THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA James Joyce and the (Post)Modern Irish Conscience A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Kevin Farrell Washington, D.C. 2013 James Joyce and the (Post)Modern Irish Conscience Kevin Farrell, Ph.D. Director: Rebecca Rainof Mas, Ph.D. This study explores the body of literature surrounding the Easter Rising of 1916 to account for that revolution’s influence upon the development of Irish fiction. Using Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as my primary examples, I argue that James Joyce’s literary innovations emerged partially in response to the ideology expressed by prominent nationalists. Over the past thirty years, postcolonial studies of Joyce’s fiction have revealed the extent to which the author’s aesthetic innovations occurred in dialogue with, and in opposition to, both British Imperialism and Irish Nationalism. While such work has proven profitable, scholars have yet to sufficiently account for Joyce’s response to the Easter Rising, one of the defining moments of modern Irish history. This study endeavors to find that response by tracing the dialectic between the ideology of the Rising and Joyce’s emergent postmodern aesthetic. Through rhetorical analysis of poetry, essays, speeches, and letters produced by the Rising’s most prominent leaders, and texts written by other Irish nationalists, I argue that the Military Council of 1916 established the grounds for their rebellion in reference to a “grand narrative” of Irish national destiny, fashioned around the telos of the Irish Republic. Drawing from numerous sources, including historical precedent, modern and ancient Irish literature, Marxism, and the mythoi of Celtic and Judeo-Christian traditions, the leaders forged an ideology that stressed both the moral authority of their cause and the inevitability of its completion. Joyce’s response to the ideology and its structure is irony, employing metafictional and satirical techniques that destabilize both the text and the ideology the text rejects. Drawing from the major texts produced by the Rising’s leaders and other prominent nationalists, I analyze the primary narrative elements of the ideology through examination of three interrelated thematic categories: the essential distinctness of the Irish people, the authority of history and tradition, and the transcendence of patriotic self-sacrifice. The remainder of the study proceeds sequentially through these thematic headings, exploring each in reference to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Tracing the appearance of each theme in Joyce’s final major works, I contend that Joyce interrogates the ideology through use of experimental literary techniques, most notably that of metalepsis. The chapters are the following: Introduction: Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week; Chapter One: “Blotty Words” and “Bloody Wars”; Chapter Two: The Sassenach Wants His Morning Rashers; Chapter Three: History as Her is Harped; Chapter Four: Ruling Passion Strong in Death; Conclusion: Our National Epic. This dissertation by Kevin Farrell fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English approved by Rebecca Rainof Mas, Ph.D., as Director, and by Joseph Sendry, Ph.D., and Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., as Readers _______________________________ Rebecca Rainof Mas, Ph.D., Director _______________________________ Joseph Sendry, Ph.D., Reader _______________________________ Ernest Suarez, Ph.D., Reader ii For Lily iii Table of Contents Introduction: Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week? 1 Chapter 1: “Blotty Words” and “Bloody Wars” 30 Chapter 2: The Sassenach Wants His Morning Rashers 71 Chapter 3: History as Her Is Harped 129 Chapter 4: Ruling Passion Strong in Death 179 Conclusion 228 iv Acknowledgements I am indebted to my director, Rebecca Rainof Mas, for all of her guidance. My thanks to Joseph Sendry, for his invaluable advice throughout this process, and to Ernie Suarez, for his generous assistance. I am also most grateful to my parents, Thomas and Maryanne Farrell, for their love throughout this process. My thanks to Leslie Neilan and Stephen Corwin, for their help and encouragement. This dissertation would not have been possible without the love, support, and patience of my wife Lily. For this, and everything else, my most sincere thanks. v Introduction: Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week? In 1918, when asked to contribute an article about the political situation in Ireland to a French publication, Joyce declined, claiming that, “the problem of my race is so complicated that one needs to make use of all the means of elastic art to delineate it—without solving it. I am restricted to making a pronouncement on it by the scenes and characters of my poor art” (Letters I 118). Joyce’s response may have seemed disingenuous at the time, given the numerous articles he had already written about Irish politics in earlier years,1 but as James Fairhall notes, “Joyce was remarkably silent on the subject of Irish as well as European politics while he was composing Ulysses” (164). This silence seemingly carried over to his art itself; anyone expecting that Joyce’s literary output would explicitly address the troubles in Ireland was sure to be disappointed. As Louis Gillet remembered after Joyce’s death, During his life—that just ended in one of the most tormented ages of history and after two wars—he never made an allusion to all that tears us apart, never said a word on the problems which throw races, peoples, classes, continents against each other. While the battle was raging at its full in 1916, he chose an ordinary date of twenty-four hours, taken at random from the most everyday pattern of a secondary town—June 16, 1904—a day that is not set apart for any famous crime 1 A partial list includes “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901), “Ireland at the Bar” (1907), “Home Rule Comes of Age” (1907), “Fenianism: The Last Fenian” (1907), “The Home Rule Comet” (1910), “The City of the Tribes” (1912), and “The Shade of Parnell (1912). 1 2 gossip-item, event or discovery, but only for an ordinary funeral and birth, and he made it the subject of his global restitution, his miraculous chronicle (175-76). While Gillet finds Joyce’s apparent silence on the matters of revolution and warfare to the author’s credit, this silence is at odds with the zeitgeist of Irish writing in the years following the outbreak of rebellion in April of 1916. Despite its rather inauspicious beginnings, the Easter Rising, the first major Irish rebellion of the Twentieth century, permanently changed the nature of Irish politics. While few could have predicted this on that Easter Monday, the Rising’s aftermath—marked by widespread arrests, the imposition of martial law, and the executions of sixteen men—captured the public imagination and reinvigorated a violent nationalism which had long laid dormant. Such a momentous occasion was difficult, even impossible to ignore. A popular ballad which emerged shortly after the military maneuvers of that Easter Monday challenged the Irish populace: Who fears to speak of Easter Week? Who dares its fate deplore? The red-gold flame of Erin’s name Confronts the world once more! (Skinneder 241-42).1 This ballad is a variation on John Kells Ingram’s “The Memory of the Dead,” a poem 1 This version comes from Margaret Skinneder’s Doing My Bit for Ireland. Skinneder, a former member of the Irish National Volunteers and a veteran of the Easter Rising, attributes the song’s composition to an anonymous nun. Other versions of “Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week” exist; see Brendan Behan’s The Hostage for alternate lyrics. 3 written in 1843 about the 1798 Rising, later set to music as “Who Fears to Speak of ’98” (and quoted in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake).2 Borrowing the melody from this earlier version, the new song follows the typical Republican method of interpreting current events through the prism of historical precedent.3 The ballad forges an implicit connection between 1798 and 1916, subsuming the latest insurrection into the wider tradition of Ireland’s armed resistance to British rule. The Easter Rising, like the 1798 Rising before it, demands comment; avoiding this demand, the lyrics claim, is a cowardly shirking of one’s duty. The Rising prompted diverse opinions among Ireland’s intellectual and literary elite, and most recognized the event as one which necessitated some manner of written response. Consequently, the weeks, months, and years following the insurrection yielded a body of Rising-based literature produced by Ireland’s most prominent writers, including Yeats, O’Casey, Shaw, Colum, and Stephens, all of whom apparently felt, by virtue of their literary vocation, obliged to respond to what happened that Easter Week. As David Krause wrote of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, “if the patriots were now the guardians of the national honor, the [writer] had to be the guardian of the national honesty” (126). Most Irish writers, then, believed they could not be silent when confronted by the “red-gold flame of Erin’s name,” since the obligations of the literary profession necessitated some reply.4 Yet Joyce, alone among Ireland’s literary elite, remained silent, leaving explicit 2 The song is referenced in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, in a passage I will consider in more detail in Chapter Three. Joyce also alludes to the song and its author in Book I, Chapter IV of the Wake with the phrase “from Sean Kelly’s anagrim a blush at the name” (93.29; McHugh 93). 3 A technique crucial to this study and one we will explore in greater detail in Chapter Three. 4 Fictionalized accounts of the Rising can also be found in later fiction, including Frank O’Connor’s The Big Fellow (1937), Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), James O’Neil’s At Swim Two Boys (2001), Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way (2005).