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Rereading Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun'

Tokyo Medical and Dental University

‘Un’ writing the Nation: Rereading Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’

小野瀬宗一郎

東京医科歯科大学教養部研究紀要 第42号抜刷 2012年3月

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東京医科歯科大学教養部研究紀要第 42 号:63〜74(2012)

‘Un’writing the Nation: Rereading Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Soichiro ONOSE

0. 和文要旨・キーワード

本論文は、ジェイムズ・ジョイス著『ユリシーズ』の第十四挿話、「太陽神の牛」 をアイルランド研究/ポストコロニアル批評の見地から再考する。既存の研究は往々 にして「太陽神の牛」における技法をモダニズム的な視座から分析してきた。特に挿 話中のパロディにおいてはこの傾向が顕著である。本論文は「太陽神の牛」を取り巻 く歴史的文脈に着目し、同挿話を19世紀末から20世紀初頭にかけて隆盛した「アイリ ッシュ・リバイバル」との関係において論じる。なかんずく、国民言語の復興を巡る 言説との往還の中に「太陽神の牛」を位置づけ、ポストコロニアル批評家であるホミ・ バーバの理論を援用しつつ、同挿話のテーマと技法の新しい解釈を試みる。

Keywords: , ‘Oxen of the Sun’, Irish nationalism, , , , Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’

Ⅰ. Introduction

This paper attempts a rereading of James Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’ in , an episode that remains the bête noir of critics. Arguably, ‘Oxen’ is the most technically challenging episode of the book. As Joyce would have it, the theme is ‘the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition’ (Joyce 1975: 251). To represent this theme in the text, Joyce offers up a cornucopia of English literary styles associated with from various historical periods, which somehow are to mirror biological processes. In a letter he sent to his friend , Joyce elaborates on the significance of the literary- biological correspondences. As it is considered to be the skeleton key to ‘Oxen’, I shall quote it at length:

Technique: a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian- Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon … then by way of Mandeville … then Malory’s Morte d’Arthur … then the Elizabethan chronicle style … then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton- Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque … after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn … and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural

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stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. (Joyce 1975: 251)

Many critics since Stewart Gilbert1 have seized on this enigmatic prompt and suggested insightful interpretations. Yet as Weldon Thornton remarks, none has provided a reading that unifies the theme and form in a meaningful way (Thornton 2000: 145). Indeed, there are too many loose ends in Joyce’s twining together of biology and that the tenuous analogy collapses sooner or later. The problem that ‘Oxen’ raises perhaps tells us more about the assumptions of the previous generation of critics than the episode. Past readings have largely focused on the aesthetic implications of the linguistic experimentations and missed the political import. Thus the critical aporia ‘Oxen’ evinces is a generic one for reading Ulysses. With an aim to address this imbalance, critics informed by Irish Studies / postcolonial theory stress the political nature of Joyce’s texts.2 For one, Len Platt reads Ulysses as ‘a hilarious subversion’ of the ideology associated with the Protestant Ascendancy (Platt 1998: 105). To extend scholarship on Ulysses in this area, I attempt to read ‘Oxen of the Sun’ in the historical context of the language revival. In discussing the interrelation of the language and politics of Ulysses, the ‘Cyclops’ episode has often been the point of departure. However, I argue that ‘Oxen’ offers valuable material for enriching such analysis by providing more insight into how Joyce responds to the specific ideology that shaped the movement. To this end, the linguistic permutations in ‘Oxen’ will be read politically by adapting Homi K. Bhabha’s theory on the discourse of nationalism. While Bhabha’s theory is still useful, its argument is perhaps too abstract. In order to present a constructive postcolonial reading of Ulysses, Bhabha’s theory needs to be recalibrated to its specific Irish colonial context. In doing so, I will also reconsider the usefulness of postcolonial theories for reading modernist .

Ⅱ. Joyce and the Gaelic Revival

Before proceeding to the textual analysis of ‘Oxen’, I would like to briefly sketch how the language revival has informed preceding texts of Joyce in ways that reveal his sustained interest in the question of language and nationality. Following the death of the nationalist leader, , and the attendant demise of the Home Rule movement,3 leading Ango-Protestant intellectuals of the day including W. B. Yeats turned to the study of ancient Irish culture and language in the hopes of fashioning a new identity for . This initiative quickly won the hearts and minds of the public, efflorescing into a broad-fronted cultural nationalism known as the .4 In particular, the debate over language and nationality has intensified from the mid-1890s on. A key text encapsulating the ethos of this movement is Douglas Hyde’s speech, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered in 1892 at the Irish National Literary Society. Taking a purist stand, Hyde argues that the revitalization of Ireland is only possible by replacing English with the native tongue:

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I have no hesitation at all 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. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to de-Anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the language. We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to understand it. We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among the peasantry who still use the language, and put an end to the shameful state of feeling. (Hyde 1894: 136-37)

The following year, the Gaelic League was established with an aim to institutionalize the teaching and learning of Gaelic. As Brian Ó Cuív indicates, Gaelic was in dire straits at the turn of century. In 1891, the population of Gaelic-speakers was a mere 14.5 percent of the total population, hardly amounting to a ‘national’ language in terms of its currency (Ó Cuív 1966-89: 389). The League, however, lived up to its promise. During the next few decades, the number of Gaelic speakers steadily increased. Yet while for Hyde the revival of Gaelic was certainly vital, he considered it as a step toward ‘de-Anglicising’ the habits and minds of the Irish. What he resented the most was the rampant ‘West-Britonism’, the custom of imitating English and European cultures due to a nagging sense of inferiority. Hyde hoped that elevating the status of Gaelic through the League would give the an identity to be proud of. The furor of language movement spilled over, resulting in the establishment of nationalist institutions in other fields. The most famous of these included the Irish Literary Theatre (later The Abbey Theatre), the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the Feis Ceoil music festival. While many Irish intellectuals hailed revivalism as the ‘new’ nationalism to take the place of Parnellism, Joyce remained aloof, dismissing the revivalist endeavor with amused contempt. His harshest criticism was reserved for the Gaelic revival. Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus that ‘Imperialism will conquer Ireland. If the Irish programme did not insist on the , I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself as an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one’ (Joyce 1966: 187). That Joyce equates Gaelic revival with imperialism is revealing. On one level, his comment suggests that revivalism was no better than imperialism when it came to (mis)representing Irish culture and identity. This problem is addressed in a text as early as ‘’. In one scene, Gabriel Conroy is accused by the ardent Gaelic Leaguer Miss Ivors of being a ‘West Brition’ for his indifference toward the language movement:

−And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish? asked Miss Ivors. −Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language. …

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−And haven't you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country? −O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I'm sick of my own country, sick of it! (Joyce 1996[1914]: 189)

The exchange undercuts the presumed success of Gaelic revival, which actually divided rather than solidified the Irish community around the question of national language. Thanks to the Gaelic League, learning Irish is no longer a matter of taste or family background. It has emphatically become for all Irishmen a patriotic duty, the failure to carry out which may lead to stigmatization, or worse, ostracization by the community. Rather than broadening the category of ‘Irishness’, the revivalists reduced it to a stereotype. In doing so, they denied and diversity to the Irish nation. The language movement was dismissed by Joyce not only because it replicated the imperialist ideology in different but similar terms, but also played into the hands of the British. By opting to use Irish and making themselves incommunicable to the rest of the world, Joyce thought, the Irish were invariably following the fate of the Gaelic speaking peasant, who was no better than a ‘deaf-mute’ before the English tribunal which sentenced him to death (Joyce 2000: 146). Fundamentally, the choice of language did not matter for Joyce. He was quite happy to remain an English speaker as long as he could use it on his own terms. In fact Joyce, despite being an English teacher, is known to have remarked to his pupil that ‘I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in tradition’.5 Here, Joyce is evoking ‘tradition’ in the name of art, but his concern went beyond . In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen express his fear of being entrapped within the ideology of English as a tool for colonial conquest after being humbled by the English dean:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce 2000[1916]: 205)

The operative word in the passage is ‘unrest of spirit’. Here Joyce is suggesting that the dilemma over language is fundamentally a historically determined cultural trauma, and therefore, cannot be done away by palliative measures proffered by the language movement. To strike at the root of the problem, Joyce needed to physically escape the language and the various ideologies that informed it. This is why lists language alongside nationality and religion as one of the ‘nets’ he must fly by before he can forge the uncreated conscience of his race.

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Ⅲ. ‘Oxen’ and the Language Revival

Set along this trajectory, ‘Oxen’ can be seen as the mature, expatriate, polyglot Joyce’s attempt to come to terms with the intractable issue of linguistic ownership that continues to haunt the Irish in its political, cultural, and psychological manifestations. No longer the naïve Stephen that he once was, in ‘Oxen’ Joyce turns the concept of ‘acquired speech’ on its head and shamelessly borrows the language of his erstwhile master, only to discard one style after another as if to indicate its worthlessness for him. Joyce’s parody of the English prose styles in ‘Oxen’ is nothing short of bravado, and he is not shy to parade the feat, as his letter to Frank Budgen amply attests. The letter, as we have seen, is more self-promotional than explanatory. The corollary to this is that we should also take the fertility theme with a grain of salt. In fact, examined in the light of the questions raised by the Gaelic revival, the fertility theme of ‘Oxen’ gains in irony. Appropriately, the episode is set in the Holles Maternity Hospital of , where the pregnant Mina Purefoy is in hard labor. Instead of being properly looked after, the hapless Mina is left to her own means and must endure the pain of childbirth alone. No man is ready to offer her aid or comfort. Her husband is out on a drinking spree, neglecting his paternal duties like the young male medics who drink and brawl instead of looking after the patients. Seeing the image of Ireland in Mina, Mary. C. King argues that mothering is the central motif of ‘Oxen’ (King 1998: 356). King is certainly right in pointing out the gender politics of the fertility theme, but perhaps she blunts the force of her argument by fixating on the maternal figure. I submit that we should also pay attention to the paternal motif, as the theme concerns itself primarily with the question of insemination of a new Irishness within the English matrix. Read from this angle, ‘Oxen’ not only re-enacts but also responds to the dilemma faced by Stephen, who at this juncture still makes his frustration plain at not being able to put his creative energies to meaningful use: ‘But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise … ?’ (14: 225-26).6 Related to this point, that Joyce never intended to present a straightforward history of English prose becomes plain once the are scrutinized. Critics who have taken the trouble to examine the composition of Joyce’s parodies point out their hackneyed quality, prompting one critic to call them ‘a strange mélange’ (Lawrence 1983: 139). More than a matter of taste, the parodies are technically maladroit, containing glaring errors that would embarrass a perfectionist like Joyce. The uses or rather the abuses of the parodies are well documented by Robert Janusko, and therefore it shall suffice to cite a few striking examples.7 The first infelicitous specimen is ‘grandam’ in the Elizabethan passage, a word Janusko shows to be cribbed from Charles Lamb’s ‘Dream Children’, published at least two hundred years later. Similarly, the phrase ‘the mare ran out freshly’ found in the Landor passage belongs to Malory, again coming several centuries late (Janusko 1983: 105, 124). The list of anachronisms can go on, but these select specimens make a telling point about Joyce’s intention behind the parodies. The English parodies rather appear as an elaborate Joycean hoax. They act as a

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smoke-screen to slip in a very un-English language, which is Gaelic. If we scour the parodies closely, smatterings of Gallicism can be found in passages like ‘[t]’is as cheap sitting as standing’ (14: 666) in the Swiftian parody, as well as Gaelic-derived lexicon such as ‘ingle’ (14: 1058) in the Lamb passage. That many contemporary English readers assumed the Gaelic words to be a part of Joyce’s perverted use of English is telling, as ‘Oxen’ is meant to be a forceful repost to the English dean who had aired his imperial superiority by assuming the English word ‘tundish’ Stephen used was Irish. With an elaborate sleight of hand, Joyce proves that the English intellectual public is no better than the dean, unable to make head or toe of their own language. Yet it is not just the English who are taken to task by Joyce. Andrew Gibson emphasizes the political significance of the inclusion of Gaelic, calling it a Joycean reworking of ‘Irishisation’ (Gibson 2005: 92). Gibson indicates that the term was originally used by Hyde, thereby suggesting that the father of Gaelic revivalism is also at the butt of ‘Oxen’, Joyce’s enfant terrible. Given this connection, it is not surprising to hear an echo of Hyde in the opening passage of the episode:

[N]o nature’s boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thiter of profundity (14: 20-26)

The grandiose and self-important tone recalls Hyde’s speech on ‘de-Anglicization’, in which a similar appeal to ancient customs and tradition was made to safeguard the national character. However, the tone is made to jar hilariously with the subject-matter. ‘Inverecund habit’ must be an oblique reference to the act of linguistic as well as sexual self-gratification, which directly runs counter to the idea of national fecundity. In this way, Joyce suggests that revivalism is but a masturbatory endeavor compelling the whole nation to follow it down the path of self-destruction. To this misguided effort, Joyce posits a corrective by deliberately giving the term ‘Irishisation’ the opposite meaning of adulteration. This accords with the view Joyce put forward in ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’. In the article, Joyce explicitly states that the essence of Irishness lay in its cultural and racial intermingling:

Our civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed, in which Nordic rapacity is reconciled to Roman law, and new Bourgeois conventions to the remains of a Siriac [sic] religion … What race or language … can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland. Nationality … must find its basic reason for being in something that surpasses, that transcends and that informs changeable entities such as blood or human speech. (Joyce 2000: 118)

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Putting this creed into practice, Joyce in ‘Oxen’ bastardizes the English language and tradition with Gaelic. In the process, new lexical combinations are produced, potentially making for new semantic margins. Significantly, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, Joyce’s act is closer to the true meaning of parody, which includes the word para, meaning ‘beside’ one another (Hutcheon 1985: 35). Indeed, by putting English and Irish side by side, Joyce shows that one language is intrinsically no purer or no richer than the other. Rather, what determines the status of a language vis-à-vis another, is the prestige imparted to it by the speaker’s authority.

Ⅳ. ‘Un’ writing the Nation

Yet, the Gaelic adulteration of the English matrix will not fundamentally alter the relationship between the English and Irish. What was needed was to put such lexical and cultural admixture to practical use. In the first instance, this meant debunking the ideology of English national discourse that attempts to neutralize the hybridity of the Irish nation. How Joyce exactly does this in ‘Oxen’ can be best elaborated by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theory on the ideology of national discourse, which he significantly terms ‘DissemiNation’ (Bhabha 1994: 199). Bhabha’s witty reformulation of the word emphasizes the role of national language as a vehicle for articulating the political will of its people, which manifests discursively as voice. Bhabha’s theory is primarily concerned with the means of reclaiming the voices of the marginalized national subjects, among whom are women, racial minorities, and the colonized (Ibid.: 219). As we saw earlier, Joyce shared the same concern, and struggles to liberate the Irish voice from the prison cell of English language in ‘Oxen’. At first sight, this seems like a misplaced concern. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ on the contrary seems like an episode where the Irish do nothing but talk. The Irish students are described as ‘brangling fellows’ (14: 505) engaging in ‘tumultuary discussions’ (14: 849) that cause variously ‘mickle noise’ (14: 124), ‘gasteful turmoil’ (14: 326), and ‘spry rattle’ (14: 735-6). Yet has noted the absence of any sound, comparing it to ‘the interior of a library’ (Kenner 1980: 108). Kenner’s simile is apt, as it points to the agency of the English writers who are thought to be part of the background. I suggest that, on the contrary, the English writers are the dominant agents of the episode, articulating the collective voice of the English nation. Thus ‘Oxen’ can be seen as a dramatization of the discursive struggle between English and Irish voices, with the latter putting up a desperate fight to hold their own. But alas, against the venerable guardians of the English language, the Irish are completely powerless. As the pervasive silence suggests, the Irish voices are drowned out by those of the English writers, who seem to get a bigger laugh out of the ‘general vacant hilarity of the assembly’ (14: 799). On a more metaphysical plane, that Joyce aligns English with writing and the Irish with speech is important. In his theorization, Bhabha gives the Derridian distinction between écriture / parole a post-colonial twist by arguing that its schematization ‘closely follows the

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agonistic, ambivalent movement between the pedagogical and performative that informs the nation’s narrative address’ (Bhabha 1994: 221). Bhabha’s theory neatly encapsulates the duality or ‘doubleness’ of the national address inherent in the semiotic narrativization of the nation. According to Bhabha, the nation’s narrative addresses must reconcile the status of its people as ‘the historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past’, with their status as ‘the “subjects” of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity’. (Bhabha 1994: 208-09) More important for the discussion of ‘Oxen’, Bhabha alerts us to the epistemological violence involved in such one-sided discursive power struggle. He explains that the political dominant group articulates its voice at the expense of the marginalized, ‘erasing’ the latter’s ‘originary presence’ within the community in the process. This attempt to occlude their existence is what Bhabha calls in terminological short-hand, ‘writing the nation’ (Bhabha 1994: 209). By demonstrating how the English have ‘written’ colonial Ireland in ‘Oxen’, Joyce alerts us to the consequence of linguistic imperialism. When a particular situation or act does not conform to the colonizer’s view, it will always be represented in his terms, resulting in a violent transcription of reality:

And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press. (14: 505)

Yet if we bear in mind that the story of ‘Oxen’ is actually told by Joyce, an Irish , the act of writing the nation in ‘Oxen’ takes on a redemptive edge. By turning the logic of the national address on its head, Joyce effectively ‘un’writes, as it were, how the English wrote the Irish nation. how Bhabha explains that the articulation of the national addresses is also predicated on the temporal paradox of ‘past / contemporaneity’. In order for the nation to sustain its cohesiveness as a self-same sign, it must be perceived as remaining unchanged with the passage of time, and so its people are rendered ‘historical objects’ in such image of the nation. However, on the other hand, the nation, being a living community of peoples with diverse backgrounds, is completely dependent on their individuated modes of articulation for its renewal and growth. In their role as the nation’s ‘subjects’, the people must continually affirm and signify the difference between their particular ‘lived times’ in the present. Significantly, Bhabha hints at the disruptive potential of the performative, which ‘introduces a temporality of the in-between’ that is ‘internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference’ (Bhabha 1994: 212). By privileging the Irish voice, or the ‘performative’ of the Irish nation, Joyce

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inscribes a similar in-between space in ‘Oxen’. Note that Oxen’ also plays on the paradox of time, making it a veritable temporal kaleidoscope as well as linguistic labyrinth. The paradox is represented as a disjunction between the time of story and narrative. While the time of the story progresses linearly in the space of an hour,8 the time of the narrative leapfrogs over the centuries from the age of Aelfric to that of Carlyle. No doubt the discomfort that many readers feel in reading ‘Oxen’ is partly due to such temporal collapsing of the narratological correspondances. Significantly, in doing so, Joyce points up to the logical end of ‘un’ writing the nation. As ‘Oxen’ nears what Joyce called its ‘tail-end’, the ‘parodies’ mutate into something quite alien in the history of . The most apt description of the passage is supplied by the episode itself: ‘this allincluding most farraginous chronicle’ (14: 1412). Without any recognizable syntax or style, what we get is a veritable linguistic chaos:

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward the ribbon counter. Where’s Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal! Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius. A make, mister. The Denzille lane boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Issacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight. Yous joins uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch. (14: 1440-48)

On one level, the passage represents the point of intersection between the time of the story and the narrative. Now we are brought into the fictional timeframe of Ulysses, June 16, 1904. No longer having any historical precedents to imitate, Joyce blissfully forfeits the act of writing the nation on the English masters’ behalf, and takes matters into his own hands. Of course, what follows is nothing like what the history of English prose has seen before. From this point on, the story gets told in a distinctly Irish mode. So the Irish students, seeing that the ‘[w]ard of watching in Horne’s house has told its tale in that washed out pallor’ (14: 1403-04), all scamper outside the hospital, and let their clamorous voices heard immediated for the first time. Interestingly, in doing so, they borrow their syntax from their colonial brethren. In the passage quoted above, jargons and dialects as different as Pidgin English and Native Americanism elbow one another. Even though they were once the ‘Allee samee’ offshoots of the English language, the inflections have become so divergent to the point that they are now hardly containable in the original lexical matrix. So insemiNation has returned as ‘DissemiNation’. The lively modern English polyphony proudly announces its bastard heritage, brimming with an energy and life-force that the proud and prim English writers would only envy.

Ⅴ. Conclusion

By staging a creative destruction at the end of ‘Oxen’, Joyce provides his corrective

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to the language revival. Neither the romantic archaism of Gaelicism nor the ossified English tradition will do, for pursuing either course will lead nowhere. Rather, Joyce suggests that the future of the modern Irish nation lies in neither choice: the modern Irish nation should be articulated through a hybrid language of all the linguistic elements it can incorporate into its vast linguistic fabric. Even if the Irish do not all possess the virtuosity of Joyce, they can aspire to his spirit, and embrace the differences and dissonances within their language that will give them a unique voice. In this connection, it is perhaps instructive that Joyce relinquishes the authority to write the Irish nation after all. The future, Joyce seems to say, is in the hands of the new Irish voices that clamor within the interstices of the nation. History proves that Ireland continued to be divided internally by insisting on a single voice for the nation, but perhaps we shall wait longer and see if the future turns out to be otherwise. (Part-time Lecturer, Department of English)

Notes

, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Study (London: , 1932). 2 For example, see Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (New York: , 1995); , Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3 For the historical background to Parnellism, see R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 400-30. 4 For a work that discusses revivalism in the context of the historical development of Irish cultural nationalism, see John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987). 5 Quoted in , James Joyce, new and rev ed. (Oxford: , 1989), p. 397. 6 Following critical convention, references to Ulysses will be made by episode and line numbers. 7 For the sources of parodies in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, see Robert Janusko, The Sources and Structures of James Joyce’s ‘Oxen’ (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1983), ‘Another Anthology for “Oxen”: Bartlett and Dale’, in , 27-2 (Winter 1990): 257-81, and ‘Yet Another Anthology for “Oxen”: Murison’s Selections’ in Joyce Studies Annual 1 (1990):117-31. 8 In Ulysses, each story is assigned a specific hour as well as symbol and art. The story of ‘Oxen’ is set between 10 and 11 o’clock p.m. For the full Schema, see Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

References

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Cheng, Vincent J. (1995) Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellmann, Richard (1989) James Joyce. New and rev ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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