James joyce, p.50
James Joyce, page 50
When Sylvia Beach asked Joyce to record part of Ulysses, he chose the Taylor speech as the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses and the only one that was ‘declamatory’ and therefore suitable for recital. Beach intuited the depth of Joyce’s affinity with Taylor’s speech: ‘I have an idea that it was not only for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out—“he lifted his voice above it boldly”—it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.’99
Beach’s impression is consistent with Joyce’s treatment of Taylor’s speech in Ulysses. Stephen must sternly resist its lure, but Stephen’s coldness towards professor MacHugh does not equate to the austerely purist objection on Joyce’s part to Taylor’s oratory in its nationalist aspect that some commentators have taken it to be. The motif of the ‘Aeolus’ episode is rhetoric. Stephen’s ambivalent disquiet about rhetoric and Joyce’s loathing of essentialist nationalism, which Taylor’s speech transcends, are distinct. Joyce’s treatment of the Irish political—and of politics beyond Ireland—consistently resists neat theoretical extrapolation, superficial equivalencies, and facile judgement.
‘Meer marchant Taylor’s fablings of a race’: The Significance of Taylor’s Speech for Joyce
Joyce apprehended more incisively than Taylor the buried nationalist resonances of Taylor’s speech. Taylor had found in the subject of the Irish language the pulse for an emotionally powerful restatement of nationalism. The refractory Parnellite was almost involuntarily situating the contemporary revival within the paradigm of the high nationalist idiom of the late 1870s and the 1880s, the last period of political renascence now pushed back by the Parnell Split into imperfectly apprehended historical memory.
In his speech Taylor did, however, add something important that the urgent advances of the Land War and the swiftness of Parnell’s rise lacked: a sense of Irish cultural destitution which itself, in a weird and complicated spiral, owed much to the Split and Parnell’s death. The imaginative rift created by the desolation of the Split and the mourning of Parnell had suddenly opened up the Irish past, and not only that immediate past from which the land agitation and Parnell came forth, but the Ireland that was anterior to Parnell. This was a complex phenomenon that was not obvious to most Irish people and observers at the time, or was at best half grasped. The enumeration in Parnellite rhetoric of heroic precursors of Parnell, which excited the derision of T. M. Healy, was crudely instrumental, but emblematic of a deeper sense of loss that Parnell’s sympathisers could not adequately articulate. Both the transformation and the perception of it were unfolding processes that lay outside conventional notions of political consequence and causality. It was in the domain of literary imagination rather than politics that the transformation was apprehended. This imaginative sequel to the Split and Parnell’s death was fully appreciated by only two writers, Joyce and Yeats, though other writers such as Katharine Tynan and Standish O’Grady had an intimation of how the Split had reinstated in modern Ireland a sense of the desolation of historico-cultural loss.
When he was writing Ulysses, Joyce realised something which Taylor—who had to negotiate his unrepented anti-Parnellism in the Split—did not quite grasp: that the speech had as much to do with the fallout, imaginative and political, of the Split as it had to do with the Irish Revival. Joyce’s rendering of Taylor’s speech in Ulysses presents an oblique but persistent querying of the naivety of ‘the Irish Revival’ as a quasi-ideology, the idea that only an Irish-speaking Ireland could represent a true and legitimate consummation of Irish independence. This was the idea that Taylor had simply dismissed in his speech as beyond the bounds of feasibility, but it was an ideological aspiration that Joyce in his generation could not simply pass over. Joyce counters the espousal of a willed counter-historical revival of Irish as the only authentic language of the Irish people, by the evocation of time—that is, time as the cycle of civilisations, nations, and empires (brilliantly turning the central conceit of Taylor’s speech in explicit opposition to revivalism in its ideologically ‘hard’ form), and the time of human mortality, of Taylor, of the dying J. J. O’Molloy and the dead Parnell, and even of the terrible ‘dumb belch of hunger’ emitted by professor MacHugh. The mortal condition is not only about death but about the limits of what is humanly achievable, of which the more zealous revivalists took little account. It is what informs the affable midday melancholy in the Evening Telegraph office.
The idea of cultural transience subsists within the impermanence of form of the speech itself. Taking a cue from X, Joyce exaggerates in ‘Aeolus’ the supposed spontaneity of the speech and absence of press coverage, so that all that survives of Taylor’s speech is the recollection of professor MacHugh and whatever anyone else present might have happened to recall. Formally it has a double ephemerality: a speech recalling a speech. It is Ulysses itself that rescues the speech from prospective oblivion, two decades after its delivery.
What the rendering of Taylor’s speech in Ulysses shows is that Joyce saw revivalism as a political phenomenon of the time. He rejected, as did Taylor, the transcendental meta-historical pretensions of revivalism. In this Joyce differed from many of his peers in University College, who readily assented to the idea that revivalism stood outside contemporary politics. He was not for a moment susceptible to the idea that the Gaelic League, and revivalism generally, was politically innocent or transcended the contemporary political.
Joyce was intrigued by the interrelationship of the treatment of the ancient past and at least implied prophecy of the future in Taylor’s speech. This engenders the sardonic echo of Taylor’s speech later in the ‘Ithaca’ episode, where Joyce completes the running saga of Throwaway, the horse that had that day won the Ascot Gold Cup which Bantam Lyons erroneously believed Bloom to have backed at twenty to one, prompting a resentment of Bloom for his failure either to impart his occult knowledge to his indigent and avidly betting fellow citizens or even to include them in the bounty of his good luck by standing drinks in Barney Kiernan’s.100 When Bloom had been given back his copy of that day’s Freeman’s Journal and National Press by Bantam Lyons, ‘which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths of Leinster Street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of his race, graven in the language of prediction.’101
Both the rhetorical and time-transforming aspects of the Taylor speech in Ulysses inform Joyce’s Finnegans Wake reference to Taylor. There Joyce wheels round what he terms ‘meer marchant taylor’s fablings of a race’ in time and political perspective to become a retrospective observation on Irish independence,102 emblematised by references to Eamon de Valera. The passage in its principal strain, as I read it, is a critique from a hostile English, or Irish Unionist, vantage of the destruction of the prospects for the independence of Ireland (‘the wastobe land, a lottuse land, a luctuous land, Emerald-illium’) wrought by the violent means by which it was achieved.103
What, then, did Taylor’s speech mean for Joyce? It revealed the possibility of invoking politically the culture of ancient Ireland and Irish history, in a way that was distinct from that of the Gaelic League and essentialist cultural nationalism, without denying the impetus of the Gaelic League. The contemporary élan of the language revival could be captured and redirected, as Taylor had contrived to do in the King’s Inns. Joyce was susceptible to the argument of the kind enunciated by Taylor that married Ireland’s artistic and historical heritage with high nationalism. The argument, implicitly dismissive of revivalism, of Joyce’s magnificent 1907 Trieste lecture ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’ is in the line of Taylor’s speech: ‘Just as ancient Egypt is dead, so is ancient Ireland. Its dirge has been sung and the seal set upon its gravestone. The ancient national spirit that spoke through the centuries through the mouths of fabulous seers, wandering minstrels, and [Jacobite] poets has vanished from the world with the death of James Clarence Mangan. With his death the long tradition of the triple order of the ancient bards also died. Today other bards, inspired by other ideas, have their turn.’104
A few months after giving this lecture, Joyce, in his article ‘L’Irlanda alla sbarra’ (‘Ireland at the Bar’), plangently described the wrongly executed Myles Joyce, who spoke only Irish, as ‘left over from a culture which is not ours’.105
1. M. Colum and P. Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 20–21. This was in the course of their first conversation, after they had left the National Library in 1902 or early 1903.
2. Freeman’s Journal, 25 October 1901.
3. U 7.795–96.
4. U 7.807.
5. Fathers of the Society of Jesus, Page of Irish History, 482.
6. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, lecture delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November 1892, in Crowley, Politics of Language, 187.
7. Hyde, ‘Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, 185.
8. Hyde, ‘Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, 184. Joyce made few references to Hyde in his correspondence and writing. Joyce was strategic in his choice of targets of criticism. Augusta Gregory and to a lesser extent Yeats were the proxies for Joyce’s suspicions of Hyde’s proselytising the revival of the language.
9. SH 89. Alongside the reference to Whelan there appears the note in the manuscript ‘offering him the grapes. I never eat Muscatel grapes’. Curran noted that Clery was in the habit of carrying grapes home with him and had offered him grapes in the Gaiety ‘gods’; C. P. Curran, Joyce notebook, UCD Special Collections, Constantine Curran Collection, Curran MS 6, 89.
10. Patrick Maume, ‘Arthur Edward Clery’, DIB 2:584–86.
11. Chanel [Arthur Clery], ‘The Sect of the Gael’, Leader, 10 February 1912.
12. SH 65.
13. SH 216.
14. Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 June 1921, Letters I 167.
15. SH 56.
16. Scholes and Kain, Workshop of Daedalus, 103 (from the notes headed ‘Mother’ in Joyce’s ‘Trieste notebook’).
17. Fathers of the Society of Jesus, Page of Irish History, 503; Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 29. Pearse was a fairly familiar figure in University College. He chaired a debate at the Literary and Historical Society in the 1901–2 session—Joyce’s last year, in which he delivered his paper on James Clarence Mangan—on the motion ‘That the Irish Language Movement is the Essential Element in Irish Nationality’; Meenan, Centenary History, 70.
18. P 5.999–1004.
19. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 183, 359. It is quite possible that Joyce’s account of Pearse deriding the word ‘thunder’ was a conceit as he worked on Finnegans Wake, in which a Vico-derived idea of thunder featured prominently. Budgen does not date Joyce’s observation on the subject.
20. SH 59–61.
21. S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 175.
22. U 17.741–44.
23. Brendan O’Hehir, A Gaelic Lexicon for ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Glossary for Joyce’s Other Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), vii.
24. O’Hehir, Gaelic Lexicon, viii; Patrick Dinneen, Fócloir Gaedhilge agus Béarla: An Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1927); Edmund E. Fournier D’Albe, An English-Irish Dictionary and Phrase Book (Dublin: n.p., n.d. [1905]).
25. O’Hehir, Gaelic Lexicon, vii–ix.
26. Ellmann, James Joyce, 90.
27. Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce, 34.
28. Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce, 35–36. Ellmann quotes the bulk of the letter of ‘X’ to the Guardian.
29. [Roger Casement], The Language of the Outlaw (n.p., n.d.), 1. The text of the pamphlet was republished in the United Irishman of 17 February 1906.
30. The issue of authorship is discussed in Abby Bender, ‘The Language of the Outlaw: A Clarification’, James Joyce Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 807–12. The pamphlet is attributed to Casement by P. S. O’Hegarty in his Bibliography of Roger Casement (Dublin: Alex Thom, 1949), 5–6. It is included in Herbert O. Mackey’s collection of Casement’s writings The Crime against Europe (Dublin: C. J. Fallon, 1958), 112–16.
31. The suggestion of O’Hegarty, who was less than clear about why he was ascribing the authorship of the pamphlet to Casement, that ‘the letter itself was possibly written by Casement himself’ (Bibliography of Roger Casement, 6) can be discounted. Casement had not read any of the contemporary accounts and only learned of it later. Casement had in fact departed the Congo Free State and reached England from Lisbon on 12 October 1901. It seems as if he was in Portrush when reports of Taylor’s speech were carried in the Dublin papers on 25 October; Séamas Ó’Síocháin, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary (Dublin: Lilliput, 2008), 134–35. Ó’Síocháin refers to Casement’s publication of The Language of the Outlaw at 223–24.
32. U 7.815–16.
33. [Casement], Language of the Outlaw, 2, 3; U 7.823, 7.793.
34. [Casement], Language of the Outlaw, 3.
35. U 7.815–18.
36. [Casement], Language of the Outlaw, 3.
37. [Casement], Language of the Outlaw, 4.
38. The reports reflect a degree of editorial bias. I have taken Taylor’s speech principally from the Freeman’s Journal, and that of Fitzgibbon from the Daily Express. That the debate was very much a Dublin occasion is reflected in the fact that no report was carried in the liberal Unionist Northern Whig.
39. Patrick Maume, ‘Gerald Fitzgibbon’, DIB 3:928–31; R. F. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 40–42. Churchill continued to attend the annual Christmas party in Howth of Fitzgibbon, who characterised the serial occasion as ‘the haute école of intelligent Toryism’ (Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill, 56–57).
40. Rhadamanthus [pseud.], Our Judges (Dublin: Irish Society Office, 1890), 36–37.
41. Yeats, Autobiographies, 215.
42. Yeats, Autobiographies, 422.
43. Freeman’s Journal, 25 October 1901.
44. Freeman’s Journal, 25 October 1901.
45. Daily Express, 25 October 1901.
46. Daily Express, 25 October 1901.
47. Daily Express, 25 October 1901.
48. SH 54. A little later in the novel, pursuing the same theme, he asks Madden, ‘And, tell me, how many of your Catholic Leaguers are studying for the Second Division and looking for advancement in the Civil Service?’ (SH 64).
49. J. F. Taylor, ‘The Irish Revival’, Freeman’s Journal, 28 October 1901.
50. Taylor, ‘Irish Revival’.
51. Patrick Maume, ‘John Pentland Mahaffy’, DIB 6:285–87.
52. Taylor, ‘Irish Revival’. Both Professor Robert Atkinson and John Pentland Mahaffy gave evidence in 1898 to the Viceregal Commission enquiring into the intermediate school curriculum. Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 223; Tony Crowley, War of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland, 1537–2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 143.
53. Linde Lunney and Pauric J. Dempsey, ‘Edward Dowden’, DIB 3:425–27.
54. Taylor, in his article, also criticised Maynooth, though less trenchantly. He observed in passing, ‘The fine tones of any language are for the few, and of two languages, for no one, not even Gibbon.’ Taylor, ‘Irish Revival’.
55. Taylor, ‘Irish Revival’. The opening references are to Edmund Burke, Henry Grattan, William Pitt, Charles James Fox and Henry Bright.
56. P 5.553–59.
57. OCPW 145–46. See chapter 15, ‘Joyce’s Triestine Lectures and Articles’, for discussion of article ‘Ireland at the Bar’.
58. Conor Cruise O’Brien has written, in a brilliant rendering of the early Burke that owes much to his wife, the poet and scholar Máire Mhac an tSaoi, ‘To be brought up in Ballyduff [in County Cork], and to love his Nagle relatives, as Burke did, was to share directly in a considerable part of the experience of the Irish, Gaelic-speaking, Catholic people and to be at least somewhat affected by Irish Catholic interpretations of history, and aspirations for the future.’ He noted that ‘Burke all his life retained an interest in the Irish language and its literature’. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992), 23.
59. Taylor, ‘Irish Revival’.
60. Leader, 2 November 1901.
61. Yeats, Autobiographies, 96–97.
62. Maud Gonne to Yeats, Paris, early 1916, in The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893–1938, ed. Anna MacBride and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992), 367.
