James joyce, p.2
James Joyce, page 2
Frank Callanan’s gifts as a literary critic are on full display in this volume. His enviable mastery of history and modern politics, his alert eye for the telling image or metaphor, and his sure sense of narrative make for fresh readings of texts that have been scrutinised for decades. His analyses of Joyce’s 1904 essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, Stephen Hero, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait, the Moses-Parnell correspondence in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, and the series of political articles and lectures that Joyce produced in Trieste are unrivalled for their penetration and fidelity to detail. Callanan is ever alert to historical effects and political dislocations. He argues convincingly, for example, that the lengthy delay in the publication of Dubliners, nearly ten years from the writing of many of the stories, muffled the political resonance of ‘Ivy Day’ and ‘The Dead’. In 1907–8, ‘Parnell’s memory just about retained some lingering political currency’, but by 1914 when the volume finally appeared, ‘the generational cycle had turned, and Irish politics was in a markedly different phase with the Home Rule crisis’. With the lapse of years and memories, ‘Ivy Day’ had lost ‘its sharply accusatory contemporary edge’.23 Joyce’s bitterness over the long delay was thus political as much as artistic. Acute observations such as these abound in the present book, rendered in an elegant prose that is often complex but always accessible, musical in its diction and rhythms, and fearless in its conceptual rigor and pursuit.
Callanan sets himself the task of isolating Joyce’s essential politics, or his political essence. Beginning with what he takes to be a uniquely perceptive insight—Constantine Curran’s characterisation of the youthful Joyce as ‘a completely unpolitical Parnellite’24—Callanan meticulously compares Joyce with the student minds around him, as if holding slides up to the light to discriminate varying hues of Irish politics. Notably, among Joyce’s university fellows, Francis Skeffington (the McCann/MacCann of Stephen Hero and A Portrait) was dogmatic, pedantic, anti-Parnellite, ‘a confused left-utilitarian’ who believed—delusionally, Joyce thought—in an alliance of Irish nationalism, post-Gladstone Liberalism, and British left politics.25 Thomas Kettle (a model for Robert Hand in Exiles) was pro-Parnell, advocated a European Catholicism, and, in the years after university, sought to reconcile Sinn Féin with the Irish Parliamentary Party. Callanan notes succinctly that Kettle’s pro-clerical Parnellism and Skeffington’s anticlerical anti-Parnellism exemplified for Joyce the incoherence of Irish politics after the Split.26 The observant Joyce was taking in the ideological postures and posturings of his comrades, quietly measuring them against his own reserved Parnellite faith, his suspended commitment as a political learner.
Can Joyce, then, be described as an Irish nationalist? Callanan is unequivocal: yes, he declares, ‘objectively’ so.27 Joyce believed that Ireland had claims to nationhood and an important literary culture, that it had suffered through conquest but had never ceased to protest it, and that ‘the rhetorical power of nationalism [had engendered] a sense of a common political identity, even if his rendering of that power tends to be most discernible when he is resisting or parodying it’.28 As a ‘dissentient’ thinker, Joyce’s nationalism may also be defined by what it was not, by what he rejected in the culture around him: teleological narratives of predestined political salvation, self-exculpating victimhood and denial of any responsibility for Ireland’s humiliated condition, chauvinistic exhibitions and religious bigotries, an over-zealous Irish language revivalism, insular anti-Europeanism, and resistance to modernity. These deficiencies were all part of what Joyce referred to in different contexts and at different times as the ‘paralysis’ of Irish life, a symptom of the abrupt defeat of political hope in the dead space after 1891, what Callanan evocatively calls the period of ‘acrid backwash: the years of disillusionment in the dismal aftermath of the overthrow and death of Parnell’.29
One of the difficulties of classifying Joyce’s nationalism is that the Ireland of his youth cannot properly be thought of as a nation. In a brilliant insight, Callanan argues that ‘the statal inchoateness of Ireland’ both constrained and liberated Joyce as a writer. On the one hand, Ireland’s unsettled pre-statal condition blocked Joyce from completing Stephen Hero, a novel conceived of in a bildungsroman tradition dependent on the institutional structures of an established state. On the other hand, the memory of Ireland’s political incompleteness and imaginative plasticity made Finnegans Wake possible: the ‘tractability of the narrative of Ireland became the breach through which coursed all of Joyce’s conception of historical and cultural cycles of change and continuity’.30 Ireland’s inchoateness before 1922 is one of the chief justifications for Callanan’s immersive approach to Joyce’s specifically Irish political initiation, and a source of his disagreements with other scholars who have written on Joyce’s politics. If he rejects Richard Ellmann’s claim that Joyce moved ‘beyond Parnell’ to a qualified embrace of Arthur Griffith and thence to a kind of modernist aloofness from politics (‘There is in Joyce no “beyond Parnell” in Ellmann’s sense’),31 he also dissents from postcolonial theory’s positing of a ‘generic anti-imperialism’ in Joyce’s writing that both relativises his political particularity and lifts it away from its Irish contexts to what Callanan sees as a rather bleakly notional terrain of textual contestation and political retort. Notwithstanding the influences of socialism and anarchism, and his parodic assaults on empire and political authoritarianism in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s ‘relationship to the Irish political’, Callanan insists, was and remained ‘his intellectual point of departure’.32
It is a consoling paradox that Frank Callanan’s never-completed volume does so much to complete our understanding of Joyce’s political life. This book might also be seen as extending the truncated political life of Parnell in that it shows how deeply that life reached into Joyce’s own and animated his efforts to write ‘the moral history of [his] country’ and ‘to forge the uncreated conscience of [his] race’.33 Writing moral history and forging a racial conscience are grandiose ambitions for a youthful writer to declare, yet when we see, with Callanan’s guidance, what Joyce lived through politically during his first thirty years, both in Ireland and in exile abroad, we are more likely to accept these declarations as affidavits of experience.
The spectacle of the unspeakable hunt—from Parnell to Oscar Wilde—was something the young Joyce witnessed, and it is never absent from his idea of the possible fate of any benefactor of Ireland. It is not absent from Callanan’s assessments of Joyce either; and Finnegans Wake’s ‘hunt me the journeyon’, with its startling inclusion of ‘me’ as a quarry of the ‘hunt’, points beyond its immediate referent in the tracked, weary Parnell to a personal, emotional stake in Irish politics and history that Joyce keenly felt and that Callanan powerfully shared. That feeling is evident in the care and cogency of the present volume and in its tendresse (a favourite word of Callanan’s) for its subject. The idea that political aspiration can be more than a brutal hunt grows as the book turns in its final pages to Finnegans Wake and its ‘bleak social anthropology of hope … [for] the potential for human consciousness to translate into political agency’.34 Joyce’s slow induction into the political—a temporal and temperamental exile to match the geographical one—brought him to this bleak, precarious hope. With this book, we can see much more clearly how he got there, and why it matters.
Robert Spoo, Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters
Department of English
Princeton University
12 August 2025
1. FW 594.7–8.
2. Among studies addressing this subject, Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2016), first published in 1980, is a valuable thematic account, particularly regarding Joyce’s reading of socialist and anarchist writers and other post-exile influences.
3. Frank Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890–91 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992); Frank Callanan, T. M. Healy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
4. Adrian Hardiman, Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law (London: Head of Zeus, 2017), 18, 19, 38. Observations in this paragraph and the previous one are developed more fully in ‘Joyce at the Bar’, my review of Hardiman’s book in the James Joyce Literary Supplement 33 (Spring 2019): 11–13.
5. Hardiman, Joyce in Court, 28.
6. Michael Wood, Marcel Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 23.
7. See ‘introduction’, 5.
8. See chapter 1, 35.
9. See, for example, Hugh Kenner, ‘The Portrait in Perspective’, in Dublin’s Joyce (1955; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 109–33.
10. For Healy’s pursuit of the politically wounded Parnell, see Callanan, Parnell Split, 110–38.
11. For sustained discussion of scandal in Joyce’s culture and writings, see Margot Gayle Backus, Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
12. P 1.1456–848.
13. See chapter 1, 30.
14. See chapter 1, 30; chapter 4, 161; chapter 7, 308.
15. Mary Colum and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 20.
16. P 1.1269.
17. U 2.264, 403.
18. See chapter 4, 194.
19. See chapter 18, 832.
20. See chapter 1, 36.
21. OCPW 191–96, 240–43.
22. The first quote (‘funerary’) is from chapter 15, 682; the second is from the Coda, 851.
23. All quotes are from chapter 12, 565–66.
24. Cited in chapter 1, 32; and chapter 6, 232.
25. From chapter 7, 300.
26. From chapter 7.
27. From the introduction, 10n9.
28. From the introduction, 11.
29. From chapter 1, 33.
30. See introduction, 14.
31. See chapter 1, 39.
32. See introduction, 13.
33. Letters II 134; P 5.2789–90.
34. See chapter 18, 841.
EDITORS’ PREFACE
IN A LECTURE HE gave about 2006 titled ‘Joyce and the Historian of Modern Ireland’, Frank Callanan explained how he came to write on Joyce:
I am an historian of modern Ireland. I have worked and written on Parnell, his enemy Timothy Michael Healy, and on the Irish Parliamentary Party.
I do not profess to be dispassionate. I am drawn to what it is that public men and women do.
When I was writing the Healy book I was increasingly conscious of the potency of Joyce’s rendering of Parnell and his myth, particularly in the article ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ that he published in Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste in May 1912, and in Finnegans Wake. I had at the start of the long vacation in 1993 bought a copy of Finnegans Wake in Dublin airport on my way to Greece. I read it on the beach; a procedure I strongly recommend. On the last page I inscribed ‘Petra, Patmos, 17 August 1993’. I was greatly affected by Joyce’s valedictory evocation of the harried Parnell of the Split as the river returns to the sea at the end: ‘but hunt me the journeyon, iteritinerant, the kal his course, amid the semitary of Somnionia. Even unto Heliotropolis, the castellated, the enchanting’. This provided the epigraph for the Healy biography.
An interval of some years supervened before, subtly goaded by my friend Patrick Healy, a considerable scholar of Joyce, I began to peck around the relation of Joyce to Parnell with the intention of writing a short monograph. That must be ten years ago. I am now caught up in something that fluctuatingly resembles a politico-historical biography of Joyce.
My interest in Joyce is in some respects deviant. What I most enjoy in Joyce is his treatment of the Irish political, and of Irish history. I believe the acuity of Joyce’s political sensibility, especially in relation to the Ireland of his lifetime, has remained weirdly underestimated and under-analysed.
The relationship of Joyce and the Irish historian is a curious one. In the first place, there is a sense in which Joyce has only in relatively recent times come to belong to Irish history. That is the sense described by Conor Cruise O’Brien in the magnificent opening of his essay ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’:
‘There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belong to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we have come to possess some sense of continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being.’
It is not merely that Joyce can now be set in historical context. The passage of time, and the cycle of Irish politics since independence, have been quite extraordinarily flattering to Joyce’s political judgement and his espousal of a critical Irish nationalism. Joyce moreover is not merely a subject of history. He has become, both biographically and imaginatively through his works, a type of historical source which informs the contemporary historical perception in Ireland of the country in the era in which he lived and of which he wrote.
Historians of modern Ireland have for the most part given Joyce a wide berth. The grudging assessment of Joyce and axiomatic preference for Yeats enunciated in F.S.L. Lyons’ uncharacteristically obtuse 1970 essay ‘James Joyce’s Dublin’ is in some respects representative.
One does not of course have to be a historian to write on historical subjects. Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce is marked by a high historical sensibility. He doesn’t get Joyce’s politics wrong, although he fails fully to apprehend its significance.
There has been something of a disciplinary stand-off. Irish historians have tended to seize the high ground, and what they have written on modern Ireland has not always been Joyce-friendly, in the sense of addressing the interests of Joyceans. On the other hand, some writers on Joyce’s politics have been prepared to make remarkably sweeping historical generalisations as if there was no such thing as, or not a lot to, historical scholarship.
I don’t for a moment suggest that writing about Joyce is confined by the world that is contemporary to him, nor by his subjective intentionality where that can be established. I am merely saying that in relation to Irish politics and history, on issues where Joyce has expressed himself, that expression has to be acknowledged and taken account of.
I say this because one does sometimes read things dogmatically imputing views to Joyce that one knows he would—justifiably on the basis of what he had written—have responded to with a thin smile, a dismissive gleam of his spectacles, or perhaps a light tenor snort. One should not in positing an argument about a person need to be fortified by the reflection that she or he is no longer around to scorn it.
One should not fit up a writer with convictions or intentions of a semi-ideological character without acknowledging the intelligence, and pertinacious elegance of his own negotiation of the ideological that is the glittering intellectual legacy of his schooling in Irish nationalism.
There is a matter in the end of intellectual good faith for a historian or biographer. It could be considered a disciplinary predisposition. Perhaps it is a prejudice of sorts. It is also a lot more fun.
Frank would go on to work for another fifteen years on his ‘politico-historical biography’ of Joyce. To Ruán Magan, his collaborator on their distinguished documentary, 100 Years of ‘Ulysses’ (broadcast RTE, 2 February 2022), he explained ‘that one typically works on Joyce for years before being able to formulate any valid propositions.… My own early scribblings were pretty much worthless.’ In 2019, with the end of his book finally in sight, he signed a contract with Princeton University Press. On 12 December 2021, Frank died suddenly and unexpectedly at home in Dublin.
In mourning, it became imperative to us to honour his life’s work and prepare his book for publication. The editorial team suggested itself: With Margaret O’Callaghan, professor of modern Irish history and politics in Queen’s University Belfast, Frank had carried on an unbroken dialogue on Irish history since they were students in University College Dublin, particularly around the period 1880–1920, in which they both specialised. Frank always credited meeting Luca Crispi, associate professor of James Joyce studies and modernism at University College Dublin, with professionalising his approach to Joyce studies. Through Peter Kennealy, deputy director and politics specialist at the European University Institute Library in Florence and senior commissioning editor at ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) Press, and another close friend since college, Frank was kept on top of current movements in political science research. Bridget Hourican, Frank’s partner for a decade, and wife for eighteen months, was working on her own book on James Clarence Mangan throughout their time together. Mangan was Joyce’s favourite Irish poet and a significant influence on him.
Over the years, Frank had shared multiple drafts of his work in progress with all of us, as well as publishing articles in the Dublin James Joyce Journal, edited by Luca. We knew that Frank’s working method was chronological and comprehensive, so we were unsurprised, if greatly relieved, to find that while the text that he left was inevitably truncated—it lacks Joyce’s later years—it was not fragmentary or partial; the chapters were completed and sequential. This simplified our task: There was no question of having to rewrite or finish sections (fortunately, since Frank’s cadence is inimitable) and little need for deletion. Our role has been to rearrange certain sections, reorganise some chapters, check for consistency, tidy up the footnotes, and clarify the working titles and subtitles that Frank left.
