James joyce, p.81
James Joyce, page 81
In holding out against irredentism, Joyce maintained a fastidious consistency with his pluralistic conception of Irish nationalism. His academic formation was Italian, and his social and intellectual ambience in Trieste overwhelmingly irredentist, but he assumed a position of reticence which aligned him with the Slavs of Trieste and its hinterland, and the politics of the working class of Trieste. It was an enriching, a deepening and broadening out, rather than a redirecting of his Irish political thinking.101 That is the coherence that allowed him to merge his political experience of Trieste with that of Dublin in Ulysses.
Not merely did Joyce decline to take a position on the irredentist issue, he conspicuously refuses to make comparisons between Ireland and Trieste in his journalism, his lecture, or even in recorded comments. This is a radical departure from the tortuous comparisons of Ireland and Italy that characterised Joyce’s meditations on Italian revolutionary syndicalism in 1906–7 which only ceased some two months before Joyce gave his lecture ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’ to the Università Popolare. His lecture was about what Ireland (an Ireland defined by its ethnic heterogeneity) might have to impart to Europe rather than to learn from the more advanced states of Europe, but more than that it was, or at least initiated, a breaking of the mould of static comparisons of polities and economies, which pitted one state or political culture against another, in favour of a more fluid conception of ethnic and cultural migrations and influences bearing on the ordinary life of humanity. That Joyce was at the time living in a city that exemplified multi-ethnicity, which Stanislaus compared to a European ‘salad’,102 is of importance.
If Joyce avoided direct comparison between Trieste and Ireland in his lecture, he deftly co-mingles the two through their ethnic and cultural hybridity, thereby taking up the challenge of demonstrating that the historical heterogeneity of the Irish was not so different from the more obvious diversity of the contemporary population of Trieste. Discussing the difference between the Irish and the English, he wrote of the Irish, ‘Our civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed, in which Nordic rapacity is reconciled to Roman law, and the new bourgeois conventions to the remains of a Syriac religion [Christianity]. In such a fabric, it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby. What race or language can nowadays claim to be pure?’103
This is not a passing observation, but the hinge on which Joyce’s reasoning pivots. That Joyce, in addition to sustaining the weight of the tacit equation—or rather co-universalisation—of Ireland and Trieste, is straining to endow Ireland with the credentials of nationhood (the ‘immense’ fabric of ‘our civilization’) confirms Kevin Barry’s proposition that Joyce is at once expressing agreement with the argument of Ernest Renan that ‘there is no pure race’ and ‘the most noble countries, England, France, Italy are those where blood is most mingled’ and challenging Renan’s exclusion of Ireland (‘the only country in Europe where the native can produce the titles of his descent’).104 The lecture is also pivotal in Joyce’s oeuvre and political thinking, holding in perfect balance an overt and traditional nationalism and his ambition to reconceptualise Ireland.
The lecture moreover contains Joyce’s only public comment that bears on irredentism—his likening of the Celtic spirit to the Slavic one105—and is his only actually recorded statement on the subject. This swerve is the single most important indication of Joyce’s attitude to irredentism. Accepting the premise of nationalism, he is preparing to consider the issue of minorities in nation-states and does so integrally. The implication that the Slavs provide a better parallel to Ireland than the Italians of Trieste is highly calculated since the idea that the Italians were oppressed was central to the rhetoric and mythology of irredentism. It is an oblique criticism of the irredentist hostility to the Slovenes and denial of their claim to nationhood, which was aligned with the critique of irredentism by socialists and even by some of the enlightened and more moderate irredentists, such as Scipio Slataper. Joyce did not like the bullying of the Slovenes. His veiled criticism of irredentism echoed his deprecation of the Hungarian oppression of ethnic minorities within its frontiers in Stephen Hero. Joyce had there scorned Griffith’s ‘Hungarian policy’, which advocated the emulation of the dual monarchy of Austro-Hungary, by reference to ‘the capable aggressions of the Magyars upon the Latin and Slav and Teutonic populations, greater than themselves in number’.106
It is true that Joyce was giving the lecture at the invitation of Attilio Tamaro, who was a hard-line irredentist publicist, to whom Joyce was determined not to be politically beholden. It is perhaps also possible that Joyce was sending a polite signal to his more moderate irredentist friends not to push him too far towards supporting the irredentist cause or equating it with Irish nationalism.
Giacomo Joyce, a set of connected epiphanies centred on a Jewish woman with whom the narrator is enamoured, gives an idea of Joyce’s personal thinking. The fragments were written between 1911 and 1914; Joyce never sought to publish them, and probably had not written them for publication. They include the sentence, ‘Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance.’107 The odd but strangely effective image of bugs awaiting a national deliverance can only be a moderately sarcastic reference to the irredentism of the city. In another passage the irredentist sympathies of the woman are rendered coldly: ‘She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are sure which country it is.’108
This refers to the episode when the pacifist and anti-imperialist Albini, a music critic for Avanti! (Joyce in Trieste was much interested in at least some music critics), had heroically refused to stand for the ‘Marcia Reale’, the anthem of the Kingdom of Italy, at a concert in La Scala in support of the Italian Red Cross and the families of soldiers killed or wounded in Libya,109 where Italy was at war with the Turks and indigenous Arabs in 1911–12.
In March 1922 Joyce wrote to Stanislaus from Paris that the ‘Dail Eirann [sic] Minister of Publicity’ Desmond FitzGerald (who was director of publicity for Dáil Éireann from April 1919 until he was appointed minister for external affairs in the provisional government in August 1922) had visited him ‘and asked me if I intended to return to Ireland at present. I told him not for the present. One redeemed city (and inhabitants thereof) will last me for a few years more.’110 Directed equally at Trieste and Dublin as the capital of the newly independent Ireland, it was a pretty good joke, but it attests also to Joyce’s lack of affinity with irredentism. Joyce’s affective compact with his Triestine irredentist friends was sternly unilateral: it rendered them sympathetic to, and understanding of, his Irish nationalism. There was no reciprocating gesture.
There is a strange crossover in the fraternity of Joyce and Stanislaus. They had taken different views on Sinn Féin in Ireland, with Stanislaus favouring the more moderate Irish Parliamentary Party. If Joyce was at best reticent on the subject of irredentism, Stanislaus was an ardent irredentist.111 It is even possible that Stanislaus, grotesquely imposed on by Joyce in Trieste, was taking the opportunity to demonstrate his independence of judgement; his Triestine diaries give the impression that they had previously discussed the curious politics of italianità in Trieste. Stanislaus was no match in political acuity for his brother. The consequences were significant, if indirect. While Joyce left for Zurich when Italy entered the First World War, Stanislaus was interned by the Austrian authorities for the duration of the war. Admittedly the brothers’ relations had by then cooled, or at least they had seen less of each other in the preceding years; but their divergent approaches to irredentism contributed to the growing apart of the two brothers.
Triestine Perceptions of Joyce’s Politics
Of the assessments by Triestines of Joyce’s Irish politics, the most important is that of Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) in a lecture given in Milan in 1927, five years after the publication of Ulysses. Some twenty years older than Joyce, Schmitz was wry, temperate, and phlegmatic. He understood Joyce very well, so that he could write with magisterial understatement of Joyce’s litany of grievances, ‘I was always much amused by Joyce’s indignation at the misadventures that befell him.’ His analysis of a Joyce ‘driven by his fate into many rebellions in order to succeed in being himself’ is penetrating. ‘Whenever you read a biographical notice of Joyce, you find definitely stated that he never took any share in his country’s struggles; and that in his Ulysses the part of Telemachus (far from the struggle) is appropriately given to the character who most resembles him. On the contrary, Joyce took part in those struggles from afar, from Trieste, with two articles in Il Piccolo della Sera.’112
Schmitz presumably had in mind Joyce’s articles ‘Ireland at the Bar’ (‘L’Irlanda alla sbarra’) and ‘The Shade of Parnell’ (‘L’ombra di Parnell’), the latter of which was ‘magnificent in its indignation and irony’. He quotes the close of the second, in which Joyce states that Parnell’s countrymen ‘did not throw him to the English wolves: they tore him to pieces themselves’:
Here you see Joyce walking through the world with one sole comrade in faith, Parnell. And Parnell is dead. Our poet here, it seems, is Zarathustra carrying the great man’s corpse on his back.
He is twice a rebel, against England and against Ireland. He hates England and would like to transform Ireland.113
Schmitz returns to the Parnell theme in considering the character of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait: ‘As a child he is entrusted to the care of the Jesuits. Already he is marked out to be an artist and no education can obliterate that hallmark. See how his whole soul responds to the news of Parnell’s death. He is ten years of age, just the age Joyce was at the time.’114 Schmitz realised that Joyce’s relationship to Trieste and to Italy was complicated, perhaps enriched, by his Irish sympathies: ‘In Joyce’s culture there is a marked Italian bias, accentuated by the desire, which was very lively at some periods of his life, to feel less English.’115
In his eccentric and self-indulgent lecture of 1922, entitled ‘Joyce intimo spogliato in piazza’ (later translated and published as ‘Joyce Stripped Naked in the Piazza’), Joyce’s teaching colleague and drinking companion Alessandro Francini Bruni related some of the mordant fables of Ireland that Joyce invented to keep boredom at bay in his teaching. Francini Bruni otherwise characterised Joyce’s patriotism as being of the drunken Irish type. He recounts Joyce frequenting a bar on the Via Belvedere kept by a Sicilian called Storky: ‘Although already drunk and glassy-eyed, he enjoyed stuffing poor Storky’s head with extraordinary stories about the Emerald Isle’.116 He portrayed the Irish nationalist in his cups, alternately scornful and sentimental: ‘In those moments if you asked him, for example, about Ireland, you would have heard a man discoursing on the heartrending state of his land, all the while showering it with scorn, his moist eyes gazing at some point in the void. In an outburst of weeping he would speak of the tears cried from thousands of eyes by thousands of tormented souls over the course of the centuries, trying himself to drown those tears in a river of eloquence. Here was the sorrow of the laughing Pagliacci.’117
Francini Bruni returned to this theme in his 1947 ‘Ricordi su James Joyce’, adding that, ‘however ironically he may have treated it, Ireland was his agony. His spirit, particularly when he was depressed, would always return to Ireland’.118
It is Francini Bruni who advanced the idea of Joyce’s suspicions of governments. In the provocative, invented vignettes, there is one in relation to the tax collector, in which he has Joyce referring Venezia Guilia to ‘that swindler, his master. Today, the swindler is the government in Vienna. Tomorrow it could be the one in Rome. But whether Vienna or Rome or London, to me governments are all the same, pirates’.119 If there is some licence in a vignette, Joyce gave a more elaborate statement of his thinking to Francini Bruni when he voiced his disillusion, already quoted, with politics, and with Italian socialism in particular: ‘His attitude is as enigmatical towards politics as towards the Church. He told me one day. “My political faith can be expressed in a few words. Monarchies, constitutional or not, repel me. Republics, bourgeois or democratic, also repel me. Kings are clowns. Republics are worn out slippers that fit every foot. The Pope’s temporal power is gone and good riddance. What is left? Do we want monarchy by divine right? Do you believe in the sun of the future?”’120
The question ‘What is left?’ relating to the Socialist Party and its anthem ‘The Sun of the Future’ conveys a sense of exhausted options, at least at the level of Joyce’s ‘political faith’. It was a loud sigh of boredom and exasperation; it did not signal a repudiation of socialism but an irritated dissociation from its institutional manifestations.
Of those whom Joyce came to know in Trieste, the most perceptive apart from Ettore Schmitz was Silvio Benco, who had been a notably moderate and intelligent irredentist, sympathetic to and respected by Joyce. His ‘James Joyce a Trieste’ was published in an Italian periodical in 1930 and might be characterised as a meditation on the inter-relationship of Joyce’s Irish nationalism and irredentism, but one that raises the neglected issue of Joyce’s relationship to modern Italy, the kingdom that came into being in 1861. While Benco had known Joyce quite well in Trieste, and had access to the articles that Joyce had written for Il Piccolo della Sera, his memoir both drew on and was provoked by Francini Bruni’s lecture, which Benco politely referred to as ‘a delightful, but today rather rare, book with the ugly title, Joyce intimo spogliato in piazza’.121 What most affronted Benco was the assertion attributed to Joyce by Francini Bruni that ‘Italian literature begins and ends with Dante’ and that the rest was ‘ballast’. This was probably accurately rendered by Francini Bruni—Stanislaus recorded his brother’s dislike of the ‘vain pompous bombast’ of Giosuè Carducci,122 recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1906 and often considered the national poet of modern Italy.
FIGURE 14.2. Silvio Benco (Wikimedia Commons).
Benco, who was sympathetic to Joyce, was driven by Francini Bruni’s assertion to suggest that Joyce held cliché-driven—even semi-touristic—views on modern Italian literature, and on the Renaissance papacy: ‘[Joyce] had instinctively found his point of affinity [with Dante], and he was right; but his hasty judgement of the rest was only one of those opinions which one hears on any literature from superficial intellects. Nor did he like Rome. Only the Roman Church seemed great to him; but great with a sort of mixed grandeur, composed of good and evil—the idea which most foreigners draw from their hyper-romantic concept of the Renaissance papacy. Concerning Italy we have nothing to learn from Joyce.’123 Besides querying the strength of Joyce’s relationship to and understanding of Italy, Benco was raising, with great astuteness, the issue of the relationship in Joyce’s thought between ‘modern’ nineteenth-century nationalism and the pre-modern: the anterior literatures, histories, and cultures of European empires, states, races, and polities. That was precisely the relationship, or fracture, that Joyce was negotiating in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Benco was also, of course, gently querying the strength of Joyce’s interest in, and understanding of, contemporary Italy. In his letter to his aunt Josephine on New Year’s Eve 1904, Joyce had expressed his impatience with Pola—‘I am trying to move on to Italy as soon as possible’124—but something of that belief in Italy as an exilic abode waned, and not only because of the disillusionment wrought by his Roman sojourn. Joyce’s ambivalent attitude towards contemporary Italy was not likely to have particularly predisposed him in favour of irredentism, and perhaps contributed something to his apparent boredom with the subject.
Benco called on Joyce in Paris sometime after the death of Ettore Schmitz in a car accident in 1928, and recorded a conversation in which Joyce repudiated politics: ‘The only thing, he says, which no longer interests him at all is politics. “No one bothers with politics anyway,” he adds. “It’s no longer in style”.’ This was not something Benco, whom Roberto Prezioso had asked to look over the Italian of Joyce’s articles for Il Piccolo della Sera, had heard before from Joyce, and he was somewhat shocked by it. Referring to those articles written between 1907 and 1912, Benco observed, ‘At that time Joyce did not believe that politics were out of style. He had brought with him from Ireland a passionate interest in the subject: indeed he had the bitterness of disillusion, the intolerance of a persecuted man and the bravado of a sceptic.’125
