Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in a Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses

â€œBuilding Up a Nation Once Againâ€•: Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses Peter C.L. Nohrnberg Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 2010, pp. 99-152 (Article) Published by Fordham University Press DOI: 10.1353/joy.2011.0005 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/joy/summary/v2010/2010.nohrnberg.html Access Provided by UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais at 11/07/12 11:50AM GMT ‘‘Building Up a Nation Once Again’’ Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses PETER C.L. NOHRNBERG It is true that advanced capitalist orders need to ward off alienation and anomie with some kind of collective symbolism and ritual, complete with group solidarity, virile competition, a pantheon of legendary heroes and a carnivalesque release of repressed energies. But this is provided by sport, which conveniently combines the aesthetic aspect of Culture with the corporate dimension of culture, becoming for its devotees both an artistic experience and a whole way of life. It is interesting to speculate what the political effects of a society without sport would be.1 In Terry Eagleton’s account of the role played by sports in contemporary society, athletics offers a collective ritual that can give meaning to the dreadful banalities of life under the sign of late-stage capitalism while avoiding the violence that religion in its most sectarian aspect cultivates. This description invites us to consider the relationship between the rise of organized sports as a collective cultural practice in the West and both the gradual fading of religious belief and the ascendancy of nationalism as a political ideology. In place of religion, organized team sports provide the kind of collective belonging Mathew Arnold envisioned for the arts; we might imagine that Arnold would be dismayed to find that soccer trumps the long poem as one of the dominant cultural practices of our time. Although the ‘‘corporate dimensions’’ of sports that Eagleton identifies are seemingly as enmeshed in globalization as any other industry (Chinese basketball players in the NBA, African soccer players in Europe), the spectacle of athletic events nonetheless serves as a powerful synecdoche for the ................. 17971$ $CH3 11-12-10 08:37:46 PS PAGE 99 100 peter c.l. nohrnberg communityofthenation.Thevisceralexperienceofsportsallowsboth participant and spectator to embody a type of national belonging, as in the singing of the national anthem at the opening of sporting events. The ostensible rivalry of the two teams being pitted against one another resolves into a larger symbolic narrative of nationhood as the very contest becomes an expression of national unity and triumph. Concomitant with the performance of national allegiance embedded in the popular culture of sports, the ‘‘virile competition’’ mentioned by Eagleton embodies a distinctly gen- dered social phenomenon (although in post Title IX America it is becoming less so). Organized team sports have often served as a powerful rite of initiation for the male adolescent into the patriarchal order of the nation, giving corporeal substance to its imagined community. The connection between organized sports and national belonging ensured that athletics became a locus for the contested politics of sover- eignty in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Born two years before the founding of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884, James Joyce could hardly have been unaware of the cultural and political import of organized group sports in colonial Ireland. Joyce’s fictions reveal the significance of the native sports revival within the larger context of political nationalism, and they theorize the connection between nostalgia and violence in these allied discourses. Furthermore, Joyce’s often satiric medita- tions on the culture of Irish athletics at the turn of the last century shine light on the social construction of the male subject at a time when ‘‘Irish- Ireland’’ nationalism promoted an increasingly rigid conception of Irish masculinity. The playing field, the boxing arena, and the gymnasium were all venues for the coordinated production of national and gender identities in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Judith Butler’s claim that the fictional nature of gender is ‘‘obscured by the credibility of those produc- tions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them’’ suggests how the bodily violence and even bloodshed integral to contact sports serves to give the ‘‘contest’’ credibility as a performance of innate masculinity, as well as to authenticate the identities of those male specta- tors who participate vicariously in the violent spectacle.2 In the discourse of organized team sports, a game is always ‘‘more than just a game,’’ because to acknowledge that it is no more than a game is to concede that it has no greater meaning outside of the circumscribed field of play. The pervasive forces of British popular culture might be seen as having shaped the discourse of masculinity in Edwardian Ireland, as in the ‘‘physical culture’’ movement inaugurated by strong man Eugene Sandow ................. 17971$ $CH3 11-12-10 08:37:46 PS PAGE 100 irish masculinity, violence, and sports 101 (whose Strength and How to Obtain It is listed among the books in Leo- pold Bloom’s library in Ulysses and whose exercises Bloom undertakes), or the ‘‘muscular Christianity’’ promoted by the Anglican minister Charles Kingsley.3 Yet nationalists also exerted a powerful influence on the image of manhood in Ireland. The following excerpt from an article in the United Irishman, entitled ‘‘Gaelic Manhood,’’ suggests the highly idealized image of Irish masculinity put forward by advanced nationalists at the time Ulysses is set: In almost every remnant of our ancient literature, annals, chronicles and legal texts, the supreme admiration of the Gael for physical per- fection is indicated. It is undoubtedly to such a quality that we owe the survival—first and most important—of the health and superb athletic ability of our race, and secondly, of that love of athletic sports and pastimes which characterises our people. Recollecting the centu- ries of almost incessant warfare, periodical famine, and relentless extermination which our race endured, it would seem miraculous not that corporal vigour was preserved, but that the race, as a race, sur- vived at all. The unimpaired virility of our people is the strongest possible demonstration of the necessity for fostering a characteristic which yields such valuable results. The Celtic race is one of the few in whom the continuity of physical strength is exhibited. Our kin- dred in the Highland, by their vigour of limb, stand in unique con- trast to the millions in the southern portions of Great Britain.4 The article, signed ‘‘Celt,’’ directly equates Irish manhood with physical strength, athletic prowess, and virility, and it goes on to argue that evi- dencegleanedfromthestudyofearlyIrishhistory,culture,andlaw reveals that ‘‘the regime of the Gael was one eminently calculated to inspire intellectual activity and to cultivate a race of muscular men and perfect women’’ (United Irishman). The column cites as evidence of Gaelic esteem for physical prowess both the exploits found in epic poetry of the Red Branch cycle, and the claim that the edicts of Breitheamh law disqualified a tanist from succession on account of physical deformity. The idealized depictions of the Irish male put forward by advanced nationalists might be regarded as the expression of a powerful need to re- assert control of the image of Irish manhood simultaneously emasculated and bestialized under British colonial rule. Nonetheless, nationalist stere- otyping of the Irish male subject inevitably harmonized with the essentialist discourses of race and gender that underwrote colonial ideology (and ................. 17971$ $CH3 11-12-10 08:37:47 PS PAGE 101 102 peter c.l. nohrnberg would ultimately become grist for the mill of eugenic theory). Such iro- nies did not escape Joyce, who, though he sanctioned the notion that the Irish constituted a unique people, eschewed essentialist conceptions of racial origin.5 Joyce’s understanding of the complex historical forces that had shaped the Irish as a people contrasted with the simplistic narratives put forward by the advanced nationalist press, for whom the ideal of perfectly formed Irish bodies harmonized with the myth of a racially pure Irish nation. Nationalist fetishizing of ‘‘Gaelic manhood’’ as something timeless and invincible drew upon the discourse of native athletics for its validation. In this narrative, the inviolable virility of Irishmen, against all odds, had been preserved from the degeneration at work in England by the ‘‘Gaelic regime’’ of physical culture. As I will go on to argue, Joyce’s fictions register the interplay between bodily ‘‘vigour’’ and spiritual purity in the discourse of Irish masculinity at the turn of the last century, a discourse in which advanced nationalism and orthodox Catholicism exerted a powerful and sometimes contradictory influence. Furthermore, Joyce’s fictions reveal the centrality of the Gaelic Athletic Association in promoting a racially embodied image of Gaelic manhood available to both ‘‘Irish Ireland’’ nationalism and physical force republicanism. PLAY,PLACE,ANDTHESCRIMMAGESOFA PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man foregrounds the significance of athletics in the life of the Irish male adolescent in its initial depiction of Stephen’s boyhood experience at Clongowes Wood College. Following the opening vignette of the novel, which ends with Stephen seeking shel- ter from his elders’ violent threats under the dinner table, the narrative locates Stephen in an ominously open space: The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries.

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