John Mccourt

UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI ROMA TRE JSI – Joyce Studies in lta1y Founder: Giorgio Melchiori General Editor: Franca Ruggieri Board of Advisors: Jacques Aubert (Université de Lyon), Morris Beja (Ohio State University), Rosa Maria Bosinelli (Università di Bologna), Daniel Ferrer (ITEM, CNRS/ENS France), Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin), Ellen Carol Jones (Columbus, Ohio), Geert Lernout (University of Antwerp), John McCourt (Università Roma Tre), Timothy Martin (Rutgers University), Francesca Romana Paci (Università del Piemonte Orientale), Paola Pugliatti (Università di Firenze), Fritz Senn (Zurich), Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri, Perugia), Carla Vaglio Marengo (Università di Torino). Joyce Studies in Italy is a peer-reviewed, bi-annual journal aimed at collecting materials that throw light on Joyce’s work and world. It is open to contributions from scholars from both Italy and abroad and its broad intertextual approach is intended to develop a better understanding of James Joyce, the man and the artist. The project was initiated in the early eighties by a research team at the Università di Roma, “La Sapienza”, led by Giorgio Melchiori. It subsequently passed to the Università Roma Tre. Originally no house style was imposed regarding the individual essays in the collection but in recent issues a standardized stylesheet has been adopted which can be found at the end of each volume. Under the patronage of honorary members Umberto Eco and Giorgio Melchiori, the James Joyce Italian Foundation was founded by Franca Ruggieri in 2006 (website: http://host.uniroma3.it/associazioni/jjif). The work of the Foundation, and the issues of the Piccola Biblioteca Joyciana series, are also intended to promote and further the work undertaken by Joyce Studies in Italy (website: http://joycestudiesinitaly. netsons.org/index.php/). Joyce Studies in Italy 4 (17 O. S.) December 2015 JOYCE, YEATS, AND THE REVIVAL edited by John McCourt EDIZIONI ROMA 2015 Volume pubblicato con il contributo dell’Università degli Studi Roma Tre TUTTI I DIRITTI RISERVATI È vietata la traduzione, la memorizzazione elettronica, la riproduzione totale o parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico. L’illecito sarà penalmente perseguibile a norma dell’art. 171 della legge n. 633 del 22/04/1941 ISSN 2281-373X ISBN 978-88-97831-24-2 © 2015, Edizioni – Roma www.edizioniq.it [email protected] Single copy Price: € 18 Subscription Rates (bi-annual) Personal: € 36 Institutional: € 60 Address: James Joyce Italian Foundation Dipartimento di Lingue, Culture e Letterature Straniere Via del Valco di San Paolo, 19 00146 Roma [email protected] [email protected] Contents John McCourt Introduction p. 7 Ronan Crowley Things actually said: On some versions of Joyce’s and Yeats’s first meeting » 31 Edna Longley “The Rhythm Of Beauty”: Joyce, Yeats and the 1890s » 55 Matthew Campbell The Epiphanic Yeats » 75 Jolanta Wawrzycka “Ghosting Hour”: Young Joyce channeling Early Yeats » 103 Barry Devine Joyce, Yeats, and the Sack of Balbriggan » 119 Annalisa Federici “What Bogeyman’s Trick Is This?”: “Circe” and Yeats’s Revival Drama » 137 Carla Marengo Vaglio Yeats’s Theatre, Joyce’s Drama » 155 Ariela Freedman “Yes I said Yes”: Eros, Sexual Violence and Consent in Joyce and Yeats » 181 Enrico Reggiani An Irish Literary Bayreuth. Yeats, Joyce and the Revivalist Wagner » 197 5 Enrico Terrinoni One of many Plots: Joyce in some Dublin libraries » 213 Giuseppe Serpillo Forgetting as an active process » 227 BOOK REVIEWS Laura Pelaschiar, Joyce/Shakespeare Terence Killeen » 245 John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea – La cavalcata al mare Emanuela Zirzotti » 250 Ennio Ravasio, Il Padre di Bloom e il Figlio di Dedalus. La funzione del pensiero tomista, aristotelico e presocratico nell'Ulisse di Joyce Elisabetta D’Erme » 254 Joyce, James, Epiphanies/Epifanie Romana Zacchi » 257 Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke, eds., Voices on Joyce Sameera Siddiqe » 261 Contributors » 267 6 JOHN MCCOURT INTRODUCTION: JOYCE, YEATS, AND THE REVIVAL In 2015 the 150th anniversary of William Butler Yeats’s birth was celebrated at readings, conferences, summer schools, exhibitions, performances held in Ireland and throughout the world, many under the official banner of “Yeats 2015”.1 Rome, or better the Università Roma Tre and the Italian James Joyce Foundation participated in this global event through the Eighth Annual James Joyce Birthday conference which was entitled “Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival”. The articles in this volume represent a rich selection of the papers given at this gathering. Two further essays, by Edna Longley and Barry Devine, were originally given as lectures at the Trieste Joyce School, which also marked the important Yeats anniversary at its annual summer gathering at the Università di Trieste. Collectively, the essays that make up this volume seek to investigate the complex relationship between Yeats and Joyce, both seen against the ever widening backdrop of the Irish literary Revival. While it is true, as standard literary histories attest, that the Irish Revival took place in the tumultuous thirty-year period between 1891 and 1922, it can also be seen from a broader perspective as having been a longer and more variegated event that stretched through time for almost a century from the time of Mangan and Ferguson before finally and definitively 1 http://yeats2015.com/ 7 grinding to a halt with the occasionally great but ultimately underachieving tail-enders, Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan, both of whom, unlike many core Revivalists, were at home or made themselves at home in the Irish as well as in the English language. Increasingly, the Revival is studied and celebrated for its plurality and variety (Kelleher 2003, Kiberd and Mathews 2015) and, indeed, for its lack of uniformity. The expanding textual corpus that is studied under the banner of the Irish Revival is of course composed of writings that are far from uniform; collectively they do not form a chorus but a cacophony of consenting and dissenting voices ˗ literary, economic, political ˗ some of which can be considered as internal and indeed integral to a tight-knit movement, others of which consciously cast themselves beyond the reach of what Joyce cleverly but cattily termed the “cultic twalette” (FW 344.12) but which increasingly are seen to fall within the widening reach of the broader Revival. Part of the enduring fascination of the Revival is that it was rife with contradictions: at once it looked back longingly to an earlier “heroic” or “primitive” period while at the same time it sought to propel Ireland into the future, despite Yeats’s denunciation in “The Statues” of “this filthy modern tide” and his recoil from the “leprosy of the modern” (Yeats 1970: 104). As is increasingly clear, the tension arising from the pull of the past and the inexorable draw of what we now call modernism provided much of the energy at the heart of the Revival. This expanded vision offers space for the inclusion of (among others) Joyce who defined the Revival as “the Irish nation’s insistence on developing its own culture” and as “the Irish nation’s desire to create its own civilization [which is] not so much the desire of a young nation wishing to link itself to Europe’s concert, but the desire by an ancient nation to renew in a modern form the glories of a past civilization” (OCPW, 111). At the same time he consciously and loudly cast himself beyond the confines of the Revival (being more concerned, perhaps, with “Europe’s concert”) with the result that he 8 would be seen, for many decades, as being irretrievably beyond its fold. Often, Joyce (and many of his early followers) exaggerated the assumed provincialism of the Revival. Enrico Reggiani in his essay “An Irish Literary Bayreuth. Yeats, Joyce And The Revivalist Wagner”, usefully shows that the Revival could be open to outside influence. He does so through a nuanced study of the knowledge and influence of Wagner and Wagnerism among a substantial coterie of literary figures who contributed to the Irish cultural renaissance. Reggiani shows a continuity of awareness of Wagner and his writings that stretched from Thomas Davis to Patrick Pearse but also, crucially included both Joyce (as is well known) and Yeats, whose Wagnerism, usually gets very little attention. Yeats conceived the Abbey as embodying the heart of the nation, as a sort of Irish Bayreuth capable of absorbing Irish myth and turning it into total theatre. In the eyes of Joyce and others it of course fell well short. However, in the early years of his exile in Trieste and Rome, Joyce clearly yearned to be part of the Revival events unfolding in Dublin and he was particularly upset at missing the uproar that accompanied performances of The Playboy of the Western World. Joyce suffered, as Shovlin writes, from “a distinct sense of exasperation at being out of the literary loop” (Shovlin 2012: 108). As he told Stanislaus: This whole affair has upset me. I feel like a man in a house who hears a row in the street and voices he knows shouting but can’t get out to see what the hell is going on. It has put me off the story I was ‘going to write’ − to wit, ‘The Dead’. Thus Joyce became one of the best-read Revival dissenters, ordering as many (and often more) of the new Irish writings that were being published in Dublin or London as he could afford while at the same time setting himself up in opposition to the literary movement which both fascinated and irritated him, publicly and privately insisting on his differences with Yeats and his followers. 9 A number of entries in Stanislaus Joyce’s Triestine Book of Days for the autumn of 1907, reveal Joyce’s disdain for the writers he believed were in vogue in Dublin.

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