James joyce, p.4
James Joyce, page 4
Postcolonial critics have been notably wary of characterising Joyce as an Irish nationalist. An acceptance that Joyce was an Irish nationalist ought not to be controversial and is only rendered so by a strange coalescence of postcolonial theory and the residues of what was once the prevalent view of him in Ireland and of the early critical reception of his work.
For Irish nationalists, the idea that Joyce could have been retrospectively a supporter of the cause of the dead leader without having nationalist sympathies is a contradiction in terms. To argue that Joyce was Parnellite but not an Irish nationalist one is driven back on two possible arguments. The first is that Joyce’s Parnellism was a boyhood infatuation that was not carried forward into his convictions and thinking in adulthood but endured as a fond relic of his Dublin boyhood—a proposition that is not maintainable on any considered reading of Joyce’s fictional and non-fictional writing. The second is that his nationalism waned, but his identification with Parnell endured, so that Joyce came to sever his Parnellism from Irish nationalism, an act of some conceptual violence which would need clear attestation in what Joyce wrote.
Joyce, famously, never avowed himself a nationalist. Defending Sinn Féin against the criticisms of his brother Stanislaus, he wrote from Rome in late 1906, ‘If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile, and, prophetically, a repudiated one.’9 That was as close as he ever got, in his extant correspondence or what is known of his conversations on the subject. In that letter he put forward the most convenient and straightforward of the many reasons why he declined to proclaim himself a nationalist when it became possible for him to consider doing so: it was an exorbitance for an exile to do so. It was an early instance of Joyce’s invocation of the contingencies of absence which derived from the strategising of his exile. The following year he gave his lecture in Trieste entitled ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’ (‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’). Having characterised with extravagant inaccuracy Irish complicity in the Norman invasion and the Act of Union, he said, ‘In my opinion, these two facts must be perfectly explained before the country in which they took place has even the most elementary right to expect one of its sons to change his position from that of detached observer to convinced nationalist’.10 The idea that Joyce could not avow himself a nationalist until these two facts were accounted for was a thin contrivance and at odds with the reason he had advanced to Stanislaus the previous year, though it had a certain rhetorical force. Joyce’s inferential self-characterisation as a ‘detached observer’ was tactical rather than substantive, part of the long game he had played of seeking out and maintaining ‘his ground of vantage’ in relation to Ireland and its controversies.11
It may be objected that being opposed to British dominion in Ireland and sympathetic to Irish independence is not enough to establish whether a writer was a nationalist. One might also expect a receptiveness to some version of an Irish national narrative, and an identification with a significant strain or strains of the political heritage or tradition of Irish nationalism. Both are present in Joyce in his recognition that Ireland had historic claims to nationhood; that it had a literary culture of some importance that reached back in time; that it had endured conquest which it had not overthrown but had never ceased to protest against; and that the aspiration to self-determination had found expression in periodic rebellions and acts of socio-political resistance. There is something else that speaks to Joyce’s nationalism: the way he wrote of the Irish people and their beliefs, taken with his sense of the rhetorical power of nationalism in engendering 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. It is difficult to conceive of someone inhabiting the communicative space of nationalism with the connoisseurship that Joyce did without being a nationalist, however dissentient.
He disdained, and sought to move beyond, the Irish preoccupation with England. In Irish politics he was intellectually revolutionary in refusing to treat the English subjugation of Ireland in isolation from the Irish response. Joyce was both provocative and rigorous in his refusal to subscribe to a narrative of Irish history as British conquest in which the Irish were passive victims. If he did not forgive the iniquities of English conquest and governance, he was unsparing on the subject of Irish disunion, enfeeblement, passivity, or objective complicity in the depredations of the conquering power. The English conquest and the Irish response had to be set side by side and understood integrally. This was an aggressively revisionist model of Irish history. Rather than a flat Irish saga of oppression, it was dialectical. What this came down to was Joyce’s disdain for a political and historical narrative in which the subjugated Irish were acquitted of all responsibility for their fate and self-beatified as victims of history. For many of his contemporaries that was an anti-nationalist posture, but it was for Joyce a translation of the axiom that Ireland had responsibility for its own destiny. He was an Irish nationalist who refused to think in conventionally nationalistic terms.
One finally comes back to the strategically chosen vantage from which Joyce wrote. His fiercely Parnellian critique of Ireland and Irish nationalism is only politically intelligible as written from within Irish nationalism, if on an outer refractory edge. It is an argument addressed to Irish nationalists. The paradox of Joyce’s nationalism is that it is in his critique of nationalism that his nationalism is most evident.
Joyce’s non-avowal of nationalism was a strategic ploy which he sedulously pursued with adroitness and pertinacity. His proclaimed refusals to avow himself an Irish nationalist tended to be formulated in a way that was strangely redolent of the high vein of Irish patriotic rhetoric. Whether Joyce was an Irish nationalist cannot be determined by whether he accepted the designation.
Joyce’s strategic position was one that he maintained across the contingencies of political time, which included the achievement of Irish independence, the central preoccupation of Irish nationalists, something which Joyce foresaw—not especially controversially—would be achieved in his lifetime, whether through Home Rule or otherwise. That he held aloof from the independent Irish state did not signify that he was, or became retrospectively, opposed to the achievement of Irish independence. Irish nationalism did not entail acceptance of the policies an independent state might pursue. In withholding acceptance, Joyce remained within the logic of Irish nationalism, and of democratic statehood. In considering Joyce’s nationalism, it is important to appreciate that what he did not do was engage in the vain (in both senses) and incoherent intellectual exercise of conditioning his support of the idea of Irish independence. His realism, and his understanding of nationalism, ran too deep for that. Joyce instead embarked on an elaborate nominalist game in which he refused to avow himself an Irish nationalist. This has its origins in Stephen Hero as applied to Stephen Daedalus, when Home Rule seemed a distant prospect, and it is maintained almost playfully in the exegetics of exile of Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake, written after the establishment of the Irish state.
Why is a recognition of Joyce’s Irish nationalism of consequence? A number of reasons might be advanced. The first is that it reveals just how political Joyce was. If the idea that Joyce was apolitical from artistic principle no longer has much currency, there remains a lingering suggestion of detached unconcern: in 1969 the Joyce scholar Phillip Herring astonishingly imputed to Joyce an ‘inherent lack of interest in the human condition’.12 It is not simply that Joyce had and retained political convictions; his Irish nationalism attested to a belief in democratic self-determination. The second is that Joyce’s Irish nationalism affects how one situates his broader politics and has filiations to other strains of political thought. A defining characteristic of Irish nationalism in its mainstream expressions (subtracting its vicious manifestations such as that of the Citizen in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses or the Provisional Irish Republican Army) is its sceptical resistance to the claims of ideology and ethnicity, and a pragmatism that seems unbounded. Irish nationalism mediated or tempered Joyce’s response to contemporary politics.
The virtuosity of his observation of and analysis of Irish nationalism—rarely if ever acknowledged as a discrete attribute—informed his apprehension of the political beyond Ireland. His sceptical interrogation of ideologies originates in his experience of Ireland. The core premise of this book is that the analysis of Joyce’s politics is best approached through his relationship to the Irish political, his intellectual point of departure.
The Irish nationalism that Joyce came to espouse was one that was pared to its conceptual core of independent statehood, shorn of the incidental chauvinistic and religious excrescences that many of his contemporaries had come to regard as defining features of nationalism.
The principal change wrought by exile—or at least that was coincident with exile—is that Joyce ceased to perceive Ireland as having nothing to impart to continental Europe by reason of its economic backwardness and political stagnation. He continued to think comparatively of Ireland in relation to European states and nations, but the terms of comparison shifted. Ireland might after all have something to impart, as an island in the Atlantic with a historical rhythm of its own that had set it apart from the Continent, and as a country whose independence had been denied by conquest but which had as a corollary been spared entrapment in the rigidities of statehood or empire other than involuntarily as a constituent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland has escaped the imposition of rectilinearity. Joyce seized on the idea of Ireland having a strange exemplarity or imaginative plasticity, even if only in the abstract, deriving from the statal inchoateness of Ireland. That sense of 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. It permitted him to move beyond his straitened analysis of Ireland as it stood in 1904, and to negotiate the bleakness of his assessment of contemporary Irish politics. It found expression in his 1907 Trieste lecture ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’ and came lastingly to inform how he rendered Ireland in his art:13 it would be hard to conceive of Finnegans Wake had the country whose history provided its principal political subject been an established nineteenth-century European state or empire with a settled narrative of statal advance or colonial aggrandisement.
Philosophically, Joyce’s Irish nationalism derives from a combination of political realism and European romantic nationalism. He was not an ideological nationalist. He was hostile to ethnocentrism and scornful of ideas of cultural purity. He was intrigued by, and not disapproving of, articulations of national cultures and narratives and could be scathingly funny about them. He was accepting of the historically sanctioned arrangement of human societies as nation-states. He conspicuously did not look to a dissolution of the state or nation-state, an idea that had a considerable currency in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Edmund Epstein in 1971 wrote that both Joyce and the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘really believed in the existences of national races: neither of them was a modern internationalist. Joyce was an old-fashioned nationalist, of the school of Herder and Matthew Arnold and Mazzini.… His nationalism was the nineteenth century liberal variety which was prevalent in the Ireland of his time’.14 This relates to Joyce’s acceptance of the nation-state; one has nonetheless to allow for the imaginative fluidity of Joyce’s conception of national identity, while his consciousness of the unceasing cultural interpenetration particularly of European nations made ‘national races’ a relative concept.
The development over time of his views on the role of the nation-state in contemporary Europe is harder to elucidate, and open to debate, in part because while Ireland became a state in 1922, it was never a great power. It is certainly possible to read Finnegans Wake, written across the terrible interval between two world wars and completed three months after the outbreak of the second, as a critique of the idea of the European nation-state, though the stronger argument is that he remained bleakly realistic in relation to the institution of the nation-state.
To say that Joyce was an Irish nationalist is not to suggest that Irish nationalism exhaustively defined his political thinking. He believed in Irish independence and was sympathetic to Ireland’s nationalist tradition. His Irish nationalism was not a politically exclusive belief. It is true that Joyce’s expressions of sympathy with Sinn Féin had an approximate synchrony with his loss of interest in Italian socialism, but he did not posit any linkage between those developments of affinity. He did not conceive them as alternatives.
His Irish nationalism had nothing in common with and was deeply antipathetic to the reactionary (and typically anti-Semitic) ideological nationalism that found contemporary expression, for example, in France in L’Action Française. Joyce’s was a nationalism that was explicitly European. The early Joyce is the first thoroughgoing exponent of an Irish nationalism that was consciously European—a title conventionally conferred on his most politically prominent contemporary in University College, Thomas M. Kettle, whose Europeanism was, however, of a more aspirational order and was politically hemmed in by his commitment to the Irish Parliamentary Party and acquiescence in the established Irish social order and the role of the Catholic Church in particular.
It could, of course, be asserted that even if Joyce was an Irish nationalist in Ireland and early exile, he ceased to be such as he passed into extratextual political ‘silence’ during the First World War, and by the time of writing Ulysses was not an Irish nationalist. That argument is really a subset of the proposition that, in passing into ‘silence’ outside his work, Joyce became apolitical, which I believe is incorrect. The idea that Joyce could have chosen to excise nationalism from his Irish political sympathies—which would have been a highly problematic exercise—reflects a misreading of Joyce, connected to a reductive understanding of Irish nationalism.
Even if one were to continue to resist the idea of his Irish nationalism, Joyce took from his experience of the fierceness of political and historical controversy in the inchoate Irish polity a scarred wisdom that set him apart from contemporary modernist writers, who were scions of established states and empires. It framed all that he wrote. In the broadside ‘The Holy Office’, written some two months before he left Ireland, Joyce wrote of
Those souls that hate the strength that mine has
Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.15
He was steeled also by the fierceness, and the intermittent passion, of the Irish political.
1. J. Aubert and M. Jolas, eds., Joyce and Paris, 1902 … 1920–1940 … 1975: Papers from the Fifth International James Joyce Symposium, Paris, 16–20 June 1975 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1979), 14. Jolas was participating in a colloque on ‘political perspectives on Joyce’s work’.
2. Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
3. In Stephen Hero we read, ‘Stephen had begun to think of himself as a literary artist’ (SH 122).
4. For further discussion of critical writing on Joyce’s nationalism, see chapter 1, ‘The Shade of Parnell’, 38–43.
5. Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), 186.
6. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce’s Hundredth Birthday: Side and Front Views (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982), 16.
7. Richard Ellmann, interview by Craig Raine, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 5 February 1982, published in Times Literary Supplement, 5 February 1982, and republished in John Gross, ed., The Modern Movement (London: Harvill, 1992), 66.
8. Robert Scholes, ‘Joyce and Modernist Ideology’, in Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 95, 102. Scholes is writing about Joyce’s ‘turn away from politics’ (97) principally in relation to socialism.
9. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, Letters II 187. The first sentence suggests that Joyce is referring to the nationalism of Sinn Féin rather than of the post-Parnell Irish Parliamentary Party. That, however, is secondary to the argument advanced here that objectively Joyce has to be considered a nationalist.
10. OCPW 116.
11. PSW 218.
12. Phillip F. Herring, ‘Joyce’s Politics’, in New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium, ed. Fritz Senn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 11, 10.
13. OCPW 108–26.
14. Edmund L. Epstein, The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 90–91. The judgement of Leslie Fiedler four years later, at the Paris symposium, conveys the depth of the misapprehension created by the early readings of Joyce as divorced from Irish nationalism and an internationalist critic of the nation-state: ‘There is one fundamental political error which Joyce made in his work in terms of political analysis of the world.… What Joyce did not understand is that nationalism would indeed remain the sole dynamic force in the world in the decades and centuries which lay ahead of him’. Having said that Joyce in Ulysses treats Zionism and Irish nationalism as dead, he continues, ‘As a political prophet, Joyce is simply wrong, wrong, wrong. Since I myself grew up as a young man sharing Joyce’s illusions and thought that internationalism would be the politics of the future, it’s a shock to me to realize that it in fact is the politics of the past, and there is something essentially therefore nostalgic and reactionary in the art of James Joyce.’ Fiedler in ‘Political Perspectives on Joyce’s Work’, symposium chaired by Morris Beja, in Aubert and Jolas, Joyce and Paris, 112. Fiedler’s misreading of Joyce is total.
