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Bruce Stewart, “James Joyce: Irish Modernist” - being a chapter in J. W. Foster, ed., Cambridge Companion to Irish Fiction (Cambridge UP 2007).
II: Joyce the Irishman Stephen’s sensitivity on the point might be seen as anticipating Joyce’s radical assault on standard English in Ulysses and the Wake. Sir Shane Leslie, an Anglo-Irish man of letters, wrote of the former that it was like a ‘Clerkenwell explosion in the well-guarded, well-built classical prison of English literature’, [3] while Joyce’s friend Arthur Power made a comparable observation about the man himself: ‘I realized that there was much of the Fenian about him […] a literary conspirator, who was determined to destroy the oppressive and respectable cultural structures under which we had been reared,’ [4] Others such as H. G. Wells, less friendly (and therefore less amused), speaking up for the liberal-progressive tradition in English letters, regarded Joyce as an anarchic force motivated by Catholic malice against Protestant civilisation. It was not Joyce’s political ideas so much as his attitude to language that threatened the English literary tradition. By means of a ludic approach to the primary stuff of literature itself, Joyce reveals the language of narration as a ‘discourse of power’ (in Michel Foucault’s phrase) pertaining to the cultural outlook of the dominant social group. It is this power-relation that Joyce eroded by constructing books from various ‘styles’ without intruding an authorial voice of his own. The effect, when carried to its logical conclusion, is to set the language of the text free to bear often contradictory meanings. This, for instance, is how Finnegans Wake is described in its own pages: ‘this Eyrawyggla saga [though] readable to int from and, is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this applies to its whole wholume’ [FW48], while, in another part we are told that ‘[t]he unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude’ [FW57]. If those irrational negations (‘unfacts’ and ‘imprecisely’) render the sentence unamenable to commonsense interpretation, they also reveal a fundamental distrust of language as the bearer of forensic truth—at least in Ireland. This distrust is tragically consistent with a colonial experience that made it impossible for any nineteenth-century Irish novelist to construct a univocal narrative which spoke equably for the society as a whole. Indeed, there was no society as a whole. The complexity of Joyce’s relationship with the English language is usefully conveyed by a further passage in the Wake: ‘Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!’ [FW12-13] This addresses the question whether the book is written in ‘the King’s English’ or an Irish version of the same and, if the latter, whether it is not in fact a downright counterfeit of the other. An apparent reference to St Peter’s pence further suggests that Joyce regards his revolution of the word as a kind of counter-Reformation, undermining the cultural hegemony of the Anglican Communion which ruled Ireland by means of the Penal Laws as well as the general climate of Protestant rationalism that gave rise to the English novel. A Swiftian undertone may possible be detected in the covert allusion to Wood’s halfpence, the subject of his Drapiers Letters (1724). Comparably, Joyce’s new literary coinage is, in effect, a challenge to the sovereignty of English. His postcolonial engagement in that matter is, however, a less obvious token of the influence of Irish race upon his work than the pervasive wealth of allusion to Irish texts (both printed and oral) in the novels themselves, as well as linguistic practices which are distinctly Irish, variously exemplifying ways of using English for the purposes of gossip, song, and story-telling, political oratory and patriotic dock-speeches, as well as for the self-consciously Irish poetics of the literary revival. Joyce’s youthful antipathy to the revival would supply him with numerous examples of brilliant and asinine excess for purposes of literary parody. At the same time it fortified his authority as a classicist among romantics in literary Dublin. In a college oration of 1902 Joyce theorized the difference between classical and romantic in terms of a cognate distinction between realist and idealist, writing that the ‘romantic school’ finds expression for its ideals under ‘insensible figures’ which later degenerate into ‘feeble shadows’ [CW74]—a fate that presumably awaits W. B. Yeats and “;AE” Russell no less than their English antecedents. In contrast to this, the ‘classical temper’ which he himself espouses is represented as a patient, elaborative art that ‘bends up […] present things and so […] fashions them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning, which is still unuttered’ [CW74]. Distinction would later serve to fuel Stephen Dedalus’s scornful criticism of the Platonist tendency among the literary revivalists in the “;Library” episode of Ulysses, ‘creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow’ [U238]. A year before that oration of 1902 he had had issued a pamphlet entitled “;The Day of the Rabblement” scourging the Irish Literary Theatre for its failure to act as the ‘champion of progress’ [CW70]. In it Joyce insisted that the business of the theatre was to produce the plays of the modern continental playwrights since even those of ‘the second rank’ could ‘write very much better plays’ than the Literary Theatre had yet has staged [CW70]. This was in keeping with his conviction that ‘a country which never advanced as far as the miracle play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad’ [CW70], a conviction that shortly afterwards led him into literary exile when he departed from Ireland with Nora Barnacle in 1904 after several preliminary trips to Paris in 1902 and 1903. In 1905-06, while settled in Pola as a language teacher, Joyce defined his position as an Irish author in a series of letters to Grant Richards, the London-based publisher of Dubliners (1916). Asserting at first the originality of his subject-matter, he wrote: ‘I do not think any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for a thousand years [and] is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire […]’. He then concluded blithely: ‘I think people might be willing to pay for the special odour of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories.’ [5] By May 1905, having met with objections to the realism of the stories, Joyce was still more forthright: ‘My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. […] I cannot alter what I have written’ [SL83]. In June he warned the publisher that he would ‘retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass’, before returning once again to the aroma of the collection: ‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs about my stories’—in a revealing repetition of the earlier phrase [SL89-90]. The appeal to authenticity in this last is an obvious hallmark of the kind of realist writer that Joyce aimed to be, but the assertion that Dublin had never been the subject of literary fiction was highly questionable since Irish novelists had been setting their scenes there since Maria Edgeworth’s Absentee (1812). More recently Somerville and Ross had opened The Real Charlotte (1894) with a snapsnot of Mountjoy Square that shares an awareness of the brown-brick houses ‘brow-beating’ each other across the intervening space with an opening sentence in Joyce’s “;Araby” set in nearby N. Richmond Street. Joyce was inclined to dismiss contemporary Irish writing as ‘ill-written, morally obtuse, formless caricature’, [6] but there was one work which certainly did not correspond to this description. In 1903 George Moore had published The Untilled Field (1903), a book that brought the method of French realism to the matter of Ireland for the first time. Yet Moore’s book was about rural Ireland in the main and Joyce was therefore right to place his emphasis on the place-name in the title: ‘The expression “;Dubliner”’, he told Richards, has a ‘meaning that such words as “;Londoner” and “;Parisian”’ simply don’t.’ [7] It is significant, however, that while he was writing Dubliners Joyce already formed the idea for another collection to be called Provincials [SL63], presumably dealing with the rest of Ireland and based on the trips he had made to Cork and Mullingar with his father. Though purely notional, this reveals his thinking about the relation between the capital to the country as a whole: Dublin, as he told Richards, had been chosen because it was ‘the centre of paralysis’ and a portrait of Dublin was therefore a portrait of Ireland. All the rest could comfortably be left to Moore; yet Moore’s Irish writings are sometimes seen as a precursor of Joyce’s nonetheless. The evidence of Joyce’s letters suggest that he had not, in fact, read Moore’s collection until after he commenced his own and, indeed, until after he had reached Pola in 1904 when he met with it in a European edition published in that year. [8] On reading The Untilled Field Joyce wrote to his brother of ‘that wretched book of Moore’s […] which the Americans found so remarkable for its “;craftsmanship”’, adding: ‘O, dear me! It is very dull and flat, indeed: and ill written.’ [9] Previously he had dismissed the older novelist in writing that ‘it is plain from Celibates (1895) and the later novels that [[he] is beginning to draw upon his literary account’ and that ‘his new impulse has no kind of relation to the future of the art.’ [CW70-71]. Ironically, however, some of the stories in Celibates are more like others in Dubliners than any in The Untilled Field. In all of these transactions, we witness Joyce defending his position against Moore as the first Irish modernist in a way that he did not have to do in dealing with contemporaries such as Seamus O’Kelly whose tales of ‘beautiful, pure faithful, Connacht girls and lithe, broad-shouldered open-faced young Connacht men’ he ridiculed in another letter [SL133-34]. [10] Yet, if Joyce was modern and continental, he was also deeply Irish; and, in retrospect, his engagement with the Irish situation that explains the magnitude of his achievement better than his departure from it. Joyce the modernist and Joyce the Irishman are not ultimately in conflict. W. B. Yeats liked to quote Oscar Wilde’s saying that the Irish were the greatest talkers since the Greeks and the dramatis personae of Ulysses arguably prove the case. Yet their actual conversation forms a comparatively small part of the total text of that novel, the rest being made up of passages that draw their ‘styles’ from the literary environment. In this respect his works can be seen as a census of the books that Irish men and women were reading or had read as well as a catalogue of the cultural influences which, in a very definite and linguistically-identifiable sense, constituted them as the men and women that they are. In the case of Little Chandler, shackled to a ‘sober inartistic life’ [D80], it is the poetry of the Irish literary revival which has drives his ambitions causing him to imagine the reviews that his yet-unwritten volume will received: ‘Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse … A wistful sadness pervades these poems … The Celtic note.’ Joyce gives further twist to his literary scalpel in writing next: ‘It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking […]’, a fault which Little Chandler sets out to amend [D80]. A comparable fantasist is Gerty McDowell, the young woman in “;Nausicaa” who throws herself into an imaginary relation to the ‘dark stranger’ Leopold Bloom, allowing him to glimpse her underwear on Dollymount Strand. Joyce called the manner adopted in this chapter a ‘namby-pamby marmalady drawsery (alto là!) style’ and the language that bears up her counter-factual habits of thought and feeling is gleaned from the columns of the Princess Novelette and the Lady’s Pictorial, women’s journals replete with tips from the ‘leaders of fashion’ [U453, 455]. The most extended exercise in stylistic parody with a specifically-Irish bent in Ulysses is unquestionably the “;Cyclops” chapter, broadly narrated by an anonymous ‘Thersitic’ figure whose acid comments are conveyed in the local demotic (‘and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye’ [U377]) in sharp contradistinction from the ‘gigantism’ of other passages for which Victorian translations of Irish hero-tales are the chief model: ‘The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero’ [U382]. To this concoction is added an inflection that owes less to the Irish manuscript tradition than to the special ineptitude of stylistically footless nationalist writers (‘Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs’ [U379]), while yet another manner is devised to convey the atmosphere of ‘heroticisms’ [FW 614]—an epithet coined in Finnegans Wake which well suits the humour of a largely feminine crowd in attendance at the patriotic martyrdom of Robert Emmet in Joyce’s remorselessly irreverent burlesque of national sacrifice on the gallows. All in all, the chapter captures a politico-cultural landscape of such emotional rancidity that the plain truth of Leopold Bloom’s naïve appeal for love as the moving principle of all social life (“;I mean the opposite of hatred” [U432]) provides the only moral foothold in the chapter. Joyce’s antipathy to the national revival did not prevent him admiring individual writers and none more than W. B. Yeats whose story “;the Tables of the Law” he knew by heart—so very different in surface and symbol from his own fiction. Stephen Dedalus carries the poem “;Who Goes with Fergus?” from The Countess Cathleen in his heart since the refrain ‘no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery’ answers so well to his tormented memory of his own dead mother [U9, 681]. It was, however, the Irish poète maudite James Clarence Mangan (1803-49) whom Joyce saw as most representative of the predicament of the Irish artist whose country’s history encloses him ‘so straitly that even in his hours of extreme individual passion he can barely reduce its walls to ruins’, as Joyce told a university audience in Trieste in 1907 [CW185]. The implication that he should transcend his country’s historical legacy in order to fulfil his individuality was a key doctrine with the young Joyce. Mangan is thus, in almost every way, the epitome of an Irish racial destiny that Joyce himself intended to elude: ‘Love of grief, despair, high-sounding threats—these are the great traditions of the race of James Clarence Mangan, and in that impoverished figure, thin and weakened, an hysterical nationalism receives its final justification’ [CW86]. By a large measure, however, it is the ‘national poet’ Thomas Moore (1779-1852) who occupies most space of all Irish writers in the works of James Joyce. Moore, a Catholic educated at Trinity College, the friend of Robert Emmet and of Lord Byron and author of saccharine drawing-room songs accompanying Irish airs arranged for the piano by Sir John Stevenson, promulgated the poetical idea of a lovable Irishman bearing secret sorrows for the lost national glories but manfully resisting the extremes of nostalgia or revolution in pursuit of the unattainable in a modern British world. The scale on which Joyce’s books reverberate with lines from Moore’s Irish Melodies (issued from 1808 and collected in 1820) can be judged from the fact that he carefully incorporated the initial phrase of each melody in Finnegans Wake with a nearby reference to the associated air on each occasion. This act of total recall is an barely more than a just acknowledgement of the immense familiarity of Moore’s lyrics, from “;Erin, The Tear and the Smile in Thy Eyes” and “;The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls” to “;She Is Far from the Land” and “;The Last Rose of Summer”, in Irish society of the time. All too often abjectly sentimental, the melodies represent an ambiguous legacy that Joyce pilloried in his glancing sketch in A Portrait of the ‘servile head [and] shuffling feet’ of Moore’s statue College Street, ‘humbly conscious of its indignity’ [AP183]. Moore’s complicity in the project of Irish auto-exoticism is perfectly captured in the Dubliners story that takes its title from the song which includes these wistful lines: ‘I’ll sing thee songs of Araby / And tales of far Cashmere, / Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh, / Or charm thee with a tear. // And dreams delight shall on thee break, / And rainbow visions rise, / And all my soul shall strive to wake / Sweet wonder in thy eyes.’ In Joyce’s “;Araby”, a harsh verdict on form of delusion crystallized therein is issued in the final sentence: ‘Gazing into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger’ [D36]. For Joyce, Moore embodied perfectly a tendency among Irish writers which he identified as the ‘court jester’ syndrome. Thus, when Stephen reflects how Buck Mulligan—the ‘gay betrayer’ [U15]—expects him to drip-feed the Celtophilic English visitor Haines with specimens of Irish wit in the opening chapter of Ulysses, he feels the lethal old infection hovering near: ‘For Haines’s chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.’ [U29] Anglo-Irish writers in the Protestant tradition who served up Irish peasants for the affectionate ridicule include Samuel Lover (1797-1868) and Charles Lever (1806-1872). Many of the former’s comic-romantic songs such as “;The Low-Backed Car” and “;O, Thady Brady You Are My Darlin’” feature frequently in Ulysses, as does a virtual anthology of Irish ballad and story, rann and song (in Yeats’s phrase) from throughout the Victorian period. Among Catholic songsters Charles Joseph Kickham (1828-1882) is best represented with songs such as “;Patrick Sheehan” and “;Rory of the Hill”, both of which adorn the “;Cyclops” episode of Ulysses where his nationalist credentials are implicitly honoured. At the same time, a somewhat different Ireland tinged with atavistic violence became the stock-in-trade of the Victorians authors who created the Irish Gothic novel and Joyce was sufficiently attentive to this tradition with its disturbing colonial subplot to take Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1863), a novel concerning a murder in the Phoenix Park and set in Chapelizod, as an important source for elements in the setting and the narrative of Finnegans Wake. In November 1906 Joyce asked Aunt Josephine in Dublin to send him ‘any old editions’ of Kickham, Griffin, Carleton […,] Banim and […] an Xmas present made up of tram-tickets, advts, handbills, posters, papers, programmes, &c.’ [SL124]. [11] There is scant indication that he engaged with these writers in any extended way and, though each represents a phase in the rather unhappy attempt to produce a prose literature for Catholic Ireland, all belong more or less indiscriminately to the sub-literary sounding-chamber of Ulysses along with the operas which provide a distinct element in the sing-a-long culture of contemporary Dublin. Prominent among these are The Bohemian Girl (1843) and The Rose of Castile (1857) by the Irish composer-dramatist Michael Balfe. The former plays a prominent part in “;Eveline” of Dubliners while his song “;I Dreamt that I Dwelt” from the former opera and “;Killarney” from another (Innisfallen) supply important hinges of meaning in “;Clay” and in “;A Mother”. However, it is the “;The Lass of Aughrim” which Nora sang to Joyce that provides the climactic musical moment in the last story and the collection as a whole [D240ff]. As a young man Joyce attended the melodramatic fare of the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin, and the most commonly referenced Irish dramatist in his work is Dion Boucicault, master of the genre. Arrah-na-Pogue (1841) and The Shaughraun (1874) are much in evidence in Finnegans Wake and there is suspicion that Joyce identified Nora Barnacle with Arrah, while Shaun the Post, who marries her in the play, is an alias of one brother in the Wake while the other is identified as Shem the Penman—based on Jim the Penman, a nineteenth-century forger who became the central character of a play by Sir Charles Young. (In the chapter of the Wake devoted to Shem and dealing with the phenomenon of artistic personality and artistic representation, Ulysses is described as an ‘epical forged cheque’ drawn at the public’s expense [FW182].) The owner of a good tenor voice, Joyce nearly won the Feis Ceol in 1904 with a rendering of Yeats’s “;The Sally Gardens”, only losing to John McCormack because he refused to sing from score. More than three hundred songs and fifty nursery rhymes are quoted in Ulysses alone and to this can be added an equal number of references to European operas—most of them part of the currency of turn-of-the-century Irish cultural life and hence the reason for their inclusion. In fact, the idea that the Irish are not a separate race or nation; that a Jew like Leopold Bloom can be an Irishman in both a pragmatic and affective sense; that Irish minds is permeated by European culture, is the fundamental trope of Ulysses and the explanation of its ‘mythic method’ and intertextual procedures. By the same token, the greatest strength and weakness of Joyce’s final book consists in the compulsion to build up a holistic image of humanity by synthesising the totality of its cultural manifestations in all times and places: that is to say, by ‘totalisating’ Everyman ‘in lashons of language’ so as to reconstruct a post-Edenic image of the original Adam who—according to the Christian mythos—is ‘ ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough’ [FW129].Finnegans Wake is first and foremost a testament to the very idea of global culture. James Joyce was an Irish writer who set his sights on the universal and the course of his career from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake is the implacable consequences of that design. In this sense Joyce the European and Joyce the Irishman are no more contradictory than Joyce the modern and Joyce the mediaevalist. What unites all of these is his uniquely perspicacious grasp of the true complexity and full potential of the postcolonial moment and his ability to transmit this in his radically innovative art. [1] Ireland’s Literary Renaissance [facs. of 1923 rev. edn.] (Dublin: Allen Figgis 1968), p.302. Bibliography
Suggested Reading Critical Studies Studies of Dubliners & A Portrait Studies of Ulysses Studies of Finnegans Wake Reference Works and Critical Collections
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