James joyce, p.87
James Joyce, page 87
The story of Maamtrasna retained a certain currency in Ireland, though marked by a tendency to fade into vaguely remembered anecdote that contrasted with the more deeply incised recall of the Phoenix Park murders, which fitted into the binary narrative of physical force versus constitutional nationalism. Joyce perhaps heard of the murders and the execution of Myles Joyce first from his father, who was friendly with Harrington.132 He may have heard it again from Nora.133 The newspaper accounts of the release of the last three prisoners in 1902 certainly called it back to mind, across the span of the two decades that had supervened. Joyce had no materials on Maamtrasna in Trieste, and it seems unlikely that he had ever read Harrington’s The Maamtrasna Massacre. Many of the details of Joyce’s narrative were wrong. Those arrested and put on trial were not ‘four or five peasants’, nor were all the prisoners ‘members of the ancient tribe of the Joyces’, as he proudly stated. Myles Joyce had not given evidence, but Joyce invented a couple of exchanges of Myles Joyce with the bench, in which the voluble answers of ‘the patriarch of the miserable tribe’ were translated with economic paraphrase by ‘the officious interpreter’. He characterised Myles Joyce as ‘protesting, shouting, almost beside himself with the distress of not making himself understood, weeping with rage and terror’.134 As it happens, Joyce had not done justice to the scene that took place when, after Myles Joyce was convicted, the judge asked him if he had anything to say. The Freeman’s Journal reported, ‘The hitherto silent and placid Myles suddenly broke into a tirade of rapid and fluent Gaelic, all of which was accompanied by the most violent but expressive gestures and bodily movements. His eyes blazed, his face reddened and yet, withal, there was no anger or resentment there but surprise, total incomprehension, a passionate desire to communicate to God, to the court, to the world, his solemn affirmation of innocence.’135
Joyce even missed Myles Joyce’s protestations of innocence on the scaffold, substituting a narrative in which the square in front of the prison was ‘packed with people who were kneeling and calling out prayers in Irish for the repose of the soul of Myles Joyce’. Struggling to recall what he had been told about the execution, he wrote that ‘legend has it that even the hangman could not make himself understood by the victim and angrily kicked the unhappy man in the head to force him into the noose.’136 In Joyce’s account, Myles Joyce was convicted because his lack of English denied him the ability to defend himself, rather than by reason of the false testimony of kinsmen and neighbours. Joyce’s account unintentionally exemplifies what came to be his conviction that historically nothing was properly remembered but neither was it entirely lost.
Joyce’s narrative pivots into a magnificent metaphor: ‘The figure of this bewildered old man, left over from a culture which is not ours, a deaf-mute before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.’137 The characterisation of Myles Joyce as ‘left over from a culture which is not ours’ (avanzo di una civiltà non nostra) is strangely affecting. It matches the pronouncement in ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’ that ‘just as ancient Egypt is dead, so is ancient Ireland’.138 The evocative resonance of the phrase is not limited to the dying out of the Irish language, though it is that which principally gives it its haunting force. It is also about the fading out of pre-Parnellite Ireland, even the remorseless effacement of that anterior Ireland by Parnellism as a modernising nationalist movement, as well as by socio-economic advances. The new Ireland rudely displaced all the old Irelands, but in Joyce’s strange way the brutality of the moment of passing briefly revives that which has seemingly vanished and flickeringly reinstates the potentialities that are lost. The statement that the culture to which Myles Joyce belonged was ‘not ours’ by reference to that of Joyce’s audience in Trieste as well as that of Ireland accentuates the distance in epoch from the Maamtrasna of 1882.
That reverberating phrase ‘left over from a culture which is not ours’ opens an imaginative rift of consummate complexity that cuts through the complacently nationalist narrative to restore the terrible solitude of Myles Joyce as he met his fate. If the judicial authority could not understand Myles Joyce (nor he its procedures), analogously to the way England denied Ireland a political hearing, the world of Myles Joyce was also lost to comprehension in the Ireland and Europe of the early twentieth century. There was in that way a subtle filiation between how Myles Joyce was perceived at his trial in 1882 and how he was perceived in 1907 that prevented Joyce’s account being read simplistically as merely an account of a gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated under British rule in Ireland. That filiation had a more powerful salience for the contemporary Irish audience Joyce’s article never reached than it had for his Triestine readership. It is the first articulation of Joyce’s anti-positivistic imaginative sympathy with individuals and cultures defeated and displaced in the process of history.
Two-thirds of the article is devoted to the subject for which the story of Myles Joyce provides the overture: ‘Like him, Ireland cannot appeal to the modern conscience of England or abroad. The English newspapers act as interpreters between Ireland and the English electorate which, though it lends an ear every so often is finally irritated by the eternal complaints of the Nationalist deputies who, it believes, have come to their House with the aim of upsetting the order and extorting money.’139
Abroad, Ireland did not feature unless there were some violent episodes such as those that had recently received coverage. These were riots in Belfast, and episodes of cattle-driving, where cattle was driven off graziers’ lands in an attempt to force the graziers’ lands to be divided into smallholdings.140 ‘The public skims through the dispatches received from London, which, while they may be lacking in acrimony, have some of the laconic aspect of the interpreter mentioned above’.141 The Irish were thus rendered in continental Europe as murderous criminals.
England’s misgovernment of Ireland contrasted with the decisive judgement it deployed on imperial matters. There was no question more entangled than that of Ireland: ‘The Irish themselves understand little of it, the English even less, and for other peoples it is complete darkness.’ The Irish did know that it was the cause of all their suffering, ‘and this is why they employ extremely violent methods to resolve it’.142 This was an odd overstatement, as cattle-driving, to which Joyce was referring, was scarcely ‘extremely violent’, as indeed he went on to make clear.
Having started with Maamtrasna, Joyce ended by referring to a miscarriage of justice in England in the Great Wyrley case. This related to a series of vicious attacks on cattle and horses in an area of the West Midlands that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of George Edalji, a solicitor of half-Indian descent, who was released in October 1906 after three years in prison and was later pardoned:143 ‘Last week two horses were found dead with the usual cuts to the base of the stomach and their guts spilled out over the grass.’144
There is immense subtlety to what Joyce was doing in this article. Maamtrasna had already generated an extraordinary and intense controversy that had deep political repercussions. His article elided this, beyond the opening reference to ‘a sensational trial’ that had taken place in Ireland several years before, and the statement that ‘public opinion considered [Myles Joyce] innocent then, and he is now thought of as a martyr.’145 That controversy could be looked at in two ways: Ireland had been alla sbarra in 1882, when the Maamtrasna murders were set on a continuum with the Phoenix Park murders; and at least for nationalist Ireland, the responsibility of the English government in Ireland for the hanging of Myles Joyce had long before been exposed. The controversy was long spent. Joyce’s Triestine readership knew very little of Ireland and had certainly never heard of Maamtrasna or of Myles Joyce. That gave Joyce the occasion to present a modernistically pared-back account of the trial of Myles Joyce, as a man from a remote western region speaking only Irish convicted in criminal proceedings he could not understand, and hanged. However uncertain Joyce’s grasp of the detail, it was an extremely poised artistic reworking of the subject of Maamtrasna. As if stripping back the accretions of controversy that instrumentalised the trials, it reinstated the terrible solitude of the conviction and death of Myles Joyce. In Joyce’s high rendering, the fate of Myles Joyce became an emblematic argument for Irish statehood.
In all of Joyce’s Triestine journalism, it is the treatment of Maamtrasna that is closest to his fictional writing. The depiction of Myles Joyce as an image of a conquered Ireland has a correspondence with the harpist in the ‘Two Gallants’, which Joyce had written the previous year. Joyce contrived to fashion a symbol of Ireland out of events in the 1880s rather than out of conventionally sanctioned literary or mythic materials. In its para-literary treatment of an agrarian crime and its sequel in Ireland in the Parnell era, it enunciates Joyce’s critique of the deemed subject matter of the Ireland of the Celtic Twilight.
‘L’Irlanda alla sbarra’ has a privileged place in Joyce’s Triestine journalism. When in 1914 he proposed to Angelo Fortunato Formiggini publishing the journalism as a collection, he intended this article to be placed first and to provide the title for the whole.146 The prioritising of the essay reflected the fact that it advanced a justification for Joyce’s journalism, the breaking through the wall of English newspaper coverage of Ireland. This was a long-standing subject of Irish nationalist complaint but had an enhanced urgency in an age of increased democratic participation and intensified mass communication, and it was a frequently expressed concern of Arthur Griffith. Joyce had a particular concern with how Irish affairs went unreported or misreported on the Continent. In contemporary notes that survive, he referred to the ‘Celtophobia of French and Italian papers.’147 Joyce’s misplaced belief in the viability of publication in book form derived from the fact that he had actually published articles abroad. Asked in Dublin in 1912 why he did not use his talents ‘for the betterment of his country and people’, Joyce retorted that ‘he was probably the only Irishman who wrote leading articles for the Italian press, and that all his articles in “Il Piccolo” were about Ireland and the Irish people’.148
The memory of Maamtrasna stayed with Joyce. In the trial of Festy King in Finnegans Wake, there are traces of Maamtrasna mixed up with the Special Commission, the O’Shea divorce case, and the trial of Oscar Wilde. Festy King, ‘a child of Maam’, on trial in relation to the unauthorised possession of a pig and firing a stone, is acquitted, ‘having murdered all the English he knew’.149
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The republication, and even the knowledge, of Joyce’s lectures and journalism in Trieste was extraordinarily lagged, even in the history of stalled publication of Joyce’s works. The consciousness was posthumous. When Joyce died on 13 January 1941, the canonical myth of him as a modernist was established and there was almost no critical consciousness of his journalism. The Triestine journalism, when disclosed, seemed an affront to the post-war internationalist perception of Joyce as a modernist who had transcended the dismal politics of national origin. That shock is registered in Ellsworth Mason’s introduction to a republication of some of the journalism in 1956. While in many respects his comments were astute, he was driven to protest: ‘But when he turns to Ireland’s oppressor, the trumpets and the drums let loose together, and Joyce is at one with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub.’ The entry into public consciousness of Joyce’s non-fictional articles and his Trieste lectures came with the publication in 1959 of The Critical Writings of James Joyce, edited by Mason and Richard Ellmann. Joyce’s Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, edited by Kevin Barry, appeared in 2000.150
Joyce’s Triestine non-fiction has more recently become a major source of citation but continues to elude comprehensive treatment and integration into the critical and biographical treatment of Joyce’s life and oeuvre.151 What Joyce wrote in Trieste, to deliver or to be read, is a rebuttal of the views of the now vanished constituency of high modernist critics who deemed Joyce loftily transcendent of the particularism of the Irish political. Post-colonial or neo-nationalist critics have drawn on Joyce’s Triestine pronouncements to indict the fleetingly prevalent high modernist idea of an apolitical Joyce, but those same pronouncements subvert the idea that Joyce held such radically abstracted anti-imperialist views as to renounce engagement with Irish politics in its actual or realisable contemporary forms. The subtle trenchancy of Joyce’s Parnellite nationalism is lost, and the coincidence of opposites strangely endures.
If Joyce’s Triestine non-fiction has tended latterly to attract somewhat joyless readings, Francini Bruni, who worked on Il Piccolo della Sera, recalled in 1947 of Joyce’s articles, ‘Though veiled in a steely coldness, they are intense pieces treating various burning issues relating to his native land.’152
That Joyce, in what he publicly wrote and lectured on in Trieste, was sympathetic to Sinn Féin is important. He contrived to be so by endorsing subsidiary but significant aspects of Griffith’s programme without avowing himself an adherent of Sinn Féin or committing himself to its central tenet of parliamentary abstentionism. What he wrote or said in public was more guarded than what he wrote to Stanislaus. His journalism disclosed that, as well as favouring its policy of national assertiveness, he saw Sinn Féin as having a legitimacy that derived historically from the Fenian separatist tradition, though it did not espouse a recourse to revolutionary violence. Politically his was a soft sympathy with Sinn Féin. He was certainly not an ‘out and out’ Sinn Féiner, if indeed it is accurate to term him a ‘Sinn Féiner’ tout court, which it is not. His articles are Sinn Féin aligned rather than Sinn Féin, and he understood the difference. He continued to decry Irish political divisions and was prepared to accept the Home Rule bill of 1912 as introduced. While he pronounced the Irish Party politically ‘bankrupt’ in 1910, he had no doctrinaire antipathy to parliamentarism.153 What was significant was that in the broad division of allegiances that opened up in his generation, Joyce was drawn to and aligned with Sinn Féin rather than the Irish Party. That is attested to in the extent to which he drew on Sinn Féin, his main continuous source of intelligence on Ireland, for his Triestine journalism.154 He read Griffith’s journalism critically, and had other sources, but it is through Sinn Féin that he principally sought to feel the pulse of Dublin from Trieste.
There is a limit to how far one can go in precisely calibrating Joyce’s attitude to Sinn Féin, largely because of the dearth of evidence on Joyce’s actual thinking after the publication in May 1912 of his article ‘The Shade of Parnell’ (discussed in chapter 16). His position was well judged and trenchantly expressed. One could argue that he found a strategic position, though that is not what he set out to achieve: it was certainly a pivotal position for Joyce himself in permitting him to articulate his critique of nation and empire. He was acutely conscious of a shift in opinion in Ireland, at least in his generation. Largely because of his own ambivalence in relation to cultural nationalism, he was prepared to afford a degree of latitude to those in his own generation such as George Clancy who were more ardently nationalist than he was. Parnell’s adage about not setting bounds to the march of a nation had a particular, and in some ways cruel, salience for Joyce’s age cohort in University College. Joyce had a certain presentiment of this.
Whatever Joyce’s later attitude to Sinn Féin, the fact that he had—both privately and in what he said and wrote publicly—identified himself with Sinn Féin affirmed a nexus to contemporary Ireland that was to be of some importance. Aside from what could be gleaned of his Parnellism from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s political views were to remain for long unknown in Ireland. The views that he expressed served to add at least a private irony to, and complicate, his laceratingly funny self-caricature as Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake, who stood accused of cowardly and egotistical flight from Ireland.
In Joyce’s Triestine lectures and writing, Parnell is a ubiquitous presence, as much where he is mentioned as where he is not. In this relatively short interval of Joyce’s Triestine articles and lectures, 1907–12, Joyce for the first and only time speaks publicly and writes directly of Parnell and of the Split and seeks to situate Parnell in Irish history and in contemporary politics. Joyce’s account of Irish history from the Norman invasion of 1169 in ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’ approximates to a projection of the Parnell Split backwards in time. Looked at the other way out, Irish disunion, treachery, and pusillanimity in relation to England, and deference to the Catholic Church, culminated in the overthrow of Parnell in 1890–91. The repudiation of Parnell by the Irish Party, and by the voting Irish public, was as if inscribed in the history of Ireland since the Norman invasion. This is of course an invalid exercise by the standards of historical scholarship, of which Joyce was never particularly respectful. The conventional fable of Irish history did not meet those standards either, and Joyce re-rendered that mournful and flaccid nationalist narrative of oppression with a strongly incised theme that, without detracting from the iniquities of British conquest and dominion, imputed to the Irish a large measure of responsibility for their own fate. It was an ambitious undertaking on Joyce’s part that, in venturing a Split-themed history of modern Ireland, went beyond the episodic historical controversies that were canvassed in the course of the Split.
Parnell’s shade suffuses the treatment of the contemporary political. Joyce resisted the temptation to make a facile equation between Sinn Féin and the dead leader. While Griffith’s resuscitation of his own admiration for Parnell did much to release Joyce from his inhibition that his Parnellism was archaic and devoid of contemporary political traction, he was acutely conscious that Griffith’s and Parnell’s nationalism were disparate and related to different phases of political time. Joyce was sufficiently scrupulous to venture an argument to the contrary, that Griffith’s Sinn Féin was the inheritor of the Fenian rather than the Parnellite tradition. If Joyce was far too politically fastidious to see Sinn Féin as blurredly continuous with Parnellism, his readiness to countenance support for Sinn Féin did not signify an abandonment of his Parnellite critique of Irish society. If anything, the significant act of expressing even qualified sympathy with Sinn Féin, initially in private correspondence but carried over into his Triestine pronouncements as a lecturer and journalist, served to sharpen his self-conception as a Parnellite nationalist.
