First World War and the invocation of the supernatural in Joyce’s works becomes only natural.
One figure who is sometimes mentioned but has not been given due attention as a source for Joyce in this respect is Allan Kardec. This 19th-century French educator coined the term “spiritsme” to define man’s communication with the spirit world. Joyce owned a copy of Kardec’s La Genèse les miracles et les predictions selon le spiritisme (1868), and marked up a handful of shorter and longer passages in it. These passages as well as other writings by Kardec are worth looking into more closely than has been done thus far. The spirits in Ulysses, my research suggests, move in ‘Kardecian’ ways.