James joyce, p.46
James Joyce, page 46
The novelty of the issue was something of which Joyce was acutely conscious. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, professor MacHugh describes the occasion of the speech of John Francis Taylor that took place on 24 October 1901, at the start of Joyce’s final year in University College. The inaugural address to which Taylor was responding was entitled ‘The Irish Revival’,2 and professor MacHugh twice explains that it was not then a familiar topic. He states that ‘the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days), advocating the revival of the Irish tongue’,3 and repeats a little later, ‘It was then a new movement.’4 This conveys the historically accurate fact that by the date on which Ulysses is set, three years after Taylor’s speech, the subject has become more familiar, which is not to say that the full political impact of revivalism was apparent by 1904.
The co-relation of the Gaelic League’s revivalism to contemporary politics added a further layer of complication. The Gaelic League claimed to be politically neutral. Even if it was, the opponents of the Irish Party sought to exploit the language issue. Some ardent revivalists were drawn to Arthur Griffith and the inchoate Sinn Féin. Griffith, who was a political nationalist, was wary of compromising his political conception of independence by co-identification with revivalism, but the cultural content of his United Irishman and the revivalist aspirations of many of his sympathisers meant that his emergent movement was seen by the country at large as ardently revivalist, and that was not a perception that Griffith could afford to repudiate.
In University College the line between the Gaelic League and what was to become Sinn Féin was sharply drawn. Though the Jesuits were largely sceptical of revivalism, it was something they were prepared to encourage on the basis that—unlike the Parnellism of the Split and the stirrings of Sinn Féin—it was in their view politically harmless. Even after the establishment of the state, the distinction lingered, and was highlighted in the 1930 Jesuit history of the college: ‘The fundamental difference between the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin lay, chiefly, perhaps, in the fact that while the former concentrated on the language, the latter was frankly a political movement.… And, although in full sympathy with the language movement, the Sinn Féiners did not allow it the paramount importance demanded for the proper programme of the Gaels.’5
Joyce came to observe the same discrimination, at least after his period in University College, but the other way around as he moved into sympathy with Griffith’s Sinn Féin.
In University College in Joyce’s era, the espousal of revivalism was not seen as having anything to do with support for Griffith’s nascent and highly minoritarian faction of nationalism. The Gaelic League’s profession of political neutrality was critically important in permitting revivalism to take hold as a national aspiration. The sons of farmers and urban members of the Catholic middle class, staunchly supportive of the Irish Parliamentary Party, were thereby denied any reason not to endorse the project of the Gaelic League. It enjoyed a broad support it would not have done if it was perceived as a challenge to parliamentary nationalism.
Revivalism was to subsist in parallel to conventional politics as practised by the Irish Party. The notion that Irish language revivalism was apolitical was doubtful from the start: it was theoretically possible but was never going to remain so in an Irish setting at the turn of the century. The acceptance of the Revival’s political innocence had a remarkably long run because reviving the Irish language seemed disarmingly noble and progressively novel. The Irish Party knew that overt querying of the project of the Gaelic League would be represented as an attack on the Irish language, and this gave the revivalists something of a free run. Irish language revivalism had a complex duality. It existed both as a discrete project and one which was inherently prone to become a vehicle—and in some respects a catalyst—for associated political philosophies and values which at once went beyond and fell short of revivalism, without quite forfeiting what seemed the pristine purity of its purpose.
The idea that the Gaelic League was apolitical—other than in the narrow sense that it did not pit itself against the Irish Party—was belied by its own history. Douglas Hyde, in his seminal paper to the National Literary Society of 25 November 1892 titled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, sought to exploit the disillusionment wrought by the Parnell Split. He was speaking in the aftermath of the bitterly contested election petitions for the North and South Meath constituencies that followed the general election of 1892. The issue of the Irish language was ‘of greater importance than whether Mr. Redmond or Mr. McCarthy lead the largest wing of the Irish party for the moment, or Mr. So-and-so succeed with his election petition. To a person taking a bird’s-eye-view of the situation a hundred years hence, believe me, it will appear of greater importance than any mere temporary wrangle, but unhappily our countrymen cannot be brought to see this.’6
Hyde’s speech is considered important in the inception of revivalism, but a large part of its significance lies in it being the first attempt to relativise parliamentarism and Home Rule in the wake of the Split by reference to the revival of the Irish language: ‘Just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived and stript of its Celtic characteristic, cut off from the past, yet scarcely in touch with the present’.7 That ‘scarcely in touch with the present’ reveals a highly astute publicist. Hyde’s pitch was finely calculated. He did not expressly advocate the general popular adoption of the Irish language but rather the arresting of its decay and the reversal of the political disfavour in which he asserted it to be mired. ‘I have no hesitation in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman, who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage the efforts which are being made to keep alive our once great national tongue.’ There was something cloying in Hyde’s rendering of the process of historical assimilation: ‘Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a generation or two fully Irished, and more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves.’8 It was that homogenising ‘Irished’ that Joyce rejected, as he came increasingly to underscore the ethnic and cultural diversity of the inhabitants of Ireland. Whatever can be said about Hyde’s potently influential speech, it was far from being politically innocent.
In University College Joyce was surrounded by contemporaries who had superficial though not inconsequential sympathies with the Revival, a constituency much larger than the narrow core of dedicated Irish revivalists who spoke Irish and were seriously invested in the prospect of an Irish-speaking Ireland. Joyce stood apart from the naivety of most of his University College peers. He grasped immediately the potentially far-reaching cultural (his more immediate concern) and political ramifications of revivalism. He was instinctively sceptical of the delusive simplicities of popular revivalism, but held back from adopting a general opposition to revivalism per se. His overt opposition was reserved for the xenophobic cultural nationalism which instrumentalised revivalism; he was also exorbitantly suspicious of what he had observed of clerical sponsorship of the Revival, which gave a Parnellite edge to his resistance to a Gaelicised nationalism. His reservations on the subject of revivalism were philosophical but were also those of a political nationalist. In a malign scenario, revivalism had the potential to copper-fasten the outcome of the Parnell Split, to affirm the complacent insularity of post-Parnellite Ireland, and to thwart his conception of Ireland as a modern European nation-state.
What Joyce had to gauge was the nature and scale of the impact of revivalism in Irish politics. He knew that revivalism was more than the pursuit of extra-curricular self-improvement; that it had political ramifications and was not simply a neutral or natural emanation of the Irish pursuit of statehood, nor a semi-antiquarian retrieval of the Irish past. More clear-sighted than his University College contemporaries, he was able to discriminate between revivalism and the historical Irish language. He recognised revivalism as a phenomenon of contemporary politics. He was characteristically alert to the possibility of diverse outcomes. In retrospect, revivalism would prove more significant in the shaping of the course of Irish politics than in its professed purpose of resuscitating the Irish language, but in the Ireland of the turn of the century the outcome was uncertain. Revivalism could yet have proved a passing fad. The attention that Joyce paid it makes plain that he did not think revivalism would prove evanescent; he saw its potency as arising from its affiliations to the neo-nationalist currents in Irish politics after the fall of Parnell.
Many revivalists were possessed of a zealotry, often semi-moralistic, which affirmed Joyce’s suspicions of their project. What repelled Joyce is captured best in a piece written of the Gaelic revival in 1912 by his University College contemporary Arthur Clery, who appears in Stephen Hero as ‘Whelan, the College orator’.9 Austere, not unintelligent, and unbiddable, Clery had joined the Gaelic League in 1897 and was an admirer of D. P. Moran, to whose Leader he was a regular contributor. Indeed, he was prepared to credit Moran with the achievement that many attributed to the Gaelic League itself, reflecting his idiosyncratic politicisation of the Revival. Clery was in later life implacably opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, to the extent of refusing to accept a pension as a member of the Dáil courts from a government he deemed illegitimate, and finally drifted into support of the reactionary Catholic An Ríoghacht.10 His 1912 article entitled ‘The Sect of the Gael’ was published in Moran’s weekly. Clery lauded Moran’s The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (first published between 1898 and 1900 as a series of articles in the New Ireland Review), which he declared ‘had become the philosophy, though not as yet the practice of Ireland as a whole’. Of the revival of Irish as an ordinary medium of communication, Clery wrote, ‘It was a purpose extraordinarily high, extraordinarily difficult of attainment.… The enterprise might fitly be described as miraculous, and though the Irish movement has achieved many miracles, it has not wrought that one yet.’ He continued,
If Ireland is to become Irish-speaking it requires a further miracle, and such may yet occur, but what has happened up to this is of a quite different kind. In fact, if one might put it so, the Gaelic movement in Ireland has brought about a result something like John Wesley’s movement in the Church of England. He set out to reform the church to which he belonged and only succeeded in creating a new sect of non-conformists. The Gaelic movement has in fact created a sect, a body of men of pure lives and high ideals, but leading a life quite apart from the general body of the population, who look upon them for the most part with benevolent wonder. As I heard a well-known Gaelic Leaguer put it at a meeting some weeks ago, Gaelic Leaguers are a body as much estranged from the general life of the people as are the Jews.
He repeated his caveat: ‘But you will never in our time get the general public to live at the intense pressure of Irish Ireland morality.’11 Clery was going beyond what had become by 1912 the blandly conventional argument that the revival movement had re-inspirited nationalism, to assert that while its revivalist purpose was unlikely to be attained, it had created a sect of high-minded dévots. That proved highly prescient.
In Stephen Hero Joyce uses the term ‘the patriots’ with a sarcastic edge to designate those of his contemporaries who were associates of Gaelic Athletic Association founder Michael Cusack, frequenters of Cathal McGarvey’s tobacco shop An Stad on North Frederick Street, adherents of Arthur Griffith and what was to become Sinn Féin, and committed partisans of Irish revivalism. After an account of an exchange between Stephen and Madden, based on Joyce’s friend George Clancy, the narrative turns to Emma Clery, with the pivot, ‘Stephen’s conversations with the patriots were not all of this severe type.’12 Joyce may have taken the term from his father. In Stephen Hero Simon Daedalus complains of the company his son was keeping: ‘lousy-looking patriots and that football chap in the knickerbockers’13 (a reference to Skeffington). Joyce retained all his life an aversion to the terms ‘patriotism’ and ‘patriots’. The indiscriminate designation ‘the patriots’ was to vanish completely in A Portrait. If that reflects the greater refinement of A Portrait, it also reflects Joyce’s realisation that the aggregation was not analytically sustainable, which in turn owes something to his reassessment of Griffith.
‘The extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?’: Joyce’s Knowledge of Irish
As part of the abbreviated and highly stylised autobiography he furnished in instalments to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce wrote in 1921, ‘My father wanted me to take Greek as third subject, my mother German and my friends Irish. Result, I took Italian.’14
Joyce did fleetingly enrol in a course to learn Irish. In Stephen Hero Stephen buys O’Growney’s primers, published by the Gaelic League, but refuses to pay a subscription to the League or to wear the badge in his buttonhole. His purpose was to join the class attended by Emma Clery: ‘People at home did not seem opposed to this new freak of his.’15 It may have been a relief to his mother, who complained that he ‘never went to church, mass or meeting’.16
From 1899 on the initiative of William Delany, Patrick Pearse taught, under the auspices of the Gaelic League, extra-curricular classes in the Irish language at University College. The first course was attended by fewer than a dozen students, among whom was George Clancy. In 1901–2 Pearse taught a second and somewhat more formally organised course attended by, among others, Constantine Curran and Hugh Kennedy.17 The slightly greater probability is that Joyce’s attendance was at the first course offered by Pearse.
Joyce did not maintain his attendance. Davin, the Clancy figure in A Portrait, having earlier asked Stephen, ‘Are you Irish at all?’, follows this up with urging him to be ‘one of us’: ‘Why don’t you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?’18 It is clear that Joyce dropped out, but perhaps not after the first lesson. Frank Budgen, who first met Joyce in Zurich in 1918, two years after Pearse’s execution, wrote in his 1934 memoir of Joyce that ‘Joyce studied Irish under Pearse, but Pearse’s enthusiasm for Irish led him often to disparage the English language, and on this account he discontinued the Irish lessons and turned his attention to Norwegian, which he has studied ever since.’ He added in his ‘Further Recollections of James Joyce’ in 1955 that ‘Pearse’s ridiculing of the English word “thunder” was probably the limit’.19
Joyce had scarcely intended to linger long on the course; if he was looking for affirmation of his suspicions of the Gaelic League as intolerant of the English language, Pearse was unlikely to have disappointed. Joyce had subscribed in some degree as an aspect of his relationship with Clancy. He needed some grasp of orally communicated Irish, however initiatory. The experience of attending one or more Gaelic League classes was potentially useful to Joyce, though it did little to inform the account in Stephen Hero of Stephen’s attendance at Irish language classes transposed to a venue in O’Connell Street.20 His leaving of Pearse’s class did not portend a complete abandonment of his study of the Irish language. Stanislaus Joyce recalled that his brother, under the influence of Clancy, ‘studied Irish for a year or two’.21
It was characteristic for Joyce to refuse to see attendance at a class of the Gaelic League as coextensive with learning Irish. However, although Joyce’s grasp of Irish, unlike his comprehension of Norwegian, remained fairly rudimentary, he still believed that he had an abstract understanding of Irish as a linguistic system. A clue to the obduracy of this conviction may find fictional expression within the sardonic grace of the catechistic interrogation in the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, after Bloom and Stephen have exchanged snatches, sacred or pedagogic, of Hebrew and Irish which may represent a very large portion of their respective knowledge of those languages.
Was the knowledge possessed by both or each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?
Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.22
The Irish scholar Brendan O’Hehir, in his Gaelic Lexicon for ‘Finnegans Wake’, addressed the issue of Joyce’s knowledge of Irish. He wrote of the slow dissipation of the assumption that Joyce knew little or no Irish, not least by Stanislaus’s significant qualification of what was inferred from Stephen’s dropping of the Irish course in A Portrait. O’Hehir suggests that Joyce attained ‘a modest competence in Irish’,23 itself possibly a polite overstatement. He refers to Joyce’s exceptional flair for languages, the brothers’ penchant for etymologising the place-names where they lived, and the fact that in Paris Joyce had Patrick Dinneen’s Irish-English dictionary and Edmund E. Fournier D’Albe’s (earlier and less highly regarded) English-Irish Dictionary;24 both authors lectured at University College in Joyce’s time. O’Hehir’s revisionism is scrupled: ‘It should not be supposed that Joyce was a profound Gaelic scholar. With a number of sharp and surprising exceptions, the Gaelic displayed in Finnegans Wake is of an elementary and commonplace character.’25
