The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism 9781474456708

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The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

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The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

Edited by Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey

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To Seamus Deane

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey, 2021 © the chapters their several authors, 2021 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of Illustrations for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5669 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5670 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5671 5 (epub) The right of Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Out of Ireland Maud Ellmann

viii ix xii 1

Part I: Heresies of Time and Space 1. Rising Timely and Untimely: On Joycean Anachronism Paul K. Saint-Amour

35

2. Temporal Powers: Second Sight, the Future and Celtic Modernity Luke Gibbons

51

3. Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake Jeremy Colangelo

67

4. W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and the Limits of Global Modernism Cóilín Parsons

82

5. Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border Maud Ellmann

96

6. Hereseas: Water in English and Irish Modernism Nels Pearson

112

Part II: Heresies of Nationalism 7. ‘A Fairy Boy of Eleven, a Changeling, Kidnapped, Dressed in an Eton Suit’: Precarious, Lost and Recovered Children in Anglophone Irish Modernism Margot Gayle Backus

131

8. Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration and the Unfinished Business of Modernism Sarah L. Townsend

147

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9. Ireland’s Philatelic Modernism Julieann Veronica Ulin

165

10. Modernism Against / For the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan Shan-Yun Huang

182

11. Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy Kathryn Conrad

200

Part III. Aesthetic Heresies 12. Modern Irish Poetry and the Heresy of Modernism Eric Falci

219

13. Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement Kelly Sullivan

234

14. The Insurgent Romance and Early Cinema in Ireland Matthew Brown

252

15. ‘Put “Molotoff bread-basket” into Irish, please’: Cruiskeen Lawn, Dada and the Blitz Catherine Flynn 16. Irish Christian Comedy: Heresy or Reform? Vicki Mahaffey

268 284

Part IV. Heresies of Gender and Sexuality 17. The Irish Bachelor Ed Madden

301

18. ‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female Catholic Reader in Irish Modernism T. J. Boynton

320

19. ‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption in the Late Novels of Molly Keane Lauren Rich

336

20. ‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction Siân White

351

21. Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Ailbhe Darcy

368

Part V. Critical Heresies 22. ‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and / as Disability in Beckett’s Happy Days Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente

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contents 23. Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction Maureen O’Connor

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24. Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity Sarah E. McKibben

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25. Affective Alchemy: W. B. Yeats and the Transformative Heresy of Joy Wendy J. Truran

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26. Watery Modernism? Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman Claire Connolly

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Index

470

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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank our contributors for collaborating in this Companion and for their patience as we pulled it all together. We also thank Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for her inspired idea of organizing the volume in terms of modernist heresies. Ersev Ersoy and Fiona Conn at EUP provided expert and responsive editorial guidance, and Wendy Lee did an admirable job of copy-editing the manuscript. Thanks go too to Hank Scotch for proofreading, Samantha Clark for indexing and Zachary Hope for editorial assistance. We are grateful to Bill Hutchison for his invaluable assistance throughout this project, and to Kate Ravin for her shrewd editorial advice. Christopher Fox as Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame brought many of the authors in this book together, including two of the editors, and we greatly appreciate his vision and generosity. We also wish to thank Sean Mooney at the National Gallery of Ireland and Daniel Trujillo at the Artists Rights Society for their generous assistance with images and image permissions. In addition we thank the following artist estates, institutions, and individuals for permission to reproduce images: the Estate of Evie Hone; the Estate of Francis Bacon; the Geddes Estate and Elizabeth Kerr and family, WM Geddes legacy trustees; National Gallery of Ireland; the Artists Rights Society; the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame; the Trustees of National Museums Northern Ireland; the Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Des Moines Art Center; Ulster Museum; South Dublin County Libraries; Westmeath County Library; Michael Shulman at Magnum Photos; and photographers Philip Jones Griffiths, John A. Ulin, Edita Kapović and Tomás Maher. We have made every effort to obtain permission to reproduce the image of the Dominican Church at Athy, from the collection of Irish Dominican Photographers and credited to photographer Fergal Mac Eoinín. Finally, thanks to John Wilkinson, John Casteen, Amanda Dennis and Laura MacMullen for their unflagging support and wisdom.

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Illustrations

Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 11.1 Figure 13.1

Figure 13.2 Figure 13.3

Figure 13.4

Figure 17.1

Figure 20.1

Telephone Silence Cabinet, Dublin General Post Office. Photograph from Irish Builder and Engineer, April 1916. Burned remains of O’Rahilly’s De Dion–Bouton after the Easter Rising. ‘The Disastrous Explosion at Victoria Station’, The Graphic, 1 March 1884. From author’s collection. Lithograph drawing of the Tara Brooch, from Henry O’Neill, Fine Arts and Civilization of Ireland (Dublin: George Herbert, 1863). Image from archive.org. Streetlamp, Kildare Street, Dublin, after 1892. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Wrought iron lamp with Irish inscription, possible attribution W. A. Scott, Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. James F. McMullen, exterior of Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1915–17. Image from John Robert O’Connell, The Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork (Cork: Guy & Co. Limited, 1916). Cover of the 1956 Bachelor’s Digest, souvenir programme for the Bachelors Ball. Image courtesy of the Westmeath County Library, used with permission. In the narrow terraced streets built for working people every house except the last needs only three walls. Northern Ireland, 1965. Photo credit Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Photos, printed with permission.

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Plates Plate 1

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Francis Bacon (1909–92), Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.

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x Plate 2

Plate 3

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Plate 8 Plate 9 Plate 10 Plate 11 Plate 12 Plate 13 Plate 14

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Plate 18

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list of illustrations Evie Hone (1894–1955), Composition, 1924. Oil on canvas, 116 × 90 cm. NGI.4378, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photograph © National Gallery of Ireland. © The Artist’s Estate. Mainie Jellet (1897–1944), The Virgin of Éire, 1940s. Oil on canvas, 64 × 92 cm. NGI.4319, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), Achill Horses, 1941. Oil on canvas, 61 × 92 cm. NGI.4320, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), Morning in a City, c.1937. Oil on canvas, 61 × 91 cm. NGI.1050, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin. Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), Old Walls, 1945. Oil on canvas, 46 × 61 cm. NGI.4716, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin. Louis le Brocquy (1916–2012), A Family, 1951. Oil on canvas, 147 × 185 cm. NGI.4709, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin. Photograph of the Dominican Church at Athy. Photo credit: Fergal Mac Eoinín, Irish Dominican Photographers. Cover of Easter Rising commemorative booklet published by Wilson Hartnell & Co., Dublin, 1916. Photograph in public domain. Dublin and the ‘Sinn Féin Rising’, cover photograph, detail. Photograph in public domain. Photograph of lighthouse in Ireland. Stamp, ‘Vox Hiberniae’. Reproduced from the original held in the author’s private collection. ‘The Fenians’ 1- and 24-cent stamps, 1967. Reproduced from the original held in the author’s private collection. Labels with official cancellation marks. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. Sinn Féin labels and George V stamps, 1920. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. Irish White Cross Society stamp, 1922. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. British King George V stamp with Rialtas Sealadac na hÉireann 1922 overprint. Reproduced from the original held in the private collection of John A. Ulin. Map of Ireland stamp, 1922. Reproduced from the original held in the private collection of John A. Ulin.

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list of illustrations Plate 19

Plate 20 Plate 21

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Electrotype facsimile of a Celtic Ardagh Chalice, attributed to the firm of Edmond Johnson, Dublin. 25 × 18.5 × 15cm. Edmond Johnson Collection at the Spurlock Museum, acquired 1916. Courtesy of The Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hand-carved figure on congregation bench, Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Brendan, stained glass, detail showing Celtic interlace decorating stalactites above St Brendan. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Brendan, stained glass, detail showing St Brendan’s pampooties. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Gobnait, stained glass, detail showing honeycomb and stylised bees. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Gobnait, stained glass, detail showing Harry Clarke self-portrait as a plague victim. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Sarah Purser (1848–1943), St. Brendan, stained glass, 1903. Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Wilhelmina Geddes (1887–1955), The Fate of the Children of Lir, 1929, stained-glass panel in leaded frame. Collection Ulster Museum, BELUM.U2120. © The Geddes Estate, reproduced courtesy of Elizabeth Kerr and family, WM Geddes legacy trustees. Photograph reproduced courtesy the Trustees of National Museums Northern Ireland. Evie Hone (1894–1955), My Four Green Fields, stained glass, 1938. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin. Image by Tomás Maher 2014, South Dublin County Libraries. Sister Concepta Lynch (Lily Lynch) (1874–1939), stencilled decoration in housepaint, oratory of the Dominican Convent at Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, 1920–36. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan. Bachelor eviction order from the minutes of the Westmeath County Board of Health and Public Assistance, 14 April 1939. Image courtesy of the Westmeath County Library, used with permission. Original photograph of Thoor Ballylee, also known as Yeats’s Tower, County Galway. Image courtesy of Edita Kapović, used with permission. Photograph of river in Ireland. Photograph in public domain.

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Notes on Contributors

Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston. Her books include Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (2013) and The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Post-Contemporary Interventions, 1999). With Joseph Valente, she has co-authored The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020). She was 2014–15 Queen’s University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. T. J. Boynton is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary British Literature at Wichita State University. His primary research areas include Modernism, Irish Studies and contemporary Anglophone literatures. His work has appeared in ELH, Éire-Ireland and College Literature, and his monograph, Against the Despotism of Fact: Modernism, Capitalism, and the Irish Celt, is forthcoming from SUNY Press (2021). Matthew Brown is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published essays about representations of political violence in twentiethand twenty-first-century British and Irish fiction and film in journals such as Éire-Ireland, New Hibernia Review and The Irish Review. He is currently at work on a book project entitled Precarious Pleasures: Fascination, Film, and the Novel. Jeremy Colangelo is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Buffalo and the author of the in-progress monograph Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature, as well as the editor of the in-progress Joyce Writing Disability. He has a PhD in English from the University of Western Ontario and his work has appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, JML, Modern Drama and Genre. He is also the author of the short story collection Beneath the Statue (2020). Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork in Ireland, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her book A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge Studies in

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notes on contributors

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Romanticism, 2011) won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Monograph, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. With Marjorie Howes (Boston College), she is General Editor of a new six-volume series, Irish Literature in Transition, 1700–2015 (2020), as well as editor of Volume 2 of the series, Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830. Kathryn Conrad is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Kansas. She is contributor and co-editor, with Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019). She has published on Irish literature and culture as read through several critical lenses, including public sphere theory, cultural geography, affect theory and surveillance studies. Her first book, Locked in the Family Cell, examined how gender and sexuality impact Irish and Northern Irish national identities. Her most recent scholarship focuses on the role of technology in mediating human experience and shaping political and ethical relationships. Ailbhe Darcy is Senior Lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. Her most recent collection of poetry, Insistence (2018), won Wales Book of the Year, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and the Pigott Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. She is co-editor of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and writes critically on Irish poetry and poetics. Maud Ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago; previously she was the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment; Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page; and The Nets of Modernism: James, Woolf, Joyce, and Freud. Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Along with Paige Reynolds, he is the co-editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020 (2020). His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared from Tuumba Press in 2019, and The Value of Poetry was published in late 2020. Catherine Flynn is Director of Irish Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she works on Irish modernist literature and culture in a European avant-garde context and on critical theory. Her book James Joyce and the Matter of Paris was published in 2019. Her essays have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, European Joyce Studies, Éire-Ireland and James Joyce Quarterly, as well as in edited volumes. She is currently at work on an edited volume titled New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions, and on a book about Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen and the young Irish state.

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Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland, and at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His publications include Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (2015); (as co-editor) Charles O’Conor: Life and Works (2015); and Limits of the Visible: Representing the Irish Great Famine (2014). Shan-Yun Huang is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. His ‘Wandering Temporalities: Rethinking Imagined Communities through “Wandering Rocks”’ appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, while his recent publications include ‘Homeless in a Big House: Alienation and Self-(de)formation in Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour’, and an article in Chinese on the unreliable narrators and national narratives in Celtic Tiger Ireland. His current work focuses on Post-Crash Irish novels. He is now the secretary of the Irish Studies Association in Taiwan. Seán Kennedy is Professor of English and Coordinator of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. Recent publications include, as editor, ‘Samuel Beckett and Biopolitics’ (2019), and Beckett Beyond the Normal (2020). Sarah E. McKibben is Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540–1780 (2010), as well as a number of articles on early modern and more recent Irish-language literature. She is currently at work on a new project on early modern bardic poetry, tentatively titled Tradition Transformed: Bardic Poetry and Patronage in Early Modern Ireland, c.1560–1660, for which she has been awarded fellowship support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ed Madden is a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice (2008), a study of modernism and sexuality. His work on Irish masculinities and Irish queer cultures has appeared in Éire-Ireland, Performance Ireland, Breac, Irish University Review, Irish Review and elsewhere. He was a 2010 research fellow at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland in Galway and the 2017 Neenan Visiting Research Fellow in Irish Studies at Boston College Ireland. Vicki Mahaffey is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (2007), States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (1998) and Reauthorizing Joyce (1988), as well as the editor of Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue. Maureen O’Connor lectures in the School of English in University College Cork. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010), co-editor, with Derek Gladwin, of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, ‘Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities’ (2018); with Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney, of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006); with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien (2006); and, with Tadhg

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Foley, of Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (2006). Her most recent book, Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in 2021. Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is the author of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (2016), and co-editor of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019), as well as Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (2015). He is currently completing a book manuscript on global modernism and the history of astronomy. Nels Pearson is Professor of English and Director of The Humanities Institute at Fairfield University. His research on historical and geopolitical contexts of British and Irish modernism has appeared in ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Irish University Review, The Blackwood Companion to Virginia Woolf and The Norton Critical Edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, among other venues. His book Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett won the American Conference for Irish Studies’ Donald J. Murphy Prize in 2015. He is also co-editor, with Marc Singer, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. Lauren Rich is Associate Professor of English at Grace College, where she chairs the Department of Humanities and directs the Office of Faith, Learning, and Scholarship. She specialises in British and Irish modernism, and her published research focuses on the role of food in the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Paul K. Saint-Amour is Walter H. and Leonore C. Professor in the Humanities and Chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Saint-Amour edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press and is a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. His scholarship on Joyce has appeared in European Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, PMLA, Representations, The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ and Collaborative ‘Dubliners’: Joyce in Dialogue. Kelly Sullivan is a Clinical Associate Professor in Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University. Her publications include ‘Elizabeth Bowen and 1916: An Architecture of Suspense’ in Modernism/modernity Print+, ‘“An Absolutely Private Thing”: Letters in Kate O’ Brien’s The Land of Spices’ in Irish University Review and ‘Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze’ in Éire-Ireland, as well as book chapters on Derek Mahon, Tim Robinson, the Anglo-Irish Big House novel, and the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. She teaches and researches late modernism, environmental humanities and contemporary Irish poetry. Sarah L. Townsend is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Her published and forthcoming scholarship examines Irish fiction and drama through the lenses of immigration, globalisation and genre. She has held residential

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fellowships at Wellesley College and the University of Notre Dame. Her current research traces the transatlantic history of the term ‘New Irish’ in order to interrogate the racial striving that underwrites contemporary Irish multiculturalism. Townsend is co-founder of the Irish Studies Program at UNM and Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies West. Wendy J. Truran is a Visiting Lecturer in writing and communications at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She earned her PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her scholarship focuses on twentieth-century literature and modernist structures of feeling. She is one of the founding editors of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry and has published work on May Sinclair, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats. Her current book project focuses on positive affect in British and Irish Modernism. Julieann Veronica Ulin is Associate Professor of Transatlantic Modernism at Florida Atlantic University. She received her PhD in English from the Keough–Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she was the Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities from 2007 to 2009. Her Irish studies scholarship has appeared in Joyce Studies Annual, James Joyce Quarterly, New Hibernia Review, WSQ and a number of edited collections. She co-edited Race and Immigration in the New Ireland (2013). Her monograph Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature (2014) explores the recurrence of twelfth-century Irish history in Ireland’s modern literature. Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor in English and Disability Studies at SUNY-Buffalo and Vice President of NEMLA. He is the author of The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (2011), James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (2009), and Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (2002). Most recently, he coauthored (with Margot Backus) The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020). He is also the editor of several volumes and special issues, including Yeats and Afterwords (2014, with Marjorie Howes), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (2002, with Amanda Anderson), and Quare Joyce (1998). His current project is entitled Autipicality: A Complexity Theory of Autism in Literature. Siân White is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia, where she specialises in modernism, narrative theory and contemporary Irish women’s writing. Her published work has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Woolf Studies Annual, Papers on Language and Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory and elsewhere. She also co-edited, with Pamela Thurschwell, a special issue of Textual Practice on Elizabeth Bowen (2013). Her current book project is on intimacy in British and Irish modernism.

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Introduction: Out of Ireland Maud Ellmann

Out of Ireland have we come. –W. B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’1

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auded as the annus mirabilis of modernism, the year 1922 witnessed the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and other landmark works of European literature. This banner year also marked the founding of the Irish Free State, when Ireland gained limited independence as an autonomous dominion of the British Empire, but at the cost of partition from the six counties of Northern Ireland, which have remained loyal to the British Crown. War-torn, impoverished and underpopulated though it was, twentieth-century Ireland produced an outsize number of literary masterpieces. As Joe Cleary points out: The names of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett are now so familiar that it is difficult for us to recapture any sense of how unlikely it would have seemed in 1900 that a small island more famed for its economic backwardness and calamitous history than for anything that might be considered ‘modern’ should have produced three figures as significant to the development of modernism as any of the major writers to emerge in England, France, Germany, Russia, or the United States in the same era.2

These three modernists tower so high over the literary landscape that their Irish context has tended to recede from view. That Joyce and Beckett chose to live in exile, while Yeats spent most of his days abroad, has contributed to their reputation as Olympians who achieved universality by transcending ‘the fury and the mire’ of their homeland.3 In recent decades, this universalisation of the Irish canon has been assaulted from several critical angles. To name just a few, postcolonial criticism has re-evaluated Irish modernism in the context of Britain’s disintegrating empire. Feminist criticism has challenged the apotheosis of male modernists and the consequential undervaluation of their female contemporaries. Together with feminism, queer theory has interrogated the heteronormative bias of modernist criticism, while crip theory has exposed its ableism. Ecocriticism has encouraged a new attention to Ireland’s seagirt, ‘riverrun’ geography, especially in the wake of the Celtic Tiger and its ruinous effects on the environment.4 Extending this environmental awareness, the New Materialism has challenged human

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exceptionalism by calling into question the boundaries between human and inhuman, consciousness and matter. These new critical approaches to Irish studies build on recent developments in scholarship on modernism as a whole. The ‘highness’ of high modernism has been challenged by powerful defences of ‘low modernism’, a ‘lowness’ that refers to subordinated populations, whether female, non-European or proletarian, as well as to mass culture.5 In a landmark essay on the ‘New Modernist Studies’, published in PMLA in 2008, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz celebrate the expansion of the field, noting the ‘temporal, spatial, and vertical’ dimensions of this growth: vertical, in that ‘boundaries between high art and popular forms of culture have been reconsidered’; spatial, in that the geographical boundaries of modernism have been redrawn, stretching beyond the imperial capitals of Europe to encompass the colonial peripheries; and temporal, in that modernism arrives much earlier and persists much longer than the early decades of the twentieth century, to which the movement was formerly confined in literary studies.6 The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism takes account of these cutting-edge developments in Irish and modernist studies to showcase innovative scholarship in the field. This introduction explains the rationale of the collection, which departs from other handbooks and critical anthologies by highlighting the ‘heresies’ of Irish modernism, its trademark modes of resistance to orthodoxy and tradition. Among these modes we have singled out ‘heresies of time and space’, ‘heresies of nationalism’, ‘aesthetic heresies’ and ‘heresies of gender and sexuality’ as the organising rubrics for each section, concluding with ‘critical heresies’ that have reshaped the academic field. This introduction provides an overview of each heresy, followed by a brief account of the chapters under its rubric, enabling readers to navigate the volume’s contents according to their own enthusiasms. Although the ensuing chapters address a wide range of modernist developments in drama, poetry, fiction, cinema, journalism, decorative arts and philately, coverage of all the arts would be impossible, so this introduction offers some pointers for further exploration of modernist painting, architecture and music in Ireland. It should be noted that the designated heresies often overlap – heresies of nationalism depend on heresies of history, for example, thus impinging on the category of time and space – but we have organised the chapters to reflect their primary emphases, with the proviso that heresies are defined by their impurity, as well as by the orthodoxies they betray – the word ‘betray’ implying both transgression and revelation.

Those Nets You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. –Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man7 With regard to the title of this Companion, the terms ‘Irish’ and ‘modernism’ (not to mention ‘companion’) are open to debate. To yoke these terms together arguably risks an oxymoron: until recently, as one critic explains, ‘Modernism has been associated with the metropole and the avant-garde, “Irish” with provincialism and cultural conservatism.’8 Terence Brown has ruefully observed that Ireland contributed to modernism mainly by driving its writers into exile,9 where their Irishness could be forgotten,

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repudiated, hybridised or exaggerated into caricature, as in the case of the ‘stage Irishman’. The term ‘Irish’ is further complicated by Ireland’s ‘semicolonial’ status,10 to vary Joyce’s pun, as well as by mass emigration. Recent scholars and anthologists have made strong (if not entirely persuasive) arguments for stretching the category of Irishness to include American writers of Irish descent, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor and Betty Smith.11 If diaspora has compromised Irish identity from without, the persistence of the Irish language has compromised it from within, producing another battleground for tradition and innovation. In addition, the border that separates British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic compromises any claim to national purity on either side of the divide. In 1994, Edna Longley declared (somewhat counter-intuitively) that the ‘great advantage of living in Northern Ireland is that you can be in three places at once’; that is, in Ireland, Britain and (up to now) Europe.12 Such provocations to national and racial homogeneity account for much of the verve and diversity of Irish culture at home and abroad. As for ‘modernism’, this label is no longer confined to particular decades or geographical locations; nor is it restricted to avant-garde experiments in art and literature. Formerly applied only to a handful of artists, modernism was understood to designate a stylistic revolution, whereby painters broke the laws of perspective, composers those of tonality, and poets those of prosody: ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,’ wrote Ezra Pound.13 In today’s critical climate, by contrast, modernism may refer to a much wider range of artistic practices, some of which were formerly dismissed as rear-guard or reactionary, including the many forms of realism in fiction that blossomed in the early twentieth century. Such was the impact of Joyce’s daredevil ‘odyssey of style’14 that other challenges to fictional convention were overlooked by the critical establishment, especially those of women novelists like Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane. Our Companion aims to make up for such omissions, endorsing the expansion and reconfiguration of the canon, as well as the extension of the timeline of modernism. In our view Irish modernism is an unfinished project,15 one that continues to flourish in the work of writers like Anna Burns, Emma Donoghue and Eimear McBride – whose recent experimental novels are the subject of Siân White’s chapter in this volume – as well as in the hands of Irish artists, architects, designers, filmmakers and composers. If modernism has yet to end, it also begins considerably earlier than the iconic year of 1922, its roots in Ireland reaching back as least as far as the Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Irish modernism is generally associated with the Counter-Revival as a reaction against the romantic nostalgia of the Celtic Twilight, recent scholarship has drawn attention to conflicts within the Revival itself, which was not a unified movement but a ‘mosaic’ of rival groups and ideologies.16 If Irish modernism extends before and after the early decades of the twentieth century, it also defies stylistic and thematic straitjacketing. In the novel, for example, realism is never quashed or superseded but jostles with anti-representational techniques, even in the work of Joyce, which owes at least as much to Dickens as to Strindberg. And despite the ‘heave’ that free verse inflicted on the pentameter, traditional prosodic forms continue to resurface in experimental poetry. In the visual arts, similarly, figurative art persists alongside abstractionism: a notable example is the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon, whose wildly heretical screaming popes (Plate 1) allude both to Velázquez’s famous portrait Pope Innocent X (1629) and to the howling nanny in the Odessa steps

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sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925).17 In all the arts, modernism is better understood as a struggle between tradition and innovation than as the conquest of the old by the new. But this is not to rob modernism of its subversive energy, characterised by Peter Gay as its ‘insubordination against ruling authority’.18 Given the difficulty of defining modernism, readers may wonder why we have retained the ‘ism’. One reason is to draw attention to the historical coincidence of modernism in the arts with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, which aimed to broaden and update Catholic doctrine. In 1907, Pope Pius X delivered the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which identified ‘Modernism’ as the ‘synthesis of all heresies’.19 Paradoxically, this synthesis was brought about by the encyclical itself, which imposed systematic form on a variety of propositions professed by disparate thinkers with no formal affiliation to each other. Lawrence Barmann explains: the papal Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis not only created Modernism; it also created Modernists – as though dozens of individuals of varying ages and experiences and of a multitude of nationalities with different degrees of religious development and levels of intellectual culture, thought with one mind and pursued one goal.20 Consolidated by its own detractors, Catholic Modernism therefore resembles modernism in the literary and artistic realm, where a diverse array of practices were also lumped together as offences to aesthetic norms. Despite disagreements on theological principles, the Catholic Modernists agreed that reform was needed for the Church to respond effectively to the challenges of modernity, yet also maintained the conviction that Catholicism could and should lead the way in transforming European society. Disregarding this conviction, the papal Pascendi denounced the Modernists as enemies of the Church, puffed up with that ‘vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and . . . rouses in them the spirit of disobedience’. Employing ‘a thousand noxious arts’ to display their ‘contempt for Catholic doctrines’, the encyclical declared, ‘their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone but of all religion’.21 To counteract this threat, the Holy Office identified sixty-five Modernist propositions as heresies, and by 1910 all Catholic priests and teachers were required to take an anti-Modernist oath. One instance in which Catholic and Irish literary modernisms coincide is Yeats’s poem ‘Vacillation’ (1932),22 which concludes with a ‘jaunty’23 envoi to the theologian Friedrich von Hügel, who was widely regarded as the ‘nerve centre’ of the Modernist movement in the Church.24 As Wendy Truran notes in this Companion, Yeats claims spiritual affinity with von Hügel, but on the basis of the theologian’s mysticism rather than his Modernism. ‘Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we / Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?’ Yes is the answer to this question, for despite the succour to be found in Christianity (‘heart might find relief / Did I become a Christian man’), it is the pagan Homer, not Christ, who guides the poet: ‘Homer is my example and his unchristened heart’ (lines 78–9, 84–5, 87). For this reason, Yeats takes leave of the Catholic Modernist: ‘So get you gone, Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head’ (line 89). À propos of this line, Martin Green remarks wryly, ‘Yeats does not know who von Hügel is. His blessings, consequently, are worth very little.’25

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While Yeats had little understanding of von Hügel, what the poet and other literary modernists have in common with the Modernist movement in the Church is their resistance to orthodoxy. Our Companion treats this resistance as definitive of modernism, whether the orthodoxy in question be religious, philosophical, aesthetic or political. The term ‘heresy’ is (in)famously taken up by T. S. Eliot in his book After Strange Gods (1934), in which he mocks many of his contemporaries for straying from the true religion. Writers like Yeats, Pound and D. H. Lawrence, Eliot contends, are ‘heretics’ who pursue strange gods instead of adhering to the Christian tradition that formerly united Western culture. Rather than demanding a return to orthodoxy, however, Eliot contrasts heresy, which he condemns, to blasphemy, which he extols. ‘First-rate blasphemy’, he claims, is ‘one of the rarest things in literature’, achieved only by such masters as Charles Baudelaire and James Joyce. ‘No one can possibly blaspheme’, Eliot insists, ‘unless he profoundly believes in that which he profanes.’26 Thus Eliotic blasphemy resembles the Freudian concept of negation, a denial that invokes what it denies: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist,’ as Hamm blasphemes in Beckett’s Endgame.27 According to Eliot, blasphemy is a backhanded form of fidelity, an iconoclastic gesture that reaffirms the sacred order that it desecrates. As G. K. Chesterton proclaims, ‘Blasphemy depends on faith, and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.’28 Where blasphemy defies God, heresy wanders off in search of alternative religions, such as Pound’s Confucius, Lawrence’s dark gods of Mexico, or Yeats’s ‘gyres and cubes and midnight things’.29 As T. E. Hulme said of romanticism, heresy is ‘spilt religion’, an incontinent diffusion of the sacred into the profane.30 Eliot compares such deviations from orthodoxy to ‘coffee without caffeine and tea without tannin’, a diluted, ersatz substitute for the real kick.31 This Companion, however, uses the term heresy in a wider sense to encompass both blasphemous denial and heretical deviation from established pieties. Heresy’s resistance to orthodoxy can take many forms, ranging all the way from outright opposition to covert backsliding. Yet heresy, like blasphemy, depends on orthodoxy, existing in dialectical tension with the norms that it betrays. In A Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus’s friend Davin exhorts him to ‘be one of us’ and fight for the cause of Irish freedom, to which the hero famously replies: ‘You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’32 The term ‘fly by’ captures the ambivalence of heresy, for it can either mean to fly past those nets of orthodoxy, or to fly with them, guided by their unacknowledged influence. In this sense heresy’s relation to orthodoxy resembles modernism’s relation to tradition; as Terry Eagleton argues, Modernism springs from the estranging impact of modernizing forces on a still deeply traditionalist order, in a politically unstable context. . . . Traditional culture provides modernism with an adversary, but also lends it some of the terms with which to inflect itself.33 In a similar way, orthodoxy provides heresy with a net to fly by, in both senses of that tricky preposition ‘by’.

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Heresies of Time and Space The first of ‘those nets’ to be addressed in this Companion is the orthodox view of time and space. Our contributors show how Irish modernists, like their European counterparts, challenge these epistemological categories. To Kant, space and time represent the underlying forms of perception that structure our knowledge of the world. Stephen Dedalus famously tests this hypothesis in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, when he closes his eyes to shut out the modality of space, only to find that the modality of time intrudes upon his ears in the rhythm of his footsteps. While Stephen ultimately accepts these modalities as ‘ineluctable’, his author plays fast and loose with them by disrupting the time–space continuum. In Finnegans Wake, time becomes spiral rather than unidirectional, and as for space, scenes no longer ‘take place’ in the singular; instead, each episode takes several places at once. While Tim Finnegan is falling off a ladder, Humpty Dumpty is falling off the wall, Adam and Eve are falling from grace, the apple is falling on Newton’s head and the stock market is falling in a Wall Street crash. All these falls compete for the same space on the page, multiplied by the ambiguities of Joyce’s puns. In this way the Wake dramatises what Johannes Fabian and other theorists call ‘coevalness’, the co-existence of conflicting temporalities. In Ireland, as Dipesh Chakrabarty says of postcolonial South Asia, ‘historical time is not integral . . . it is out of joint with itself’. Against ‘universalist narratives of capitalism’ that privilege the modern – secular, rational, literate, disenchanted – over the premodern – superstitious, irrational, oral, traditional – Chakrabarty advocates a view of history that emphasises ‘contradictory, plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable’. Owing to the heterogeneity of time, he argues, the present is ‘noncontemporaneous with itself’.34 In Finnegans Wake, similarly, the present becomes ‘anacheronistic’,35 a pun combining anachronism with the Acheron river in the underworld. In a dramatic interlude, Joyce announces ‘Time: the pressant’,36 suggesting that the present is prescient of the future, pressured by the past, and pressed in every temporal direction. These distortions of time and space invite comparison to modernist experiments in other media, such as Cubist painting, which fractures the illusion of three-dimensional space established by the rules of perspective dominating Western art since the Renaissance. To break up space is necessarily to break up the linear conception of time; in Cubism, as in Finnegans Wake, simultaneity replaces linearity so that objects are depicted from many angles at once, much as multiple scenes collide in Joyce’s puns. The first artists to introduce the Cubist aesthetic to Ireland were women who rebelled against the expectation that ‘Ladies have to paint pussy wussies and doggie woggies,’ as the painter Mary Swanzy complained.37 The pioneer among these heretical ladies was May Guinness (1863–1955), known as ‘the first practicing artist to introduce a modernist sensibility into Irish art’.38 Among her disciples were Grace Henry (1868–1953), Swanzy (1882–1978), Evie Hone (1894–1955) (Plate 2, Plate 27), and Hone’s long-term companion, Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) (Plate 3, Plate 4), whose ‘Decoration’ was one of the first abstract paintings shown in Ireland, where it was greeted with outrage from the critics in 1923: ‘all squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours’.39 George Russell (also known as Æ), echoing Max Nordau’s invective against modern painting, ridiculed Jellett’s work for ‘breaking out in strange blotches and ulcers’, a disease contracted from ‘pointillists, cubists, futurists and other

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aesthetic bacteria’.40 But Jellett’s painting owes more to traditional iconography than her detractors recognised, as the National Gallery of Ireland explains: ‘the format, colour range and media of this work strongly recall religious icons depicting the Madonna and Child’.41 Thus Jellett’s abstraction shows something of the ambivalent attitude to orthodoxy that Eliot attributes to blasphemy, in which faith masquerades as desecration. The chapters in ‘Heresies of Time and Space’ address some of the innovative ways that Irish modernism rethinks these titular categories. With regard to time, Paul K. Saint-Amour takes up the question of anach(e)ronism, Luke Gibbons the concept of prevision, and Jeremy Colangelo the unofficial histories arising from gossip and rumour. With regard to space, Cóilín Parsons reconsiders the relation between place and space in Yeats’s drama, my own chapter explores the cultural effects of Ireland’s spatial partition between north and south, and Nels Pearson examines the island’s vexed relation to its surrounding seas (Plate 5, Plate 6). In the first chapter of this section, Paul K. Saint-Amour argues that Ulysses is both timely and untimely. Each of the novel’s episodes (except for the last, in which Molly Bloom’s reverie dilates under the sign of eternity) is assigned a specific hour on 16 June 1904, suggesting a forensic exactitude about chronology worthy of a crime scene investigation. But this ostentatious timekeeping masks a sneaky penchant for anachronism that Anthony Burgess described as Joyce’s ‘one cardinal sin’. In Ulysses, SaintAmour explains, ‘timeliness is less a design than a device, a way of smuggling in the untimeliness with which the novel teems’. Sceptical of teleological narratives of stateformation, Ulysses deploys anachronism to insinuate that ‘no moment is temporally self-identical’, but is ‘constituted of other moods and tenses, including the past tense of memory, the future tense of prophecy, the future conditional of forecast, and the subjunctive moods of the counterfactual’ (pp. 38, 40). In Chapter 2, ‘Temporal Powers: Second Sight, the Future and Celtic Modernity’, Luke Gibbons examines an archaic ‘Celtic’ heresy of space and time that re-emerged in the interwar period, that of ‘prevision’, or foreseeing the future. In this heresy, ancient superstition converges with cutting-edge scientific thought: namely, the theory of relativity that overthrows the orthodoxy of linear, unidirectional time. In novels by Bram Stoker, Dorothy Macardle and Neil Gunn, Celtic lore about ‘second sight’ is given a distinctively modern turn by drawing on ideas associated with the Irish writer J. W. Dunne’s controversial An Experiment with Time (1927). In Chapter 3, ‘Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake’, Jeremy Colangelo takes up the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses where Stephen meditates about ‘infinite possibilities’ of the past ‘ousted’ by official histories.42 Examining two articles on Ireland that Joyce published in 1907 in Trieste, both of them notorious for their historical inaccuracies and inventions, Colangelo argues that these errors are ‘portals of discovery’43 that testify to Joyce’s heretical approach to history, whereby gossip and rumour destabilise the official record. In this way, these early articles look forward to Finnegans Wake, which revolves around a supposed crime known only through hearsay: a crime reperpetrated in the imagination by every gossiper who passes on the juicy secret. While Saint-Amour, Gibbons and Colangelo address modernist heresies against accepted notions of time and history, Cóilín Parsons in Chapter 4 turns to the crisis of space, epitomised in Yeats’s play The Dreaming of the Bones (1919). Based on the

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Easter rebellion of 1916, this play deterritorialises the Rising by recasting it in the form of Japanese Noh theatre. Yeats’s play bears witness to a cartographic impulse to ‘murmur placename upon placename’,44 grounding the action in a national geography, but it also conjures up a transnational poetic landscape far removed from local politics. Citing Christopher Morash’s argument that The Dreaming of the Bones stages ‘the process of producing place from space on the stage’ (p. 86), Parsons reverses this formula to suggest that Yeats produces space from place, abstracting the local into the unlocalisable. Like the unnamed speaker in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’,45 Yeats strives to soar above the place names of the earth to glory in the tumult of the clouds. Chapter 5, ‘Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border’, examines the impact on recent Irish fiction of the border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, ‘the most militarised border in the archipelago’.46 Bewailed by Gerry Adams as ‘an awful flaw, an awful wound in the psychic [sic] of this island and nation’,47 the border is deplored as a spatial heresy by Irish nationalists who envision a united Ireland, but defended as an orthodoxy by Unionists who insist on their political allegiance to the British state. This chapter compares two thrillers set in borderland territory, Eugene McCabe’s Victims and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera, with Anna Burns’s deconstructed Bildungsroman No Bones, set in Belfast where borders have proliferated everywhere.48 While McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas rework the conventions of the Big House novel, with its traditional focus on domestic space, at once imprisoning and open to invasion, Burns shows how the border spreads division through the home, the city and the mind, undermining the distinction between outside and inside, public strife and private madness. In Chapter 6, punningly titled ‘Hereseas’, Nels Pearson argues for a spatial understanding of Irish modernity and modernism that stresses the island’s geographical, historical and symbolic connection to the sea. Surrounded by sea and laced with waterways, Ireland is ‘an island with a long premodern history of archipelagic and continental maritime connectivity’ (p. 115). In the Irish imaginary, the sea has figured as both a threat and a lure: a threat because it ‘brought the strangers to our shore’,49 subjecting the island to imperialist invaders, and a lure because it fostered economic and cultural commerce with a wider world. At times, Irish nationalism has adopted a defensive posture towards the sea – reminiscent of the legendary warrior Cuchulain fighting ‘the invulnerable tide’50 – by insisting on an insular conception of national identity that defies the multicultural influences of the sea. As Pearson explains, Such defensive and fraught engagements with the sea are part of a larger tendency in Irish modernism to register the ways that the island is at once enmeshed in and estranged from water routes, or alienated from the archipelagic and global flows in which it participates. (pp. 119–20)

Heresies of Nationalism The ‘of’ in the above subheading points to the ambiguity of nationalism, which can function as a heresy but also as an orthodoxy; as Emer Nolan has pointed out, nationalism comes in many contradictory varieties.51 If Stephen Dedalus sees nationality as

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one of the nets that impede his flight, Irish nationalism enabled the Free State to emerge out the net of British imperialism. In the following decades, however, Irish nationalism often assumed the character of an orthodoxy in its own right, which is perhaps an occupational hazard of any heresy. Having shaken off the British yoke, the Free State inflicted new tyrannies upon itself, subjecting its artists to the double stranglehold of nationalist piety and Catholic prudery. ‘The most conservative revolutionaries in history’, as Kevin O’Higgins boasted, those leaders who survived the civil war to rule the Free State determined that Irish art must be pro-Irish and pro-Catholic, and must promote a nostalgic ideal of rural Ireland as a bulwark against modernity.52 Meanwhile, the partition of Northern Ireland ushered in a century of warring national allegiances, with Irish nationalists defending their Irishness as fiercely as Unionists defend their Britishness, their ‘copycat English ways, incongruous as a top hat on a Tonga king’, as Brian Moore mocks the statelet’s dominant caste in his novel Lies of Silence (1990).53 Northern Ireland has clung to its binary nationalist orthodoxies in the face of a changing archipelago where, according to Andrew McNeillie, the names we use to designate this ‘unnameable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast’ belong to another age.54 In Archipelagic Modernism, John Brannigan observes: We do not yet have the vocabulary to describe what Tom Nairn called ‘postUkanian’ political identities, since all existing terms have been bound to legacies of imperialism, nationalism, and unionism, and these identities are ‘decreasingly useful lies’ in an age in which the Empire has long been dissolved, nation-states are no longer sovereign actors, and the United Kingdom maps on to no consensual union of interests, allegiances, or aspirations.55 If these conditions have rendered nationalism obsolete, they have engendered new orthodoxies in their turn, such as the neoliberal rallying cry of globalisation, which has resulted in outsourced jobs, undercut wages and rampant poverty. In this context, nationalism has regained its heretical force, for better and for worse, as a radical alternative to free trade and its devastating consequences. For much of the last century, Irish modernism was also globalised in literary criticism, in the sense that its major writers were uprooted from their origins and exalted into universal sages. Franco Moretti’s much-censured parenthesis, ‘(what ever has emerged from the studies that interpreted Joyce on the basis of Ireland?)’,56 has received a resounding chorus of rejoinders from critics committed to restoring Joyce and other Irish modernists to their local context. From a cynical point of view, this critical strategy could be accused of repatriating runaway authors in an effort to hype the Irish ‘brand’, an impulse that Joyce mocks in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses with an epic catalogue of Irish luminaries that includes ‘Patrick W. Shakespeare’ among its dubious nationals.57 The rise of postcolonial theory, however, has encouraged critics to combine a renewed emphasis on the local with a broader comparative perspective that implicates Ireland in worldwide processes of decolonisation. This approach has shown how the concept of the nation, often enshrined as orthodoxy, can also function as a heresy by pitting regional specificity against imperial hegemony. While postcolonial criticism has largely focused on literature, the reception of the painter Jack B. Yeats, brother of the poet, brings to the fore the ambiguity of

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nationalism, which can take the form of orthodoxy or heresy, depending on context. According to Thomas MacGreevy, the modernist poet who served as director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963, Yeats is ‘the national painter’, comparable to Rembrandt, Velásquez or Watteau in their respective countries. Samuel Beckett, on the contrary, attributes Yeats’s greatness to the light he brings to ‘the issueless predicament of existence’ – a ‘demystifying light’, as David Lloyd comments, which spurns the consolations of the homeland.58 In his ‘Homage to Jack Yeats’, Beckett praises the painter for achieving ‘Strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other. What less celt than this incomparable hand shaken by the aim it sets itself or by its own urgency?’59 What seems ‘celt’ to MacGreevy seems radically denationalised to Beckett, who projects his own disenchantment with the Saorstát on to a painter more often esteemed for his romantic humanism than for what Beckett describes as his ‘inorganism’.60 This disagreement between McGreevy and Beckett shows how Yeats’s paintings may be enlisted either to support or to defy cultural nationalism. Like the human figures in Yeats’s work, caught between emergence and deliquescence into fields of colour, his paintings’ references to Ireland glow and fade – much as they do in Beckett’s landscapes – at once familiar and estranged. The five chapters in ‘Heresies of Nationalism’ address a range of arts and media, including Joyce’s fiction and Yeats’s poetry (Margot Gayle Backus), rural Irish drama (Sarah L. Townsend), philately (Julieann Ulin), the influence of Joyce on Taiwanese modernism (Shan-Yun Huang), and Wilde’s ambivalent response to Fenian insurgency in The Importance of Being Earnest (Kathryn Conrad). In Chapter 7, Backus opens the section by examining the figure of the changeling in Yeats and Joyce. Although Protestant and Catholic respectively, Yeats and Joyce had in common the Irish middle-class experience of ‘public’ boarding school for boys, each author having been wrenched out of his childhood home to be indoctrinated in the language and culture of the British Empire. ‘This early, transformative rupture’, Backus claims, ‘precipitated and shaped the later imaginative work of both authors, particularly in their repeated representations of magical transfigurations of children and youths perilously caught between mutually occluding worlds’ (p. 134). Backus therefore aligns Yeats’s much-anthologised poem, ‘The Stolen Child’,61 with the many images of faery abduction in Joyce’s work that culminate in the resurrection of Bloom’s dead son, Rudy, at the end of the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses,62 arguing that these stolen boys mark the fissure between a disappearing agrarian tradition and an emergent urban, anglicised hegemony. In Chapter 8, ‘Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration and the Unfinished Business of Modernism’, Sarah L. Townsend examines how Irish rural drama negotiates the tension between land as soil and land as property. She quotes Seamus Deane’s shrewd definition that ‘[s]oil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source. . . . It is a political notion denuded, by a strategy of sacralization, of all economic and commercial reference’ (p. 149). Townsend shows how Rutherford Mayne’s play. Red Turf, which premiered at the Ulster Literary Theatre in 1911, dramatises the contest between two competing claims to land, ‘one grounded in timeless telluric right, the other secured through profit and proprietary vigilance’ (p. 154). Red Turf, like other rural dramas such as Padraic Colum’s The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray’s Birthright (1910), commits a heresy against the pieties of cultural nationalism by positing material security rather than spiritual inheritance

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as the foundation for a prosperous Irish future. Largely neglected by literary criticism, these plays also challenge the orthodox story of modernism whereby old-fashioned realism is superseded by avant-garde experiment, much as the rural is superseded by the urban. Often performed in the same venues as contemporary avant-garde plays, Irish rural dramas demonstrate that modernism did not progress in a straight line but along ‘multiple concurrent, intersecting’ paths (p. 159). In Chapter 9, ‘Ireland’s Philatelic Modernism’, Julieann Ulin observes that the ‘humble postage stamp may appear an odd focal point for this volume’s consideration of the heresies and orthodoxies of Irish nationalism’ (p. 165). Her chapter demonstrates, however, that stamps played a significant heretical role in asserting Irish independence before the fact, but later served to promote nationalist orthodoxy after the foundation of the Free State. Ulin examines the complex political constraints that stifled innovations in philatelic design and prevented postage stamps from emulating modernist experiments in the visual arts. In Chapter 10, ‘Modernism against / for the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan’, Shan-Yun Huang examines how Irish Home Rule, the Irish Revival and modernist aesthetic experiments – particularly those of Joyce – influenced similar nationalist, cultural and aesthetic developments in Taiwan, the ‘Ireland of Asia’ (p. 182). Focusing largely on Wang Wen-hsing, the experimental writer known as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’, Huang shows how Wang’s novel, Family Catastrophe (Jiabian, 1972), became a lightning rod for heated debates between modernists and nativists – debates that echoed similar disputes between modernists and revivalists in Ireland. Citing Susan Stanford Friedman’s argument that non-Western modernisms are ‘different, not derivative’ (p. 193), Huang identifies a fundamental paradox in Wang’s Taiwanese modernism: rather than signalling a betrayal of self and native culture, Wang’s ‘Westernization’ made him native and his work, in turn, indigenised the West. In Chapter 11, ‘Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy’, Kathryn Conrad argues that The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’ (p. 200), contains an explosive undercurrent of social critique. The funniest of Wilde’s plays, Earnest satirises the subterfuge (‘Bunburying’) demanded of sexual heretics in Victorian society, where marginal identities and desires were excluded, suppressed or, in Wilde’s case, brutally penalised. Conrad investigates Wilde’s ambivalent attitude to direct revolutionary action such as the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881–5 and French anarchist activities of the 1890s, attending particularly to the 1884 bomb explosion in the cloak-room at Victoria Station, the ‘terminus’ where Miss Prism left the infant Jack Worthing in a handbag containing her three-decker novel. As Conrad argues, ‘texts, bodies, and bombs all meet at Victoria Station’, and Wilde, as an Irishman and a homosexual, could himself be seen as ‘a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victorian society’ (pp. 204, 210).

Aesthetic Heresies The aesthetic heresies of Irish modernism encompass those of nationality, time and space, and gender, but this section focuses on formal experiments in literature and the visual arts. The present introduction provides an overview of Irish modernist developments in writing, painting, architecture and music, followed by brief previews of the section’s five chapters, which address a wide spectrum of the arts, including

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poetry (Eric Falci), stained glass (Kelly Sullivan), cinema (Matt Brown), journalism (Catherine Flynn), and fiction and drama (Vicki Mahaffey). Mahaffey, in her influential study States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment, proposes that these three writers share a heretical impulse to ‘riddle’ the English literary tradition. The term ‘riddle’ emphasises the idea of play but also refers to the puzzling and the obscure; the term derives in part from the Middle English raeden, meaning ‘interpret’, which suggests that what seems puzzling in modernism may also be explanatory. To ‘riddle’ also means to ‘puncture’, to fill with holes, as in a sieve, thus connoting a tendency to deconstruction. ‘If we riddle a container’, Mahaffey explains, ‘it will spring leaks, and imperialism, patriarchy, and highly conventional art forms all represent attempts at containment.’ According to Mahaffey, Irish writers were well placed to become the arch-riddlers of modernism: What made Ireland particularly hospitable to experimentation was a long history of political resistance curiously reinforced by an equally strong adherence to Christianity, and a linguistically oriented, six-thousand-year-old culture that was never really unified; for reasons that were partly geographical and partly historical, Ireland was always a country with many ‘centers’.63 It was also a country where ‘the centre cannot hold’, as Yeats writes in ‘The Second Coming’,64 having too many centres to be unified into a seamless whole. Modernist writers and artists have responded to this condition by decentring their own productions. In painting, Cubists like Jellett decentre the perspective of their paintings, depicting objects from competing points of view. In fiction, Joyce in Ulysses dispenses with the conventions of a central narrator and a unified idiom, enlisting multiple voices to portray one day in his three heroes’ strikingly unheroic lives. In drama, Wilde revels in self-contradiction, defying the idea of a central, univocal truth, while Beckett’s plays, such as Not I (1972), decentre the illusion of the sovereign ego. The idea of continuous, homogeneous time, which Benedict Anderson identifies as a fundamental precondition for imagining the nation, undergirds the linear chronology of the nineteenth-century European novel. But as Declan Kiberd has pointed out, Irish fiction has never achieved or even aspired to this continuity; instead, it manifests a kind of modernist disjointedness avant la lettre. Kiberd attributes this fissiparity to the belated emergence of a native bourgeoisie. If the novel is the ‘bourgeois epic’,65 as Hegel proclaimed, Ireland was still ‘hiberniating’66 in a broken feudal order long after the bourgeoisie became the ruling class in capitalist Europe. In Ireland, Kiberd explains: The native aristocracy was toppled after 1600, two or more centuries before equivalent events elsewhere in Europe, but a truly comprehensive native middle class didn’t emerge until well into the twentieth century. Between these dates, the keyworks of Irish prose were collections of micro-narratives cast in the appearance of a novel but without its sense of a completely connected plotline. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is really four short contes and Castle Rackrent describes many generations in sixty pages. Works as varied as Siabhra Mhic na Mìochomhairle, Ulysses, At Swim-Two-Birds or Cré na Cille are structured around episodes and anecdotes which never quite shape themselves into a novel.67

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Ireland’s heterogeneous temporality, in which premodern social conditions persisted alongside modern innovations in technology and infrastructure, nurtured what Terry Eagleton describes as an ‘archaic avant-garde’, producing writers like Flann O’Brien, whose radical innovations derive from ancient Irish sources.68 Indeed, it could be argued that Irish literature was always already modernist, particularly in its scepticism towards the epistemological assumptions of the realist novel, such as the linearity of time and the unity of the self. As for the visual arts, modernism got off to a bad start in Ireland with the controversy over the art dealer Hugh Lane’s magnificent collection of Impressionist paintings. Lane, a nephew of Yeats’s friend and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory, offered to donate the paintings to the city of Dublin on condition that a gallery be constructed to house them. For many discreditable reasons, this gallery failed to materialise and the paintings were transferred to London’s National Gallery, thus depriving Dublin of a priceless legacy.69 Ever since this fiasco, as Róisín Kennedy has observed, ‘modernist art produced in Ireland has had a rather tentative relationship with international modernism, especially the avant-garde, and an equally hands-off attitude to the realities of modern Ireland’.70 A prudish distrust of modern art also impeded the development of a modernist visual aesthetic in Ireland. ‘Though Irish writers often portrayed themselves as the primary victims of censorship’, Luke Gibbons has shown that ‘the real concern of the moral police in the post-Treaty state was popular culture and the image’. The ‘vaguest eroticism, especially in relation to the female body’, was strictly prohibited.71 In 1904, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom nips into the National Museum to ogle the buttocks of the goddesses, but during the 1930s such statues were covered or removed from public spaces. These conditions might have encouraged artists to evade censorship by turning to abstraction, but as the outrage caused by Jellett’s ‘Decoration’ shows, heresies against formal conventions proved equally scandalous to contemporary viewers. As late as 1952, the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art refused Louis le Brocquy’s major work A Family (Plate 7), which went on to win the Venice Biennale in 1956. Only in 2001 was the painting acquired by the National Gallery of Ireland, thus bringing to a close what the curator euphemistically described as ‘an unfortunate episode in our cultural history’. One of Le Brocquy’s ‘grey’ paintings, A Family depicts a naked ‘dysfunctional family’ ranged around the conjugal bed, where a malign cat peeks out of a vaginal tunnel in the sheets.72 The painting’s sharp angles and monochromatic palette hark back to Picasso’s Guernica, while its isolated, melancholy figures may have been perceived, consciously or unconsciously, as a heresy against traditional iconography of the Holy Family. In the visual arts, European modernism met with resistance from Irish cultural nationalism, which urged the development of nativist traditions. Some artists, including Jellett, strove to unite these rival tendencies. While her early attempts to introduce a modernist aesthetic to Ireland were greeted with hostility and derision, her later canvases blend Celtic and Christian iconography with elements of abstractionism. Elizabeth Bowen, a childhood friend of Jellett’s who took art classes with her under the tutelage of Yeats’s sister Elizabeth, quotes Jellett’s own account of her aesthetic aims: ‘Non-representational work based on Christian religious subjects treated symbolically without realism’.73 Jellett also insisted that Celtic design and contemporary abstraction shared common ideals: ‘if an Irish artist of the eighth or ninth century were

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to meet a present-day Cubist or non-representational painter they would understand each other’.74 Modernist music, like modernism in the visual arts, made little headway in Ireland until after World War II, which was known as ‘the Emergency’ in neutral Éire. Earlier in the century, when the Free State was trying to establish its newly decolonised identity, avant-garde European music was perceived as a threat to Ireland’s homegrown musical tradition: ‘The more we foster modern music the more we help to silence our own’ was a common sentiment.75 In this context the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, in which Bloom resists the seductions of music in the Ormond Hotel in order to compose a letter to his erotic penpal, Martha Clifford, seems to foreshadow the dominance of letters over music in Irish modernism.76 While literature depends on a national language, even if that language is imposed rather than indigenous, music – like the visual arts – is always prone to deterritorialisation, its native modes readily appropriated and cross-fertilised by outside influences. Thus the quest for national purity in music seems doomed from the outset: the inherent mobility of music, combined with the rise of mass media, guarantees dissemination and – as diehard nationalists might see it – adulteration. While nationalism posed an ideological impediment to modernist art music, the most significant deterrent was a chronic lack of investment in a musical infrastructure during the colonial era. No permanent full-size orchestra existed in Ireland until 1948, by which time Radio Éireann’s original ensemble of 1926, comprising five string instruments and a piano, had increased to sixty-two players. But the orchestra did not reach anything approximating full size until 1990. Nor was musical education available, except to those who could afford to study abroad. Hence the critical establishment, having little musical experience or knowledge, reacted with shock and consternation to modernist experiments long since accepted and even canonised in continental Europe. Mark Fitzgerald explains: As late as 1937, the Irish Times critic could describe Stravinsky’s far from modernist Trois Mouvements de Pétrouchka (1911, arr. 1921) as being ‘in a language beyond ordinary human understanding’; Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) did not receive its first Irish performance until 1962. Whereas some of Stravinsky’s music eventually became a part of the regular repertoire in Ireland, the music of the Second Viennese School has fared less well – indeed, Alban Berg’s two operas Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1935) have yet to receive an Irish performance.77 Thus underdevelopment, compounded by musical xenophobia, meant that the reception of modernist music in Ireland was delayed by half a century. That Britain was also backward with regard to advanced developments in art music exacerbated the isolation of its former colony. The revolution of the word in Irish literature therefore lacked an equivalent revolution of the note, a lack reflected in the absence of a chapter on modernist music in this Companion. This omission does not mean that the ‘noisy island’, as Gerry Smyth calls it, is bereft of music – on the contrary, Ireland has achieved worldwide success in traditional and popular music.78 Benefiting from immigration during the short-lived economic boom, today’s popular music embraces multiple idioms, ranging from traditional Irish music to Afro-pop. Groups like The Pogues reveal the influence of punk, which in turn was influenced by modernism via

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Situationism, but these influences have been transformed in the process of assimilation and no longer bear a national signature.79 Modernist art music, on the other hand, had to struggle against prejudice and underfunding to gain a hearing. Architecture tells a different story, with Irish architects very much aware of cuttingedge innovations in construction and design. Seán Rothery explains: ‘Despite its revolutionary birth in 1922, the new Irish Free State did not espouse a national style of architecture but, from the very beginning, quietly yet positively supported an international image for Ireland.’80 Casting off the influence of the British Empire, many architects looked to the United States for inspiration, especially to Chicago, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had emigrated in 1937. The Bank of Ireland headquarters in Baggot Street (1968–75), designed by Ronnie Tallon of Scott Tallon Walker, pays homage to Mies’s Federal Center in Chicago with three free-standing curtain-walled structures that face each other across a public plaza. Compared to its Miesian prototype, however, the Bank is drastically shortened, the tallest of its structures standing only eight storeys high, in contrast to Mies’s forty-five-storey Kluczynski Federal Building, which would have towered over the Dublin skyline. Instead, the Bank of Ireland was built to fit in with its Georgian neighbours, its design ‘a product of an Americanised modernism and a response to its specific Dublin site’.81 A full survey of modern architecture in Ireland is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it should be noted that the modernist principles embraced by Irish architects met with considerable resistance from their compatriots, particularly from the Catholic Church, which clung to its outdated architectural orthodoxy. One unlovely product of this orthodoxy is Galway Cathedral, built between 1957 and 1965, a ‘huge Hiberno-Romanesque pile’, as Simon Walker has described it, which ‘represents the apogee of the inward-looking, fiercely traditionalist Catholic society, and sent a clear warning to those entertaining thoughts of “corrupting” Ireland with modern values’.82 None the less, Ireland offers some exciting exceptions to the conservatism of ecclesiastical architecture. Posing a sharp contrast to the gloomy grandiosity of Galway Cathedral is the airy, uplifting structure of the Dominican Church at Athy, built in 1960–5 and recently repurposed as a library, with its hyperbolic paraboloid curved roof and exuberant artwork in stained glass by George Campbell (Plate 8). Thirty years earlier, the Chicago architect Barry Byrne, who was trained by Frank Lloyd Wright, brought a modernist aesthetic to the Church of Christ the King in Cork, the first Irish church to be clad in concrete instead of the traditional brick, a pyramidal structure with staggered walls that resemble an accordion. Soaring above the entrance, a nineteen-foot sculpture of Christ, designed by the Chicago modernist sculptor John Storrs, welcomes visitors with arms outstretched over the double doors. Inside the church, a single wide space embraces church and sanctuary, bringing the altar closer to the congregation in the democratic spirit of the Vatican reforms. To preview the contents of ‘Aesthetic Heresies’, this section begins with Eric Falci’s chapter on ‘Modern Irish Poetry and the Heresy of Modernism’, which advocates a renewed attention to the neglected middle of the twentieth century, a period often disparaged as a falling-off from the ‘age of Yeats’ or as an anticipation of the ‘age of Heaney’. Thus ‘the Irish poetry of the middle decades of the twentieth century is subjected to a kind of diachronic imperative: it is made to matter primarily for what it can tell us about poetry in Ireland before and after it’ (p. 220). Against this imperative, Falci argues that mid-century poetry is ‘differently heretical’ from modernism, with

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poets such as Brian Coffey and Sheila Wingfield developing long forms that conform to neither the lyric nor the epic mode and belie the routine dichotomy between the mainstream and the avant-garde. In Chapter 13, ‘Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement’, Kelly Sullivan shows how this movement introduced a bold new aesthetic in the visual arts that scandalised orthodox opinion. Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window, for example, a work in stained glass commissioned by the Free State government as a gift to the League of Nations in Geneva, paid homage to Ireland’s most celebrated writers with illustrations of their works. These illustrations, however, included images of drunkenness and sexuality that alarmed W. T. Cosgrave, the first head of government of the Free State, who objected that these scenes ‘would give grave offence to many of our people’ and ‘give rise to misunderstanding and much adverse comment’ if exhibited ‘as representative of Irish literature and culture’.83 Shortly after his window was rejected, Harry Clark’s premature death from tuberculosis marked the end of the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland. But Irish visual artists continued to innovate, particularly in the applied arts of metalwork and stained glass, producing such masterworks as Evie Hone’s My Four Green Fields (Plate 7), a stained-glass window that incorporates traditional Irish symbolism in a ‘fragmented series of panels reminiscent of modernist collage’ (p. 246). In Chapter 14, Matt Brown turns to early cinema in Ireland, an artform pioneered by no lesser modernist than James Joyce, who, with the backing of friends in Trieste, founded the Cinematograph Volta in Mary Street, Dublin, in 1909. Although Joyce soon lost interest in the venture, the Kalem Company (based in New York City), shortly followed by the Film Company of Ireland (an indigenous enterprise established just before the Easter Rising of 1916), launched a series of increasingly ambitious films, which introduced many of the cinematic tropes that dominated Irish filmmaking in the revolutionary era. A leading genre was the ‘insurgent romance’, defined by Brown as a political–erotic drama, usually set in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, which rebels against its own conventions to ‘demand a weirder and wilder accounting’ (p. 254). While insurgent romances have been criticised for presenting a nostalgic, sentimental view of Ireland, Brown argues that ‘the distracting, flirtatious, comedic and melodramatic gratifications of these films ask to be taken very seriously’ (p. 254). Although they could be seen as rear-guard heresies against high modernism, these films subvert their own genre protocols, especially through ambiguous endings that resist the consolations of closure. In Chapter 15, Catherine Flynn investigates Myles na gCopaleen’s long-running satirical column in the Irish Times, Cruiskeen Lawn, which began in 1940 during ‘The Emergency’. Written in both Irish and English, and often juxtaposing these languages in a single instalment or transliterating one into the orthography of the other, Cruiskeen Lawn makes fun of nationalist piety about the Irish language, debunking the idea of a ‘purely Irish voice’. The column’s polyglot, polyvocal play mocks the idea of national or linguistic isolation, thereby challenging Eamon de Valera’s isolationist policy of neutrality in World War II. Heretical to nativism in its use of modernist polyglossia and fragmentation, Cruiskeen Lawn is also heretical to modernism in so far as it ‘moves outside of literary genres, and outside of the available genres of the newspaper, excerpting the discourse of its day and amplifying, distorting and subverting it through linguistic play’ (p. 272).

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In Chapter 16, ‘Irish Christian Comedy: Heresy and Reform’, Vicki Mahaffey argues that a new form of religious comedy emerged in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Initiated by J. M. Synge, this literary mode uses Christian stories as a backdrop to everyday life, revitalising those stories by reuniting the sacred and the profane. In Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, for instance, Christy Mahon’s name aligns him with the Christ figure, but instead of being sacrificed by his divine father, Christy tries to kill his all-too-human ‘da’.84 And instead of being ostracised as a murderer, Christy finds himself lionised for his derring-do. Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien follow Synge’s lead in challenging orthodox interpretations of scripture with a heretical humour that restores to the Christ story a mystery stifled by one-sided dogmatism. Thus their comedies liberate the ambiguities suppressed by institutional religion; as Mahaffey points out, religare means to bind.

Heresies of Gender and Sexuality One of the most dramatic events in the recent history of Irish scholarship was the furore that greeted the 1991 publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,85 a massive compendium edited by Seamus Deane with numerous subeditors. Encyclopaedic though it is, this three-volume work allotted little space to women writers and, more egregiously, included only a handful of women subeditors. Deane’s response was to invite a team of feminist scholars to redress the omissions of the first three volumes with a two-volume supplement totalling well over 2,000 pages, which is devoted entirely to women’s contributions to Irish written and oral culture. Although ridiculed by Edna Longley as ‘The Madwomen in the Annex’,86 these supplementary volumes gave rise to a major achievement in feminist scholarship, as the all-female team of editors excavated the neglected history of women’s writing in Ireland. Like the previous volumes, volumes IV and V reach beyond the literary arts of fiction, poetry and drama to encompass religious, legal, political, folkloric and medical writing in both the languages of Ireland, addressing such issues as sexuality, warfare, science, conventual life, infanticide, domestic economy, education, emigration and racism. Heretical in relation to the male-dominated original collection, the last two volumes have proved to be a ‘dangerous supplement’,87 not only by undermining the supposed completeness of their predecessors but also by sparking a feminist revolution in Irish studies. Formerly a male preserve, Irish letters has been fundamentally transformed by the emergence of women scholars and their heresies against male privilege and chauvinism. In the introduction to The Field Day Anthology’s supplementary volumes IV and V, the general editors point out: Irish literature, history and culture are human constructs, not natural phenomena; their presentation in print has usually been conditioned by ways of thinking and writing developed through generations of scholarship, and the underlying assumption of much of that scholarship has been that both reader and writer are male.88 This assumption still prevails in scholarship on Irish modernism; as recently as 2019, A History of Irish Modernism, edited by Geoffrey Castle and Patrick Bixby,89 contains only one chapter on Irish women’s writing, Geraldine Meaney’s study of Kate O’Brien, and only six of the twenty-three contributors are female. Apart from Kate

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O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen earns a few mentions in this volume, but women poets are conspicuously absent. In the editors’ defence, it could be argued that few women writers revolutionised traditional literary forms with the flamboyance of Joyce, Beckett or Flann O’Brien. But these male writers’ assault on tradition has now become an orthodoxy in the critical establishment, defining the modernist brand and excluding most of the contemporary literary field. Clearly, this narrow definition of modernism has to give way if Irish women writers are to be recognised and the diversity of their aesthetic heresies appreciated. With regard to the rubric of this section, ‘Heresies of Gender and Sexuality’ refers in the first instance to the incursion of women writers and artists into the modernist canon, a club formerly reserved for men. But the chapters in this part of the book also explore the heresies that Irish writers of both sexes have opposed to gender stereotypes. Foremost among those stereotypes in Catholic Ireland is the coercive idol of the Virgin Mary, exalted as the sexless mother who renounces pleasure and independence for the sake of family values. Nationalist ideology tends to conflate the Virgin Mother with the Shan Van Vocht, the allegorical figure of Ireland as a poor old woman robbed of her ‘four beautiful green fields’ by the ‘strangers in the house’, the British invaders. In the play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),90 co-written by Yeats and Augusta Gregory, the Shan Van Vocht takes the form of the title character who calls on Ireland’s sons to sacrifice their lives in order to restore her stolen lands. This call for blood sacrifice explains why Stephen Dedalus calls Ireland ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’,91 an infanticidal mother who demands the immolation of her sons. Eamon de Valera, the leader of the Anti-Treaty faction during the Irish Civil War, who went on to become Taoiseach of Éire in 1937, rewrote the previous constitution of the Irish Free State in the same year to include the notorious Article 41.2.1: ‘The state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ A further clause seemed to many feminists to confine women to their traditional role as mothers and domestic drudges: ‘The state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’ 92 The historian and novelist Dorothy Macardle, who was a friend and champion of de Valera, none the less objected strongly to this Article: ‘I do not see how anyone holding advanced views on the rights of women can support it, and that is a tragic dilemma for those who have been loyal and ardent workers in the national cause.’ 93 Instead of removing the offending Article, however, de Valera added insult to injury in his corny radio broadcast of 1943, which has come to be known as the ‘comely maidens speech’ (though the quaint adjective ‘comely’ is a misquotation): The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.94

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Not only did the 1937 constitution reaffirm women’s traditional role, but it also retained an existing prohibition on ‘unlawful procurement of a miscarriage’, which was ultimately codified as a ban on abortion in the 8th Amendment to the Constitution in 1983. This ban remained in place until 25 May 2018, when Irish voters overwhelmingly approved Bill no. 29, granting women the right to terminate a pregnancy. As Abigail Palko has observed: Repeal of the 8th amendment was achieved only after an intensive campaign to sway public opinion. Like the referendum vote to legalize same sex marriage approved three years previously, the abortion referendum passed in part because large numbers of Irish citizens living abroad returned home to vote. Social media accounts of Irish expatriates traveling back to vote provide a startling contrast to the 170,000 women obliged to travel abroad to obtain an abortion since 1980.95 Meanwhile, Northern Ireland defied both the United Kingdom and the European Union in retaining its ban against abortion until 2019, when the collapse of the powersharing government allowed Parliament to step in and bring the territory’s laws in line with Britain’s principles of human rights.96 The same power vacuum enabled Parliament to legalise same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland, four years after it had been legalised in the Republic of Ireland. Homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1993 after a campaign led by the Senator and Joyce scholar David Norris. In a 1981 article in The Crane Bag, Norris points out that the Irish experience of homosexuality differed little from that of other countries, except for the ‘unusually homogenous nature of our society and the tacit assumption that to be Irish is to be white, heterosexual, and Catholic’.97 This bogus uniformity meant that the homosexual minority was condemned to the closet, except when scandals like those of Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement broke the conspiracy of silence, with lethal consequences for the offenders. Yet, within a generation, Ireland has been transformed from ‘a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction’, as Brian Moore described it in 1970,98 into a haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) equality and women’s reproductive rights, embracing some of the most progressive attitudes to sexuality in today’s world. The exposure of rampant sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, along with scandals like the Magdalene Laundries, where, for two centuries, hundreds of ‘fallen women’ were imprisoned and enslaved, their offspring dumped into mass graves, no doubt contributed to this sea-change in public opinion, with the moral authority of the Catholic Church drastically compromised. In this Companion, ‘Heresies of Gender and Sexuality’ includes both women’s writing, which has been under-represented in criticism of Irish modernism, and ‘writing against the heterosexual grain’,99 which opposes the long-standing interdiction on gay and lesbian experience. The five chapters in this section address a range of deviations from traditional sexual roles and practices, including the figure of the bachelor (Ed Madden), the corruptible young female reader (T. J. Boynton), the greedy, selfpleasuring heroines of Molly Keane (Lauren Rich), the victims of patriarchal violence and their unconventional style of testimony (Siân White), and the devalued female traditions revisited in the Irish-language poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Ailbhe Darcy).

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In Chapter 17, Ed Madden argues that ‘the Irish bachelor’ emerges as a type in the 1930s in response to the 1937 Constitution and the pro-natalist rhetoric of the fledgling state. In this rhetoric, the bachelor – usually a farmer – was stereotyped as older and rustic, sexually frustrated and socially isolated. Typical of this stereotype is A. J. Stanley’s neglected play Troubled Bachelors (1940), which deals with the 1939 eviction of single men from council cottages. Conventional in form and attitude, this play none the less suggests heretical forms of masculinity that move beyond the imperatives of marital and constitutional responsibility, challenging orthodox conceptions of gender, identity and community. In Chapter 18, T. J. Boynton investigates the Irish response to modern mass media, in which Catholic and cultural nationalists converged in their efforts to de-anglicise the fledgling nation. For different reasons, both factions noisily condemned such modern vulgarities as tabloid journalism, Hollywood movies, music halls, bodice-rippers and penny dreadfuls. The iconic figure of the young, female, Catholic reader loomed large in these invectives, with Catholic nationalists campaigning to preserve her purity while cultural nationalists bemoaned her seduction by the international culture industry. Boynton argues that ‘Irish modernism developed in part through “heretical” efforts to challenge the representation of this consumer demographic as pure, pious and simple’ (p. 320). Above all, Joyce’s depiction of Gerty MacDowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses punctures this representation by portraying this ‘specimen of winsome Irish girlhood’100 as immersed in the sensational, romantic, commercial and even pornographic print culture of her day. At the same time, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness narrative ‘plunges the reader into a modernism whose forms are directly imitative of these genres’ (p. 328), so that the author’s voice merges with Gerty’s ‘namby pamby jammy marmalady drawersy’ style.101 As Gustave Flaubert is reputed to have said of Emma Bovary, Joyce implies: ‘Gerty MacDowell c’est moi.’ In Chapter 19, Lauren Rich argues that Molly Keane’s ‘heretical’ late novels ‘violate every possible standard of good behaviour’, especially in their scandalous emphasis on the unsavoury aspects of eating and excreting. Mesmerised by these nauseating details, critics have tended to overlook Keane’s affirmation of the pleasures of food and its redemptive value for her Anglo-Irish heroines, trapped as they are in the crumbling Big Houses of the moribund Protestant Ascendancy. Keane insists on ‘the uncomfortably close relationship between the grotesque and the delicious’ in a context where denial of physical pleasure and suppression of appetite are important markers of class and gender, as elements of ‘good behaviour’, the title of Keane’s 1981 masterpiece. In the ‘starved spaces’ of Keane’s Big Houses, women seek out forbidden food as private consolation for their confinement and alienation (pp. 336–8). In Chapter 20, ‘“Stories Are a Different Kind of True”: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’, Siân White takes up three recent experimental novels by women writers, Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and Anna Burns’s Milkman, which won the Booker Prize in 2018. These novels build on the modernist legacy of Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien by using experimental form specifically to critique orthodoxies of gendered power. All depict women and children injured and exploited by men but assign these victims the role of narrator, much as the #MeToo movement has encouraged survivors to speak out against sexual violence and harassment. These narrators’ seemingly unreliable accounts – subjective, fragmented, digressive – paradoxically confer credibility on their voices, even

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though survivors’ testimony is routinely silenced or disbelieved precisely because of such unconventional expression. In Chapter 21, ‘Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Ailbhe Darcy shows how these poets dissent from both the longstanding orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the newly ascendant orthodoxy of secular neoliberalism. Writing in the Irish language, itself a pocket of resistance to the bureaucratic languages of capitalism, Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin call on relics or ‘ruins’ of the past, such as the ‘síscéal’ (fairy tale) and the keen, to challenge the current idolatry of growth and progress, which came to such a crushing anticlimax with the Celtic Tiger. Like Paul K. Saint-Amour, Luke Gibbons and Jeremy Colangelo in their contributions to this Companion, Darcy explores how anachronism can be mobilised to reclaim what Stephen Dedalus describes as the ousted possibilities of history. While dismantling the ‘iconic feminine’ – that is, the myth of the sexless, selfless mother enshrined in both Catholic and nationalist ideology – Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin recover forms of female ritual and discourse that resist today’s dogma, epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s notorious catchphrase, that ‘there is no alternative’ to global secular capitalism.

Critical Heresies The final section of this Companion showcases some of the critical innovations that have energised Irish studies in the past few years. The most ground-breaking heresy with regard to Irish modernism has been the postcolonial approach spearheaded by the Field Day collective, which includes such major critics as Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary and Declan Kiberd. In 1988, Field Day commissioned pamphlets by Edward Said, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton which, later republished with an introduction by Deane in a slim but highly influential volume, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990), set the terms for subsequent discussions of the ‘isms’ in its title. Whether Ireland ever was a colony in the same sense as India or Zimbabwe has aroused heated debate, although, as Joe Cleary argues, the concept of the colony covers a multitude of ‘anomalous states’, none of which provides a definitive template.102 One strong objection to the Field Day project came from Edna Longley, who accused the group of using new-fangled postcolonial theory to dress up retrograde nationalism: ‘old whines in new bottles’.103 Yet nationalism, as Eóin Flannery points out, ‘is never a homogenously transhistorical or transgeographical entity or process’.104 While opposing the sectarian nationalism of the North, for instance, Seamus Deane advocates liberationist nationalism as an antidote to the kind of pluralism that ‘refuses the idea of naming; [that] plays with diversity and makes a mystique of it’. This pluralism, Deane argues, ‘is the concealed imperialism of the multinational, the infinite compatibility of all cultures with one another envisaged in terms of the ultimate capacity of all computers to read one another’. In this context, nationalism, with its commitment to ‘nomination and origin’, poses a granular resistance to the homogenising force of global capitalism, which would eradicate the untranslatable particularities of local cultures.105 In addition to postcolonialism, feminism and queer theory, further critical heresies have shaken up accepted views of Irish modernism. Some of these heresies are represented in this Companion, including crip theory (Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente),

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affect theory (Wendy J. Truran), New Materialism (Maureen O’Connor), ecocriticism (Claire Connolly), and the challenge to Anglophone hegemony represented by experimental writing in Irish (Sarah E. McKibben). Crip theory, to begin with, challenges ableism, the privileging of physical soundness and the consequential discrimination against impaired or unproductive bodies. The irony is that all bodies are incapacitated in infancy, most in old age, and many in illness or injury, so that the ideal of the able body is something of a phantasm. At best, the able body is transient, as Oedipus’s solution to the riddle of the sphinx implies: man (and woman) is the animal that walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening, and noon is only a brief interval. Most bodies are dependent, even parasitical, most of the time: working bodies, as Michel Serres points out, are ‘rather rare’.106 None the less, the orthodoxy of ableism means that those who are perceived as less than able are subject to exclusion, abuse and even genocide, as in the Nazi concentration camps. While Irish modernism is scarcely proof against dominant misconceptions of disability, some works interrogate these prejudices, as in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses when the sight of Gerty MacDowell’s limp flips Bloom’s pornographic lust into patronising pity: ‘A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite.’107 Beckett, on the other hand, overturns ableist norms by presenting a world of geriatric outcasts who rarely stand on their own two feet. ‘Why should I have a sex, who have no longer a nose?’ demands the Unnamable. ‘All those things have fallen, all the things that stick out, with my eyes my hair, without leaving a trace . . . .’ 108 Beckett’s disintegrating bodies give corporeal form to his aesthetic quest for an ‘unlessenable least’, for an art of lack and incapacity. In a widely quoted New York Times interview, Beckett distinguished his aesthetics of failure from Joyce’s aspirations to mastery: while Joyce ‘is tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist’, Beckett said, ‘I’m working with impotence, ignorance.’109 In Beckett’s work, the classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano gives way to a vision of madness and suffering that defies what Leo Bersani criticises as ‘the culture of redemption’.110 Instead of excluding disability, Beckett excludes the proud perspective of the upright biped looking down on those who crawl or hobble on four legs or three.111 In Beckett, everyone is falling, failing, fooling, fading. Opening the section on ‘Critical Heresies’, Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente’s Chapter 22 on Beckett’s ‘degeneration’ of form engages with affect and crip theory. Borrowing for their title Beckett’s search for ‘a form that accommodates the mess’, Kennedy and Valente argue that Max Nordau’s notorious screed against degeneracy in the arts112 goaded Beckett to devise ‘literary and dramatic structures responsive in their antinormativity to the anomalous, dissident or disabled states being portrayed, and the peculiar emotional intensities these degeneracies occasion’ (p. 389). While many commentators have noted that Beckett presents disability as the human condition, rather than a stigmatised exception to the norm, Kennedy and Valente argue that Beckett’s art of failure and impotence applies to the literary form, as well as to the maimed and incapacitated creatures of his fictional universe. A ‘literature of the unword’, in Beckett’s famous phrase, his work strives to disable meaning, ‘to bore one hole after another in [language] until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through’.113 What seeps through, according to Kennedy and Valente, is ‘raw, visceral’ affect, at once ‘too brutal and too subtle for words’ (p. 399). In Chapter 23, ‘Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction’, Maureen O’Connor makes use of

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the critical ‘heresy’ of New Materialism, especially the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, to examine Bowen’s idiosyncratic treatment of the inhuman world. Like the New Materialists, O’Connor argues, Bowen’s fiction ‘proposes radical challenges to received ideas about human centrality by undermining foundational divisions, including the assumed separation between the human and the nonhuman’ (p. 406). Much of the humour and arresting oddity of Bowen’s fiction arises from her subtle subversion of these epistemological categories. Sarah E. McKibben’s Chapter 24, ‘Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity’, redresses the exclusion of literature in Irish from orthodox accounts of Irish modernism. To take this literature seriously, McKibben argues, constitutes a critical heresy ‘against a smugly indifferent, often condescending Anglophone status quo’ (p. 421). Like Matt Brown in his chapter in this volume, McKibben turns to Robert Flaherty’s fictionalised docudrama Man of Aran, a highly romanticised portrait of the Aran islanders’ manly struggle for survival in a rugged, unforgiving landscape. As McKibben shows, these islanders were much less insulated from modernity than the film acknowledges, but what is also suppressed is the very hallmark of their archaic authenticity: the Irish language. McKibben compares this ‘devoicing’ to Pádraic Ó Conaire’s 1910 novella in Irish, Deoraíocht (‘Exile’), a ‘gap-ridden’ text recounting the misfortunes of an Irish-speaking immigrant in London (pp. 424–7). The chapter concludes with a succinct account of the tribulations of the Irish language from the time of the Great Famine, when the language was nearly wiped out as a consequence of mass starvation and emigration, to the late nineteenth century, when Revivalist efforts to forge a new literary tradition out of a language deemed defunct undercut the orthodoxy identifying ‘progress’ with the English language and the British state. In Chapter 25, Wendy J. Truran shows how Yeats’s affirmation of the body and sensual joy rebels against the puritanical Catholicism of the Irish Free State. Beginning with Yeats’s poem ‘Vacillation’, with its envoi to the Catholic Modernist von Hügel, Truran examines Yeats’s principle that ‘consciousness is conflict’,114 and that all human life consists of the struggle of antinomies, crucially those of body and soul. The most ardent defender of the body is Crazy Jane, a persona based on ‘a drunken woman who had some distaste for the bishop’ in Loughrea, County Galway (as Yeats mentioned to the novelist Gerald O’Donovan in a letter discovered by Timothy P. Foley).115 Although Yeats eventually complained that he wanted ‘to exorcise that slut “Crazy Jane”, whose language has grown unendurable’, this poor old woman provides him with a mouthpiece to vent his frustration with orthodox morality and his heretical enthusiasm for the flesh.116 In Chapter 26, ‘Watery Modernism?’, Claire Connolly adopts the lens of ecocriticism to compare Yeats’s early novel, John Sherman (1891), to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), both of which are set in the West of Ireland, a region imperilled by modernisation in both cultural and environmental spheres. Ecocriticism is a ‘heresy’ in the sense that it draws on a range of disciplines, such as geography, which lie outside the traditional purview of literary criticism. Connolly shows how Yeats’s and McCormack’s novels, although published over a century apart, share a deep concern with ‘water as political, cultural and environmental threshold in the Anthropocene’ (p. 452). Her chapter makes a fitting bookend to Nels Pearson’s chapter on ‘Hereseas’ in the first section of this volume, in that Connolly focuses on Ireland’s internal waterways and Pearson on its oceanic frontiers. Both stress the precarity of water in the face of climate change and other environmental depredations of the Anthropocene.

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In conclusion, the editors of this Companion recognise that our emphasis on heresy runs the risk of turning heresy into a new orthodoxy, in much the same way that ‘queering’ threatens to become a dogma rather than a provocation in literary studies. If approbation is couched only in terms of subversion, offence and challenge, these criteria can lose their critical force. By contrast, the essays in this volume find room for humour, aesthetic pleasure, even nostalgia. Whereas catechism is the definitive form of orthodoxy and imposes a merciless reminder of the correct, perhaps literature is heretical by definition and its errors the portals of discovery.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, line 11, Collected Poems, p. 255. Cleary, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, p. 1. Yeats, ‘Byzantium’, line 8, Collected Poems, p. 248. See Flannery, Ireland and Ecocriticism. ‘Riverrun’ is the first word in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, p. 3 line 1. See, inter alia, Potter and Trotter, Critical Quarterly, Special Issue, ‘Low Modernism’. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘New Modernist Studies’, pp. 737–48. Joyce, Portrait, p. 220. Newman, review of Cleary, pp. 276–7. Brown, ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’, p. 25. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 152 line 16. See, inter alia, Pierce, Irish Writing, which includes excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Betty Smith; and Cleary, ‘Irish American Modernisms’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, pp. 174–92. Longley, The Living Stream, p. 195. Pound, Canto 81, available at (last accessed 4 August 2020). See Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’. See Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Unfinished Project’. The Celtic Twilight is one of the names given to the Celtic Revival, and especially the Irish Literary Revival; it is also the title of a book by W. B. Yeats. ‘I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry,’ Bacon later explained. See Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, pp. 40–3. Bacon’s London studio was acquired by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 1998, thus reclaiming this embittered exile for Ireland, but as his screaming popes indicate, his sources of inspiration were transnational. Roísín Kennedy (‘Storm in a Teacup’, p. 116) notes that Bacon ‘had no inclination to be considered Irish . . . although he did acknowledge the potential impact that various traumatic experiences in Ireland might have had on his later work.’ Gay, Modernism, p. 4. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, p. 85. Barmann, ‘The Modernist as Mystic’, p. 215. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, pp. 90, 89, 72. Yeats, ‘Vacillation’, Collected Poems, pp. 249–53: line numbers in text. See Vendler, ‘Vacillation’. Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, p. 20. Green, Yeats’s Blessings, p. 2. Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 52. Beckett, Endgame, p. 38. Qtd in Pinkerton, Blasphemous Modernism, p. 4.

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29. Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 41; Yeats, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, line 184, Collected Poems, p. 450. 30. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, p. 118. 31. In this passage Eliot is referring to Matthew Arnold’s substitution of poetry for religion: see Eliot, The Use of Poetry, p. 26. 32. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, p. 220. 33. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 297. 34. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. 42, 112. 35. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 202 line 35. 36. Ibid., p. 221 line 17. 37. Qtd in Hartigan, ‘Irish Women Painters’, p. 64. 38. Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’, p. 129. As Marianne Hartigan (‘Irish Women Painters’, pp. 63–5) points out, most of the modernist women artists in Ireland came from privileged Anglo-Irish Protestant backgrounds, which enabled them to develop their talents abroad. May Guinness, Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett and Mary Swanzy studied in Paris, as did the famed architect and designer Eileen Gray. Edith Somerville was also trained as an artist in Paris before she teamed up with her cousin, Violet Martin, to become the novelists Somerville and Ross; Constance Gore-Booth, better known for her revolutionary politics, studied art in Paris too. Elizabeth Bowen, another scion of the Protestant Ascendancy, studied art at the London County Council School of Art before she turned her attention to fiction. It seems to have been something of an Anglo-Irish tradition to encourage daughters to study art; in Bowen’s novel The Last September (1929), Lady Naylor tries to extricate Lois Farquhar from a hasty and unsuitable engagement by sending her to art school. 39. See cover image (last accessed 5 October 2020). 40. Qtd in Coulter, ‘Translating Modernism’, p. 58. Compare Nordau, Degeneration, Ch. 3, p. 33, where the author accuses ‘impressionists’, ‘stipplers’, ‘mosaists’, ‘papilloteurs’, ‘quiverers’ and ‘roaring’ colourists of degrading literature and painting into crazed dermatologies of spots and blotches. 41. See (last accessed 5 October 2020). 42. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.50–1. 43. Ibid., 9.229. 44. Parsons is playing on Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, line 61, Collected Poems, p. 181. 45. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, Collected Poems, p. 135: although unnamed, the airman Yeats had in mind was Major Robert Gregory. 46. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, p. 99. 47. Qtd in Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, p. 18. 48. This is the Belfast evoked in Eoin McNamee’s Belfast thriller Resurrection Man (1994), p. 13, where Ryan, the reporter, tries to ‘develop the knowledge that the inhabitants of the city had. The sense of territory that guided them through hundreds of streets. That feeling for the anxious shift in population.’ 49. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.392–3. 50. Yeats, ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’, line 86, Collected Poems, p. 36. 51. See Nolan, Introduction to James Joyce and Nationalism, pp. 1–22. 52. Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 482. 53. Moore, Lies of Silence, p. 135. See also Wilson, Eureka Street, p. 163: ‘The tragedy was that Northern Ireland (Scottish) Protestants thought themselves like the British. Northern Ireland (Irish) Catholics thought themselves like Eireans (proper Irish). The comedy was that any once strong difference had long melted away and they resembled no one now as much as they resembled each other.’

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26 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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maud ellmann Qtd in Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, p. 7. Ibid. Moretti, ‘The Long Goodbye’, p. 190. Joyce, Ulysses, 244.190–1. Beckett, ‘MacGreevy on Jack B. Yeats’, Disjecta, pp. 96–7; Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing, p. 32. Beckett, ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’, Disjecta, p. 149. Beckett to MacGreevy, 14 August 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, p. 540. Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, Collected Poems, pp. 18–19. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.4956–67. Mahaffey, States of Desire, pp. 4–5, 10. ‘The Second Coming’, line 3, Collected Poems, p. 187. The phrase ‘der modernen bürgerlichen Epopöe’ comes from Hegel’s Ästhetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Berlin: Aufbau, 1955), p. 983; the phrase is translated by T. M. Knox as ‘the modern popular epic’ in G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, p. 1092. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 316 line 15. Kiberd, ‘Literature and Politics’, p. 13. Eagleton, Heathcliff, pp. 273–319. The architectural plans submitted by Edwin Lutyens in 1913 were turned down, ostensibly for financial reasons. Another reason, as Yeats explains in a letter to Lady Gregory, was that ‘the Corporation will not accept an English architect’, though Yeats also blamed the fiasco on Irish middle-class philistinism: ‘a little huxtering nation groping for halfpence in a greasy till’ (qtd by Gregory, Hugh Lane’s Life, p. 128). Taking offence, Lane lent thirtynine paintings to the National Gallery in London, where they remained until his death on the Lusitania in 1915. A codicil to Lane’s will indicated his desire to bequeath the paintings to Ireland, but legal technicalities prevented their relocation. Kennedy, ‘Storm in a Teacup’, p. 113. Gibbons, ‘Modalities of the Visible’, p. 20. Kennedy, ‘Storm in a Teacup’, p. 115. Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, p. 119. Coulter, ‘Translating Modernism’, p. 45. Qtd in White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination, p. 5. Joyce, Ulysses, 11 passim. Fitzgerald, ‘A Belated Arrival’, p. 348. Smyth, Noisy Island. See Cleary, ‘The Pogues’. Rothery, ‘Ireland and the New Architecture’, p. 18. Rowley, ‘From Dublin to Chicago’, p. 225. Walker, ‘Architecture in Ireland’, p. 26. Bowe, ‘Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window’. Synge, Playboy, p. 93: ‘A murdered da?’ Deane, The Field Day Anthology. Longley, review of The Field Day Anthology, p. 119. See Derrida, ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’. Bourke et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology, vol. 4, p. xxxii. Castle and Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism. Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan, p. 7. Joyce, Portrait, p. 220. The Irish Constitution can be downloaded from this website: (last accessed 5 October 2020).

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93. Qtd in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 405. Macardle’s novel The Unforeseen (1946) is discussed by Luke Gibbons below. 94. See (last accessed 5 October 2020). 95. Abigail L. Palko, ‘Irish Motherhood’, work in progress. See also Palko, Imagining Motherhood, esp. pp. 59–63. 96. See (last accessed 5 October 2020). 97. Norris, ‘Homosexual People’, p. 31. 98. Moore, Fergus, p. 202. 99. Qtd from Ailbhe Smyth in Walshe, Sex, Nation, and Dissent, p. 13. 100. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.81. 101. Joyce, Selected Letters, p. 246. 102. See Cleary, ‘Misplaced Ideas’; Lloyd, Anomalous States. 103. Qtd in Eóin Flannery, Ireland and Postcolonial Studies, p. 37. 104. Ibid., p. 35. 105. Deane, Introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, p. 19. 106. Serres, The Parasite, p. 87. 107. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.774–5. 108. Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 299. 109. Shenker, Israel, ‘Beckett: Moody Man of Letters’, p. 3. Widely quoted though it is, most Beckett scholars doubt the authenticity of Shenker’s interview; see Dettmar, ‘The Joyce that Beckett Built’, pp. 610–12. 110. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption. 111. I discuss this point at greater length in ‘More Kicks than Pricks’. 112. Nordau, Degeneration. 113. Beckett, Disjecta, pp. 173, 172. 114. Qtd in Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, p. 153. 115. Foley, ‘The Bishop and Crazy Jane’. 116. Qtd in Harper, ‘The Problem of Crazy Jane’, p. 17.

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McNamee, Eoin, Resurrection Man (London: Picador, 1994). Mahaffey, Vicki, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 132:3 (2008), pp. 737–48. Moore, Brian, Fergus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). Moore, Brian, Lies of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1990). Moretti, Franco, ‘The Long Goodbye: Ulysses and the End of Liberal Capitalism’, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983; London: Verso, 1988), pp. 182–208. Newman, Daniel Aureliano, review of Joe Cleary, The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 39:2 (2016), pp. 276–9. Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Nordau, Max, Degeneration (1892/5; London: Heinemann, 1898). Norris, David, ‘Homosexual People and the Christian Churches in Ireland: A Minority and Its Oppressors’, The Crane Bag, 5:1 (1981), pp. 31–7. Palko, Abigail L., Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Passerin D’Entrèves, Maurizio, and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Pierce, David (ed.), Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000). Pinkerton, Steven, Blasphemous Modernism: The Twentieth-Century Word Made Flesh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Pius X, Pope, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, ‘Encyclical of Pope Pius X on the Doctrines of the Modernists, September 8, 1907, 174’, in Claudia Carlen Ihm, The Papal Encyclicals (Raleigh, NC: McGrath, 1981), pp. 71–98. Potter, Rachel, and David Trotter (eds), Critical Quarterly, 46:4 (2004), Special Issue, ‘Low Modernism’. Pound, Ezra, ‘Canto LXXXI’, Poetry Foundation, (last accessed 6 October 2020). Reynolds, Paige (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2016). Rothery, Seán, ‘Ireland and the New Architecture’, in Becker et al. (eds), Twentieth-Century Architecture: Ireland, pp. 17–22. Rowley, Ellen, ‘From Dublin to Chicago and Back Again: An Exploration of the Influence of Americanised Modernism on the Culture of Dublin’s Architecture, 1945–1975’, in King and Sisson (eds), Ireland, Design and Visual Culture, pp. 211–34. Serres, Michel, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Shenker, Israel, ‘Beckett: Moody Man of Letters’, interview with Samuel Beckett, The New York Times, 6 May 1956, pp. 1, 3, (last accessed 6 October 2020). Smyth, Gerry, Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005). Steward, James Christen (ed.), When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland (London: Merrell Holberton, 1998). Sylvester, David, Interviews with Francis Bacon (1980; New York: Thames and Hudson, 2016). Synge, J. M., The Playboy of the Western World (1907), in Harrington (ed.), Modern Irish Drama, pp. 73–118. Vendler, Helen, ‘Vacillation: Between What and What?’, Yeats Annual, 18 (2013), pp. 151–68.

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Walker, Simon, ‘Architecture in Ireland 1940–75’, in Becker et al., Twentieth-Century Architecture: Ireland, pp. 22–8. Walshe, Eibhear (ed.), Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). White, Harry, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Wilson, Robert McLiam, Eureka Street (London: Secker and Warburg, 1996). Yeats, W. B., Cathleen ni Houlihan, in Harrington, Modern Irish Drama, pp. 3–11. Yeats, Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). Yeats, W. B., The Celtic Twilight (London: A. H. Bullen, 1902).

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Part I Heresies of Time and Space

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1 Rising Timely and Untimely: On Joycean Anachronism Paul K. Saint-Amour

Well, I’ve helped to wind up the clock – I might as well hear it strike! —Michael Joseph O’Rahilly on Easter Monday, 1916 [Mr Bloom] raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

T

his chapter began to take shape during the centenary year of the Easter Rising and aimed to brush against that year’s commemorative grain. I hoped to resist a certain triumphalist historiography of state formation, which tends to string anniversaries into a plot of national Bildung with a strongly foregone conclusion. It is a plot that can accommodate contingency up to a point – the point, say, where accident touches off a cascade of events whose issue is then quickly recuperated as inevitable – a powderkeg awaiting a match, to use a beloved cliché. It is a plot that can admit a certain degree of counter-factualism, too, but again only to the degree that alternative paths and might-have-beens can be channelled back to the main plot of national becoming. Yet as certain works of commemorative modernism remind us – foremost among them James Joyce’s Ulysses – anniversaries do not have to be celebrations of forestructured history or festivals for flattering the present. They can also be occasions for remembering what the plot of national Bildung likes to leave in the cold: the roads not taken, the subjects uncelebrated, the prospects unmet, the hopes and futurities left in cold storage. Anniversaries can be occasions, too, for re-emplotment – for re-emplotting romance as tragedy, as David Scott has urged of anticolonial movements in the Caribbean, or triumphalism as compromise, or closure as aperture.1 When better than on an anniversary, on a centenary no less, to attend to the politics of time – to pay, as Gary Wilder puts it, ‘special attention to how a given historical epoch may not be identical with itself and historical tenses may blur and interpenetrate’?2 I will return to the non-self-correspondence of Easter 1916 and to Ulysses’ several ways of keeping the Rising’s time out of joint. But first I would like to dwell on a few varieties of timeliness and their central role in how the events of April 1916 are often remembered and evaluated. Although the Easter Rising commenced a day later than planned owing to the British capture of German arms on 21 April, it otherwise slots easily into the punctuality narrative that is, by now, a default in the historiography of strategic insurgency. According to this script, the revolutionary organisation bides its

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time in the shadows, exhibiting a radical patience. Then, to use the language of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic read by Pádraic Pearse on Easter Monday, 1916, ‘having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she [that is, Ireland, acting through her secret revolutionary and open military organisations] seizes that moment and . . . strikes in the full confidence of victory’. If it comes at all, such an event comes, again in the Proclamation’s phrase, ‘at this supreme hour’, with the double punctuality of crisis and destiny. Even Michael Joseph O’Rahilly, the Irish Volunteers co-founder who opposed unilateral action and had tried to stop the rebellion, invoked the precision timekeeping of revolution when he arrived in the centre of Dublin on Easter Monday to participate in the fighting. Alighting from his custom De Dion–Bouton motorcar, O’Rahilly uttered what became one of the Rising’s most quoted lines: ‘Well, I’ve helped to wind up the clock – I might as well hear it strike!’ Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO) – the site where O’Rahilly stepped from his car into the rebellion and where Pearse read the Proclamation – incarnates a different kind of timeliness. As historian Clair Wills notes, the GPO was the central ganglion of the city’s postal, banking, telegraph and telephone networks and therefore stood for the muscular chronometry of capital and empire.3 This role was most visibly materialised in the large, clock-topped telephone silence cabinet (Figure 1.1) that stood

Figure 1.1 Telephone silence cabinet, Dublin General Post Office. Photograph from Irish Builder and Engineer, April 1916.

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inside the GPO and was used during the Rising to imprison an off-duty Royal Fusilier who happened to be in the building when the rebels captured it.4 To occupy the GPO, then, was to mount an assault on temporal imperium itself, an assault reminiscent of Verloc’s attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. (Luke Gibbons has recently observed that with the Time [Ireland] Act of August 1916, the British abolished Dublin or Dunsink mean time and replaced it with Greenwich time. Thus Irish time was liquidated, Gibbons writes, ‘as if in retaliation for the Easter Rising four months before’.5) But even as the insurgents assailed clock time, they also relied on it in planning and coordinating their movements. And they were so committed to real-time recordkeeping that we can now reconstruct detailed, hour-by-hour accounts of the Rising. Many sentences in the event’s narrative histories begin with phrases like ‘Promptly at noon’ or ‘just after four o’clock’. The fact that the barricades erected by the Citizen Army contained not only the charred remains of O’Rahilly’s motorcar (Figure 1.2) but also ‘scores of marble clocks’ taken out of local stores is nicely emblematic of the fact that the Rising was crucially built out of clock time.6 An event’s timeliness also lies in its evident correspondence with coeval events, such that it can be said to belong to its moment. By now it is routine to point out that by the end of the Rising, the centre of Dublin resembled nothing so much as the towns of France and Belgium, shelled level during the world war that, by April 1916, was nearing its midpoint. Routine to point out, as well, that this resemblance was not lost on the Dubliners

Figure 1.2 Burned remains of O’Rahilly’s De Dion–Bouton after the Easter Rising.

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who, having seen the rubble of Sackville Street and environs, were put in mind of photos of Louvain and referred to their own ruined town as ‘Ypres on the Liffey’, an expression picked up, for instance, in the cover photo caption of a commemorative booklet published later in 1916 (Plate 9, detail Plate 10). The Rising belongs to its time because it produced, as Wills says, ‘a terrifically speeded-up version of the First World War . . . from cavalry charge to bombardment and shelling in a few days’.7 But the Rising’s punctuality, the sense that it began (and ended) right on time, is, above all, the result of historical narratives that, with the benefit of a hindsight supremely difficult to unsee, instal it as the endpoint of a relatively static period in Irish politics that commenced with the fall of Parnell. Even when these narratives dub the Rising a failed coup, they do so to make its generative political legacy a function of that failure by characterising the story of the Rising’s leaders as one of hopelessness triumphant, of galvanising martyrdom and of willing blood sacrifice. The Rising becomes, by these lights, the period-defining catalyst of a more general awakening that culminates in the War of Independence and the establishment of the Irish Free State: the inevitable match to the powder-keg of anticolonial nationalism. In turning now to the untimely facets of the Rising, we could look at the many ways in which the events of April 1916 and their reception peel away from the clock face and thus from the self-correspondence of the well-timed event. We might consider the false starts, delays and problems of national coordination that bedevilled the rebellion’s commencement. We could theorise the constitutive earliness of that political speech act, the Proclamation, which declared the existence of a Republic in advance of popular mandate, in advance even of the sovereign law in which the Proclamation’s authority was implicitly rooted. We could attend to the shapelessness and non-simultaneity of the rebels’ experience once they were trapped in disparate buildings – the way the punctuality of occupation, proclamation and battle trailed into the amorphous, even the tedious condition of the siege. We could enlist as varied a cast of thinkers as Hegel, Rosa Luxemburg and Žižek in considering whether the Irish War of Independence, like all revolutions, had to commence unseasonably, could succeed only as the repetition of a failed, premature attempt called the Easter Rising. Or we might think about how the intertextuality of the Rising – its intentional and incidental allusions to the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, and its later quotation by numerous anticolonial revolts – instals it in a hyperspace, or a hypertime, of insurrection that defies our habits of thought. In keeping with my focus on modernism and the Rising, however, I would like to take up that particular work of modernist commemoration to which I referred above, Joyce’s Ulysses. Set entirely in a painstakingly detailed Dublin on Thursday, 16 June 1904, Ulysses would seem to be punctuality’s epic. But I want to suggest that for Joyce’s novel, timeliness is less a design than a device, a way of smuggling in the untimeliness with which the novel teems. The years elapsed between its 1904 setting and its publication in 1922 allowed the book to bear dyschronic witness to the intervening eighteen years, with Easter 1916 at their heart. Ulysses is a stream that forks around the Rising, lapping along both its leading and its trailing shores. This double flow might have swept the rebellion into a story of national prophecy and fulfilment, culminating in the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 and its provision for the creation of the Irish Free State one year later. Instead, I argue, Ulysses declines such narratives of national foreordination, using its polytemporal view of the Rising to look askance at the event and what it augured, both for Ireland’s future political form and for the rapidly changing world-system of violence production.

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As a way of getting at that sideways look, I begin with the broader but related question of the book’s historical accuracy and its conspicuous limits – that is, with Ulysses’ commission and thematisation of anachronism. The first generations of scholarship on Ulysses’ contemporaneity (as opposed to its mythical method) tended to focus on the book’s fidelity to the culture and politics, the built environment, the population and the archive of Dublin in 1904. Of course, as scholars traced Joyce’s mining of periodicals, directories, maps and other sources, discrepancies between the novel and the historical record started to emerge. These were understood, however, either as minor adjustments in the service of the novel’s Homeric matrix or as rare moments of authorial oversight. In 1987, Hugh Kenner likened one of the novel’s narrative lacunae to Homer’s nod. ‘It would be like Joyce to insert an equivalent for that famous nod,’ he wrote, epitomising a strong critical tendency in Joyce studies to recuperate error to a greater plan.8 Mistakes resistant to such recuperation were also read as exceptions that proved the rule of the book’s historical accuracy. Anthony Burgess, in Joysprick (1973), calls anachronism ‘the one Joycean sin’. He troubles to point out the few allusions in Ulysses to books published after 1904 because, as he puts it, ‘Joyce is otherwise so meticulous in keeping the known future out of his reconstructed past.’9 It is only more recently that students of the book have begun to suspect that Ulysses’ many departures from historical records and its violations of the 1904 frame might be neither reducible to its Homeric structure nor explicable as minor gaffes or glitches; that anachronism might be one of the book’s objects of scrutiny, one of its under-celebrated techniques, even one of its great themes. Fascinatingly, this emergent reading of Ulysses’ anachronisms has aggregated not around chronologically impossible quotations but around the book’s oblique gestures toward two events that we have already seen pinned together outside its pages: the Easter Rising and the First World War. To begin with the latter: in the 1970s and 1980s, several critics, among them E. L. Epstein and Robert Spoo, noticed language in the ‘Nestor’ episode that was less suggestive of its 1904 setting than of trench warfare under way in 1917, the year during which Joyce drafted the episode. Spoo went so far as to say that ‘Nestor’, in its saturation with its Great War context, bears comparison with the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siefried Sassoon.10 In the early 1990s, Mark Wollaeger noticed that the British Army recruiting poster that Bloom looks at in the Westland Row post office, in ‘Lotus Eaters’, was of a type not produced, historically, until the First World War.11 In at least one place in the prepublication drafts of Ulysses we see Joyce considering a less oblique reference to the same war in the form of a prophecy.12 In later deleting the passage, with its too-sharp foreglimpse of massive English and German losses in a war of attrition, Joyce may have avoided committing the ‘one Joycean sin’ of anachronism. Yet at least two other passages in Ulysses contain what look like weaker forecasts of the Great War. In a passage in ‘Aeolus’, Freeman’s Journal editor Myles Crawford observes that Edward VII has recently ‘Sent his heir over to make the king an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day.’13 And in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, the proprietor of the cabman’s shelter holds that a day of reckoning . . . Was in store for mighty England . . . There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel. (16.996–1003)

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Added to the language of ‘a hill above a corpsestrewn plain’ (2.16), ‘European conflagration’ (2.327), ‘battling bodies in a medley’ (2.314–15), ‘the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts’ (2.317–18) and other passages in ‘Nestor’, Ulysses practically dares its readers not to think of the war of 1914–18 from the midst of a diegetic 1904. At the very least, such a dare foregrounds the difficulty and artificiality of isolating a date seventeen and a half years before the book’s publication, tearing the chronological sutures between the reader and the moment constructed by the text. More, it insinuates that no moment is temporally self-identical. It hints that a given present is constituted of other moods and tenses, including the past tense of memory, the future tense of prophecy, the future conditional of forecast and the subjunctive moods of the counterfactual. And traversing many, if not all, of these, is the hypertime of historically disparate but affiliated moments, such that an utterance like ‘Any other victory like that and we are done for’ could issue, as Stephen thinks in ‘Nestor’, from ‘any general to any officers’ (2.17) standing on a hill above a corpsestrewn plain. If the First World War asserts such a strong, albeit spectral, presence in Joyce’s book, how much more intensely must Easter 1916 haunt Ulysses from the diegetic future? Although the first generations of scholarly monographs on Joyce’s novel largely bypassed the Rising, it is now unusual for a volume of Ulysses criticism to do so. (Indeed, it is now common to find multiple mentions of Ulysses in narrative histories of the Easter Rising.14) In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd goes as far as to describe the Rising as a referent that may be transcendental by virtue of its effacement from the novel’s direct reference-world: The Rising is the great, unmentionable fact which hovers behind so many episodes of Ulysses – the setting of ‘Aeolus’ near the Post Office which provided its headquarters; the ‘triumph of failure’ motif in that episode and in the Library scene; the blood sacrifice theme of ‘Lestrygonians’; and the Viceregal cavalcade [in ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Sirens’]. Elaborating elsewhere on his reading of ‘Aeolus’, he adds that Stephen’s Parable of the Plums is put into a quite different perspective by the fact of Easter 1916. By the time that Ulysses was published six years later, the ‘triumph of lost causes’ argument no longer sounded so threadbare, for a ‘hopeless rebellion’, centered next to the very site of all this verbalizing, had led to the founding of an Irish Free State.15 For Kiberd, the Rising may be nowhere referred to, but it is everywhere implied, the more so when read by the hind-light of 1922, when its lose-to-win strategy had prevailed. In Enda Duffy’s several discussions of Ulysses and the Rising we find a focus on different episodes, particularly on ‘Cyclops’, whose procession of saints follows some of the streets hardest hit by British ordnance and whose Jacob’s biscuit tin, hurled with such fury by the Citizen that the ensuing earthquakes devastate part of the city, commemorates the Jacob’s factory occupied by the rebels; and on ‘Circe’, whose ‘Dublin’s burning’ passage evokes a Rising-like scene of urban military violence, with artillery

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firing and troops deployed in the streets.16 For Duffy, the gap between setting and publication allows Ulysses to ‘secrete within its account of a day in 1904 a palimpsest or secret history of the revolutionary occurrences of 1914–1921’. Learning to read that secret history, he adds, reveals a certain latency, imminence or potential in Ulysses’ portrait of the Irish middle class in 1904. It is a potential that the novel confirms, by way of the post-1904 material transmitted on its encrypted carrier wave, will soon become manifest in the bourgeoisie’s economic emergence, political awakening and revolutionary struggle, culminating in the founding of the Irish Free State. This palimpsestic reading leads Duffy to dub Ulysses, much more even than Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, ‘the work that commemorates and celebrates a newly independent Ireland . . . the nation-text of a new, postcolonial, middle-class Ireland’.17 Both Kiberd and Duffy, then, give us a Ulysses whose historical commitment to 16 June 1904 is porous enough to admit certain ghosts of Ireland’s future. This is an untimely Ulysses, one that registers how the past is overwritten by supervening events even as it insists that historical moments are never identical with themselves to begin with – are, instead, shot through from the start with discrepant orientations in and to time. And yet if the Ulysses described by these eminent Joyceans is untimely, its account of the Rising as an event remains installed in a familiar, linear and bourgeois nationalist narrative of state formation, in which the rebellion ‘leads to’ the founding of the Irish Free State and the birth of the nation redeems the evident futility and blood sacrifice of the Rising. I do not wish to treat this narrative dismissively, either as a historical object or as a narrative that may still have productive work to do in the present. But I am not convinced that this is the only, or even the chief, way Ulysses has of emplotting Ireland’s political future or of understanding the Easter Rising. For starters, it sidelines Joyce’s antagonism toward the nation-state as a political form generally, as well as his particular ambivalence about Irish statehood. (We can hear both of these attitudes in his response, when asked whether he looked forward to the coming of an independent Ireland: ‘So that I might declare myself its first enemy?’18) What is more, the plot of state formation does not square with the Ulysses one finds on the page, whose punctuality is less, and less interestingly, haunted by a known political future than by an unknown one. For Duffy, Ulysses’ formal modernism intensifies alongside the anticolonial struggle concurrent with the writing of its later episodes, reaching ‘a crescendo in the crazed phantasmagoria of “Circe”, written during the height of the War of Independence’.19 As I read them, however, what crescendos in the later episodes is a refusal to presuppose the future political form of Ireland. And in declining to emplot any sort of dénouement to the plot of national becoming, the novel asks us to consider what more broadly emancipatory prospects were overwritten or made dormant by the Easter Rising and by the convulsive wartime nationalism that was one of its enabling conditions. To test some of these claims, I would like to consider the ‘Dublin’s burning’ passage in ‘Circe’, which Duffy characterises simply as ‘the Dublin of Easter Week, 1916’.20 distant voices Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire, on fire! (High Explosive fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Lewis guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Rebels shout. Civilians bawl. Brigadiers screech. The HMS Helga hoots on the Liffey. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Gunmen crouch by barricades. Looters

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paul k. saint-amour empty the shops. . . . The midday sun is darkened. The ground trembles. The dead of Dublin from Sackville Street to Little Britain Street lie interred in rubble. Part of Liberty Hall collapses from the shell of an 18-pounder. . . . Volunteers make redhot baraabombs in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal. ICA ladies fire their Webley revolvers to protect themselves. . . .)

But I am cheating. This is not the passage we find in Joyce’s book but one that I have conjured up, as if from an alternate-universe and unequivocally nationalist or at least nation-oriented Ulysses. It is a passage that flagrantly commits the one Joycean sin of anachronism in order to consecrate the Rising as the inciting cause of the War of Independence, at whose height ‘Circe’ was being completed. I offer it as a way of imagining what a writer who was willing to plant weak post-facto prophecies of the First World War in his book could have given us by way of a strong prophecy of the Rising, had he been fully committed to that event and its evident teleology. What we actually find in the pages of ‘Circe’ is much more heterogeneous in its temporality, as well as in its tone and reference worlds: distant voices Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire, on fire! (Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. . . . The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless yawn. . . . Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves. Laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragons’ teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows. . . .) (U 15.4659–81) The scene here is Dublin, and it does evoke the Rising. But it also evokes the Crucifixion, Armageddon, Walpurgisnacht and, via the ‘dragons’ teeth’ of Cadmus, Greek myth. ‘Pikes clash, on cuirasses’ points us to the 1798 Rebellion; ‘Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs’ evokes suffragist revolt and, especially when juxtaposed with the line, ‘Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves’, proletarian revolution. For all that the passage reverberates to the shelling, street fighting and military occupation of towns in the Great War, the Gatling gun actually indexes nineteenth-century wars, from the American Civil War where this gun was first used to the colonial spaces where it cut down Matabele and Zulu warriors, Bedouins, Mahdists, central Asian nomads and many others by the thousands. What is the effect of this passage, which evokes a diegetically future event as a crossroads for so many ontologies of violence, social disruption, even apocalypse? We could read it as allegorising the world-ending degree of political upheaval initiated by the Easter Rising. But the gravity of such a reading has to ignore the passage’s antic, cartoon-like energy, just as a singular focus on the Rising must ignore the passage’s miscellaneity and

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dense intertextuality. This moment in ‘Circe’ seems, rather, to deconsecrate the Rising by placing it beside a range of violent discontinuities, most of them offering a stark contrast to it along the lines of race, gender, class, political form or some combination of these. Where apocalyptic narratives imagine the eschaton as the singular Event to which all history leads and all signs point, this passage disports with apocalyptic time in order to disperse it, compiling in its place an anthology not of the known or the foreknown but merely of the possible. It thus dislodges the Rising from narratives of inevitability and singularity. But to say that the ‘Dublin’s burning’ passage in some manner deconsecrates the Rising is not at all to say that it belittles it. The passage insists, rather, that such events do not have their meaning alone – that their importance inheres not in their singularity but in their multiplicity, their being made up of echoes and distortions of like and unlike events in history, religion and myth. These constitutive events shine sidelights on one another as well. The suggestions of world war and colonial war in the passage ask not only how these phenomena are connected but also where the Rising is located in the global system of injury production that they together constitute. The factory lasses who ‘toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs’ anticipate the altogether predictable effacement of women from most historical portraits of the Rising. They also remind us of the agonistic relations between the Irish Labour movement and the middle-class elites who made up most of the Rising’s instigators. Set beside the passage’s evocations of world war, the bomb-tossing factory lasses may even ask us to imagine a counter-factual Rising unshaped by the nationalist energies of the war, a Rising grown more directly out of the 1913 strike and lockout, during which the Irish Citizen Army formed to protect demonstrating workers. I think we can see these untravelled historical roads better when we consider the broader context of ‘Circe’ in which the ‘Dublin’s burning’ passage is set. It is the culmination of a set of exchanges that begin once Stephen confronts his mother’s ghost and plunges out of Bella Cohen’s brothel into the street. There he has a run-in with two British soldiers, Privates Carr and Compton, and that encounter escalates rhetorically until Carr strikes Stephen, knocking him out cold, just after ‘Dublin’s burning’. That blow metonymises not only larger-scale violence committed by British occupying forces against Irish civilians but all violence committed by combatants against non-combatants, a condition that in 1916 had for the first time been dubbed total war.21 Elsewhere I have read the encounter between Carr and Dedalus as exposing the connections between total war and so-called colonial policing – as identifying the colonial periphery, with its near-perpetual state of exception, as an advance laboratory for the techniques of what gets called total war when it is waged between metropolitan nation-states.22 But the pages of escalating tension between Carr and Stephen also rotate through a series of rhetorical and political tributaries to the Rising. These include international labor movements, as when the rabbit-faced Patrice Egan cries ‘Socialiste!’ (15.4505) from the depths of a mock-cosmopolitan Paris; the figure of anticolonial blood sacrifice, incarnated in a brief appearance by the Croppy Boy, whom we see executed by hanging; and Stephen’s upending of that sacrifice, in his words to Private Carr: ‘You die for your country. Suppose. . . . Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so’ (15.4471–74). In a cameo by Edward VII we also encounter contending prospects in advance of the Great War: both the international ‘Peace, perfect peace’ (15.4459) that Edward’s treaties of arbitration were angling for and the violent prerogatives of imperial nation-states, as when the same king sings ‘Coronation Day’ while the hangman crowns himself with the Croppy Boy’s smoking entrails. All this against the historically charged backdrop of the

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Monto, the impoverished Dublin neighbourhood that would play an important role in both the Rising and the War of Independence, and where, on this night in 1904, both British soldiers and educated middle-class Dubliners are patronising working-class sexworkers. There is no manifest or incipient ‘Terrible beauty’ in such a scene, no backdated prophecy of the Rising as a rendezvous with national destiny. What Joyce does instead is to repopulate the foretime of the Rising and the First World War with loudly rivalrous possibilities – examples of what the historian Reinhart Kosselleck calls futures past – and then to suspend the question of which failed, which prevailed, and which subsided into a dormancy from which they might wake.23 Clearly, not all of the futures past warehoused by Ulysses are even arguably more inclusive or egalitarian ones than the future that did materialise. One of the prospects Joyce’s novel records is that of an Irish nationhood without Jews. It is a prospect visible in the anti-Semitic nationalism of the Citizen, whose hostile question to Bloom – ‘What is your nation if I may ask?’ – would disqualify the latter from Irish national belonging on the basis of his Jewishness (12.1431). Characters who are otherwise unsympathetic to the Citizen’s nationalism paint similar portraits of the Jew as an existential threat to Gentile nations. The Englishman Haines laments that his own country might ‘fall into the hands of German jews’, a danger he takes to be England’s ‘national problem’ (1.667–8). And Stephen’s employer, the Ulsterman Deasy, claims that ‘Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength’ (2.348–9). The historical figure who anchors the anti-Semitic strain of nationalism in Ulysses is Arthur Griffith, who founded the political party Sinn Féin in 1905 and served as the second President of the Dáil Éireann from January 1922 until his death that August.24 Griffith does not appear in the novel but is repeatedly invoked and alluded to. Although in 1904 he was still a politically marginal figure, it was a pivotal year for him. In the first half of the year he published a series of articles subsequently collected as The Resurrection of Hungary, whose argument for passive resistance to British rule on the basis of an analogy between Ireland and Hungary laid the conceptual groundwork for Sinn Féin in the pre-Rising period.25 (In Ulysses, Bloom’s being ‘a perverted jew’ with Hungarian roots on his father’s side apparently leads members of the occupying government to conclude, probably erroneously, that ‘it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system’ (12.1635–6) – in other words, that Bloom gave Griffith the Ireland–Hungary analogy at the heart of The Resurrection of Hungary.) In 1904 Griffith also publicly supported – in the pages of The United Irishman, the radical nationalist newspaper favoured by Joyce’s Citizen (12.1509–10) – the Limerick boycott of Jewish tradesmen. Molly Bloom obliquely refers to this event in ‘Penelope’ while she is thinking about her husband’s political affiliations, and then about Griffith himself: yes and he was going about with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves talking his usual trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he well he doesnt look it thats all I can say still it must have been him he knew there was a boycott I hate the mention of their politics . . . . (18.383–8) Incited by a local priest’s anti-Semitic sermons in early 1904, the supporters of the Limerick boycott economically ostracised, intimidated and physically attacked

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the city’s Jewish families. No deaths occurred. But by the time the boycott ended, Rabbi Elias B. Levi and two companions had been stoned and five of Limerick’s Jewish families had moved away as a direct result of the agitation.26 Griffith, for his part, had supported the boycott in nakedly anti-Semitic terms, characterising the Jew ‘in all countries and in all Christian ages’ as ‘a usurer and a grinder of the poor’ and further condemning ‘[t]he Jew in Ireland’ as both a ‘parasite’ and ‘in every respect an economic evil’.27 When in the ‘Cyclops’ episode Blooms says, ‘And I belong to a race too . . . that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant’ (12.1467–8), he may well be referring to the Limerick boycott, of which the Irish papers had been full in the months before June 16. My point in placing Griffith’s anti-Semitism alongside his nationalism is not to conflate the two but to underscore the fact that in 1904, no less a person than the soon-tobe founder of Sinn Féin was envisioning a future Ireland that excluded Irish Jews. In holding this view, Griffith did not stand for all nationalists, of course; nor did he stand alone among them. Noting that one of the futures-past most prominently archived in Ulysses is an anti-Semitic vision of Ireland-to-come casts other archived futurities in a different light. It places the political hopes and forecasts of Bloom, a self-identified Jew, fundamentally at odds with those of more influential figures, including some of the future architects of Sinn Féin, the Easter Rising and the Irish Free State. The difference between these political futures is as much a question of ontology as it is of philosophy. Early readers of ‘Cyclops’ tended to read Bloom and the Citizen as hero and villain, respectively, on the basis of their political utterances, celebrating Bloom’s tolerant, pacifist, liberal cosmopolitanism and decrying the Citizen’s violent ethno-nationalism. As Emer Nolan sums up this reading, Bloom was seen to incarnate ‘multivocal dialogism’, while the Citizen was simply ‘a monolingual monocular bigot’.28 In the 1990s, however, Nolan, Duffy and others approaching Joyce from a postcolonial Irish studies vantage point began to complicate the Manichean account of the two characters, noting that Bloom is intermittently pro-empire, capable of monologism, and given to pieties and tautology, while the Citizen echoes some of Joyce’s own published critiques of British imperialism in Ireland.29 Without minimising the real disparities in the two men’s political philosophies, I want to suggest that it is the fact of Bloom’s claiming Jewishness and being seen as a Jew that exposes the starkest difference in their respective visions of political futurity. In the Irish future envisioned by the Citizen – and, in 1904, by Arthur Griffith – Bloom’s Jewishness will have negated his claim to Irish nationality despite his having been born on Irish soil. In the Irish future that Bloom sees, the aspiration borne by the same claim – ‘Ireland. . . . I was born here. Ireland’ (12.1431) – will have been fulfilled. This is to identify a kind of anachronism in Ulysses quite distinct from chronologically impossible knowledge, allusions, works or objects. Bloom in particular, as a beset minority, is, in a sense, a living anachronism, the non-contemporary of his Christian ethno-nationalist contemporaries inasmuch as he lives in a present angled toward a future they would ward off. More broadly, by reactivating a set of mutually exclusive political futures-past, Ulysses turns the advocates of any and all of those futures into potential tangents to the arc of history, each embracing a vision that readers at later historical moments might understand as having been left behind. From the vantage of Easter 1916, it is Griffith’s and the Citizen’s anti-Semitic nationalism that appears superseded. The Limerick boycott was widely condemned and did not spread to other

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parts of the country. Irish Jews were not shut out of nationalist efforts around 1916. As the historiography of the Rising is belatedly starting to recognise, they joined Sinn Féin, the Irish Citizen Army and the Volunteers. Rebecca and Molly Goldberg, whose family had left Limerick after their father Louis was severely beaten in July 1904 during the boycott, joined the Cumann na mBan, the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation, smuggling ammunition to the GPO as well as hiding and nursing Irish Republican Army (IRA) soldiers during the days of the Rising.30 They were joined in their efforts by Estella Solomons, a young woman whose Orthodox family disapproved of her nationalist connections.31 Abraham Weeks, a Jewish stonemason, Wobbly and member of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), was fatally wounded outside the GPO, the first casualty of Easter Monday, which was also the last day of Passover.32 Readers of Ulysses are left to speculate about what role, if any, Bloom might have played in the Rising.33 But that event, which leaves so many phantom traces in Joyce’s novel, would not have been closed to him. Yet to read June 1904 only by the light of April 1916 and its immediate aftermath would be to accept just the kind of narrowly emplotted historiography I have been suggesting that Ulysses refuses. As a check on such nationalist teleologies, Joyce’s novel offers an image of open-ended vigilance in the face of a still unwritten future, a political ‘not yet’ to match the chronometric ‘not yet’ in this chapter’s second epigraph. In the ‘Ithaca’ episode, we learn that a drawer in the Blooms’ walnut sideboard contains ‘a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed into law)’ (17.1787–90). In 1904, Bloom would have known that both the 1886 bill and its 1893 successor failed to pass. By 1922, the first readers of ‘Ithaca’ would have known that a third Home Rule bill from 1914 had been postponed by the First World War and then superseded, in 1920, by a fourth bill that took effect only in Northern Ireland, its provisions for the South being overridden by the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the 1919–21 War of Independence. Thanks to Ulysses’ layered temporalities, Bloom’s unopened 1886 prophecy cuts in several directions. In the book’s 1904 setting it signifies hope that Home Rule – parliamentary self-government by an Ireland still belonging to the United Kingdom – might yet become a reality. In relation to Easter 1916 it might be understood to rebuke the rebels whose armed uprising scuttled the hope of imminent parliamentary Home Rule. From the vantage point of 1922, it poses the question of whether the incipient Irish Free State should be seen as a fulfilment of Home Rule hopes, an improvement on them or a betrayal of them. In a general sense, it gives us a moving portrait of Bloom as an archivist of his own political futures-past, undertaking as an individual what Ulysses does on a much larger scale. And in the aggregate it reminds us that futures-past – both the ones we desire and the ones we abhor – are not necessarily invalidated, even when their calendrical sell-by dates have come and gone. In 1918, Le Journal de Genève asked Joyce to write an article about the Easter Rising and contemporary Ireland. He declined, saying, ‘The problem of my race is so complicated that one needs to make use of all the means of an elastic art to delineate it. . . . I am restricted to making a pronouncement on it by means of the scenes and characters of my poor art.’34 The elasticity to which he referred forbore either to consecrate or to dismiss the Rising, preferring to instal it at a complex crossing of forces and conditions, large and small, and to multiply its possible sequels. Without pretending

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that its chief rhetoric was oriented toward anything but the territorial sovereignty of an independent nation-state, Ulysses’ elastic delineation of the Rising pushed it now in the direction of wartime nationalism, now in the direction of its socialist, syndicalist and internationalist inputs, all of which it treats in jocoserious fashion. In this respect, Joyce’s way of warehousing the Rising in what he called his ‘poor art’ is not so far from the mid-century work of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. In Gary Wilder’s analysis, the Martinican Césaire and the Senegalese Senghor ‘attempted to invent novel frameworks that could link political universality and cultural multiplicity, democratic equality and legal plurality, autonomy (for peoples) and solidarity (as humans), popular sovereignty and planetary interdependence, humanist and cosmopolitan norms with mutual responsibility and socialised risk’.35 If Ulysses stops short of inventing or mapping such frameworks in the head-on manner of Césaire and Senghor, it is nevertheless deeply agnostic about narratives of terminal state-formation, and as deeply invested in keeping unforeclosed the future of our political forms. Walter Benjamin, mulling over Marx’s description of revolutions as the locomotive of world history, wondered whether they might instead be ‘an attempt by the passengers on the train to activate the emergency brake’.36 But revolutions, whether they fizzle or flourish, can be transumed into the same kinds of historical narrative they hope to interrupt. Ulysses, I have been arguing, blasts the pre-1916 era out of the homogeneous course of history that has emulsified around the Rising. In so doing, it also loosens the hold of national Bildung on the moment of its publication. A veritable seed bank of past conjurations of the future, Joyce’s novel pauses on the threshold of Irish nationhood to ask what other political forms and projections might have germinated, and might still do so. On the occasion of the Rising’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Declan Kiberd wrote a piece for The Sunday Press that was later expanded for the Field Day collection, Revising the Rising. Kiberd rejected the reductive binarisms to which Marxist antinationalist critics had reduced the discussion over the Rising and its legacy: The real problem is that the designer Stalinists who control so many Irish debates can deal with only one idea at a time: for them, it must always be a simple choice between tradition or modernity, nationalism or social progress, soccer or Gaelic football. Kiberd rejected, too, that favourite text of Rising critics, The Plough and the Stars, as caricaturing both the middle-class elites and the working classes of Dublin. It was time, he implied, to put away Sean O’Casey and pick up Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. For he saw in the life of the latter ‘an eloquent reminder that it is possible to be nonviolent and republican, that not all who sympathise with nationalism are autocratic reactionaries, and that people who are labelled ‘subversive sympathisers’ are often being punished for subtleties of which their assailants are incapable’.37 I am mindful that in considering the Rising from over a century away, we need to be able to deal with more than one idea at a time – more than ever, given the tendency of historical distance to flatten and simplify its objects as they recede behind us. Without exhorting you to put down your Sheehy-Skeffington, I urge you to take up Ulysses. Joyce’s novel registers the Easter Rising without representing it, showing the event’s tributaries converging without inevitablising that convergence through post-facto prophecy. It connects the Rising to differently configured moments of social discontinuity. And

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without negating or rejecting Irish nationhood, it hesitates before the vision of the nation-state as the best or last political form to issue from anticolonial dissent. Ulysses offers us an archive of more than one Rising at a time – and of more than one Rising out of time.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 11–14. Wilder, Freedom Time, p. 15. Wills, Dublin 1916, p. 6. Unsigned, ‘Easter Week’, n.p. Gibbons, Joyce’s Ghosts, p. 180. Wills, Dublin 1916, p. 27. Ibid., p. 29. Kenner, Ulysses, p. 82. Burgess, Joysprick, p. 80. Burgess’s example is an allusion to Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation (1908) in Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts during the ‘Proteus’ episode. See Epstein, ‘Nestor’; Spoo, ‘“Nestor” and the Nightmare’. See also Fairhall, James Joyce, pp. 165–70; and Stead, ‘Great War Ulysses’, p. 4. See Wollaeger, ‘Posters’. An expanded discussion of recruiting posters appears in Wollaeger, Modernism. Joyce, Archive, vol. 13, p. 120 (Buffalo MS V.A.8, p. 19v); Joyce, Joyce’s Notes, p. 169. I discuss this passage at greater length, alongside the role of prophecies in Ulysses, in SaintAmour, ‘Imprevidibility’, and in Chapter 5 of Saint-Amour, Tense Future. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 109 (7.542–3). Further citations are keyed to episode number and line number. See, for example, Foster, Vivid Faces, p. 149, p. 162, p. 179, p. 301; and Wills, Dublin 1916, p. 152. Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, p. 156, p. 121. Closer to my approach is Patrick McGee’s reading of ‘Aeolus’ as creating, through its subtexts, ‘a historical possibility for Irish liberation that cannot be strictly reduced to the form of the nation-state’; see McGee, ‘Machines’, p. 99. See Duffy, Subaltern, Chapters 3 and 4; and Duffy, ‘Disappearing’. Duffy, ‘Setting’, p. 81, p. 93. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 399. Joyce reported his own remark to Herbert Gorman, his first biographer. Duffy, ‘Setting’, p. 92, italics in original. Duffy, Subaltern, p. 144. The expression la guerre totale, or ‘total war’, appears to have been coined by the far-right French journalist Léon Daudet in ‘Une Guerre’, n.p. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, pp. 246–60. See Kosselleck, Futures Past. Griffith is also a strange attractor for anachronism in Ulysses, which refers to Sinn Féin a year before the party’s 1905 founding and has Molly Bloom describe Griffith as ‘the coming man’ (18.385–6) in advance of his rise to political visibility. Fairhall, Question, p. 177, describes Molly’s characterisation of Griffith as ‘a proleptic anachronism’ that treats the politician as ‘unrealistically prominent for 1904’. The articles appeared in The United Irishman, which Griffith edited. See Magalaner, ‘Anti-Semitic Limerick’. Reizbaum, Judaic Other, pp. 35–45, offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of Griffith’s anti-Semitism. My analysis is generally indebted to Reizbaum’s.

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27. Arthur Griffith, writing in the United Irishman, 23 April 1904; qtd in Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, pp. 131–32. 28. Nolan, Nationalism, p. 96. 29. See, in particular, ibid., Chapter 3; and Duffy, Subaltern, Chapter 3. 30. Goldberg, ‘Opinion’, n.p. On the Goldberg family, see Keogh, Jews, pp. 11–14. 31. Turkington, ‘Solomons’ Rising’, n.p. 32. Benson, Jewish Dublin, p. 27. 33. For one projection of Bloom’s relationship to the Rising, see Costello, Life. Costello’s Bloom does not participate in the insurrection and ventures to the scene of the fighting only after the surrender. Looking on ‘the familiar city of his youth blasted out of existence’, he asks Simon Dedalus, ‘Did you ever think we would live to see the like of this? . . . What was it all for?’ (p. 123). 34. Joyce, Letters, p. 118. The original letter is in French. 35. Wilder, Freedom Time, p. 255. 36. Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena’, p. 402. 37. Kiberd, ‘Elephant’, p. 15, p. 17.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, in Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Benson, Asher, Jewish Dublin: Portraits of Life by the Liffey (Dublin: A&A Farnar, 2007). Burgess, Anthony, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (New York and London: Harvest, 1973). Costello, Peter, The Life of Leopold Bloom: A Novel (Shull, West Cork: Roberts Rinehart, 1993). Daudet, Léon, ‘Une Guerre totale: eux ou nous’, Action Française (11 March 1916), n.p. Duffy, Enda, ‘Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Space’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 37–57. Duffy, Enda, ‘Setting: Dublin 1904/1922’, in Sean Latham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 81–94. Duffy, Enda, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Epstein, E. L., ‘“Nestor”’, in Clive Hart and David Hayman (eds), James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 17–28. Fairhall, James, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Foster, R. F., Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2014). Gibbons, Luke, Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Goldberg, Alexander, ‘Opinion: The Jewish Role in the Easter Rising’, Jewish News (29 March 2016), (last accessed 6 October 2020). Joyce, James, Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for ‘Ulysses’: Selections from the Buffalo Collection, ed. Phillip F. Herring (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977). Joyce, James, Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber & Faber, 1957).

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Joyce, James, The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden, Hans Walter Gabler, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz and Danis Rose (New York: Garland, 1977–9). Joyce, James, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). Kenner, Hugh, Ulysses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Keogh, Dermot, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). Kiberd, Declan, ‘The Elephant of Revolutionary Forgetfulness’, in Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (eds), Revising the Rising (Derry: Field Day, 1991), pp. 1–21. Kiberd, Declan, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Norton, 2009). Kosselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). McGee, Patrick, ‘Machines, Empire, and the Wise Virgins: Cultural Revolution in “Aeolus”’, in Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (eds), Ulysses – En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 86–99. Magalaner, Marvin, ‘The Anti-Semitic Limerick Incidences and Joyce’s “Bloomsday”’, PMLA, 68 (1953), pp. 1219–23. Manganiello, Dominic, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge, 1980). Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Reizbaum, Marilyn, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Saint-Amour, Paul K., Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Saint-Amour, Paul K., ‘“The Imprevidibility of the Future”: On Joycean Prophecy’, in Sam Slote, Daniel Ferrer and André Topia (eds), ReNascent Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), pp. 90–105. Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Spoo, Robert, ‘“Nestor” and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses’, Twentieth Century Literature, 32 (1986), pp. 137–54. Stead, Alistair, ‘Great War Ulysses’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 71 (2005), p. 4. Turkington, Sharon, ‘Solomons’ Rising: The Personal Revolution of an Irish Jewish Woman in 1916’, Tablet (15 April 2016), (last accessed 6 October 2020). Unsigned, ‘Easter Week Inside the GPO: Fusilier Officer’s Thrilling Story’, Irish Times (29 April, 6 May and 13 May 1916), n.p. Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015). Wills, Clair, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Wollaeger, Mark, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Wollaeger, Mark, ‘Posters, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War I Recruiting Posters in Ireland’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 6 (1993), pp. 87–131.

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2 Temporal Powers: Second Sight, the Future and Celtic Modernity Luke Gibbons

Remember: the past won’t fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future. –Joseph Brodsky, ‘San Pietro’

I

O

ne of the abiding anxieties of modernism in the interwar period was a sense that war was not over but would break out again: trauma emanated from the future as well as the past.1 A growing awareness that experiences of terror did not end with events themselves but lay in wait to surface again was one of the symptoms of shell shock, first subjected to systematic diagnosis during the Great War. In this breakdown of both mind and body, the traumatic past resembled the future in that it was unavailable to consciousness, and had built into it the likelihood that it would recur. But this phenomenon was not restricted just to psychically wounded veterans of the front – war neuroses and forebodings passed into everyday life itself, as testified by the anxieties of ‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante’ in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.2 Presentiments of the future weighed as heavily as hauntings from the past. Wary of strange Gods, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church did not take kindly to forces ushered in, or reactivated, by the modern era, listing among ‘Forty Current Erroneous Systems’ the heresies of ‘Modernism’ itself, ‘Psycho-Analysis’, and under ‘Spiritism’, the dangers of ‘trance-speaking, clairvoyance . . . and the like’.3 It is not surprising that the onset of a modernity marked by two catastrophic world wars should generate profound anxieties about reading the future, with portents appearing in the most unlikely places. In his early account of the close-up in cinema,

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the film theorist Béla Balázs noted how the camera picked up the ‘physiognomy’ of place, treating objects as faces wherein viewers might read strange matters: the physiognomy of certain objects exudes a premonition of the future of which the characters in the film are as yet unaware. The close-ups of a cloud formation, a decaying wall, the dark opening of a door, create the atmosphere of anxious concern on behalf of unsuspecting people, and we see in advance the shadows of fate silently closing in.4 According to Siegfried Kracauer, cinema itself assumed this premonitory gaze in Weimar Germany, its preoccupation with certain themes – the dark side of the unconscious, the replacement of the ineffectual father figure in the family with the strong leader, the authority of uniforms, the atavism of myth, blood and soil, ‘mountain films’ with their demands of physical vigour and national rejuvenation – foreshadowing and paving the way for the fully-fledged cult of Fascism in the 1930s.5 The issue here is not so much the content of foreshadowing as its form, the means by which time does not proceed in a linear narrative but unfolds in multiple temporalities. It is no coincidence that, in explaining the perturbations of time in cinema, Balázs has recourse to ‘Einstein’s famous “thought experiment”, in which two observers, one on a moving train and one on the ground outside, see two lightning flashes’, and experience them as happening at different times: ‘This led Einstein to conclude that we need to revise our understanding of the nature of time.’6 One of the more controversial attempts to revise time in the light of the new physics, as we shall see, was the concept of ‘prevision’ or precognition developed by the imaginative Irish aeronautics engineer John William Dunne (1875–1949) in An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927.7 Born of army stock in the Curragh, County Kildare, Dunne made his reputation initially as an aviation pioneer, his tailless fixed-wing biplane attracting the attention of Orville Wright, but turned his energies after the Great War to a heady blend of theoretical physics and psychoanalysis, Einstein’s theories of time being pressed into service in the interpretation of dreams.8 Nor was Dunne the first ‘prophet’ from the Celtic periphery to seek to unlock the secrets of the future. His experiments with time coincided with the re-emergence of an interest in ‘second sight’, a propensity to see into the future, which was associated with the Highlands of Scotland and outlying districts in the Irish countryside. Second sight – the ‘seer’ – is often connected with blindness, as in the prominence accorded to the figure of Tiresias in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but in its Celtic expressions, this prevision could be interpreted as symptomatic of a cultural epoch in which the future presented itself as a blind alley. The fatalistic implications of an ability to foresee things to come are readily apparent: if the future is already settled, what is the point of foreknowledge, for nothing can be done about it? As tropes of the ‘Last of the Clans’ or the ‘Last of the Bards’ suggested, the Celts were to the forefront of the concept of doomed races that accompanied the march of progress under Empire, and by virtue of the possession of second sight, were to some extent complicit with their own extinction.9 What is striking about the re-emergence of foreknowledge in the modern period is that it provides another example of the phenomenon whereby predicaments of the periphery migrate, as Hannah Arendt noted, to the metropolitan centre, the precarious futures of the colonies finding their way home to the West.10 Second sight and superstition become prevision and precognition when filtered

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through the anxious foreboding of the interwar years. Nevertheless, as befits the multiple perspectives of the modernist era, an element of narrative indeterminacy is introduced, as we shall see, that allows for intervention in what seems like a preordained future. Flash-forwards may indeed be ‘genuine’ but they are subject to the ambivalence of meaning rather than the certainties of truth. Though the writing may have been on the wall for the Celtic periphery, a way with words and images, and a capacity to read between the lines, showed that how this writing was deciphered was another matter, and this disruption of preordained fate can be seen as a distinctive contribution of the periphery to modernism in dark times. In what follows, I will look at several novels that address the gift – or affliction – of second sight as it surfaces in the modern era, in two ‘Celtic’ related novels by the Irish writer Bram Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909), both dealing with imperial rivalries in the run-up to World War I, and then with two works directly influenced by J. W. Dunne’s prevision, the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn’s Second Sight (1940) and the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle’s The Unforeseen (1946), both novels set in the interwar period on the eve of World War II.

II Early in Bram Stoker’s novel on modern war, The Mystery of the Sea, the hero, Archibald Hunter, on holiday at Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire, in northeastern Scotland, discovers a series of mysterious letters in a treasure chest he has purchased, and is determined to crack the code: ‘I knew something of secret writing, for such had in my boyhood been a favourite amusement with me’.11 He soon encounters other mysteries that do not lend themselves so easily to intellectual ingenuity, primary among them the gift of second sight, which he discovers he possesses on meeting a strange gypsylike woman from the Highlands, Gormala MacNiel, who speaks in Gaelic runes.12 In the opening scenes in the novel, Archibald experiences a flashforward to the future, foretelling the death of a child, and when it is tragically confirmed, accosts Gormala to seek an explanation for the curious lack of specificity in the vision: Am I to take it . . . that whoso sees the Vision or hears the Voice is but the blind unconscious instrument of Fate? . . . I gather that you do not always know to whom something is going to happen; but only that death is coming to some one! (Mystery of the Sea, pp. 12–13) In a manner not unlike the physiognomy of objects described by Balázs, including the use of the proto-cinematic device of ‘diorama’ in the theatre of the mind, Archibald reflects on a world of omens: [N]ow that my mind was bent on the phenomena of Second Sight the whole living and moving world around me became a veritable diorama of possibilities . . . . When I look back, it seems to me that all the forces of life and nature became exposed to my view. A thousand things which hitherto I had accepted in simple faith as facts, were pregnant with new meanings. (Mystery of the Sea, p. 28, italics added) It is notable that, for all the implacability of fate, the diorama here presents ‘possibilities’ (in the plural), and ‘facts’ turn out not to be univocal but to yield many meanings. That

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things might have been otherwise troubles Archibald, however, for foreknowledge without attempting to avert fate would thus imply responsibility for events, and he charges Gormala with this responsibility in another case in which she foresees the drowning of a wounded fisherman, Lauchlane: ‘you refused to help me with the wounded man – whom you had followed, remember, for weeks, hoping for his death’ (Mystery of the Sea, p. 47). Gormala replies, in her Scottish vernacular: ‘I saw, as you did, that Lauchlane’s sands were run. You and I are alike in that . . . Wha then be ye that condemn me that only saw a sign an’ followed? Gin I be guilty, what be you?’ (Mystery of the Sea, p. 48). Realising that, without omnipotence (as in the case of God), foretelling or predicting the future does not mean one is causing it, Archibald no longer imputes responsibilty to Gormala: Lauchlane’s death was in no possible way due to any act of hers. She had only watched him: and as he did not even know that she watched he could not have been influenced in any way by it or by her. (Mystery of the Sea, p. 48) She responds in a similar vein in relation to Archibald’s guilt, pointing out that ‘no livin’ arm could aid him in that hour o’ doom. Aye! laddie, the Fates know their wark o’er weel to hae ony such betterment o’ their plans’ (Mystery of the Sea, p. 49). It turns out that not only the future but also the past works in mysterious ways in The Mystery of the Sea. Looking out on Cruden Bay, Archibald is taken aback some days later by a grim spectral scene in which a procession of ghosts of all those drowned in the bay (not unlike T. S. Eliot’s spectral procession on London Bridge) emerge from the sea, walking slowly along the cliff, ending with the recently drowned fisherman. One particular group in the procession, who appear to be revenants from the Spanish Armada, attracts his attention: ‘As they passed, one of them turned and looked at me. As his eyes lit on me, I saw spring into them, as though he were quick, dread, and hate, and fear’ (Mystery of the Sea, p. 39). As the story unfolds, it becomes clear why a ghost from the Spanish Armada accosts Archibald in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. The story is set during the Spanish–American War over Cuban independence in 1898, one of the first modern wars, precipitated by the explosion of the US battleship Maine in Havana harbour, and leading to the introduction of concentration camps – reconcentrados, incarcerating civilian women and children as well as rebels – by the Spanish to cut off popular support for the Cuban cause (Mystery of the Sea, pp. 149, 270–2).13 The maps and codes in the chest purchased by Archibald contain the key to the recovery of treasure trove lost for several centuries, donated by the Vatican to the Spanish Armada in their fight against English naval supremacy. The love interest in the story takes the form of a romance between Archibald and a beautiful American heiress, Marjory Drake, who turns out to be a descendant of the famous sea buccaneer / commander Sir Francis Drake. Marjory has used her wealth to provide American forces with a battleship in the Spanish–American War, and as a result has to flee her country to escape pursuit by Spanish spies. She seeks refuge in a remote mansion, Castle Crom, in the Scottish Highlands, only to discover that it is owned by a Spanish grandee, Don Bernardino de Escoban. The nobleman is on the trail of the lost treasure as well, and bears a striking resemblance to the Spanish ghost encountered by Archibald at Cruden Bay; it transpires that the treasure belonged to his aristocratic ancestor, who managed to hide it in underground caverns in the vicinity of Castle Crom. In the current crisis, Don Bernardino’s laying hands on the wealth would be tantamount to providing a war chest to fund the

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Spanish war effort, and is therefore staunchly resisted by the patriotic Marjory and her newly acquired husband, Archibald, who uses considerable ingenuity (helped by methods spelled out in several technical appendices in the novel that resemble guides to Finnegans Wake) to decipher the code found in the trunk. Towards the end of the novel, the Spanish marauders catch up with Marjory and kidnap her, holding her captive in a ship anchored close to the dangerous ‘Skares’ in Cruden Bay. At this point, Archibald’s second sight resurfaces, for on encountering Gormala once again on the cliffs (before an accidental fall leads to her death), he has an out-of-body experience in which he is spirited over the sea to the whaler ship where Marjory is held. While conscious of standing on the wild coast, his mind and ‘senses’ soar across the bay: All the time there was to me a dual consciousness. Whatever I saw before me was all plain and real; and yet I never lost for a moment the sense of my own identity. I knew I was on shore amid the rocks under the cliff, and that Gormala’s dead body was beside me as I knelt. But there was some divine guiding principle which directed my thought – it must have been my thought, for my eyes followed as my wishes led, as though my whole being went too. They were guided from the very bow of the ship along the deck, and down the after hatchway. I went down, step by step, making accurate and careful scrutiny of all things around me. (Mystery of the Sea, p. 424) As in Balázs’s account of film style, the eye here prefigures an aerial point-of-view shot, following a trajectory towards an object of desire hidden from view: At the time, though I was conscious of it, it did not strike me as strange; no more strange than that I could see far and near at the same glance, and take in great space and an impossible wilderness of detail. No more strange, than that all things were for me resolved into their elements; that fog ceased to deaden or darkness to hide; that timber and iron, deck and panel and partition, beam and door and bulkhead were as transparent as glass. (Mystery of the Sea, p. 425) Taking in ‘a wilderness of detail’ amounts visually to another proto-cinematic device, that of the close-up: homing in, Archibald’s ‘eye’ notices a cabin door with a ‘rough bolt’ but no key in the lock, and a heavily armed guard with the chronometer above him, ‘which marked Greenwich time as 2.15 [a.m.]’ – that is, forty-five minutes into the future. The ‘spirit eyes’ (Mystery of the Sea, pp. 425–6) then pick up a boat speeding towards the captive ship with seven of the roughnecks on board who had been pursuing Marjory, including a particularly dangerous black man (allowing Archibald to give full vent to his racism). As they boarded the ship, Archibald’s vision begins to lose clarity, but not before he sees the great negro, his face over-much distorted with an evil smile, steal towards the after hatchway and disappear. With the growing of the fog and the dark, I was losing the power to see through things opaque and material; and it came to me as an actual shock that the negro passed beyond my vision. With his going, the fear in my heart grew and grew; till, in my frantic human passion, all that was ethereal around

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luke gibbons me faded and went out like a dying flame . . . . All was so dark around me that my eyes, accustomed to the power given in my vision of making their own light, could not pierce the fog and the gloom. I tried to look at my watch, but could only see the dial dimly . . . I found it was now half past one o’clock. I still, therefore, had three-quarters of an hour, for I remembered the lesson of the whaler’s chronometer. (Mystery of the Sea, pp. 427–8)

The ‘cinematography’ of this scene, the gradual fade to black, resolves the dilemma of freedom and fate – how to reconcile an ability to intervene with the fait accompli of accurate foreknowledge – by withdrawing clarity of vision at the last moment: Well I knew that the vision I had seen with the eyes of the dead Gormala was no mere phantasm of the mind; that it was no promise of what might be, but a grim picture of what would be. There was never a doubt in my mind as to its accuracy. Oh! if I could have seen more of what was to happen; if I could have lingered but a few instants longer! (Mystery of the Sea, p. 428) But it is not in Archibald’s (still less Marjory’s) interest that the mind’s eye should have ‘lingered a few instants longer’: impending death would have been certain if Marjory’s death were depicted, and fate would have shown its hand. The narrative ensures that vision dissolves just as the black villain descends the stairs, and an element of uncertainty (‘what might be’) is introduced that allows Archibald to go to the rescue. Swimming out in stormy waters to the whaling ship (Bram Stoker himself was a powerful swimmer), the preview of the living quarters afforded by his vision stands him in good stead, and he is able to effect a daring rescue of Marjory in her moment of peril. Gormala’s and Archibald’s visions act as if the future is preordained; yet they also introduce degrees of agency and interpretation that break the ‘chain of destiny’. Stoker’s story ‘A Gipsy Prophecy’ (1885) is also a chronicle of a death foretold but again, while the image of the future rings true, the gypsy’s reading of it is wrong: ‘the gipsy was wonderfully near the truth; too near for the real event now to occur’, as the relieved protagonist notes.14 Likewise, Gormala in The Mystery of the Sea foresees Marjory struggling in the water with a floating shroud (Mystery of the Sea, p. 185), but the semantic instability of second sight becomes clear when the explanation is proffered: it transpires that it is Marjory’s loose . . . skirts that have been abandoned, along with her modesty, to allow her to swim ashore during the rescue (Mystery of the Sea, p. 449). As in metonymy, a part is (mis)taken for the whole: it is as if figures of speech constitute the cunning of history, releasing the future from the grip of fate, and the foregone conclusions of second sight. Second sight is a frequent narrative device in Stoker’s work and recurs in The Lady of the Shroud, a strange blend of Gothic and science fiction that, with uncanny prescience, foresees a mechanised European war instigated by conflict in the Balkans. The gift to see into the future is associated with Janet MacKelpie, the Scottish aunt of the hero, Rupert St. Leger, who traces her proud lineage to Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite cause. Rupert explains to his uncle, Sir Colin: ‘By Jove, sir, this is history repeating itself. Aunt Janet used to tell me when I was a youngster how MacKelpie of Croom laid his sword before Prince Charlie.’15 To this Sir Colin replies: ‘I am thinking she has in her some of the gift of Second Sight that has been a heritage of our blood.

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And I am one with my niece – in everything! . . . The whole thing was quite regal in manner; it seemed to take me back to the days of the Pretender’ (Lady of the Shroud, p. 65). The occult powers of an endangered Gaelic culture in the mid-eighteenth century were characterised by a tragic irony, as noted above: the preternatural ability to look into the future was the prerogative of those with no actual future. The political background to the rise of interest in the phenomenon of second sight in the 1690s was the defeat of the Stuart dynasty by Williamite forces in Ireland.16 The subsequent persistence of the Jacobite cause in Scotland, culminating in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invasion in ’45 and the disaster of Culloden, reactivated interest in the phenomenon, which found its most sympathetic treatment in Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), as noted by Stoker in his book review of Norman Macrae’s study, Highland Second-Sight, in 1909.17 A later theosophical publication, Second Sight: A Study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance (1912), with an introductory chapter on ‘The scientific position’, outlined its own physiognomy of objects in an age of empire: Black bread denotes a famine; spotted or mottled bread, a plague. This symbol was seen in June 1896, with other symbols which connected it with India, and there followed a great outbreak of bubonic plague in that country. This symbol, however, was not properly understood until the event came to throw light upon it. The following note is from a seance which took place in India in the spring of 1893: ‘A leaf of shamrock is seen. It denotes the United Kingdom or the Triple Alliance. It is seen to split down the centre with a black line. It symbolises the breaking of a treaty. Also that Ireland, whose symbol is the shamrock, will be separated by an autonomous government from the existing United Kingdom and will be divided into two factions’.18 It is striking that the question of interpretation (‘not properly understood’) is raised in this presentation of ‘evidence’: as will be seen in relation to déjà vu below, the prophecy is often recognised for what it is only in retrospect. When Rupert in The Lady of the Shroud takes up residence in the ‘Land of the Blue Mountains’ on the Adriatic Sea, his Jacobite aunt, Janet, foresees his secret marriage to a strange lady in a shroud, whom he weds in a crypt. But as if to foreclose predestination, the fatal consequences of the vision are once more intercepted by a semantic gap that opens up between images and their decoding: I had heard long ago that Second Sight is a terrible gift, even to its possessor. I am now inclined not only to believe, but to understand it. Aunt Janet has made such a practice of it of late that I go in constant dread of discovery of my secret. She seems to parallel me all the time, whatever I may do. It is like a sort of dual existence to her . . . . Happily Second Sight cannot speak as clearly as it sees, or, rather, as it understands. For the translation of the vague beliefs which it inculcates is both nebulous and uncertain – a sort of Delphic oracle which always says things which no one can make out at the time, but which can be afterwards read in any one of several ways. (Lady of the Shroud, pp. 131–2, italics added) So far from being instantly legible, second sight, even at its most vivid and transparent, possesses a cryptic or oracular quality. What is seen is one thing, but its meaning is another: images cannot be readily translated into words, thus leaving room for

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manœuvre, that is, interpretation. The most uncanny aspects of The Lady of the Shroud lie in the real-life future vistas summoned up by the novel; in its forecasting of new technological warfare, aerial bombing, X-rays, even atomic weapons, the novel anticipates a war originating in the Balkans that engulfs Europe, before the British, led by Rupert St. Leger’s mastery of the skies, finally subdue the German / Austrian enemy.

III Writing in London thirty years later, in October 1938, the Irish novelist Dorothy Macardle noted with a sense of foreboding: ‘London might be wiped out any day; gasmasks, newspaper scares, incessant wondering as to what was likely to happen.’19 The longing for intimations of the future is such that when, in Macardle’s wartime novel, The Seed Was Kind (1944), the young protagonist Diony returns to London from Paris, she is treated almost as a Cassandra: ‘They wanted her to talk to them about France; interpret the mind of the Russians, prophecy about the future of Austria. Like all people whose future has suddenly been obscured, they longed for an oracle’.20 In these dark times, it is not surprising that second sight re-emerges in fiction, as in Macardle’s third novel, The Unforeseen (1946), set in Ireland on the eve of war in the summer of 1938, and in Neil Gunn’s novel Second Sight (1940), set among an English hunting party stalking deer in the Scottish Highlands, with a liminal awareness of the ‘international situation’ in the background.21 Gunn’s novel stages a series of debates and dissension among characters in response to an ominous premonition of the fate of a member of the hunting party revealed to one of the Highland guides, Alick (a story relating to a Scottish gamekeeper possessed of the occult powers of second sight was recounted from first-hand experience by Bram Stoker).22 In one of the discussions, the mysterious ability to see into the future is linked by one of the party, the Dean, to the mystical powers of Yoga gurus in India, and is taken as representing a triumph of mind over matter: ‘The strife here is between matter and mind, and mind will win through because it is more important, more stupendous in its significance, than matter’ (Second Sight, p. 235). This does not settle the argument, however, for in a shift of register echoed in Dorothy Macardle’s The Unforeseen, the terms of debate in Gunn’s novel are switched from the esoteric and spiritual to the secular materialism of Einsteinian relativity. At stake here are the implications of new concepts of time for the startling theories of ‘prevision’ worked out in John William Dunne’s controversial An Experiment with Time (1927), reprinted by Faber under T. S. Eliot in the 1930s with an afterword by the eminent scientist, Sir Arthur Eddington. Dunne’s book, and its follow-up The Serial Universe (1934), proved a source of continual fascination for writers, their impact on Eliot apparent in the opening lines of Four Quartets: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.23 Other writers drawn to Dunne’s experiments with time included James Joyce, J. B. Priestley, John Buchan, Jorge Luis Borges and, not least, Flann O’Brien, whose The Dalkey Archive (1964), ‘a study in derision’, bore the stamp of its influence.24 In a letter to his publisher, Tim O’Keefe, in 1962, Flann O’Brien wrote:

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You may remember Dunne’s two books An Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe, also the views of Einstein and others. The idea is that time is as a great flat motionless sea. Time does not pass: it is we who pass. Even human mortality cannot be taken for granted in O’Brien’s novel, for one of its characters is James Joyce, wrongly believed to be dead: A man says to me: ‘What do you mean by “the late James Joyce?” You might as well say Hitler is dead. Joyce is alive and living in retirement in and possibly in disguise in Skerries, a small seaside place about 20 miles north of Dublin.’25 ‘Who is the gentleman again – Mr. Dunne?’ asks the character Blair in Gunn’s Second Sight (p. 223) during one of exchanges on Alick’s fateful premonition. Another character, Mr Brown, answers: I happened to mention the word serialism, wherein it is made to appear that Mr. Dunne foresaw the happening of certain events. Now Mr. Dunne is an army man like myself, obviously an able mathematician, and his attitude is self-evidently scientific. He is not concerned about inducing mystical states . . . . He does attempt to account for it not at all on the basis of miracle, but on a basis of mathematics and the existence of a dimension beyond the third. (Second Sight, pp. 223–4, 225) Dunne’s creative elaborations on Einstein’s theory, that time was not absolute or an objective relation between things, led him to conclude that it was therefore a mental construct, a subjective means of negotiating motion and transformation in the universe. If consciousness was suspended, as in the case in dreams or unconscious, trance-like states, then time could also be suspended, and the future placed on a continuum with the present: the concept of a ‘future . . . cut off from the growing “past” part by a travelling “present moment” – was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake’ (Experiment with Time, p. 32).26 In Dorothy Macardle’s The Unforeseen, the influence of Dunne is already apparent in the fact that glimpses of the future obtained by the main character Virgilia are revealed in trance-like states, as in random glances through windows, mirrors or her daughter’s Nan’s sparkling ‘witch-ball’. As the recently qualified young doctor, Perry Franks (the future fiancé of her daughter Nan), points out: ‘You saw what you were going to see’. ‘Exactly’, she replied. ‘Paranormal precognition’, Perry said. ‘Precognition?’ ‘“Prevision”, to be exact’. . . . ‘ – this requires a revolution in our ideas of causation’. [Perry’s father, Dr B. J. Franks, adds] ‘It does’, Perry said, bluntly. ‘It requires’, the doctor continued, ‘a new concept of time’. ‘Dunne has worked that out’. (Unforeseen, p. 51)

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The Unforeseen is set in Ireland during the summer of 1938 but was written by Dorothy Macardle on her return to Ireland from wartime London in 1945. The story deals with the experiences of a Dublin woman, Virgilia Wilde, who returns from England following the death of her husband to live in the tranquil surroundings of Glencree, County Wicklow, where she also hopes to resume her career as a photographer and writer on wildlife. Virgilia suffers from anxieties but not of the normal kind: she has flashforwards to the future, sometimes innocuous but other times portending tragic events. Her physician, Dr B. J. Franks (father of Perry), assures her that it is all in the mind, but when her daughter Nan, an art student, comes home on a visit from London to escape a relationship with tempestuous Sicilian artist Carlo, Nan soon realises that all is not well with her mother. In keeping with Gormala in The Mystery of the Sea, gypsies and ‘tinkers’ have long been associated with second sight and fortune-telling, and in The Unforeseen, the presence of a Traveller family camping in the Wicklow countryside sets off the chain of events that intensifies the terror of Virgilia’s second sight. Returning from a photographic assignment for the cover of her new book, she ‘sees’ the body of a young Traveller boy, Timeen, who has escaped from a reformatory and whom she has befriended, floating in the water as she crosses a bridge. On checking, she is relieved to find there is no body in the stream but then it dawns on her that she has glimpsed a frightening premonition of his fate, if he does not leave the area with his family. She determines to drive the Travellers from the neighbourhood, but is paralysed by the fear that the die is already cast: ‘But there was nothing to be done about this . . . . This is predestined; otherwise it couldn’t be foreseen. But perhaps not – dreams can be meaningless; why not these visions also, sometimes’ (Unforeseen, p. 127). In fact, as in the case of the flashforwards in Stoker’s fiction, it is the meaning projected on the image, not the vision itself, that causes the problem, for when Virgilia confides in her traditional-minded house help, Brigid, too much is read into the picture: Brigid listened and sat in thought for a time, murmuring, ‘The poor little child! . . . Tell me’, she asked, ‘did he look to be dead?’ ‘He did’. ‘Och, Mhuire, ’tis a pity’. ‘Perhaps it won’t happen’, Virgilia said weakly. (Unforeseen, p. 130) When Timeen goes missing from the caravans leaving Glencree during a storm, Brigid’s alarm prompts Virgilia to refocus on the image: ‘“Killed by the lightning he is, or drowned in a ditch or a bog-hole, they’ll find him, like a dead lamb”, Brigid lamented. “His head’s not in the water”, Virgilia said’ (Unforeseen, p. 160). This sudden realisation goads Virgilia into action, a race against time that leads to the discovery of the child on the verge of drowning under the bridge. The flashforward was accurate but its meaning was not self-evident: the conclusions drawn were not warranted by the initial alarmed response to the image. It is clear that knowledge of Timeen’s maltreatment in the past, under both incarceration and the rough justice doled out by his family, has influenced interpretations of his fate, in the process subjecting destiny itself to a hermeneutic reading, to many possible interpretations of what is to come. ‘Do other things – memories, or fears, or expectations – sometimes get mixed up with the visions, so that one could misinterpret them?’

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(Unforeseen, p. 172), Virgilia enquires at one point, to receive the answer later: ‘I suppose those things are settled in a way by factors that exist already – your disposition . . . the sort of work you’ve begun, and your interests and friends’ (Unforeseen, p. 174). Virgilia remembers, in her first consultation with Dr Franks, that she had met him decades earlier, when they both attended Miss Galbraith’s dancing classes in Harcourt Street as children, only for a flash of memory also to surface in which her hair was violently ‘pulled out by the roots afterwards by that jealous little wild-cat, Suzette . . . Suzette?’: She broke off, not only because she had forgotten the name but because that shocking memory sickened her: a dark little face, distorted with fury; narrowed eyes that glared like a cat’s; hands like claws, threatening her, gripping her hair, shaking her head with terrifying violence, while the other children shrieked . . . . Until she was in the teens there had been nights when she woke screaming, and Suzette’s face had come back to her in nightmares for years. (Unforeseen, p. 39) When Dr Franks disarmingly informs her that Suzette Perry became his wife, and that his son, Perry Franks, is named after her, it does not augur well for Virgilia’s responses to Nan’s new boyfriend, later to become her fiancé. Virgilia notices in passing Perry’s facial resemblance to his mother, and a number of other incidents, including his ill-tempered handling of Timeen’s mother, Sal, when she threatened Virgilia over the attempts to drive the Travellers away, stokes her anxieties. When the next premonition flashes before her eyes, of her daughter Nan being attacked in the dark by a frenzied male in their cottage, it seems as if her worst fears are confirmed. Like mother, like son: Virgilia on the brink of a nervous breakdown does everything to destroy her daughter’s relationship with the suspected future male assailant, the young Dr Perry Franks, including boarding up the house. Virgilia is unhinged, until a twist in the dénouement reveals that the course of history, in so far as it is structured like a narrative, is never a foregone conclusion. When the image of a seeming death foretold comes to pass, Nan is indeed subjected to a violent attack in the darkened cottage, not by the innocent Perry but by her estranged admirer, the demented Sicilian artist, Carlo. To the extent that Virgilia is driven ‘out of her mind’ (Unforeseen, p. 235) in jumping to conclusions, her plight is akin to that of Judge Daniel Schreber, analysed by Freud, whose paranoid fears of impending danger derived not from the future but from events buried deep in his past.27 As Virgilia reflects: Her own excessively visual memory was part of it. That should be shown – how the dark, sharp face, hard with hate, had come between her and Perry’s; between her and Carlo’s; how the feeling of those hands gripping, choking, shaking, had rushed back; how the dread of an inherited lack of control, had obsessed her. (Unforeseen, p. 259) ‘“A nice, classical complex out of childhood – jam for the psychoanalysts”, Perry said’, to which his friend Garrett replies: What transpires . . . is that one has got to allow an immense margin for error in such experiences as these. Every sort of thing seems to come in – associated ideas, obsessions, auto-suggestion, complexes, memories, telepathy, guess-work. I suppose we ought never to trust such experiences at all. (Unforeseen, p. 260)

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Garrett might well have extended this distrust to experience itself. Freud’s patient, Dr Schreber, accepted that psychoanalysis threw considerable light on his sufferings but refused to accept that they were all of his own making: ‘I can of course only speak with certainty of myself when I maintain that an external cause for these sensations exists’.28 Psychologists would assure him that the ‘external cause’ lay firmly in the past but in another related context, that of ‘belatedness’ or Nachträglichkeit, Freud sought to establish that, often, what is projected on to the past emanates from its own ‘future’, the present, or at least is recast through present concerns.29 It took only an extra step for J. W. Dunne, redirecting psychoanalysis towards things to come, to advance the possibility of the future preceding events in the past: hence his dream in 1902 that provided a sneak preview of the newspaper headlines that followed the disastrous volcanic eruption on the island of Martinique (Experiment with Time, pp. 21–2). The effect, the dream, came first; the cause – the eruption, newspaper coverage – happened later. If previsions flash up in moments of danger, they are still images, possessing graphic immediacy but lacking any narrative or contextual grounding: ‘Second Sight cannot speak as clearly as it sees, or, rather, as it understands’, as Stoker notes in Lady of the Shroud, quoted above. Images do not speak for themselves: their meanings, as Roland Barthes has shown, are undecidable until anchored by a text, caption or – the possibility exploited by fiction – a narrative frame.30 ‘It had been a mere flash. It remains in my mind like a picture’, Virgilia notes: ‘You see, I wanted so much to think that a vision need have no meaning at all’ (Unforeseen, p. 169). The reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein abandoned the picture theory of meaning in his early Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1922) was that pictures required frames or contexts, not always to be understood as words but, at the very least, involving cultural practices: ‘The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But what is its application?’31 In a comment that illuminates Virgilia’s premonitions, Wittgenstein further notes: ‘An expectation is embedded in a situation, from which it arises’.32 As Balázs points out, expectation itself is a function of narrative, so that flashforwards devoid of a build-up amount to little more than surprises (albeit of shocking import in cases of second sight): This explains why surprises are far less effective in films than gradual developments – if we exclude ones designed for comic effect. Tension amounts to the premonition and expectation created by the direction in which the images are pointing. The gradual onset of destiny, the visible approach of conflict image by image, is what generates the scary, oppressive atmosphere, which can be much more terrifying than a sudden cataclysm. (This explains why a vampire is more frightening than a murderer.) The surprise caused by a new, unsuspected danger can never seem as uncanny as one that keeps recurring, that we continually expect, that is therefore really present all the time and that turns into a vengeful, implacable, mysterious fate.33 The mistaken belief that images yield their meaning at a glance prompts a rush to judgement, a tendency to read more into the picture than what is there. The momentary, disjointed nature of flashforwards encourages an impulse to join dots that is not, strictly speaking, justified by the situation. The ‘Author’s Foreword’ in The Unforeseen warns us that the human world is not regulated by iron laws of necessity or causal determination, and is thus open to random turns of direction:

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It seems to us that on the narrow track of individual destiny there are forkings and crossroads where choice is free, and that the whole sequence of things would have been different if a different decision had been taken at this or that critical moment. (Unforeseen, p. xviii) In so far as it is intelligible, chance acquires meaning through narrative, and in a reflexive passage reminiscent of Balázs’s account of the ‘detail’ in a film, Virgilia notes that a flashforward is like a film still, removed from a narrative frame: But looking back, now, I see that moment as static. Have you ever been watching a film when a still photograph was suddenly shown? It’s like that in my memory; as if even a torrent had ceased to move. But I may be imagining this. I certainly didn’t remark it at the time. (Unforeseen, p. 171) It may be, as Dunne suggests in one of his more astute observations, that second sight is déjà vu in reverse, the feeling of being there not only before but before something happens: ‘[W]hat about the curious feeling which almost everyone has now and then experienced – that sudden, fleeting, disturbing conviction that something which is happening at that moment has happened before?’ (Experiment with Time, p. 31). If, as Paul K. Saint-Amour has shown in Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015), the interwar period was subject to a sense of trauma from the future as well as the past, this was because, in a troubling sense, the First World War never ended.34 ‘Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks’, wrote T. W. Adorno: ‘But nothing, perhaps, is more ominous for the future than the fact that . . . for each trauma of the returning combatants, each shock not inwardly absorbed, is a ferment of future destruction’.35 Waiting for the ‘inevitable’, whether as omen or actual event, picks up on the seeming powerlessness of second sight, and there is always the risk that a preview of the future will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing on unconsciously the event foretold: ‘If you knew you would tell him’, Virgilia states to Nan, ‘and that would make it happen’ (Unforeseen, p. 225). But there is also the possibility that advance warnings of what is to come may act as shock-absorbers for the jolts to the system described by Adorno, preparing an individual (or a culture) for grave, imminent danger: ‘“One would know what to expect”, exclaims Nan: “One could prepare oneself”’ (Unforeseen, p. 200).36 The power to intervene entailed by the visuality of second sight ensures that foreknowledge is not foreclosure, and that seemingly predetermined futures are open to the vicissitudes of unresolved pasts.

Notes 1. See Gerwath, The Vanquished. 2. Eliot, The Waste Land, Part I, lines 58–63. 3. An Irish Priest, A Manual of Catholic Action, pp. 13–15, 63–6, 42. ‘Modernism’ here refers to its first use in contemporary culture, marking a heretical movement spearheaded by the Irish priest, Father George Tyrell, S. J., among others. 4. Balázs, ‘The Close-up’, p. 40. 5. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler.

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6. Balázs, ‘The Close-up’, p. 40. 7. Dunne, An Experiment with Time. Subsequent page references in text. 8. For an overview of Dunne’s theories, see Priestley, Man and Time, pp. 165–95; Gleick, Time Travel, pp. 131–5. For Dunne’s strained relation to psychoanalysis, see Stewart, ‘J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture’. 9. See Stafford, The Last of the Race, especially Chapter 4, ‘The Last of the Bards’. 10. Hannah Arendt, ‘Imperialism’, pp. 159–386. 11. Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea, p. 89. Subsequent page references in text. 12. For Stoker, second sight and ‘other knowledges’, see Wynne, ‘Mesmeric Exorcism, Idolatrous Beliefs, and Bloody Rituals’. 13. For a discussion of modernity, race and empire in Stoker’s fiction, see Luke Gibbons, ‘The Old Far West and the New’. 14. Stoker, ‘A Gipsy Prophecy’, p. 242. 15. Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud, p. 64. Subsequent page references in text. 16. Feibel, ‘Highland Histories’. 17. Stoker, ‘The Second Sight’, p. 1. For critical commentary, see McAlduff and Browning, ‘Bram Stoker’s Oeuvre and “Other Knowledges”’. 18. ‘Sepharial’ (Walter Richard Old), Second Sight, p. 72. 19. Smith, Dorothy Macardle, p. 85. 20. Macardle, The Seed Was Kind, p. 140. 21. Macardle, The Unforeseen, p. 51; Gunn, Second Sight, p. 182. Subsequent page references in text. 22. McAlduff and Browning, ‘Bram Stoker’s Oeuvre and “Other Knowledges”’, p. 6. 23. Eliot, Four Quartets, lines 1–3. 24. Brian O’Nolan [Flann O’Brien] to Timothy O’Keefe, 15 November 1963, in The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, p. 359. 25. Brian O’Nolan to Timothy O’Keefe, 21 September 1962, ibid., pp. 324–5. 26. For Dunne, literature and modernism, see Stewart, ‘J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture’. 27. Freud, The Schreber Case. 28. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, p. 269. 29. Belatedness or Nachträglichkeit refers to a process whereby ‘a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action [nachträglich]’. Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, p. 365. 30. Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’. 31. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §424. 32. Ibid., §581, italics added. 33. Balázs, ‘Visual Linkage’, pp. 71–2. 34. Saint-Amour, Tense Future. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Minimia Moralia (1929), cited in Saint-Amour, Tense Future, p. 303. 36. As Robert Jay Lifton noted of the premonitions of disaster reported by inhabitants of Hiroshima before the fall of the atom bomb in 1945: ‘These “premonitions” were partly attempts at psychic preparation, partly a form of “imagining the worst” as a magical way of warding off disaster’. Cited in Saint-Amour, Tense Future, pp. 1–2.

Bibliography An Irish Priest, A Manual of Catholic Action: Its Nature and Requirements (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1933). Arendt, Hannah, ‘Imperialism’, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Schocken, 2004), pp. 159–386.

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Balázs, Béla, ‘The Close-up’, in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 38–45. Balázs, Béla, ‘Visual Linkage’, in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 67–75. Barthes, Roland, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 32–51. Dunne, J. W., An Experiment with Time (1927; Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2001). Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, in The Waste Land and Other Poems (1922; London: Faber and Faber, 1956). Feibel, Juliet, ‘Highland Histories: Jacobitism and Second Sight’, Clio, 30:1 (2000), pp. 51–77. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. I (1895; London: The Hogarth Press, 1975). Freud, Sigmund, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber (1911; London: Penguin, 2002). Gerwarth, Robert, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Penguin, 2017). Gibbons, Luke, ‘“The Old Far West and the New”: Bram Stoker, Race and Manifest Destiny’, in Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (eds), Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 188–205. Gleick, James, Time Travel: A History (London: 4th Estate, 2016). Gunn, Neil, Second Sight (1940; Glasgow: Richard Drew, 1986). Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). McAlduff, Paul S., and John Edgar Browning, ‘Bram Stoker’s Oeuvre and “Other Knowledges”: The “Lost” Book Review of Norman Macrae’s Highland Second-Sight (1909)’, Gothic Studies, 18:2 (2016), pp. 86–95. Macardle, Dorothy, The Seed Was Kind (London: Peter Davies, 1944). Macardle, Dorothy, The Unforeseen (1946; Dublin: Tramp Press, 2017). O’Nolan, Brian [Flann O’Brien], The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018). Panchasi, Roxanne, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Priestley, J. B., Man and Time (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968). Saint-Amour, Paul K., Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Schreber, Daniel Paul, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida MacAlpine and Richard J. Hunter (1903; New York: New York Review of Books, 2000). ‘Sepharial’ (Walter Richard Old), Second Sight: A Study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance (London: William Rider, 1912). Smith, Nadia, Dorothy Macardle: A Biography (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2007). Stafford, Fiona J., The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Stewart, Victoria, ‘J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s’, Literature & History, 17:2 (2008), pp. 62–81. Stoker, Bram, ‘A Gipsy Prophecy’, in Best Ghost and Horror Stories, ed. Richard Dalby, Stefan Dziemianowicz and S. T. Joshi (1885; New York: Dover, 1997), pp. 233–42. Stoker, Bram, The Lady of the Shroud (London: William Rider, 1909). Stoker, Bram, The Mystery of the Sea (1902; London: William Rider, 1913).

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Stoker, Bram, ‘The Second Sight’, The Timaru Herald (Supplement), XIIC:13874 (10 April 1909), p. 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (1953; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Wynne, Catherine, ‘Mesmeric Exorcism, Idolatrous Beliefs, and Bloody Rituals: Mesmerism, Catholicism, and Second Sight in Bram Stoker’s Fiction’, Victorian Review, 26:1 (2000), pp. 43–63.

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3 Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in FINNEGANS WAKE Jeremy Colangelo

H

‘

istory’, says Stephen Dedalus in the second episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’1 This line has three related contexts which make it especially relevant to a reading of the role of history and nationalism in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its various pre-texts. When he speaks these words, Stephen has already spent the morning dogged by history. The line appears as a direct response to the anti-Semitic windbaggery of his employer, Mr Deasy, who, in the process of trying to convince Stephen to place an article of his in a newspaper, has repeated a conspiracy theory about Jewish people secretly running the world. As Deasy says, ‘they have sinned against the light . . . . And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day’ (U 2.361–3). Yet curiously, it is Stephen, not Deasy, who first mentions ‘history’ in this conversation. When Deasy responds to Stephen’s observation that hardly any person has not ‘sinned against the light’, Deasy’s theory of history is both predictable and familiar: ‘all human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God’ (U 2.380–1). I am probably not alone in seeing a resemblance here to Haines’s facile remark in the previous chapter, in response to Stephen’s pointed (and justified) criticisms of his imperialist cultural tourism, that ‘it seems history is to blame’ (U 1.649) for Britain’s unjust treatment of Ireland. The presumption of a teleology towards some higher unity or goal – be it God, ‘History’ or Empire – in each case serves a dual function. It brushes aside past injustices as having been agentless tragedies, as though anti-Semitic violence and colonial dispossession were natural disasters, while also excusing and underwriting continued atrocities, both ongoing and planned for the future. Here we see already how Joyce depicts narratives of historical determinism as vectors for both imperialist ideology and (as we will see) forms of anticolonial nationalism which recapitulate imperial violence. In his search for an alternative, he develops what we might call a heretical approach to history and historical writing. Yet there is another element to the equation, one especially relevant here, given the common reading (useful as far as it goes) of Finnegans Wake as taking place within a sleeping person’s dreamscape. What does it mean to wake up from the nightmare of history? It might seem that one can wake up from history no more easily than one can find the last sentence of the Wake – the whole mass of it appearing as a hypercoherent system with no outside. That would be the problem Stephen grapples with in his other encounter with history in the first two chapters of Ulysses, when he teaches the history of ancient Rome to some bored pupils. Retrospect colours this scene: as Greg

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Winston points out, ten years after it takes place, the young adults who would have been children in 1904, their brains filled with ancient tales of glorious battle, would sign up en masse to be slaughtered pointlessly in the trenches of World War I. The ‘schoolboys are made to reflect upon the facts of ancient battles as they are groomed for future ones’,2 Winston writes, observing that their ‘school regime, like their historical fate, seems ineluctable and imposed’.3 Was another path available? On Stephen’s mind at this point is the mutability of a past that, by the time Ulysses was published, could seemingly promise only one horrific future. He asks what would have happened had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? (U 2.48–52) The dream of history – of historical determinism – must be woken from, Ulysses seems to imply, for it sets us on a path of inescapable destruction and death. Finnegans Wake shows us that to wake up from the nightmare of history is to answer ‘yes’ to Stephen’s question about the unfulfilled possibilities of history. As the above scenes show, it is not merely the case that ‘history’ functions as part of the toolbox of authoritarian rhetoric, justifying, before or after the fact, whatever crimes ‘history’ is applied to. Rather, the sedimentation of a singular, determinate version of history itself serves this role by closing off alternate visions of the future. If ‘history is to blame’ for the British Empire, it is because a vision of the empire as an all-powerful cultural and military force, inheritor of the banner of Rome, cuts away possible futures in which that power is no longer absolute. To wake up from history is to accept a past of doubt and ambiguity, one more resembling a rumour mill than a monograph, and thereby to open oneself to new possibilities. The present chapter explores how this ambiguity emerges in Finnegans Wake, and especially how Joyce, by 1939, had undertaken a complex critique of the nationalist politics that had, by that time, seized the recently independent Ireland. The chapter also explores texts beyond the Wake and Ulysses wherein Joyce developed a mode of history open to ambiguity and capable of encouraging divergent futures. These texts include the non-fiction works that Joyce produced in the first decade of the twentieth century, which bear many resemblances to the innovations of the Wake, resemblances that Joyce criticism has often overlooked. His essays ‘Ireland at the Bar’ and ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, both written in 1907 while he was living in Trieste, Italy, constitute some of the earliest examples of this sceptical approach to official histories. They produce in an underdeveloped form, by way of error and fabrication, what Joyce would later perfect through his use of rumour and gossip in the historical fabulations of the Wake.

Advantages, Vantages and Disadvantages The historical writing in Joyce’s assorted non-fiction is highly inaccurate, and in some cases outright fabricated. My goal here, however, is not to list Joyce’s inaccuracies, nor to explain them, or explain them away. But the fact that his essays, specifically ‘Ireland at the Bar’ and ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, are grounded on falsehoods is itself critically notable, and should form a greater part of how these two essays are read in relation

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to Joyce’s larger body of work. For, as Katherine Ebury and James Fraser write, Joyce’s essays and other non-fiction writings, ‘precisely as a result of [their] questionable status both within his wider work and as standalone acts of composition, provid[e] a case study for the re-examination of the ideological forces that shape’ the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.4 With regard to the larger issues of nationhood and history, especially as Joyce toys with them in Finnegans Wake, it is useful to read Joyce’s approach to history in terms of Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument that ‘the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture’ because ‘only through the power to use the past for life and to refashion what has happened into history’ is it possible for a person or a nation of people to achieve full actualisation. Whether or not Joyce read Nietzsche’s essay,5 its image of a life overburdened with history – and specifically an unformed history, a history that is not one’s own – is a dead-ringer for Stephen’s malaise in the early chapters of Ulysses, where history manifests for him ‘as a usurper and a destroyer of creative potential’.6 As Maud Ellmann writes, ‘as a belated poet, Stephen finds it difficult to separate the air he breathes from the airs of prior masters of the arts’,7 and this aesthetic airlessness is closely linked to his overburdened historical sense. There are many ways that you can ‘use the past’, but first you must escape the past that has been used against you. The method adopted by the nationalistic Irish revivalists, of forming a mythic history based on a nostalgic ideal of precolonisation Ireland, represented what Declan Kiberd calls ‘a projection of imperial fantasy’,8 and so would hardly do for Joyce. In his essays, we can see Joyce exploring another possible way out. Take ‘Ireland at the Bar’: originally published in Italian in the irredentist Triestino newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, this article shows a clear awareness of its audience in the manner by which it correlates Irish anticolonial struggles with the efforts by Italian-speaking residents of the Trieste region to leave the Austrian Empire and rejoin Italy, most obviously in the way that Joyce foregrounds linguistic conflicts in its description of events. His main argument is that the British-controlled press has created a skewed and false notion of what Ireland is like by focusing exclusively on stories of crime and violence, thereby limiting Ireland’s ability to make a case for its independence on the world stage. Its central point of reference is the trial of Myles Joyce (no relation), who was falsely convicted of participating in the Maamtrasna Murders – a notorious mass killing in a small rural village in the west of Ireland in 1882 – for which he was executed.9 ‘Ireland at the Bar’ is not only a response to English propagandising but also a repudiation of the English monopoly on knowledge production. As Edward Said observes, the object of colonial knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny . . . . To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’ . . . since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.10 Said here is writing of the British colonial administration in Egypt, but the observation is highly pertinent to Ireland, both in how the acquisition of knowledge colludes with the acquisition of control, and in how colonial epistemologies pin down and reify the colonised culture, thwarting its tendency towards growth and change. Unable or unwilling in this context to posit Ireland as an alternative site of knowledge, Joyce instead casts the matter into darkness, where at least coloniser and colonised may

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engage on equal terms. Of ‘Ireland and her arrogant mistress’, Joyce declares, ‘Truly, there is no question more entangled than this. The Irish themselves understand little of it, the English even less, and for other peoples it is complete darkness.’11 He makes a similar point at the beginning of the essay, in a subtler manner: Several years ago a sensational trial took place in Ireland. In the western province, in a remote place called Maamtrasna, a murder was committed. Four or five peasants from the village were arrested . . . . The eldest of them, a certain Myles Joyce, sixty years of age, was particularly suspected by the police. Public opinion considered him innocent then, and he is now thought of as a martyr. (OCP 145) This opening paragraph is notable for its lack of specificity. It gives only a vague sense of the details – that the murder happened ‘several years ago’, in a ‘western province’, and involved the arrest of ‘four or five’ suspects. Joyce could have given exact details for all of this information: his own father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a friend of Tim Harrington, a nationalist campaigner and barrister who, in 1884, wrote a pamphlet about the murders.12 James Joyce had therefore been aware of them for some time when he wrote the essay, and would have had both the means and the opportunity to nail down specific facts. Yet the vagueness also leverages Joyce’s key rhetorical advantage. It is, after all, unlikely that any of his Triestino readers would have heard of the murders, and even less likely that they would know many concrete details. Joyce thus takes the role which he attributes to the English, that of the ‘bar’ over which all details must pass. We can see this dynamic at play in the second part of the above passage, where, again in vague and generalised terms which permit Joyce a maximum of descriptive flexibility, the authority of the police is held up against that of an amorphous ‘public opinion’ and found wanting. Joyce begins the paragraph by refuting the detailed specificity of a court document or a newspaper article – precisely those apparatuses he deems captive to British imperialism – and then proceeds to hold up instead the vague and gossipy world of public opinion, which, for all its faults, proves to be correct in the end. It is a manœuvre, as we will see, that Joyce repeats in Finnegans Wake. In the most harrowing section of the essay, Joyce narrates the interrogation of Myles Joyce, who spoke no English and had to be questioned through an interpreter: The old man broke out into intricate explanations, gesticulating, appealing to the other accused, to heaven. Then, exhausted by the effort, he fell silent; the interpreter, turning to the magistrate, said: ‘He says no, your worship.’ (OCP 145) The problem here is that none of the above actually happened. As Margaret Kelleher explains, in her recent extensive study of the murders and their aftermath, that not only is there no record of this conversation in the court documents themselves, but even conducting the interrogation at all would have been against court regulations. As she writes, this direct questioning of the prisoner would not have occurred in a criminal court in 1882: until the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898, the accused in a criminal case was considered an ‘incompetent’ witness . . . and therefore not permitted to testify or be examined.13

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What is fascinating about this passage, though, is that it is a fabrication not just in terms of content but also in terms of form – in the use of direct quotation, and in the appearance of being a paraphrase of a real document. A reader of the article could be forgiven if they believed that Joyce had the trial record in front of him as he wrote. Joyce’s approach to history in ‘Ireland at the Bar’ resembles that of his lecture ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, not only in the reappropriation of historical narratives, but also in a flippant attitude towards historical sources and other official sites of knowledge production. In this lecture, Joyce argues that it was the ancient Phoenicians who first ‘established a civilization in Ireland which was in decline and had almost disappeared before the first Greek historian took up his quill’ and that ‘the language that the comic dramatist Plautus puts in the mouth of the Phoenicians in his comedy Poenula is virtually the same language, according to the critic Vallancey, as that which Irish peasants now speak [i.e. Irish Gaelic]’ (OCP 110). Scholars discussing this article have noted the argument’s inaccuracy. To call it inaccurate, though, is too kind – by the standards of both modern linguistic history and the historical understanding of Joyce’s day, the idea of linking Irish to Phoenician is, in fact, completely ridiculous. ‘Vallancey’s ideas’, writes Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, were ‘discredited in the philological community by the rise of the Indo-European paradigm, [but] were still part of the Zeitgeist in late nineteenth-century Ireland.’14 As Joseph Lennon explains, Vallancey began to grow less popular after the Irish rebellion of 1798, but it was ultimately the work of the philologist William Jones – ironically, a good friend of Vallancey’s – connecting Sanskrit to the major European languages that displaced the philological framework within which Vallancey’s work made sense, establishing in its place the still-dominant Indo-European paradigm.15 It did not help that Vallancey himself was a rather sloppy thinker, his ‘linguistic acumen’ having ‘never expanded beyond locating apparent cognates in distant languages to confirm his theories’.16 Vallancey produced a body of work which, in Bernd Roling’s words, amounted to ‘a monumental, rambling and overflowing narrative which no one to date has made a serious attempt to reconstruct’.17 It is easy to see why Joyce may have been attracted to Vallancey’s work: its disorganised cross-connection of distant languages and cultures carries a distinctly Wake-ian flavour which, much like Vico’s philosophy, might have made it interesting to Joyce, regardless of its validity. Joyce might also invoke Vallancey for the same reason that many Irish writers continued to do so long after the world’s philologists and linguists had left him behind. Linking Irish to Phoenician, and through Phoenician to the storied histories of Hebrew and Egyptian, deliberately went against the perception of Ireland as backward, primitive and uncultured – a fact noted by Ira Nadel, who also argues that the linkage permitted a further comparison ‘between the suppression of the Jews under the Egyptians with the Irish under England’.18 So long as Ireland and the Irish language were considered backward and uncultured, Vallancey’s ideas remained useful, regardless of the fact that they were a century out of date by the time Joyce cited him. Yet this fact alone is not enough to explain both how and why Vallancey appears in ‘Saints and Sages’. As Lynne A. Bongiovanni notes, this Irish nationalist adoption of Orientalist tropes had a frequent tendency to repeat and reinforce the narratives and ideologies of British imperialism – a tendency Joyce lampoons in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, and so was unlikely to repeat himself. Similarly, she notes that while Orientalist tropes do frequently appear in Joyce’s work, ‘Saints and Sages’ is unusual in

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its seeming bluntness and unsophistication.19 Why is Joyce, then, suddenly citing discredited scholars and employing the very tropes of eastern otherness he had criticised in, for example, ‘Araby’? It might well be that there is more going on in ‘Saints and Sages’ than has previously been realised. Joyce’s use of Vallancey returns us to the question of sources and the generation and propagation of knowledge which we saw him addressing in ‘Ireland at the Bar’, with its suggestion of courtroom officialness even as it presents an outright fabrication. As Joyce goes on to argue, the Irish nation’s desire to create its own civilization is not so much the desire of a young nation wishing to link itself to Europe’s concert, but the desire of an ancient nation to renew in a modern form the glories of a past civilization. (OCP 111) And far from being an excuse for nationalist insularity, in linking Ireland to an empire of seafarers Joyce holds that the alleged Phoenician connection shows that Ireland ‘is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed’, such that ‘it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby’ (OCP 118). The idea of an Irish nation bearing a long and storied history – ‘if it is not really a useful fiction’ (OCP 118) – thus serves several purposes in Joyce’s handling which are distinct from the Irish Orientalism of the nationalists. Vallancey’s work opens up the nation, transforming it into not only an old civilisation, but one that is integrated in a vast network of cultural exchange. In this manner we can see a purpose to Joyce’s flippant attitude to the mechanisms of knowledge generation – of official court documents and up-to-date scholarly research. Accurate or inaccurate, the scholarship of the day which sees Irish as merely a small leaf on a distant branch of the Indo-European language tree serves, in the context of British imperialism, as yet another ‘bar’ that isolates Ireland from the world. While the censorship of the British press prevents Ireland from expressing itself to the wider world, a tendency to see Ireland as isolated and remote, as terminally uncultured, is a self-reinforcing process which prevents Ireland from taking in new influences. Given Joyce’s distaste for the parochialism of the Gaelic League and the language politics of the revivalists, it makes perfect sense that he would see much value in a narrative which saw Ireland as an outpost of a cosmopolitan seafaring empire. This cosmopolitanism – useful to Joyce not as a counterpoint to Irish nationalism, but rather as a way towards a better, more culturally sophisticated nationalism – in these essays becomes the motivation for a destructive appropriation of the discursive apparatuses of British imperialism, abandoning the academic consensus on the origin of Irish while nevertheless adopting discarded elements of its discourse to produce a new historical narrative independent of colonial narratives of Ireland’s isolation. It is a process we see frequently in Finnegans Wake: for example, in the ‘Nightlessons’ section with its depiction of a scribbled-upon school textbook. And this scepticism towards official histories also manifests in the Wake’s adoption of a discourse of gossip and rumour. For Joyce, the creation of a linguistic and historical space in which Irish culture may thrive requires either the appropriation or the destruction of dominant paradigms of knowledge production, which, in a colonial context, as Said shows us, serve to create a rigid model of the colonised culture’s identity more pliable to expropriation. In ‘Ireland at the Bar’, Joyce seizes upon his role as the sole likely source of information

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that his audience has for the story of the murder trial in order to portray the central conflict as fundamentally linguistic. In this way he implies a common cause between Ireland’s plight and that of the Triestine irredentists, who, as minority Italian speakers in the Austrian Empire, could perhaps provide a source of solidarity. In ‘Saints and Sages’, Joyce leapfrogs over the dominant paradigm of linguistic history to portray an ancient Ireland which was culturally dominant, intellectually advanced, and plugged in to a diverse and pluralistic seaborne empire. Thus Joyce appropriates the means and methods of both the revivalists and the imperialists, turning those tools towards the end of an Ireland which could stand on its own without retreating into parochialism and a mythologised rural life.

Thy Willing Be Done As Vincent Cheng writes, nation-making ‘involves a discursive occlusion (in both present and past history) of the internal cultural differences which exist within any large and heterogenous contact zone’.20 In this regard he echoes Benedict Anderson, who writes in Imagined Communities that ‘the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them . . . has finite, if elastic, boundaries . . . . No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.’21 This drive to limitation had complex implications for a nation like Ireland at the turn of the century, which had at once to assert itself as a cultural force in its own right (against imperial claims of its backwardness) and also to be open to and connected with a wider cultural context (against a hypernationalist drive to parochialism) – a conflict of which Joyce was aware. The ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses reveals this awareness in the list of ‘Irish heroes’ which adorns the citizen’s clothing, a litany of names that includes everyone from Cuchulain to Muhammad (U 12.176–99). If the identity of the nation depends on the imposition of limits, so does the meaning of words. Linguistic meaning, as Derrida contends, entails the closing-down of linguistic play to create the impression of singular meaning.22 The Wake is an exercise in refusing this process, an effort to produce a text, as Derek Attridge puts it, ‘whose meanings occur in the form of alternatives between which it is impossible to decide’.23 As with the word, so with the world – or, it should be said, the nation. Let us take the ‘Museyroom’ section, which occurs right at the Wake’s putative beginning. The section takes place in a museum (to the extent that the Wake can be said to ‘take place’ anywhere), but the narration assumes the form of a museum tour of some exhibit that, on one level of interpretation at least, has to do with The Duke Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo: This the way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in! Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom. This is a Prooshious gun. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the flag of the Prooshious, the Cap and Soracer. This is the bullet that byng the flag of the Prooshious. This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull that bang the flag of the Prooshious. . . . This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleumhat. This is Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape. (FW 8.9–17) There are plenty of ways to gloss this passage – the ‘Cap and Soracer’ on the ‘flag of the Prooshious’ might, in addition to a cup and saucer, refer to the crown and sceptre

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on the black eagle of the Prussian flag. The ‘tip’, ‘byng’ and ‘bang’ might be taken as battlefield sounds, functioning similarly to the ‘tap’ of the blind stripling in Ulysses, as a sort of audible metonymic presence. But what is interesting about the passage, and much of what follows it in this section, is the repeated insistence of ‘this way’, ‘this is’, various commands (‘Mind your hats goan in!’), and other indications that we, or whoever else this passage may be addressed to, are being shown around. It recalls a kind of history like that which has been drilled into the schoolchildren in ‘Nestor’. This directive voice could also be compared to the domination of the Indo-European paradigm in linguistics, or, more specifically, the way that paradigm (correct as it may be) could be used as a rhetorical bludgeon to marginalise Irish and overwrite its genuine complexity. The museyroom presents history as a fixed and deterministic narrative wherein the fact that events turned out a certain way means that they could have gone no differently. In the museyroom the Battle of Waterloo takes the form of a curated mythology, a kind of conservative, imperialistic, deadening teleology, where the same events and notions are encountered in the same way and in the same order, always with the ‘helpful’ voice of some curator, or guide, or editor, or teacher to make sure one does not get lost or misdirected – or knock one’s hat off on the doorframe. It is a history that uses its readers instead of one used by them, guiding them along a specified trajectory without acknowledging history’s submerged possibilities. In terms of its surface-level narration, the ‘Museyroom’ section implies that history exists outside and beyond any person’s desire or agency and is therefore ripe for use as a tool of imperial ideology. Indeed, even the pastness of the historical event seems at times to be obscured. Present-tense descriptions like ‘This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull’ or ‘This is Willingdone on his same white harse’ might imply that the people in question are actually present at the scene, as though frozen in a tableau of stultified history, ready for our awestruck consumption. Yet it is also at this point that the illusion begins to fall apart. With asides like ‘tip’ and ‘Lipoleumhat’ the smooth progression of descriptions begins to break down. That the sounds of battle inaugurate these diversions is important. As David Pierce argues, ‘once inside [the museyroom], the reader keeps noticing the visual reminder of war in the riot of exclamation marks accompanied by the wails and shrieks of those who died from bullets or explosions’.24 A line like ‘This is the bullet that byng the flag of the Prooshious’ obfuscates the death and destruction of war even while memorialising it: a bullet from an old historical battle sits in a museum exhibit, removed from its context, removed from its gun, unfired and unfireable. Yet even the word ‘byng’ signals a breakdown of this decontextualised, non-violent violence. It resembles the word ‘bang’, and so invokes the function a bullet would normally serve. But, also, as Roland McHugh points out in his annotations, the word refers to two historical Byngs: John Byng, 1st Earl of Strafford, who served under Wellington at Waterloo (and was also involved in suppressing the 1798 Irish rebellion), and Admiral John Byng, who was executed in 1757 for failing to win the Battle of Minorca during the Seven Years War.25 One Byng lives and the other dies, one was present at England’s most famous victory over France and the other at a humiliating defeat. The double nature of the name ‘Byng’ in this context thus opens a door to alternative historical narratives, one where the victory at Waterloo was but one engagement in a long back and forth between France and England, one where the heroes of the Napoleonic Wars were also brutal suppressors of Irish independence, and one where the great victory contains a memory of past defeats.

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This ambiguity is made all the more fascinating by another instance of historical inaccuracy: ‘Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape’. Wellington’s horse, Copenhagen, was in fact brown. As Cheng points out, Joyce frequently uses the colour white to indicate patriarchal power, citing the phallic obelisk of the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park (which, unlike the horse, is white) as an example.26 Yet the name ‘Cokenhape’ also undermines this very reading: if read in relation to the Dutchspeaking Kingdom of the Netherlands, which at the time controlled Belgium and, by extension, Waterloo, the phoneme ‘hap’ is also Dutch for ‘bite’. Loosely glossing ‘Cokenhape’ as ‘cock-in-bite’, or perhaps simply ‘cock-bite’, does much to undermine, one might say cut off, the patriarchal triumphalism of Wellington on his horse or his great white obelisk indecently exposed in the park. The very symbol of Wellington’s authority itself becomes a record of its impending castration.27 The ‘Museyroom’ section represents an evolution of the approach to history Joyce began developing in his Trieste essays, and of a critique of imperialist historiography we see in ‘Nestor’, ‘Cyclops’ and elsewhere. The overlay of oral recounting, factual errors and stray asides and allusions to the suppressed reality of warfare, transforms this history which uses its readers, which guides them through a curated exhibit, into a history that they can use. The sensationalism and orality of ‘Ireland at the Bar’ and the distrust of official source material in ‘Saints and Sages’ recur in the museyroom in a more nuanced and complex form, fully integrated with Joyce’s larger project and with the Wake’s general approach to historiography, which one could compare, for example, to the treatment of the schoolbook in ‘Nightlessons’ and its critical reappropriation of Euclidian geometry.28 Yet the conflation of an oral recounting of history, instantiated with the implied museum tour guide, with mistakes of fact (like the colour of Wellington’s horse) represents an important addition as well to what Tim Conley calls the ‘aesthetic of error’ that Joyce is clearly pursuing. As Conley has observed, the phrase ‘history is to blame’ has a second, less obvious, reading besides ‘history is at fault’ – that ‘to make history is to blame’.29 To put history to work, as Nietzsche advocates, is thus to begin settling scores with one’s enemies, and to reverse the trajectory of blame against one’s self. But the Wake is neither a catalogue of vindictiveness, nor a simplistic settling of scores, but rather, among other things, a critique of score-settling itself. As we see in ‘Museyroom’, it is a biting-off of the phallic symbol rather than the erection of a new one. And one of the most important ways that Joyce accomplishes this goal is by supplanting teleological history with the rhetorics of gossip and rumour.

Dirty Laundry Rumour has a reputation for frivolousness and error, and in that context has been the subject of significant philosophical analysis. Martin Heidegger, for instance, excoriates it under the name of ‘idle talk’ in Being and Time, writing that ‘when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is – as Being-in-the-world – cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world’.30 Yet for an author writing in a colonial or postcolonial context, as Joyce was, a state of being ungenuine can often be a useful tactic (in Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term31) when writing against the prevailing state of perceived possibilities. One can compare Joyce’s uses of gossip and of historical error to the later adoption among postcolonial writers of magical realism. As Zoe Norridge writes, ‘in drawing on local mythologies and oral

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narratives, novels with “magical realist” elements call into question the “politics of the possible” or what we (whoever “we” might be) choose to believe is (un)likely’.32 Citing obsolete linguistics monographs which claim that Irish descends from Phoenician may not be good scholarship, but it opens up imaginative possibilities wherein Ireland and Irish literature are at the centre of European culture rather than at its periphery. Portraying an interrogation that never happened may not be good journalism, but it makes obvious the mechanism by which the British press keeps secret Ireland’s tremendous complexity. We might then contrast Heidegger’s treatment of gossip as uncritical, uncurious and disengaged with Walter Benjamin’s ‘chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’, who thereby ‘acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history’.33 There are few readers more motivated and engaged than the censor, whose attentiveness is backed up with the power to select what enters the wider discourse, and what does not. An embrace of the disengaged and the alienated can be a way to recover what was thought lost, an abandonment of the ‘bar’ that filters and curates, which might create the chance for a history one may use and live with. Recent philosophical analysis of gossip and rumour, mostly but not exclusively by writers in the analytic tradition, has pointed to this potential. Probably the best single source on the philosophy of gossip remains the 1994 essay collection Good Gossip. In her contribution to the collection, Maryann Ayim observes that ‘gossip’s model captures several aspects of [Charles Sanders] Pierce’s notion of a community of investigators’ in the way that it permits a collective social construction of knowledge, and that ‘those who remain shut off from the bastions of community recognised social and political power will continue to look to gossip as one form of inquiry . . . available to them as other forms are not’.34 In a similar fashion, Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that gossip is ‘a crucial means of self-expression, [and] a crucial form of solidarity’, and observes that gossip ‘always involves talk about one or more absent figures; always such talk occurs in a relatively small group’.35 Likewise, Tommaso Bertolotti and Lorenzo Magnani, while noting that gossip is frequently ‘despised as rumour-mongering, deceitful, and inspired by ill feelings’ such that ‘one is often encouraged not to give too much weight to gossip’, hold that ‘the epistemic ground and the social one are deeply intertwined in gossip’.36 These writers point to the value of gossip as a mode of epistemic subversion, as a way to formulate new counter-narratives and counter-histories. Its embeddedness in everyday life combined with the absence of its subject – be it an abstract imperial power (as in Joyce) or a specific figure of authority – makes it ripe as a tool of subversion. Joyce uses that tool in ‘Ireland at the Bar’, both in the absence of the English (his audience being Italian irredentists) and in his observation that ‘public opinion considered him [Myles Joyce] innocent then, and he is now thought of as a martyr’ (OCP 145). The use of the passive voice in ‘thought of’ injects a vagueness into Joyce’s prose which contrasts with the (phony) specificity of the direct quotation soon after, while also moving from the world of an official account to the (implicitly more accurate) world of gossip. Thomas Pavel, in his analysis of the narrative role of gossip, argues that many modernist and postmodernist works have eschewed gossip as a narrative mode. 37 Yet the Wake shows that gossip can function powerfully in modernist writing as an epistemological mode that subverts dominant historical narratives to make

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space for new, formerly subaltern, possibilities.38 Gossip and rumour, through their uncontrollable circulation and subversion of the ‘bar’ of colonial hegemony, loosen the grip that imperialism has on the past, and thereby make space for a transformed future. In his Trieste essays, Joyce seems to embrace the subversive potential of gossip in his mocking use of official sources and elevation of Irish ‘public opinion’, where rumour thrives and English curation is absent. Gossip performs this subversion, importantly, without adopting the authoritarian and homogenising effects of empire in the effort to overthrow them, as Joyce saw the Irish nationalists do, and which he parodied via the citizen in ‘Cyclops’. Declan Kiberd writes of ‘a xenophobic element within the nationalist movement, which often threatened to negate its own better ideals’, and argues that the citizen’s ‘ideas were based on English models which he claimed to contest’.39 Liam Lanigan, more recently, has characterised the Irish revivalists as being, by Joyce’s estimation, an ‘introverted movement’ possessing an ‘identitarian aesthetic’.40 By contrast, Joyce saw Irishness, as instantiated in the Wake, as not only being heterogenous but representing ‘a kind of originary heterogeneity’, as Emer Nolan has demonstrated.41 Gossip, in its most common form, injects heterogeneity into a homogenous discourse. The gossiper spreads information that cannot be said openly – gossip is whispered, spoken in private, usually about someone who is not there. That is to say, gossip typically occurs in the background of some kind of dominant narrative, and in the context of censorship or self-censorship, of certain things not appropriate to say. Gossip performs this function in the ‘Museyroom’ section, where the orality of the descriptions permits the hidden brutality of war to break through from time to time. But gossip in the Wake most conspicuously occurs in relation to HCE and his transgression in Phoenix Park, to which we have no direct access but only hints through rumours, overheard speech and speculation. Given HCE’s role as an arch-patriarch, it is easy to see how gossip can take on an anti-authoritarian role. Gossip typically does not arise, however, in the context of one patriarchal figure replacing another, but rather one who falls and, like Humpty Dumpty (himself an HCE figure), does not get back up. A great example of the Wake’s use of gossip happens in the washerwomen section at the start of I.8. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. . . . Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. . . . Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. (FW 196.5–16) As Janine Utell argues, HCE’s identity ‘is created through the linguistic performance of the community, not only by authority and the pronouncements of authority but by the language of the people of the streets and bars’.42 HCE, for all his associations with figures of authority, ultimately emerges from the same dubious sources in rumour which held Myles Joyce to be innocent and the Irish language to be of Phoenician descent. Joyce also hints that Dublin itself is based on gossip: the black water washing out of HCE’s dirty laundry

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(figurative and literal) invokes the Irish term ‘Dubhlinn’, for which Dublin was named and which translates as ‘black pool’.43 To ‘air dirty laundry’ is to make private matters public, which is largely what a washerwoman’s job entails – taking her client’s dirty clothes to wash in the river, to see and hold these private garments as an integral part of her job. And it is from the black outflow of dirty water in the Liffey that all of Dublin was built. As the washerwomen clean dirty laundry, they air dirty laundry. We get, as usual with regard to HCE’s transgression, only vague and inconclusive information – and a possible invocation of rape in its similarity to ‘reppe’ (also an allusion to the River Repe), which fits the general pattern of HCE’s transgression as sexual in some way. But more interesting is the combination of the invocation ‘tell me’ with the assurance ‘I know, go on’. As is so often the case in Finnegans Wake, all that is happening has happened before, and the washerwomen have already heard the story many times. Everybody already knows what happened – to the extent that anyone in the Wake knows anything that happened – which means that HCE has lost control of the story. Meanwhile, the River Liffey, representing HCE’s wife ALP, takes in all the dirt and gossip, manifesting in herself the plurality which neither the imperialists nor the revivalists could ever manage. The ‘private’ linen made ‘public’ removes the secrecy of HCE’s transgression, which, like the state of Ireland in Joyce’s time, was made invisible by the producers of official knowledge such as the British press. The washerwomen give the ‘dirt’ on HCE and let it flow into the Liffey, through Dublin and out to sea – towards a new and uncontrollable future, rich with heterogenous possibility. The abandonment or disparagement of official knowledge that we see in the essays and the ‘Museyroom’ section creates space for the subterranean epistemology of gossip, and with it perhaps a decolonised future.

An Inconclusion Joyce’s non-fiction thus presages and instantiates a long and fruitful engagement with the problems of history, both in general and in the context of (post)colonial nationhood – an engagement which flows through Ulysses and reaches its most complex and developed form in Finnegans Wake. As we see at the end of the Wake, no one awakes from history, but instead achieves a kind of lucid dream, where, far from a nightmare, history becomes a labile clay with which to build a habitable future. Finnegans Wake accomplishes this transition through the introduction of gossip as a historical and narrative mode, something that was suggested in Joyce’s essays’ troubled relationship with official sources and academic knowledge. Gossip, as a sort of subaltern historiography, functions similarly to magical realism by breaking up hegemonic imperial discourses to make space for a heterogenous future. Joyce in this way manages to evade what Stephen Dedalus might call the ‘nets’ of both nationalist and imperial nation-making, generating a communal language capable of sustaining the complexities of everyday life.

Notes 1. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.377. All future citations of this text will be parenthetical and indicated with the letter U. 2. Winston, Joyce and Militarism, p. 12.

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3. Ibid., p. 113. 4. Ebury and Fraser, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 5. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, pp. 10–11. For an exploration of Nietzsche’s impact on Joyce, see Slote, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. 6. Cheng, Amnesia and the Nation, p. 16. 7. Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism, p. 143. 8. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 335. 9. An excellent and detailed summary of the trial itself can be found in Chapter 2 of Hardiman, Joyce in Court, which lays out in exacting detail the many legal travesties which led to Myles’s execution. The Irish government officially pardoned Myles in 2018. 10. Said, Orientalism, p. 32. 11. Joyce, ‘Ireland at the Bar’, p. 146. All further citations of Barry, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing will be in-text, as OCP. 12. Kelleher, The Maamtrasna Murders, p. 195. 13. Ibid., p. 202. 14. Cullingford, ‘Phoenician Genealogies and Oriental Geographies, p. 232. 15. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, pp. 95, 99. 16. Ibid., p. 89. 17. Roling, ‘Phoenician Ireland’, p. 755. 18. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews, pp. 156, 3. 19. Bongiovanni, ‘Turbaned faces going by’, pp. 29, 31. 20. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, p. 195. 21. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 6–7. 22. See Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, pp. 278–94. 23. Attridge, ‘Finnegans Awake’, p. 191. 24. Pierce, The Joyce Country, p. xxiii. 25. McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 8. 26. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, p. 281. 27. Animal imagery appears frequently in the Wake as a means of undermining patriarchal authority, often by way of the revealing of personal details – acts of ‘airing dirty laundry’ which we analyse below. For an analysis of this use of animals in Finnegans Wake see Lovejoy, ‘The Bestial Feminine in Finnegans Wake’, p. 4. 28. For Joyce’s use of geometry in ‘Nightlessons’ as a tool for exploring the latent possibilities of seemingly deterministic system, see McMorran, Joyce and Geometry, pp. 15–50. 29. Conley, Joyces Mistakes, pp. 15, 34. 30. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 214. 31. See Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 29–42 and passim. 32. Norridge, ‘Magical / Realist Novels’, p. 77. 33. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 254. 34. Ayim, ‘Knowledge Through the Grapevine: Gossip as Inquiry’, pp. 87, 99. 35. Spacks, Gossip, pp. 5, 4. 36. Bertolotti and Magnani, ‘An Epistemological Analysis of Gossip and Gossip-Based Knowledge’, pp. 4038, 4051. 37. Pavel, ‘Safely Watching Wild Adventures’, p. 8. Thank you to Yonina Hoffman for drawing my attention to some of this material. 38. For a similar point about rumour, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 286. 39. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, pp. 162, 351. 40. Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Modernism, p. 100. 41. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 148. 42. Utell, ‘Unfacts and Evidencegivers’, p. 689. 43. This fact is pointed out in McHugh, Annotations, p. 196.

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Lovejoy, Laura, ‘The Bestial Feminine in Finnegans Wake’, Humanities, 6:3 (2017), pp. 1–15, available at (last accessed 7 October 2020). McHugh, Roland, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). McMorran, Ciaran, Joyce and Geometry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020). Nadel, Ira, Joyce and the Jews: Culture and History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1994). Norridge, Zoe, ‘Magical / Realist Novels and “The Politics of the Possible”’, in Ato Quayson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 60–80. Pavel, Thomas, ‘Safely Watching Wild Adventures’, Narrative, 24:1 (2016), pp. 1–12. Pierce, David, The Joyce Country: Literary Scholarship and Irish Culture (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2018). Roling, Bernd, ‘Phoenician Ireland: Charles Vallancey (1725–1812) and the Oriental Roots of Celtic Culture’, in Karl A. E. Enenkel and Konrad A. Ottenheym (eds), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art, and Architecture (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 750–70. Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Slote, Sam, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (London: Palgrave, 2013). Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985). Utell, Janine M., ‘Unfacts and Evidencegivers: Rumor, Reputation, and History in “Finnegans Wake”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 41:4 (2004), pp. 689–700. Wexler, Joyce, Violence Without God: The Rhetorical Despair of Twentieth-Century Writers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Winston, Greg, Joyce and Militarism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

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4 W. B. Yeats’s THE DREAMING OF THE BONES and the Limits of Global Modernism Cóilín Parsons

T

HE DREAMING OF the Bones, W. B. Yeats’s 1919 play set in the immediate aftermath of

the 1916 Easter Rising, opens with a precise and unmistakable invocation of place: The little village of Abbey is covered up; The little narrow trodden way that runs From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe Is covered up . . .1

Almost immediately, the audience learns that the Young Man who appears on the stage in the opening moments was ‘in the Post Office’, establishing the exact timing of the encounter between the Young Man and the Stranger to whom he gives this information.2 There is no room here, in this play that remembers the Rising, for any ambiguity regarding its time and place – it is a story of Irish political betrayal and potential redemption. The action of the play is quite simple: the Young Man is on his way to the Aran Islands to make good his escape from the British forces who are searching for revolutionaries who had taken part in the Rising. While waiting for his transport to the islands, he meets the Young Girl and the Stranger, who are in fact the ill-starred lovers of Irish history, Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, whose love affair (or, perhaps, the abduction of Dervorgilla) led to the Anglo-Norman invasion and the subsequent conquest of Ireland in the late twelfth century. The lovers are cursed, doomed to wander the country unable to kiss until such time as they are pronounced forgiven. When the Young Man learns that this is the couple whose affair resulted in the conquest of Ireland 700 years earlier, he refuses outright to forgive them and they remain separated from each other. On the one hand, this play is resolutely historically, politically and geographically bounded – it takes place there and at that time. On the other hand, the characters are types – a ‘Young Man’, ‘Young Girl’ and ‘Stranger’ – to be found in any place at any time, and drawn, as Yeats made clear, from the formal conventions of the Japanese Noh theatre. Two of the actors wear ‘heroic masks’, their faces covered, expressionless, devoid of individuating marks that we might associate with the idea of character.3 Yeats wrote that he went ‘to Asia’ for these ‘more formal faces’ that a mask provides, substituting for ‘the face of some common-place player . . . the fine invention of a sculptor’.4 Of all Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays collected in Four Plays for Dancers (1921), The Dreaming of the Bones may not be the most performed or the best known

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(At the Hawk’s Well claims that crown), but it is the play in which tensions between local politics and world form, or between historical specificity and abstract performance, come most strikingly to the surface. With its time-worn story of Irish betrayal, the play dresses ‘Fenian teleology in Noh form’, as Roy Foster pithily declared, but it also exposes the faultlines of the geographical limits of Irish modernism, balanced as it is between an immediate political encounter and a larger commitment to an aesthetic project that Yeats sees stretching in a long line from the ancient Noh tradition to the drawing rooms of London and Dublin.5 The result is a somewhat ill-fitting play, not quite at home either in Ireland or in the world, yet one that has consistently led critics to claim it for one camp or the other. The contention over Yeats’s encounter with and adaptation of Noh theatre in the late 1910s indicates critics’ anxiety about Yeats’s Eastern interests, and a need either to dismiss Yeats as disingenuous or even racist, or to celebrate his cosmopolitan vision. At the centre of the critical debate is a question of scale, or an anxiety over the geographical boundaries of a thing called ‘Irish modernism’. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards argue that Yeats is a central figure for thinking through questions of space in Irish literature and culture, since his work ‘registers a crisis of space’, visible in his apocalyptic vision in his 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’ as much as in his endless experiments with theatrical space.6 But while Morash and Richards see Yeats (and Beckett after him) wrestling with the tension between practised place and abstract space, there is another spatial contest at play in Yeats’s Noh plays, in his world history project in A Vision, and elsewhere. These border-crossing experiments map a crisis of scale as much as of space, defining, grappling with and sometimes being defeated by the challenges of moving from small (the local, the intimate, the personal) to large (the nation, the globe, the Spiritus Mundi) scales. It is this question, of how the play negotiates scalar shifts, that is the subject of this chapter. In focusing on this one short play, though, I also want to make a larger observation about how and when Irish modernism meets its geographical limits and how it attempts to overcome them. The example of The Dreaming of the Bones, with its Irish political contexts and its Japanese form, helps us to recognise how Yeats is drawn to a tradition distant from him in time and space, and is not yet entirely comfortable with its provenance. If The Dreaming of the Bones is a play that enacts a crisis of scale, it does so by drawing on a wider vocabulary of mapmaking, and it echoes a signal mapmaking project of the nineteenth century in doing so. The play is about landscape as much as it is about history, and this chapter pays close attention to how The Dreaming maps its landscape. From a general consideration of Yeats’s cartographic excursions, the chapter moves to a discussion of the way that Yeats’s landscapes are always abstractions, pared-down versions that seem to promise intimate local detail but always refuse to be pinned down. This, I suggest, is how Yeats’s work picks up on a key feature of nineteenth-century mapmaking in Ireland – the recognition of the constitutive instability of land and landscape. If Yeats is a mapmaker, his object never quite comes into view, always eluding him. The intense place-based aesthetic of the Noh drama offers him an image of a desired appreciation of the genius loci, but its East Asian roots, far from the setting of Yeats’s plays, mean that his dreams of locality are always mediated. From here, the chapter proceeds to a discussion of Yeats’s connection to a Noh practitioner, and that of another Irish writer of the same period, James Cousins. In two separate anecdotes, the awkwardness of the marriage between

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Irish modernism and Japanese tradition takes shape, revealing the limits of sympathy of these two Irish writers. In The Dreaming of the Bones is to be found writ small the whole complex question of the scaling of literature, from the local to the global. Writing of Yeats and maps is far from straightforward. Such allusions as we might find in his work are fleeting and oblique – to be seen, perhaps, only in the breach. David Lloyd has identified one such cartographic breach in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, which fancifully rewrites the topography of South Galway to have a stream, Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop, Run underground, rise in a rocky place In Coole demesne, and there to finish up Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.7 As Lloyd points out, the geography is both meticulously observed and wholly inaccurate. For, after all, ‘What’s water but the generated soul?’ – its materiality is denied, its actual topography remapped. Paul de Man’s argument about the poem has become axiomatic: ‘Yeats’ landscapes have a symbolic meaning prior to their natural appearance, and act as predetermined emblems embedded in a more or less fixed symbolic system which is not derived from the observation of nature’.8 ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’ is a poem in flux, its unstable imagery and language paradoxically celebrating Yeats’s mastery over both, and reflecting the simultaneous foundation and demise of a tradition that he sees in the last days of Coole. At the same time, as Lloyd notes, ‘Yeats’s writing here is far from the consolatory tradition . . . which seeks to maintain symbolic continuity between place and poetic intention’.9 Yeats, in fact, shatters the sense of place that the poem appears to construct carefully, choosing symbolic coherence over verisimilitude. His commitment to a discontinuity between ‘place’ and ‘poetic intention’, even in his most geographically dense poems, suggests that Yeats’s cartographic interests might be most clearly displayed not in a reclamation of practised place but in its repudiation in favour of abstract space. We can see this at work in his move towards abstraction in the set design for his plays, which was some time in coming. As early as the 1905 preface to J. M. Synge’s play, The Well of the Saints, Yeats writes: we are rehearsing The Well of the Saints, and are painting for it decorative scenery, mountains in one or two flat colours and without detail, ash-trees and red salleys with something of recurring pattern in their woven boughs. For though the people of the play use no phrase they could not use in daily life, we know that we are seeking to express what no eye has ever seen.10 Earlier in this preface, Yeats claimed to have sent Synge to Aran to ‘express a life that has never found expression’. Now, by his own account, the Abbey Theatre has become part of that effort to express the unexpressed, or, perhaps, the inexpressible. The Abbey’s set could be justified by the first two lines of the play alone. Mary Doul asks her blind husband, ‘What place are we now, Martin Doul?’ ‘Passing the gap,’ he replies, using an empty topographical referent that is unidentifiable, uninterpretable, ‘a place that no eye has ever seen’.11 There is a tension here that Yeats identifies and

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admires, between the intense locality of Synge’s writing, based on his ethnographic and linguistic research, and a pull towards an abstract, unidentifable setting that highlights an imagined universality. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) is perhaps the most perfect expression of this, torn between the borrowed formal constraints of Greek tragedy and the local traditions of the (unnamed in the play) Aran Islands. The abstract landscape set that Yeats so admires in this staging of Synge’s work reappears in the Noh plays. In The Dreaming, The stage is any bare place in a room close to the wall. A screen, with a pattern of mountain and sky, can stand against the wall, or a curtain with a like pattern hang upon it, but the pattern must only symbolize or suggest.12 However gestural and suggestive the set must be, the play itself establishes a significantly more concrete temporal, political and geographical setting – in the days after the Easter Rising, around ‘the ruined Abbey of Corcomroe’. As Chris Morash writes in an essay that establishes The Dreaming as a ‘bewildered remembrance’ of the Rising, there is a stark contrast between the ‘lack of visual definition’ of the set and the language of the piece, which is ‘dense with references to specific places’.13 Its coordinates – Aran, Muckanish, Finvara, Aughinish, Bailevelehen, Aughtmana – are all redolent of the Burren area of north County Clare, though they suffer from varying degrees of Yeatsian orthographic imprecision. The desolate landscape of the Burren – grey, bleak karst limestone, devoid of trees, grass or water – is as close to the set that Yeats describes as any landscape can be: Sometimes among the great rocks on the scarce grass Birds cry, they cry their loneliness. Even the sunlight can be lonely here, Even hot noon is lonely.14 This is a landscape that resists the elements that make land habitable, the nearest expression in Ireland of ‘sands of the desert’ that are at the heart of the anarchy that is being ‘loosed upon the world’ in ‘The Second Coming’, which Yeats was writing at the same time as The Dreaming.15 However, Yeats first planned to set the play in Wicklow, a more likely place in which to find the ‘Young Man’, who has just escaped capture by the British in Dublin. F. A. C. Wilson, in an early analysis of the play, takes umbrage at this shift in location, since ‘Noh legends are always traditionally associated with some particular genius loci and cannot conceivably be transplanted at a dramatist’s whim’. 16 The shift in location notwithstanding, Natalie Crohn Schmitt argues that in The Dreaming, ‘the story is about the place . . . the characters have come to just this place and no other anywhere in the world, so that this story may happen’.17 Focusing more narrowly on Corcomroe Abbey, Carmel Jordan writes that its Irish–Romanesque architecture was a ‘defiant Irish deviation from the restrained, unadorned architecture that is the hallmark of early English Cistercian abbeys in England and Ireland’, and that it appealed to Yeats particularly, who admired this excessive, ornamented style as the ‘glorious expression of an unfettered imagination’.18 It is hard to deny that Yeats found in the abbey at Corcomroe symbols to suit his ideas of the imagination, yet these readings of the play

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that rely so heavily on dramatic setting and the physical landscape also put great pressure on the play’s dogged attachment to the poetic and diegetic on stage, rather than the theatrical or visual.19 They bind the ties of landscape and meaning too closely, seeking to forge iron-clad connections between play and place. While these readings pay superficial homage to the Noh tradition’s investment in place, they overlook the implications of the fact that Yeats’s plays gesture towards identifiable Irish localities while at the same time drawing on an aesthetic tradition that is far removed from Ireland. Yeats entices the reader or audience member to treat the setting of the play as sacred, and to value the local, but it is not necessarily particularised. Morash argues that the specific setting, be it Wicklow or Clare, is a ruse, for ‘it is the specificity of place, not the specification of a particular place, that is framed on a stage . . . [Yeats] stages a play that is about the process of producing place from space on the stage’.20 And yet the play, in its spare visual aesthetic and its global form, seems to resist this reading – the rich, practised, inhabited nature of the idea of place does not find a safe harbour here, as Yeats relishes ‘a sense of aesthetic detachment’.21 How can we square this overproduction of local details, the simulacrum of place, with ‘aesthetic detachment’? The answer may lie in the instability of place itself in Ireland. Any effort to map the setting of The Dreaming to geographical location is shadowed by the impossibility of the task, which assumes a stable referent outside of the play that can offer some kind of answer to the question of the distance between the imaginary and the real. Place names, of which The Dreaming is full, are notoriously slippery affairs in Ireland. When the British government decided to undertake the first ever complete cartographic survey of Ireland – the famous Ordnance Survey (1824– 42) that readers will probably know of from Brian Friel’s play Translations – the whole undertaking nearly collapsed under the burden of trying to establish incontrovertible names for topographical features. Between surveyors’ patchy knowledge of Irish, lost topographical knowledge, a lack of any standardised orthography in Irish, and other obstacles, the desire to fix once and for all the place names of Ireland, along with their historical derivations, was doomed to failure. The Survey revealed that Ireland’s landscape and the names used to identify it were neither fixed nor solid.22 In October 1839, as the Ordnance Survey fieldworker John O’Donovan travelled through County Clare, he wrote about Corcomroe, indicating some confusion about the name itself: The present and apparently ancient name of this parish is Mainistir Chorcum-ruadh i.e. the Abbey of Corcumroe, but I have never been able to ascertain why it received such an appellation, as it is not situated in the territory now called Corcumroe but in that of Burren. An inserted note by O’Donovan over a year later shows that he had succeeded in clearing up some of the confusion – ‘Corcomroe originally comprised the present barony of that name and also the barony of Burren’.23 But that was not the only question that dogged O’Donovan, for he also wrote: the present tradition in the county is that the abbey of Corcomroe was founded by the son of Conor na Siudaine O’Brien on the spot where his father was killed in battle by Guary O’Shaughnessy of Dun Guaire near Kinvarra . . . but there is

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no truth in this tradition, for it appears from the Annals of Inishfallen as well as from the Wars of Torlogh that this Abbey was in existence long before the death of Conor na Siudaine, and that Conor na Siudaine was not killed by O’Shaughnessy.24 ‘Corcomroe’, like so many other place names, was something of an empty shell into which generations of people, near and far, had poured their own stories. To murmur place name upon place name, all of them in the strange hybrid orthography of the Ordnance Survey, as Yeats does in The Dreaming, gestures towards the impossibility of settling or fixing any particular meaning. The mapping that Yeats performs, or at least implies, captures something at the heart of the Survey – a recognition of the landscape’s function as an historical palimpsest. Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, the lovers whose affair brought the Normans to Ireland in the twelfth century, can plausibly appear as the Stranger and the Young Girl in a play set in the twentieth century because the landscape where this is set is cross-hatched by visible and invisible events and stories of the past that co-exist with the present. At the same time, the Irish landscape is a site of alienation – in which the language used to name it is neither indigenous nor entirely new, spoken nowhere but seen everywhere, and a site in which the question of ownership is inescapable. There is no easy reclamation to be found in mapping, but only ever an index of the strained political landscape of revolutionary Ireland. The Ordnance Survey lays the representational groundwork for The Dreaming in its abstraction of a messy, layered landscape into the clean, stark lines of a black and white map. The representational challenges that Yeats encounters and seeks to solve by turning to Noh are not new to the Ireland of Yeats’s time; Ordnance Survey maps are the product of a very similar struggle to distil but not thereby wholly erase a complex and contested history. In this sense, Noh and maps have much in common, for as Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound write in their study of Noh drama, ‘the beauty and power of Noh lie in the concentration. All elements – costume, motion, verse, and music – unite to produce a single clarified impression. . . . Thus, the drama became a storehouse of history’.25 Yeats did not give up all pretence at invoking the spirit of place. Writing of his Noh plays, he suggests that he very much regretted having, in his early plays, to ‘put away an ambition of helping to bring again to certain places their old sanctity or their romance’. ‘I found no pause in the hurried action’, he continues, ‘for descriptions of strand or sea,’ and he regrets his failure to conjure up particular places. Yeats writes that in the Noh play that influenced him most, Nishikigi, ‘the tale of the lovers would lose its pathos if we did not see that forgotten tomb where “the hiding fox” lives among “the orchards and the chrysanthemum flowers”’, or if the fine details of the place were lost to the audience.26 And yet this appeal to the landscape appears in an essay that calls for art’s ‘distance’ from the world: All imaginative art keeps at a distance and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world. . . . Our unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to pass for a few moments into a deep of the mind that had hitherto been too subtle for our imagination.27

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Noh allowed Yeats to hold these two opposite tendencies – to represent or to separate from the world – in productive balance. Yeatsian Noh is not a syncretism of two traditions, much as we (and Yeats) might want that to be true, but a balancing of the poetics of place and of non-place that describes Irish modernism more generally. In Noh there is a clash between the intensity of local experience and the lure of global forms that captures the Janus-faced geography of the locations of Irish modernism – Noh marks the point at which the turn to Asia is also the bend for home. Noh does not thereby become another genuinely Irish drama, identified by the ‘peasant quotient’ occluded in these abstract pieces. Quite the opposite – Yeats identifies in a certain landscape representation an abstraction of forms that allows him, more compactly and concretely, to paint the Irish landscape using a Japanese brush. At the heart of the play is Yeats’s relationship to the idea of mapping spaces and places in his work – we cannot talk about the scalar challenges of Yeats’s work without first thinking of how he maps his world. The Dreaming, of all the Noh-inflected plays that Yeats wrote, right up to Purgatory (1939), is inescapably focused on plotting, marking, noting and speaking the topographical names and features amongst which it is set. In this sense, it ought to be a prime exhibit in Edward Said’s argument that Yeats’s work is marked by a cartographic impulse. Writing in the late 1980s about Yeats and decolonisation, Said argued that it is necessary for a colonised people to ‘seek out, to map, to invent, or to discover’ a world that derives ‘from the deprivations of the present’.28 Drawing on Neil Smith’s discussion of the production of space and nature under capitalism, Said finds that the decolonising writer is obliged to invent new forms of space (and not simply recreate historical forms) for a postcolonial world: ‘One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land’.29 But in many ways, Said’s argument for reclamation misses the subtleties of Yeats’s relationship to land, territory, space, maps, and especially nation. The Dreaming is one of those Yeats works in which, while the impulse may be cartographic, the territory being mapped is far larger and less easily defined than the decolonising nation, and the purpose is not reclamation, renaming or reinhabiting a national space. The traces of Noh traditions alone that give shape to the play complicate such nationfocused dreams. What is at work in Yeats is not simply a reclamation of colonised spaces through imaginative description – wresting space from the idealised abstraction of colonial management – but a deeper engagement with the very processes and rhetoric of mapping itself. This impulse might be described as an undoing from within, a recognition of the already existing tensions within (and not seamless formation of) a field of representation that is the perfect expression of both colonial power and colonial anxieties – the map. It is in the Noh plays that we see some of this commitment to a more complex form of cartographical thinking emerge. The origins of Yeats’s fascination with Noh have long been traced back to 1913, when Yeats and Ezra Pound spent their first winter together at Stone Cottage, in Sussex. Pound had been working on editing the notes for and translations of Noh plays by Ernest Fenollosa (an American scholar of Japanese art and philosophy), which Pound was to publish as Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916). Yeats, as Carrie Preston writes, ‘was convinced that he had discovered the dramatic form he had been seeking, one that did not follow realist theatrical conventions but taught audiences to reach into the “deeper” and, for Yeats, more “Irish”, parts of the mind’.30 However, as Preston herself points out, it is not true that Pound and Fenollosa were Yeats’s entry

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into Japanese drama. In fact, Yeats was introduced to Noh by poet and critic Yone Noguchi, whom Yeats met in 1903, and the conversion narrative set in Stone Cottage masks a longer and deeper connection between Yeats and Noh.31 The attraction was not all one way, since Noguchi’s description of early meetings with Yeats detail an ‘unconditional surrender’, and a ‘sudden awakening of Celtic temperament in [his] Japanese mind’.32 In 1906, Noguchi wrote a short article for the Japan Times, offering some details of what he saw as the synergies between Yeats’s desire for a poetic theatre and the practice of Noh: I think, as Mr. Yeats once wrote, that the modern stage, in the West as in Japan, has been degenerating for some time. He has been attempting to reform and strengthen the Western stage through his own little plays which are built on Irish legend or history; and so far, in his own way, he is successful. I feel happy to think that he would find his own ideal in our No performance, if he should see and study it. Our No is sacred, and it is poetry itself. It is ten times more agreeable to have a thoroughly appreciative audience, however small, than a big house with little attention.33 That latter idea, that Noh is well served by a small audience, makes its way into Yeats’s introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan, in which he wrote, famously, of having invented ‘a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way – an aristocratic form’.34 Attention has long been focused on the latter half of that declaration, perhaps an early trace of Yeats’s later elitism or even Fascism. But the weight of the argument seems to lie with ‘indirect and symbolic’ form – a form that stands at an angle to the object being represented, abstract rather than realist, and that mediates between the world as we see it and the world as it might actually be. For Morash, the theatre offered Yeats ‘a form in which the specificity of things (grounded in the particularity of place) could enter into a dialectical engagement with the abstract thought that, for him, characterised modernity’.35 Yeats found this form and this idea in Asia: ‘It may be well if we go to school in Asia, for the distance from life in European art has come from little but difficulty with material’.36 The impetus is not all Asian, as what Yeats finds there resonates with a certain strand of Irish representational practice that he sees emergent: ‘I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think that they will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement’.37 There is a tension between this geographically expansive aspect of The Dreaming’s composition and the claustrophobia of the stages on which Yeats hoped to perform these plays. It is a tension that speaks to a much larger question of the play’s negotiation of scales and of the authenticity of Yeats’s version of the Noh, which have long exercised critics. One critic writes that At the Hawk’s Well might be read as ‘an embarrassing misreading of Pound’s misreading of Fenollosa’, while another characterises the plays as ‘exuberant fantasies bred in considerable ignorance’.38 Yet another accuses Yeats of treating the ‘Orient’ as a ‘storehouse of primeval traditions’.39 The argument largely turns on the authenticity or opportunism of Yeats’s Japanese turn, but Carrie Preston notes that Michio Ito and Yeats, in their collaboration on At the Hawk’s Well, ‘never used the language of authenticity. . . . Yeats was interested in adapting noh for his own aesthetic and political purposes rather than attempting an authentic recreation of it’.40 A desire by critics to parse and weigh the relationship, sniffing out any hint of

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either paternalism or inauthenticity, asks the impossible of Yeats – to surrender himself entirely to the rules of a rigid tradition in which he is decidedly inexpert. At the same time, the plays’ Irishness has come under scrutiny, the object of a familiar struggle in the field of modernism between those who wish to claim its Irish or its Japanese heritage.41 In the years before and since the centenary of the Easter Rising, that antagonism has coalesced around the question of whether, as Terence Brown puts it, the play dramatises the sentiment of ‘Easter 1916’ – ‘All changed, changed utterly’.42 The immediate historical moment of the composition of some of Yeats’s Noh work is inescapable: the first edition by the Cuala Press of Certain Noble Plays of Japan ends with the words ‘printed and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the county of Dublin, Ireland. Finished on the twentieth day of July, in the year of the Sinn Fein [sic] Rising, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’.43 When Yeats had nearly finished The Dreaming, he wrote to Lady Gregory that he thought it ‘the best play I have written for years . . . & I am afraid only too powerful politically’.44 A revolutionary play it undoubtedly is, but cast in the highly stylised form of a Noh play. It is as if the play itself is undecided, negotiating the distance between Irish setting and Japanese form, and between historical engagement and aesthetic experiment. As Barry Sheils writes, the Young Man entering, ‘praying in Irish’, ‘seems to interrupt, with reference to national politics, an exemplary exercise of spiritual internationalism, namely the capture of Japanese culture by English literature’.45 Towards the end of Yeats’s first winter at Stone Cottage, as his collaboration with Pound was intensifying, Yeats, Pound and others travelled to the home of Wilfred Scawen Blunt to offer him a celebratory dinner. The guest list for this so-called peacock dinner – Yeats insisted on a peacock being served – caused Yeats no little anxiety. The question of inviting Yone Noguchi came up, and Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory about it: Pound suggests our bringing Nagochi the Japanese poet, as ‘he will make it known among men of letters in Japan’. ‘It concerns the world of letters’ he says ‘& nobody else’. I hesitate about the Japanese, as I am afraid he may not know Blunt’s work & I cannot find out until Saturday till when he dines with me. He is quite a distinguished man & Prof of English at some Japanese University. I am afraid if full up with people, who might show ignorance and spoil the compliment.46 Yeats is probably right to be concerned – his first care is that the dinner be meaningful, and inviting a man who is not familiar with Blunt’s work would indeed make the evening somewhat less special. But, as Lucy McDiarmid points out, neither Pound nor Yeats expected it to be an intimate evening – both anticipated it becoming known, becoming part of a ‘world of letters’ through the sharing of details of the evening by a network of close acquaintances. If there is a practice of world literature at play here, it is one that is firmly rooted in gentlemanly camaraderie.47 While Noguchi was an expert on Noh theatre and may also have been a signal influence on the Yeats who was becoming more interested in Noh in early 1914, Noguchi’s outsider status here presents an opportunity for Pound and a problem for Yeats. For both of them, Noguchi is a stranger – to be either exploited or ignored. It is too easy to chalk all this up to a kind of inherent racism on both Pound’s and Yeats’s parts, although both poets’ later turns to fascism would support this reading. But what is more important at this moment is that Noguchi and Noh must be managed and mediated. In celebrating Blunt, the famous

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old man of anti-imperialism, Pound and Yeats encounter the problem of how exactly a performance tradition and a writer from the far side of the globe are to be integrated into a ‘world of letters’ that does not always have room for them. A few years later, just as Yeats was preparing his Four Plays for Dancers for publication, a former leading light of the Dublin literary stage, James Cousins, was spending a year teaching at Keio University in Japan. Cousins – who had a testy relationship with Yeats – and his wife Margaret had left Ireland for India in 1915 at the invitation of the Theosophist Annie Besant, and in 1919 Noguchi invited Cousins to lecture in Japan.48 Cousins was, on the whole, unimpressed with Japan, which he thought had capitulated to a Europeanised modernity and turned its back on tradition, a fact brought to a sharp point when he was surprised to be met at the railway station by a man wearing ‘a suit of rather rough English clothing and a bowler hat’, who turned out to be Noguchi.49 Later in Cousins’s stay, Noguchi brought him to see a Noh play, which affected Cousins very much. The most moving part of the evening was when Cousins found out that he had been sitting beside the widow of Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish–Greek writer and folklorist who had settled in Japan in 1890. Describing the experience of watching the play, Cousins slips into a familiar exoticising refrain: ‘I passed from the Japan of the twentieth century transition to the Japan of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’.50 He admired the fact that ‘there is not a realistic moment in the Noh-drama . . . It is sheer artifice – and its effect is the most intense that I have ever felt’. But here, too, Cousins’s encounter with Japan is tinged with disappointment, for he learned that Noh, far from being a popular institution, was a belated survivor of Japan’s old culture, and was kept alive by groups of the aesthetically faithful in small halls such as that in which the performance I am speaking of was held before about two hundred people.51 While Cousins and Yeats might have agreed about the power of artifice in Noh, what Yeats found laudable (Noh’s suitability as closet drama) was for Cousins a sign of an irreversible decline. Yeats saw in Noh a pure, ancient art and a catalyst for the revitalisation of European art; Cousins felt that the Noh tradition had already been lost, as Japan had capitulated to the pressures of an enforced, European ideal of modernity. Cousins retreated to India, secure in the knowledge that there, at least, he would continue to find an Eastern tradition, unsullied by European intervention. As Cousins, one of the most internationalist of Irish writers in the early twentieth century, retreats from Japan and falls back on a racialised idealisation of India, we see the limits not just of Yeats’s global modernism but of Irish modernism writ large.52 I end with these two anecdotes about Yeats’s and Cousins’s encounters with Noguchi in order to illustrate the position in which Yeats and Noh find themselves, mediating the distance between Ireland, Britain and Europe, and Japan and India. While the question of the authenticity of Yeats’s Noh is somewhat tired and ultimately undecidable, the debate itself, from Yeats’s time to the present, indicates the extent to which the four plays for dancers have always been plays about mapping and navigating distances in time and space. Throughout this chapter I have offered instances of how Yeats’s engagement with Noh theatre represents a crisis of scale for his practice. While the synthetic imagination of A Vision (1925 and 1937) seeks to answer the question of scale precisely

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by being vast – covering millennia, continents and planetary systems – The Dreaming of the Bones does not have this luxury. The concentration and brevity demanded by the Noh tradition leave Yeats no room to explore in detail the implications of the geographical reach of his imagination. Noh does, however, offer something of a solution to this problem of its enforced narrowness in its turn to spectrality. In the introduction to Certain Noble Plays, Yeats writes that the presence of ‘god, goddess or ghost reminds me at times of our own Irish legends and beliefs, which once it may be differed little from those of the Shinto worshipper’.53 Never far from the surface, Yeats’s interest in the occult, and especially in ghosts, drew him towards Noh, and indeed rubbed off on Pound when they worked together at Stone Cottage.54 In an explanatory note on The Dreaming, written for the publication of Four Plays for Dancers, Yeats explains the spiritual impetus of the story, which derives from some ill-defined belief shared ‘world-wide’: the dead dream back for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa, dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons; and there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created winding of the labyrinth of conscience. The Judwalis distinguish between the Shade which dreams back through events in the order of their intensity.55 The Judwalis appear again, crucially, in A Vision, as Yeats moves even farther away from Irish mythology alone and towards a radically larger set of mythical sources. The Dreaming contains an early version of the cosmological spiritual system in A Vision that Yeats will spend the rest of his years refining, a system whose principal goal is to measure, navigate and overcome the distances between East and West, past and present, visible and invisible. While the spirit world may be the centre of The Dreaming, with its centuries-old characters, the stage and lighting design of all Yeats’s Nohinspired plays was quite far from the world of spirits, given his instructions that they should be played under a ‘large chandelier’, in ‘the lighting we are most accustomed to in our rooms’.56 As Katherine Ebury has convincingly argued, Yeats was both obsessed with the new science of light that he saw being formulated around him in the early years of the twentieth century, and convinced that advanced lighting techniques (not chandeliers) could capture spectral presences of the stage. In this sense, too, The Dreaming feels like unfinished business, gesturing towards a more fully realised ghostly future that will come to fruition in Purgatory and will continue, becoming even more spectral, into the work of Beckett.57 The Dreaming of the Bones seems to pull in all these directions at once, suspended between near and far, local and global, visible and spiritual, and all the while troubling the boundaries of what we take to be ‘Irish’ or ‘modernist’.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

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Yeats, Collected Works, Volume II, p. 308. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 308. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, p. xv.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life II, p. 88. Morash and Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre, p. 48. Yeats, Variorum Poems, p. 490. de Man, ‘Symbolic Landscape’, p. 138. Lloyd, Anomalous States, p. 65. Synge, Collected Works, Volume III, p. 68. Ibid., p. 71. Yeats, Collected Works, Volume II, p. 307. Morash, ‘Bewildered Remembrance’, p. 128. Yeats, Collected Works, Volume II, p. 308. Yeats, Variorum Poems, pp. 401–2. Wilson, Yeats’s Iconography, p. 204. Qtd in Crohn Schmitt, ‘“Haunted by Places”’, pp. 70–1. Jordan, ‘Monastery of the Moon’, pp. 20–4. On anti-theatricality in Yeats’ plays see Puchner, Stage Fright, pp. 119–38. Morash, ‘Bewildered Remembrance’, p. 132. Armstrong, Reframing Yeats, p. 66. See Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey; and Parsons, The Ordnance Survey. Ordnance Survey Letters, Clare, vol. 1, p. 18. Ibid., p. 24. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’, or, Accomplishment, pp. 122–3, cited in Morash, ‘Bewildered Remembrance’, p. 123. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, p. xv. Ibid., p. v. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 272. Ibid., p. 273. Preston, Learning to Kneel, p. 64. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid. Noguchi, ‘Mr. Yeats and the No’. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, p. ii. Morash and Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre, p. 51. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, pp. v–vi. Ibid., p. i. Martin, ‘Yeats’s Noh’, p. xiv; Albright, ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Noh Theater’, p. 34. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, p. 282. Preston, Learning to Kneel, p. 65. See, for example, Daithí Ó hÓgain’s suggestion that the play’s dance is quintessentially Irish, as against Yeats’s own claims for its roots in the Noh’s movements: Ó hÓgáin, ‘Dreaming and Dancing’. Yeats, Variorum Poems, 391–4. Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, pp. 241–3. On The Dreaming and 1916 see also Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, pp. 53–67, and Morash, ‘Bewildered Remembrance’. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, n.p. Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life II, p. 88. Sheils, W. B. Yeats and World Literature, p. 128. Qtd in McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner, p. 52. Ibid., pp. 52–7. James and Margaret Cousins’ move to India is chronicled in their memoir, We Two Together. On the Cousins’ disappearance from the Irish literary scene, see Viswanathan, ‘Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism’.

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94 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

cóilín parsons Cousins, The New Japan, p. 12. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., pp. 74–5. For a longer elaboration of Cousins’ racialised internationalism see Viswanathan, ‘Ireland, India’, pp. 27–30. Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, p. xiv. Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life I, p. 505. Yeats, Four Plays, p. 129. See also Yeats, ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’ and ‘Calvary’, pp. 235–9. Yeats, Four Plays, p. 3. Ebury, ‘Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama’. See also Takahashi, ‘The Ghost Trio’, and Worth, ‘Enigmatic Influences’, p. 150.

Bibliography Albright, Daniel, ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Noh Theater’, The Iowa Review, 15:2 (1985), pp. 34–50. Armstrong, Charles I., Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Brown, Terence, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Cousins, James H., The New Japan: Impressions and Reflections (Madras: Ganesh, 1923). Cousins, James H., and Margaret E. Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950). Crohn Schmitt, Natalie, ‘“Haunted by Places”: Landscape in Three Plays of William Butler Yeats’, in Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri (eds), Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 53–83. de Man, Paul, ‘Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 125–44. Doherty, Gillian M., The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture, and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). Ebury, Katherine, ‘Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett’, in Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (eds), Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 229–47. Fenollosa, Ernest, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, Certain Noble Plays of Japan, from the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, Chosen and Finished by Ezra Pound, with an Introduction by William Butler Yeats (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1916). Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats, A Life I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats, A Life II: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jordan, Carmel, ‘Monastery of the Moon: Corcomroe Abbey and The Dreaming of the Bones’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 16 (1998), pp. 17–32. Lennon, Joseph, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). Lloyd, David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). McDiarmid, Lucy, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Martin, Augustine, ‘Yeats’s Noh: The Dancer and the Dance’, in Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray (eds), Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1990), pp. xiii–xviii. Moran, James, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005). Morash, Chris, ‘Bewildered Remembrance: W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and 1916’, Field Day Review, 11 (2015), pp. 121–36.

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Morash, Chris, and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noguchi, Yone, ‘Mr. Yeats and the No’, Japan Times (3 November 1907), p. 6. Ó hÓgáin, Daithí, ‘Dreaming and Dancing: W. B. Yeats’s Use of Traditional Motifs in “The Dreaming of the Bones”’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 8:1 (2002), pp. 57–75. Ordnance Survey Letters, Clare, Volume 1. Royal Irish Academy Box 14 B 23, Ask About Ireland, (last accessed 7 October 2020). Parsons, Cóilín, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Preston, Carrie, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Puchner, Martin, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Sekine, Masaru, ‘Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones’, Irish University Review, 45:1 (2015), pp. 54–68. Sekine, Masaru, and Christopher Murray (eds), Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1990). Sheils, Barry, W. B. Yeats and World Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Synge, John Millington, The Collected Works, Volume III: Plays I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982). Takahashi, Yasunari, ‘The Ghost Trio: Beckett, Yeats, and Noh’, The Cambridge Review, 107:2295 (1986), pp. 172–6. Vendler, Helen Hennessy, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Viswanathan, Gauri, ‘Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism’, Journal of World History, 15:1 (2004), pp. 7–30. Wilson, F. A. C., Yeats’s Iconography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960). Worth, Katharine, ‘Enigmatic Influences: Yeats, Beckett and Noh’, in Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray (eds), Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1990), pp. 145–58. Yeats, W. B., Four Plays for Dancers (New York: Macmillan, 1921). Yeats, W. B., The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001). Yeats, W. B., ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’ and ‘Calvary’, Manuscript Materials, ed. Wayne K. Chapman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Yeats, W. B., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russel K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

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5 Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border Maud Ellmann

I

n FINNEGANS WAKE Joyce coins the portmanteau word ‘borderation’, combining border with botheration, to hint that borders bring forth botheration and territorial strife.1 In another pun on borders, ‘The boarder incident prerepeated itself,’2 the inaudible ‘a’ in ‘boarder’ harks back to ‘The Boarding House’ in Dubliners, a story that centres on a ‘boarder incident’, in which a scheming landlady tricks a gullible boarder into marrying her daughter. In the Wake, the pun on ‘boarder incident’ evokes an image of Ireland itself as a boarding house, crammed with fractious tenants fighting for their borders in the face of ‘great hatred, little room’.3 Such battles, Joyce suggests, are destined to eternal recurrence, ‘prerepeating’ before they even start. Today the Irish border has reached its first centennial, having been established between 1920 and 1925. Its founding thereby coincides with the publication of Ulysses – itself an event that was fraught with border incidents, the most notorious of which occurred in 1919 when the US Postal Authorities confiscated and burned two issues of The Little Review containing portions of two episodes of Joyce’s novel. As Joyceans prepare to celebrate a hundred Bloomsdays, the Irish border might have been nearing the end of its prerepetitions, driven into obsolescence by demographic and political developments. With Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, however, the Irish border has come back like the return of the repressed, having been ignored by Brexiteers at the time of the disastrous referendum. Whether this border will be ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ or something in between remains to be negotiated. Imposed without regard to geographical demarcations, the Irish border currently stretches across 310 miles, some of which are water,4 and contains well over 200 crossing points. Maria Gatland, née Maguire, who was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1972 and is now (astoundingly) a Conservative councillor for Croydon, published a memoir of her paramilitary year in 1973, when only twenty border crossings counted as ‘approved roads’. These were equipped with customs posts: ‘But there are also nearly two hundred other roads where [the border] can be crossed, with no customs posts at all, and the only thing preventing people from using them is a sign which reads “Unapproved road”.’ Such a toothless sanction would scarcely have deterred the IRA, so the British Army undertook to make these routes impassable by blowing holes in them with explosives. ‘It was an exceptionally stupid plan,’ Maguire reports. ‘It certainly would not prevent our men from crossing the border’ and was ‘bound to enrage the local population on each side of the border who used the roads, especially farmers, and involve a new group of people in the conflict’.

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This tactic also placed the British Army in an ‘extremely vulnerable position’, with its soldiers stationed on isolated roads in country ideally suited to guerrilla warfare.5 Today these unapproved routes have been repaired, with few remaining signs of former craters, spikes and roadblocks at the border. Instead, this boundary snakes invisibly through rivers, villages and even dwelling places, splitting single households into separate nations. In one such household, perched on the divide between County Monaghan and County Fermanagh, the family ‘can go to bed in Northern Ireland and have their breakfast in the Republic of Ireland’, according to their neighbour, Mary Rafferty.6 The writer Eugene McCabe, author of the story ‘Victims’, discussed below, who describes himself as ‘a farmer who writes and a writer who farms’, lives on a farm extending on both sides of the border.7 On the outskirts of Clones in County Monaghan, the border cuts through Eamon Fitzpatrick’s grocery, hardware and fuel business: ‘Those fuel pumps are in the north and those ones in the south,’ the proprietor explained to a reporter in 2017, at a time when the Brexit referendum raised the prospect that a hard border, complete with customs checkpoints, could be reinstated in the middle of his property.8 Paul Muldoon reflects on such paradoxes in his poem ‘The Boundary Commission’:9 You remember that village where the border ran Down the middle of the street, With the butcher and baker in different states? The Boundary Commission, founded in 1924 to establish a viable boundary between the partitioned jurisdictions, failed to resolve these territorial ambiguities. Nebulous from the beginning, the Irish border has always been prone to disappear, at least from the attention of the nations to its south and east.10 ‘In different ways and for different purposes’, Joe Cleary argues, ‘the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom have all striven discursively to occlude the most militarised border in the archipelago.’ To sustain this occlusion, the border tends to be represented as an inevitable outgrowth of sectarian rivalry rather than a state-sanctioned agent of division: a falsification that enables Britain and the Republic of Ireland to represent themselves as ‘disinterested “external” brokers working to help the two “internal” communities overcome unfortunate legacies of sectarian bigotry’.11 Only during the Troubles of the late 1960s to 1998 did the border become inescapably visible in the form of roadblocks and military checkpoints, along with the watchtowers or ‘sangars’ that loomed over the hilltops of South Armagh, as captured in Donovan Wylie’s haunting photographs.12 For fifty years the British government turned a blind eye to Northern Ireland’s oppressive regime, allowing the Protestant majority to commandeer most of the available jobs and all the best housing through gerrymandering, ballot rigging and the ubiquitous threat of violence. But Britain was forced to take notice of the region when the provisional IRA resumed its military campaign in 1969. A different kind of darkness then descended on the embattled province, in which the media, instead of exposing the injustices that fuelled the conflict, stood behind the British Army, ignoring its collusion with Unionist paramilitaries, and attributed the ‘disturbances’ to atavistic tribal animosities: ‘naked sectarian hatred of the traditional Irish kind’, to quote the right-wing Daily Telegraph.13

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The border’s most recent disappearing trick occurred as a consequence of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, when the military installations were dismantled, along with customs checkpoints. After thirty years of bloodshed the violence – apart from some deadly outbursts – began to taper off. As the border’s visibility waned, however, so did the world’s attention to Northern Ireland, which once again receded into darkness. The British media, as Roy Greenslade points out, have largely reverted to the habit of ignoring the North, which has remained a deeply fractured society where religious ghettos persist behind ‘peace walls’, schooling is separated by religion, and ‘passionate disputes over language rights, same-sex marriage and abortion are unresolved’.14 Rather than vanishing altogether, the border has metastasised, producing extensive fault lines that threaten to shatter the precarious armistice. With the advent of Brexit – that ‘absolutely disastrous and . . . tragic mistake’, according to the novelist Anna Burns15 – those fault lines are liable to unleash tectonic forces, undermining the foundations of the peace. Largely invisible in politics, the Irish border has also been occluded in literature and other cultural forms, where it tends to feature obliquely, if at all.16 While the Troubles have brought forth a vigorous creative response, especially after the peace process allayed immediate dangers to life and limb, most of the writing to emerge from the struggle has centred on the turbulent cities of the North, Belfast and Derry. When an American student in Lionel Shriver’s irritating Belfast novel Ordinary Decent Criminals visits the Linen Hall library to ask for literature on the Troubles, the librarian scoffs, ‘This whole floor is the Troubles. You’d as well write a paper on the Planet, A.D.’ With her characteristic cheap cynicism, Shriver adds, ‘History was Ulster’s last viable export.’17 But it is an export produced largely in the cities, whereas the border that divides the rural counties, with a few notable exceptions, rarely surfaces in novels or short stories. The next part of this chapter addresses some of those exceptions, examining two borderland thrillers, Eugene McCabe’s ‘Victims’ (1976), set in County Fermanagh, and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera (1977), set near the author’s birthplace in Omagh, County Tyrone. These works rejig the conventions of the Big House novel, an elegiac genre from its inception in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) – that breakneck chronicle of the decline and fall of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy that Declan Kiberd has memorably described as ‘Gibbon on speed’.18 This genre, like the Ascendancy itself, continues to haunt a modern, capitalist Ireland in which the feudal order represented by the Big House is defunct. Posthumous from the beginning, the genre’s afterlife reached its apogee in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929), set during the earlier Troubles of 1920, which established the tropes that Northern Irish writers have recycled or recast: centrally, the dilapidated country mansion besieged by rebels and ultimately consumed in flames. Both McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas are loosely based on the abduction, on 3 October 1975, by rogue IRA operatives of the Dutch industrialist and Nazi concentration camp survivor, Tiede Herrema, who was held hostage for thirty-six days before his kidnappers capitulated to the authorities.19 Topical though these novels are, however, they also look back to Irish mythology, invoking opposing images of mother goddesses: in McCabe’s case, the Shan Van Vocht who demands her sons’ self-sacrifice for Ireland; in Kiely’s, the pagan goddess of the ‘nameless lake’20 desecrated by paramilitary violence: ‘The lake would never be the same again.’21 This opposition resembles Melanie Klein’s theory

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of infantile development in which the maternal breast is split into two contradictory imagos, the ‘good breast’ (the pagan goddess) – constant, nurturing, inexhaustible as a lake – versus the ‘bad breast’ (the Shan Van Vocht) – fickle, murderous, devouring.22 Thus Kiely’s rural goddess stands for an organic, presectarian community, as opposed to the nationalist cult of the Shan Van Vocht, a figure parodied in ‘Victims’ as a monstrous mother glutted with the flesh of her own farrow. In contrast to these borderland fictions, Anna Burns’s Belfast novel No Bones (2001) dispenses with maternal deities, both good and bad, as well as with the anachronistic tradition of the Big House. Set in the Catholic tenements of Ardoyne, this genre-bending Bildungsroman presents Northern Ireland as ‘a balkanized state continuously on the verge of disintegration’, in Cleary’s words, where the border can no longer be kept in place but fractures every household, neighbourhood and consciousness.23 While McCabe and Kiely are by no means hidebound by literary convention, having been schooled in modernism as well as in the realist tradition of the Big House novel, their innovations look tame in comparison to those of Burns, arguably the most inventive Irish writer since the heyday of modernism.

Eugene McCabe, ‘Victims’ The story ‘Victims’ provides the title for a collection of three short fictions which, like Joyce’s Dubliners, are united by their setting more than by their plot. Although McCabe’s stories share some of the same characters, they lack – or spurn – the continuity of novelistic form, each partitioned, as it were, within its own micronarrative, with scattered crossing-points. This fragmented structure supports the view, expressed in different ways by Elizabeth Bowen and Frank O’Connor,24 that the short story has thrived on the fissiparous state of Ireland, in contrast to the novel, which has benefited from the comparative stability of English ‘daily island life’, as Gertrude Stein describes it.25 The ostensible victims in McCabe’s novella are a jaded Anglo-Irish family called the Armstrongs, the inheritors of the Big House of Inver, which refers to Inver Townland in County Fermanagh but also to Somerville and Ross’s The Big House of Inver (1925), a family saga that allegorises the fall of the Ascendancy in the tradition of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. The Big House in ‘Victims’ is invaded by a motley crew of republican militants: ‘a one-eyed dummy, two imbeciles and a sadist’,26 in the bitter words of Millicent, the Armstrongs’ pregnant daughter. Millicent addresses this sneer to Bella Lynam, the fifth marauder and the focaliser of the story, whose character, according to Henry Patterson, is ‘plainly based’ on Maria Maguire, the IRA renegade.27 Like Bella Lynam, Maguire was studying English literature at University College Dublin when she was recruited as a ‘provo’ in the early 1970s, but defected after Bloody Friday, the Provisional IRA’s deadly bomb attack on Belfast in 1972 that killed nine people and injured another 130. McCabe’s Lynam, disillusioned like Maguire with the IRA’s military campaign, has been dragooned into this raid by Martin Leonard, the one-eyed leader of the cadre, who is acting under orders from Lynam’s married lover, Burke, the absent mastermind behind the operation. Burke’s orders are to hold the Anglo-Irish ‘gentlefolk’ (p. 143) hostage unless and until three IRA prisoners are released from Long Kesh; if the authorities drag their feet, one hostage is to be executed every six hours.

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The novella opens at an agricultural fair held in the grounds of Inver, where a ‘Union Jack flap[s] in the south wind’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ booms over the noisy crowd (p. 141). Officiating at the show is Colonel Armstrong, a decorated veteran of Montgomery’s campaign in World War II, who has authored a family history called ‘The Armstrongs in Ulster: The intruders who contributed’ (p. 170). His disenchanted wife, Harriet, who thinks him ‘inhuman’ (p. 170), has taken to drink. Her ex-lover, Alex Boyd-Crawford, ‘inheritor of one of the oldest names in Ulster’, is also a drinker whose bankruptcy seems to stand for the exhaustion of Anglo-Irish influence in Ireland: ‘I’m bankrupt every way,’ he mutters (p. 150). Also attending the fair are an American professor, whose complacent banalities about the Irish conflict infuriate Harriet, and Canon Plumb, a bigoted Anglican cleric who proclaims that Catholics have ‘a lower I.Q. than Negroes’ (p. 170). These unappealing friends of the family, together with Millicent, are later imprisoned with their captors in an all-night vigil while the state’s armed forces and the world’s media muster outside the walls. Cooped up in the house together, the Protestant grandees and their Catholic nationalist attackers could be seen as a microcosm of their fractious statelet: great hatred, little room. Before the raid, Leonard drives Lynam to a nearby house to pick up the brothers McAleer, two lookalike bomb makers named Pascal and Pacelli after former popes, together with Jack Gallagher, a psychopath with a castration complex who bears the surname of Herrema’s kidnapper, Eddie Gallagher. The McAleer twins, nicknamed Tick and Tock because of their obsession with clocks and time bombs, invite Lynam to meet their obese, bedridden mother, a grotesque ‘blancmange’ (p. 159) of Catholic and nationalist piety, who looks as though ‘she could deliver Pascal and Pacelli fully grown’ (p. 157). Decorating her fetid bedroom are portraits of a ‘frail Madonna’ and of Pádraic Pearse, ‘his head in a halo of flames’ (p. 157), with his poem ‘The Mother’ printed underneath: a lament, quoted reverently by the bloated invalid, in which a mother grieves that she must sacrifice her sons while taking comfort in the fact that they ‘were faithful and they fought’ (p. 158). Pearse’s filicidal mother, like Mrs McAleer herself, harks back to the legend of the Shan Van Vocht, the legendary poor old woman who enjoins her sons to die for the ‘four green fields’ of Ireland: hence Stephen Dedalus’s quip about ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.28 Curiously, the ‘old sow’ in ‘Victims’ seems to be content with only ‘three green fields’ (p. 158), as if she had forgotten or relinquished Ulster – or devoured it. Lynam is convinced that this is the last day of her life, and her sense of doom aligns her with her Anglo-Irish hostages: ‘We’re both dead’ (p. 195), she tells Harriet. The death sentence that hangs over both the hostages and their captors makes the siege seem futile and redundant, as if all these ‘victims’ – of ideology as well as violence – had to be killed twice over. If Colonel Armstrong regards his forebears as ‘the intruders who contributed’, the raiders intrude on the intruders, who have outlasted their presumptuous civilisation. But the raiders themselves are portrayed as the ‘Living Dead’, a phrase that Harriet recites in a grim couplet: A tale lamentable of things ill done For the living dead: no comfort from the sun. (p. 217) When the murderous Gallagher, in a furious assertion of machismo, forces a kiss on Lynam, she recoils ‘as though she had been kissed by a grinning corpse’ (p. 207). These

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hints that both the Ascendancy and its violent antagonists are undead add a Gothic dimension to this thriller. Once the militants invade the house, the narrative holds its readers hostage by shutting out the external world and zooming in on the imprisoned occupants. A captive audience in every sense, readers are obliged to interpret what is happening outside the house through half-heard sounds and half-seen glimpses. At one point, footsteps overhead alert the occupants to the presence of ‘Rats on the back roof, four or more’ (p. 199), meaning that scouts have been dispatched to penetrate the mansion from above, in defiance of the militants’ conditions. Retribution follows swiftly but off stage: Boyd-Crawford, having been drugged unconscious by the raiders, is hauled out of view by Tick and Tock, after which two pistol shots ring out in the adjacent hall. Like the hostages, readers are left to guess at the identity of both the shooter and the shot, as if the narrative itself had been infected by the secrecy of the conspirators. The resulting confusion is never resolved; later, Leonard fires two bullets into Boyd-Crawford’s inert body, which twitches after the first shot, as if the Anglo-Irish bankrupt had to be killed not only twice but three or four times to be terminated – such is the persistence of the undead. The standoff ends when the authorities offer to release three prisoners from Long Kesh in exchange for arresting three of the raiders. Faced with this ultimatum, Leonard decides to swap Lynam, along with Tick and Tock, on the grounds that Leonard and Gallagher have more to offer to the military campaign than an ambivalent young woman and two nerdy mechanics – ‘Don’t look quite the full shilling do they?’ as Harriet remarks (p. 197). A flashback reveals that the absent Burke, dismayed that Lynam has aborted their unborn child instead of being ‘a seed bed for his image’ (p. 152), has assigned her to this ‘suicidal’ (p. 144) mission in revenge. Lynam had decided that the child ‘had no future’ (p. 152), but it does have a future in the novella’s imagery, which is haunted with references to unborn, dying and abandoned babies: the pregnant Millicent, mortally endangered by the militants; the tinker woman who begs a ‘copper’ for the sickly ‘baba’ in her arms (p. 146); the shopping bag floating down the river that Lynam mistakes for a ‘Moses basket’ (p. 153); the assassinated ‘victim’, Alex Boyd-Crawford, whose curled-up corpse looks like ‘an abandoned foetus wrapped in tweed and hessian’ (p. 211); along with allusions to the farrow-eating Shan Van Vocht. While Lynam is treated sympathetically by McCabe, and granted an interiority denied to her male confederates, her abortion links her metaphorically to the Shan Van Vocht and her avatar, the McAleeses’ paralytic mother, whose immobility seems only to enhance her insidious power. The story hints that the militants, for all their swaggering machismo, are puppets manipulated by an off-stage female force, comparable to Lady Macbeth – another infanticidal mother. The men may seem to call the shots, but the power of life and death belongs to the old sow that eats her sons. The border in ‘Victims’ makes itself felt more as a class barrier than a geographical division, a barrier enshrined in the Big House in which the Protestant Ascendancy historically immured itself. As Elizabeth Bowen explains in her history of her family’s Big House, Bowen’s Court, each of these ‘house-islands’, with its intense, centripetal life, placed a ‘frame’ around the lives of its inhabitants, in which the Anglo-Irish lived like only children, isolated from the local population by religion, nationality and social class – ‘singular, independent and secretive’.29 Entrenched in an island within an island and bordered by a restive underclass, ‘the big house people were handicapped, shadowed and

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to an extent queered – by their pride, by their indignation at their decline and by their divorce from the countryside in whose heart their struggle was carried on’: a struggle to maintain a style of living far beyond their means. ‘Victims’ of their own pretensions, as well as of ‘ennui’ – ‘that threat to life in Ireland’30 – the Armstrongs ultimately fall victim to the violent avengers of the dispossessed. Easily invaded and commandeered, their Big House makes a flimsy border but a stifling trap.

Benedict Kiely, Proxopera Kiely’s Proxopera also centres on a violated house, though this is not an ancestral pile but the realisation of a childhood dream of Granda Binchey, the main character, who had always yearned to own the picturesque white house that overlooked the ‘nameless lake’.31 A cultivated former schoolteacher, Binchey is a middle-class Catholic widower who had been married to a Protestant, and hence belongs to a postfeudal, postsectarian dispensation – a dispensation jeopardised by the resurgence of tribal animosities. In Proxopera, as in ‘Victims’, Binchey’s family is held hostage in his home by IRA militants, but in Kiely’s novella three masked gunmen force Binchey to drive a proxy bomb into the nearby town where he was born and raised, threatening to kill his family if he disobeys their orders. Returning from a holiday in Donegal, the Bincheys are surprised not to be greeted by their housekeeper, Minnie, who is later found gagged and tied to a chair. The gunmen who assaulted her proceed to hold the family hostage while they wait for a bomb, disguised in a creamery can, to be delivered with the milk in the early morning – a bad breast indeed. When it arrives, Binchey embarks on his mission of murder and destruction, ferrying the bomb – ‘delicate as a virgin’ (p. 35) – across the perilous obstructions in the road, including a military checkpoint where the old man is held up by a friendly longwinded policeman in a nail-biting interlude. At the last moment, Binchey flouts his tormentors’ orders and diverts the car into a bog, escaping just before the bomb explodes harmlessly with a ‘muffled boom’ in ‘a pillar of cloud’ (p. 57). Convalescing from this traumatic episode, Binchey learns that his family has survived, although his son lost a kneecap to the raiders before they fled. Two of the attackers have been blown up by their own bomb, but not before setting fire to Binchey’s beloved white house ‘to destroy fingerprints’ (p. 62) – an absurd precaution since Binchey had already recognised one local assailant by his feet, another by his eyes: ‘Mad Eyes Minahan’ (p. 30). We never learn what happened to the third assailant, probably the ringleader ‘Corkman’ (p. 9 and passim), as Binchey identifies him by his accent. What we do know is that Binchey’s terrible gamble has paid off: both the town and his family have survived, and the old man has emerged from the ordeal as a hero. Even the house has been burned but ‘not destroyed’ (p. 65); too cowardly to do their own bombing, the militants have also proved incompetent at arson. The novella therefore ends with a ray of hope that the house will be restored but also with the shadow of a gunman on the loose. As many critics have noted, Troubles fiction tends to be generically conservative, adhering to the conventions of the thriller and the romance. Proxopera shows all the suspense of a thriller, but its narrative form is more adventurous, making use of the modernist technique of stream of consciousness. During the long vigil when the household is waiting for the ‘milk delivery’ (p. 27), Binchey’s interior monologue

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takes over the narrative. His nocturnal reflections, roaming between the present and the past in the tradition of Joyce’s Molly Bloom, fill in some of the backstory behind the current crisis: Bearing the bomb, an angel of death, he will in the morning drive past the graveyard in which his wife is buried. . . . The two main paths in the graveyard are cruciform, Protestants to the left as you enter, Catholics to the right, the cross that divided them in life divided them also in death: on one arm of the cross the grave of my father and mother and beside it my wife, a controversial placing perhaps, since she had been born and died a Protestant. . . . The evening I asked her father could I marry her, and he said yes, he walked with me to the edge of the town where the roads meet and he talked with melancholy about what was to come on Europe and the world. (pp. 22–3) This reverie, which stretches over several paragraphs, alternates between the third and the first person, breaching the border between character and narrator. Images of borders and border crossings also figure prominently in the monologue itself: first in the graveyard with its cruciform paths that partition Protestants from Catholics, and second at the crossroads where Binchey asked his future father-in-law for the hand of his daughter, a Protestant woman destined to be buried, as well as married, in Catholic territory. Thus the crossroads marks a convergence of the Protestant and Catholic communities, but this union is overshadowed by the crisis of Europe on the verge of World War II; the word ‘crisis’, incidentally, derives from a Greek word for a turning-point in the course of a disease, a kind of temporal crossroads. At one level, Proxopera is a howl of civilised protest against the latest paramilitary outrage, the IRA’s heinous proxy bomb campaign having been launched in 1973. But a musical pattern of leitmotifs lends a deeper dimension to the narrative. One such leitmotif is that of milk, whose nutritive connotations are defiled by association with the bomb: in Kleinian terms, the good breast has been turned into the bad, ‘shattering’ breast (p. 35). Feminised by its mammary associations, the bomb is also figured as an untouched virgin: the leader of the bomb squad warns Binchey to avoid any bumps on the road because ‘She’s as delicate as a virgin’ (p. 35). Put together, these metaphors transform the bomb into a virgin mother, a murderous Madonna, a lethal instantiation of the Shan Van Vocht. As Binchey drives the ‘milk’ into the bog, he reflects that ‘here . . . should surely to Satan, be the place for the virgin to awake, relax, open legs, abandon the membrane’ (p. 56). The bomb’s ‘membrane’ belongs to a network of images of boundaries, borders, thresholds and hymeneal partitions in the text: the violated ‘doorway’ of the house (p. 9), the military checkpoints at the town limits, the ‘half-a-hundred ridges and bridges’ on the ‘long route’ (p. 3), the ‘high, green, terraced banks’ (p. 46) that flank the road, the reeds that ‘frame’ the ‘nameless lake’ (pp. 6, 55), the crossed paths that segregate the two religions in the graveyard, bordered by ‘spiked rails’ (p. 42) that separate the living from the dead, and even the masks that shield the gunmen’s faces, imposing a barrier to sympathy and recognition. In his memoir Drink to the Bird, Kiely explains that Binchey was modelled on Michael J. Curry, a beloved educator who influenced ‘the lives of wave after wave of men’ who passed through his school: ‘His mannerisms, his remarks, his witticisms became portion of the folklore of the Town.’32 Familiar with generations of

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the town’s inhabitants, Binchey represents the continuity of the community, notably by recognising fathers in their sons: he identifies the gunman by his father’s feet, while the talkative policeman is the living echo of his ‘longwinded’ father (p. 36). Through Binchey’s long (and conspicuously patrilineal) memory, Kiely evokes ‘a Heaney-esque sense of place’, as Elmer Kennedy-Andrews has observed; a ‘totemistic, hieratic, magical landscape, “instinct with signs” of folkloric belief’.33 Among such beliefs is the legend Binchey remembers as he drives his deadly cargo ‘towards the nameless lake of the mad old women’ (p. 55) – the lake where these women are fabled to have drowned. These mad old women may allude to the poor old woman or the Shan Van Vocht who embodies Ireland under its foreign yoke, but instead of exhorting young men to die for their violated nation, in the manner of Cathleen ni Houlihan or Pádraic Pearse’s ‘Mother’, these madwomen give themselves up to the ‘goddess’ (p. 2) of the lake – presumably a pagan goddess predating Christian Ireland. The lake and the madwomen who surrender to its watery embrace therefore represent a local piety, older and deeper than the nation and the nationalist cult associated with the Shan Van Vocht. By invoking this myth of an organic community, Kiely discounts the political motives of the militants, presenting their violence as mere desecration. As Kennedy-Andrews points out, ‘Terrorist violence is taken out of a political context and treated metaphysically, as the manifestation of evil and madness.’ The militants are ‘denied a human face’,34 literally in the sense that they are masked, and the narrative dwells with a kind of morbid fascination on the serpentine hissing of their stifled breath (p. 12). ‘A Big House novel with a contemporary twist’, as Eamonn Hughes describes it,35 Proxopera invokes this long-established genre to imply that the moral issues have remained unchanged. Today, as yesterday, ‘the men of violence’ – as Margaret Thatcher called them – are hell-bent on destroying the ‘traditional sanctity and loveliness’36 of country homes. By eternalising the Troubles (as Thatcher did) as a Manichean struggle of good against evil, Kiely oversimplifies the conflict, reducing his insurgents – in Belfast speak – to ‘wee eejits’ inflamed by a toxic ideology. The euphemism ‘the Troubles’, which is applied to both the War of Independence and the thirty-year struggle in the North, encourages the tendency to conflate these episodes in a myth of cyclical tribal bloodletting.

Anna Burns, No Bones While Kiely presents a rural paradise defiled by motiveless malignity, Anna Burns presents an urban war zone where violence is endemic and inescapable. In Burns’s Belfast, terrorism comes from inside, not from outside in the form of masked invaders; the family home is a hotbed rather than a refuge from carnage. The border between good and evil, innocence and guilt, firmly reinstated in Proxopera, disintegrates in Burns’s world, where everyone is ‘hailed’ into the conflict, interpellated into its insidious web.37 The nameless heroine of Burns’s Milkman (2018), for example, is ensnared from the moment she is hailed by the ‘renouncer of the state’, her paramilitary stalker, despite her resistance to his sexual harassment. In a city tyrannised by vigilantes, as well as by the British Army in collusion with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and policed by gossip and mutual surveillance, the only way out is exile or madness. Amelia Lovett, the heroine of No Bones, chooses the first getaway only to succumb to the second, fleeing to London where she undergoes a mental breakdown.

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Deconstructing the Irish Bildungsroman, as epitomised in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, No Bones replaces the novel of growth with a jagged montage of disintegration. Instead of commanding the limelight, Amelia shifts in and out of view, sometimes speaking in the first person, sometimes relegated to the third, and frequently dislodged by other characters. Rather than being a continuous narrative, the novel is fractured into twenty-three vignettes that juxtapose the Troubles without to the troubles within the characters’ disordered minds. Many of the titles of these vignettes apply the language of warfare to private struggles, thus conflating the personal with the political. The vignette titled ‘Battles, 1987’, for example, concerns Amelia’s struggle with alcoholism, ‘battles’ standing in for ‘bottles’ throughout the episode; ‘Safe House’ refers to her search for refuge after her release from mental hospital. Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s writing with its slapstick humour, Shandean digressions and ‘preposterous dreamscapes’,38 No Bones makes ‘no bones’ about the collective psychosis of the Troubles, the violence that spills out of the home into the streets and back again. Public and private cannot be kept apart, each infected by the paranoia of the other. Commenting on the reception of No Bones, Burns recalls, ‘the critics seemed to think I was writing about a dysfunctional family to show up the dysfunctional society, but it was actually the other way round. The Troubles was the backdrop and the family stuff felt more important and urgent.’39 If these critics got the book the wrong way round, however, this is because the borders between the home, the statelet and the mind are radically undermined. Throughout the novel ‘hard borders’ are set up, only to be broken down. In the first episode the residents of Ardoyne, warned about marauding rioters, barricade themselves into their homes. For the next twenty-five years, Ardoyne hunkers down in siege mentality, boarded up in fear as much as timber. Notably, Burns avoids identifying sides in the ensuing mêlée, presenting violence as a contagion rather than a systematic tit-for-tat: a contagion in which the borders between religious camps, as well as those between the public and the private sphere, succumb to nightmarish confusion. Also confused is the conventional borderline between soft-hearted women and belligerent men, that stereotype enshrined in much of the fiction of the Troubles, such as Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones (1987). In No Bones, Beckett’s ‘peace-loving mother’40 gives way to the sororicidal Mariah Lovett, who instructs her daughter Amelia in the rules of fighting, epitomised by Rule (h): ‘Think “I’m going to kill this person” and pretend that’s all you’ve got to do that’s unpleasant for the rest of your life’ (p. 100). Where McCabe and Kiely present malignant femininity as a covert, mysterious force, operating by remote control in the case of Mrs McAleese, or disguised as milk in Proxopera, Burns’s women – like her men – make ‘no bones’ about their savagery in a milieu where violence has long been established as the norm. Take Bronagh McCabe, Amelia’s cutthroat schoolmate, whose career in violence begins at a Youth Training Programme: a quixotic ‘mixed community pilot scheme’ (p. 137) that descends into rioting when Bronagh loses her temper and dispatches most of the participants to the casualty ward. After a stint in prison, Bronagh reemerges as a ‘provy’ with six small sons, all named after Irish freedom fighters, including the hilarious ‘Baby Wolfe Tone’ (p. 256). Even the children’s teddy bears look like casualties of Bloody Friday: ‘One had an arm missing, the other an eye missing, the third had stuffing spilling out from everywhere’ (p. 258). In need of ‘fast sex’ (p. 252) to work herself up to a bombing attack, Bronagh pounces on Amelia – now

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a frail shell-shocked anorexic – as a convenient target for her erotomania. In another cartoonish scene of kinky sex, Amelia is nearly raped by her demonic brother Mick and his slavering wife when a gang of seven girls, all called Mary, set to pummelling the couple, inflicting their bloodiest attack on Mick: ‘They ripped him apart, tore his flesh from his body and left him to die in the hallway.’ This scene of sparagmos or dismemberment, where Mick is torn to pieces by the Mary-maenads like Pentheus by the Bacchae, reflects the fragmented structure of the novel itself, as well as the psychological disintegration of its terrorised protagonists. No Bones contains two mad scenes, the first involving Vincent, Amelia’s childhood friend, and the second Amelia herself. In both cases the reader is plunged into the characters’ delusions, deprived of a retrospective metacommentary to distinguish the real from the imagined. When Vincent, for example, is questioned by the psychiatrist Dr Parker (‘Nosey Parker’, p. 163), in a diagnostic interview that bears an ominous resemblance to a police interrogation, the reader is placed in the same position as the patient, ‘hearing voices’. ‘Transmissions were flying thick and fast about the place. “. . . doesn’t respond to treatment, Parker [. . .] couldn’t quite be classed as schizophrenic” [. . .] “Oh for God’s sake! Borderline then. Psychotic incidents, call them what you will!”’ (pp. 164–5, my emphasis). Presumably, Victor is overhearing doctors quarrelling about his case, but these voices, ‘flying thick and fast’, confound the ‘borderline’ between the inside and the outside of his mind. As Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem observes, Burns ‘develops a poetics of doubt . . . registered as madness, vacillation, hesitancy, fragmentation, forgetting, self-reflexive interrogation, and a desperate and dogged uncertainty regarding the truth claim’.41 What Cleary calls the ‘spectral presence’42 of the border emerges in Victor’s ‘borderline’ insanity, as well as in persistent images of thresholds, edges, precipices, walls and barricades. In the last chapter, Amelia, visiting from London in 1994, invites her Belfast friends to join her on a day out. So accustomed are these friends to what amounts to lockdown that they balk at the idea of breaking out of their cocoons. ‘Wasn’t it bad enough trying to exist in your own house, trying to do a weekend in your very own surroundings, without going off and looking for trouble somewhere else?’ (p. 334). Eventually deciding that their ‘long-established, insular identities’ will survive the outing, so long as they can ‘come back and be miserable later on’ (p. 335), the friends take off in a rented car with a chary Amelia in the driver’s seat. The day trip takes them through several borders, beginning with the city limits and culminating at the Irish coastline, where they board a boat to the island of Rathlin – ‘sad, often massacred little Rathlin’ (p. 359) – infamous for its bloodbaths of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that foreshadow the current carnage of the mainland. Here, these citified intruders are greeted with suspicion by the xenophobic islanders, who freeze them out, much as the islanded communities of Protestant Shankill and Catholic Ardoyne ostracise each other in Belfast. Snubbed when they ask for food and shelter, the daytrippers instinctively make their way to the ‘Cliff of the Screaming’, though none of them knows about this name; nor do they know that ‘on this cliff, as on every cliff in Rathlin, at some time or other in its history, people had been butchered and murdered and then thrown over it’ (p. 357). Having lived on edge, and on edges, since their childhood, these edgy friends find themselves drawn to this bloodstained cliff edge: ‘there was something familiar about sitting, nervy, on the edge of such a borderline. They had felt the cliff’s pull and had gravitated naturally towards it’

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(p. 357). This ‘borderline’, which marks the limit between land and sea, also represents the edge between the outer and the inner worlds, for Amelia recognises the Rathlin cliffs as those she dreamt about in the mental hospital. In this dream, Amelia is passing through the ‘old famine graveyard’ in the Glens of Antrim when she catches sight of her schoolmate Roberta, who was blown up by a bomb in 1975, ‘standing on the edge of the cliff’ (p. 291). This allegorical terrain suggests that Amelia’s own self-imposed famine has brought her to the edge of suicide: ‘It was a heavy drop, a deep, sleepy drop, easy, so easy, to let go, just fall over, and disappear’ (p. 291). More ghosts crowd into the dreamscape: ‘instead of just the two of them, there were now others, half-present, half-not-present, inching their way out of the darkness towards her’ (p. 292). The revenants include Amelia’s murdered school friends but also the countless victims of the Troubles, the maimed, the murdered and the disappeared. To get away from these familiar compound ghosts, Amelia ‘stepped back without hesitation and fell off the edge of the cliff’ (p. 292) – a fall repeated several times within the nightmare. The implication is that Amelia has to cross the ‘borderline’ between the living and the dead in order to come back to life. The border’s spectral presence also makes itself felt in Amelia’s life-threatening anorexia, her private ‘famine graveyard’ (p. 291). Coinciding with the IRA Hunger Strike in Long Kesh prison in 1981, Amelia’s self-starvation can be understood as an attempt to barricade the borders of her body. Just as the Ardoyne residents board up the orifices of their homes, so Amelia strives to insulate her body from invasion by a hostile world. In this sense, her condition could be seen as an embodiment of the partitioned state, her anorexia the suicidal consequence of closing borders. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, in an influential study, introduces the concept of the ‘skin-ego’, which he defines as a psychic border or envelope modelled on the epidermal surface of the body.43 Like the skin, the skin-ego performs the dual function of containment and absorption, protecting the contents of the body from spillage or inundation while also filtering exchanges with the outer world. In this sense the skinego (and the skin) resembles a territorial border, which functions as both a limit and a crossing. The Northern Irish term for such a border is a ‘march’; as Seamus Heaney explains, The verb [march] meant to meet at the boundary, to be bordered by, to be matched up to and yet marked off from; one farm marched another farm; one field marched another field; and what divided them was the march drain or the march hedge.44 What divides is also what connects: in this sense the skin ‘marches’ on the outside and the inside of the body, forming an interface between them. If this border grows too soft or hard, it produces ‘borderation’, resulting in blockades or ruptures like those inflicted by the British Army on unapproved crossings. Anzieu explains that the skin-ego’s border can become too rigid, stifling the ego and blocking out the vitalising influence of the environment. But the skin-ego can also become too porous – the ‘sieve Skin-ego’ – allowing the contents of the self to drain away. Anzieu cites a dream reported by an anorexic girl: ‘my skin gets all full of holes like a sieve, and all organs, the heart, the lungs, etc. seep through the holes to the outside and I am completely empty inside’.45 This case casts light on Burn’s novel, where anorexia implies the need to establish a ‘hard border’ to protect the self not only against invasion by ‘foreign

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bodies’ but also against leakage from within. The fear of being emptied out may be signalled by the title No Bones, which has several reference points within the novel – to the area of Ardoyne called ‘the Bone’, for instance – but also connotes an inner vacancy or destitution. A desperate attempt at self-containment, anorexia could be seen as a means of both revealing and concealing a deboned, eviscerated sense of self. Writing at the end of the last century, Anzieu attributes the malaise of his times to a disturbance of the collective skin-ego, which has resulted in a failure of containment and an overcompensating drive to harden borders. If I were to sum up the situation of the west – perhaps of all humanity – at the end of the twentieth century, I would emphasize the need to set limits: limits to demographic expansion, to the arms race, to nuclear explosions, to the speedingup of history, to economic growth, to insatiable consumption, to the widening gap between the rich nations and the third world, the huge scale of scientific projects or economic enterprises, the invasion of the private sphere by the media of mass communication, the incessant pressure to break records, at the cost of over-training and doping, the compulsion to go faster, farther, more expensively, at the price of congestion, nervous tension, cardiovascular diseases and general discontent.46 But the flipside of this destruction of limits, as Andrzej Werbart has observed, is the ‘longing for “stony” borders and unwavering norms, the allure of nationalism and fundamentalism’, which ‘runs parallel to and is a reaction to the culture of boundlessness’.47 Although Anzieu did not live to witness it, the current response to Covid-19 – a foreign body that knows no borders – exemplifies his point. Having spread across the globe, due to unlimited air travel, this virus has brought about a worldwide lockdown, closing borders, grounding planes and imprisoning civilians in their homes – if they are fortunate enough to have them. Everyone is now enduring the ‘borderation’ that afflicted Northern Ireland for much of the last century, hunkering down in fear of an invader more insidious and genocidal than the masked gunmen of the Troubles.

On the Edge This chapter has traced some of the ways that the Irish border has informed the fiction of the North, comparing the rural borderland of McCabe and Kiely to the urban milieu of Burns. Sometimes the border materialises as a barrier, as in the military checkpoint of Proxopera; but in Burns’s Belfast novels the border insinuates itself more stealthily, partitioning the city street by street, church by church, and house by house. The peace process provided reason to hope that the Northern Irish border might turn into a ‘march’, in Heaney’s terms: The word did not mean to walk in a military manner but to be close, to lie alongside, to border upon and be bordered upon. It was a word that acknowledged division, but it contained a definite suggestion of solidarity as well.48 The Brexit débâcle, however, compounded by the present epidemic, threatens to replace marches with hard borders not only in Ireland but across the suffering world.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 528 line 31. Ibid., p. 81 lines 32–3. W. B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’ (1932), Collected Poems, p. 255 line 12. Garrett Carr, who followed Colm Tóibín’s lead in walking the length of the border, realised that he would need ‘to borrow a boat occasionally’; see Carr, The Rule of the Land, loc. 93. Maguire, To Take Arms, pp. 80–1. ‘Homes and Businesses Divided by Irish Border’. Storey, review of McCabe and Kiely, p. 129; and Tóibín, Bad Blood, p. 125. ‘Splits Across the Irish Border?’ Paul Muldoon, ‘The Boundary Commission’, p. 635 lines 1–3. The disappearing border works to smugglers’ advantage: Clive White, the wide boy in Glenn Patterson’s Troubles novel, The International, ‘developed a special fondness for border towns and border people. He admired the pragmatism that could wish the boundary away at the same time as profiting from its existence; he loved the way a cow, say, became less and more than itself when translated across the invisible line’ (p. 92). Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, pp. 99, 100. Louise Purbrick, in her essay ‘British Watchtowers’ in Wylie’s British Watchtowers, explains that ‘sangars’ was the Royal Engineers’ term for watchtowers (p. 63). The last sangar was demolished in 2007 (p. 70). See Greenslade, ‘The Belfast Blindspot’. Ibid., p. 32. Gatti, ‘A History of Violence’, p. 29. See Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, p. 104. Shriver, Ordinary Decent Criminals, pp. 173, 175. Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 244. See Kathy Sheridan, ‘Tiede Herrema’. Another source for Proxopera, in addition to the Herrema kidnapping, was a Dublin newspaper report ‘about the man near the village of Kesh, County Fermanagh, who saw red and turned his bomb-burdened automobile on the gunmen who had so burdened it, and sent them scarpering, for their precious, patriotic lives’ (Kiely, Drink to the Bird, p. 146). This incident is referred to in Proxopera (p. 40). See also Kennedy-Andrews, ‘Benedict Kiely’s Troubles Fiction’, p. 110. Kiely, Proxopera, pp. 6, 55. Ibid., p. 1. See, for instance, Klein, ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, p. 132 and passim. ‘For many writers’, as Cleary points out, ‘the conflict in the North is generally not conceived as a story of state borders (of partition) at all, but as one of sectarianism and communal borders’ (Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, p. 108). Burns is one of those writers for whom borders are more intimate and ubiquitous than the state frontier. See Bowen, ‘Pictures and Conversations’, p. 276; Frank O’Connor, ‘The Lonely Voice’, pp. 85–7. Stein, ‘What is English Literature’, pp. 14–15 and passim. McCabe, ‘Victims’, p. 201. All page numbers in this section refer to the edition of ‘Victims’ in the Bibliography. Patterson, ‘Border Violence’, p. 158. See Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan, p. 7; Joyce, Portrait, p. 220; Ulysses, 15.4581. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, p. 20. Bowen, ‘The Big House’, pp. 27, 28.

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31. Kiely, Proxopera, pp. 6, 55. All page numbers in this section refer to the edition of Proxopera in the Bibliography. 32. Kiely, Drink to the Bird, p. 146. 33. Kennedy-Andrews, ‘Benedict Kiely’s Troubles Fiction’, p. 111. 34. Ibid., p. 112. 35. Hughes, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 36. Yeats, ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, line 42, in Collected Poems, p. 245. 37. The concepts of ‘hailing’ and ‘interpellation’ come from Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. 38. Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, p. 137. 39. Gatti, ‘A History of Violence’, p. 28. 40. Rolston, ‘Mothers, Whores and Villains’, p. 46. 41. Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, p. 145. 42. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, p. 130. 43. Anzieu, The Skin-Ego. 44. Heaney, ‘Something to Write Home About’, p. 55. 45. See Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, pp. 67–71, 110–17; Weizsächer, ‘Dreams’, pp. 189–90. 46. Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, p. 7. 47. Werbart, ‘The Skin is the Cradle of the Soul’, p. 56. 48. Heaney, ‘Something to Write Home About’, p. 55.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 121–76. Anzieu, Didier, The Skin-Ego, trans. Naomi Segal (London: Routledge, 2016). Bowen, Elizabeth, Bowen’s Court (New York: Knopf, 1942). Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Pictures and Conversations’ (1975), in The Mulberry Tree, pp. 265–98. Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘The Big House’ (1940), in The Mulberry Tree, pp. 25–30. Bowen, Elizabeth, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Virago, 1986). Burns, Anna, No Bones (2001; New York: Norton, 2013). Carr, Garrett, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, kindle edn (London: Faber, 2017). Cleary, Joe, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Davis, Wes, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Fadem, Maureen E. Ruprecht, The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Gatti, Tom, ‘A History of Violence’, interview with Anna Burns, New Statesman (26 October to 1 November 2018), pp. 28–9. Greenslade, Roy, ‘The Belfast Blindspot’, New Statesman (25–31 October 2017), pp. 31–2. Harrington, John P. (ed.), Modern Irish Drama (New York: Norton, 1991). Heaney, Seamus, ‘Something to Write Home About’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2002), pp. 51–62. ‘Homes and Businesses Divided by Irish Border’, Sky News (1 December 2017), (last accessed 7 August 2020). Hughes, Eamonn, ‘Introduction: Northern Ireland – Border Country’, in Eamonn Hughes (ed.), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, 1960–1990 (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 1–12.

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Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (1916; London: Penguin, 1992). Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet and Finn Fordham (1939; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Walter Gabler (1922; London: Bodley Head, 1984). Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, ‘Benedict Kiely’s Troubles Fiction: From Postcolonialism to Postmodernism’, Irish University Review, 38:1 (2008), pp. 98–119. Kiberd, Declan, Irish Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Kiely, Benedict, Drink to the Bird (London: Methuen, 1991). Kiely, Benedict, Proxopera (1977; St Ives: Turnpike Books, 2015). Klein, Melanie, ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21 (1940), pp. 125–53. McCabe, Eugene, ‘Victims’ (1976), in Heaven Lies About Us (New York: Vintage, 2006), pp. 141–219. Maguire, Maria, To Take Arms: My Year with the IRA Provisionals (New York: Viking Press, 1973). Muldoon, Paul, ‘The Boundary Commission’, in Wes Davis (ed.), An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, p. 635. O’Connor, Frank, ‘The Lonely Voice’, in Charles E. May (ed.), Short Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 83–93. Patterson, Glenn, The International (1999; Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2011). Patterson, Henry, ‘Border Violence in Eugene McCabe’s Victims Trilogy’, Irish Studies Review, 19:2 (2011), pp. 157–69. Purbrick, Louise, ‘British Watchtowers’, in Wylie, British Watchtowers, pp. 57–71. Rolston, Bill, ‘Mothers, Whores and Villains: Images of Women in Novels of the Northern Ireland Conflict’, Race & Class, 31:1 (1989), pp. 41–57. Sheridan, Kathy, ‘Tiede Herrema: “The kidnappers were nervous. So was I”’, Irish Times (24 October 2015), (last accessed 7 August 2020). Shriver, Lionel, Ordinary Decent Criminals (New York: HarperCollins, 1992; previously published as The Bleeding Heart, 1990). ‘Splits Across the Irish Border? Garage Frets for Post-Brexit Future’, Reuters World News (11 February 2019), (last accessed 7 August 2020). Stein, Gertrude, ‘What is English Literature?’, Lectures in America (1935; Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 11–55. Storey, Michael L., review of Eugene McCabe, Heaven Lies About Us and Benedict Kiely, The Collected Stories, Studies in Short Fiction, 37:1 (2012), pp. 129–32. Tóibín, Colm, Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (London: Picador, 2001). Weizsächer, Victor V., ‘Dreams in So-Called Endogenic Magersucht (Anorexia)’, in M. Ralph Kaufman and Marcel Heiman (eds), Evolution of Psychoanalytic Concepts. Anorexia Nervosa: A Paradigm (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 181–97. Werbart, Andrzej, ‘“The Skin is the Cradle of the Soul”: Didier Anzieu on the Skin-Ego, Boundaries, and Boundlessness’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 67:1 (2019), pp. 37–58. Wylie, Donovan, British Watchtowers (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007). Yeats, W. B., Cathleen ni Houlihan, in Harrington (ed.), Modern Irish Drama, pp. 3–11. Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996).

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6 Hereseas: Water in English and Irish Modernism Nels Pearson

Drownings come in patterns; they throng and cluster. The island race had a native talent for the genre. –Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier (2019)

A

spatial understanding of Irish modernity and modernism that accounts equally for land and water is perhaps long past due. This is not only because Ireland is an island whose populations have dispersed across seas but also because it is situated within a dynamic and interconnected archipelago – an island group whose ‘history is pelagic, maritime and oceanic’, shaped by an ‘extraordinary diversity of cultural and other movements’ (Plate 11).1 While attentive to recent work on Irish migration and the ‘green Atlantic’,2 this chapter’s primary objective is to consider how modernity on the Irish island itself was formed within broader archipelagic and maritime contexts, how this oceanic modernity relates to aesthetic and thematic uses of water in Irish modernism, and how these uses overlap with, yet differ from, certain aquatic tropes in mainstream British modernism. Before delving into the Irish context, and for the sake of comparison, I will therefore briefly consider some of the more prominent ways that water figures in British modernity and modernism. Although far from comprehensive, this context will help substantiate the threefold thesis of this chapter: first, that Ireland was more integrated in global-maritime circuitry, and participated more substantively in an archipelagic awareness of water as a connective medium, than is often assumed; second, that it was also frequently alienated or estranged from the saltwater circuitry in which it was engaged, dating at least to the early nineteenth century; and third, that this ironic duality resulted in a continuous and paradoxical mode of modern dislocation that features significantly in Irish literary modernism and is distinct from the images of water as impending universal arbitrariness that appear more regularly in Anglo-British modernism.

Britain, Ocean and Modernism Maritime and naval endeavours were, of course, essential to the construction of ‘Britishness’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both because ‘being at once Transatlantic, global and European was a function and an emblem of British power’ and because the abstract idea of ‘Britain’ was sustained by the contrivance that

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England and Scotland shared medieval Anglian roots and a common geographical vocation to ‘rule the waves’.3 As a political and cultural concept, Britishness is made manifest in the act of emanation, of appropriation and spreading outward, not only via overseas colonisation, but also across the North Atlantic archipelago with the acquisition of Wales and Scotland (creating ‘Great Britain’ as a political state), then Ireland (creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland).4 In 1902, the geographer Halford Mackinder confidently asserted that ‘Britain is possessed of two geographical qualities, complementary rather than antagonistic: insularity and universality’, owing to ‘the ocean-highway, which is in its nature universal [as] every part of the ocean is accessible from every other part’.5 As Jon Hegglund notes, Mackinder here ‘imaginatively annex[es] the spaces of the ocean to the British empire’.6 This annexation, or naturalised and expansive relationship between territory and water, is also evident in the quotidian popularity of nautical references in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture. As Sophie Gilmartin, Siobhan Carroll and Margaret Cohen have all variously noted, ideas of maritime craft and topoi of sea adventure fiction permeated the domestic cultures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain.7 The result, as Joseph Conrad memorably put it in ‘Youth’, was an ‘England [in which] men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak’.8 A key marker of English modernity, however, is the gathering threat to this possessive and naturalised association between landed nation and universal sea – a late imperial anxiety over the contraction of British influence, both globally and across the increasingly separatist home islands, as well as a racial dissolution of Britishness due to colonial contact and migration. This anxiety is arguably latent in English modernism’s penchant for figures of submersion, inundation, fluid interiority and precarious insularity. A good example is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which superimposes one coastal limit of British space, St Ives in west Cornwall, upon another, the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides, amidst themes of land erosion and the effort to reassemble drifting entities. Woolf’s conflated Cornish–Scottish perimeter is a slippery space where ‘things wavered and vanished, waterily’, a metonymic ‘spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away’.9 The novel’s modernist fluidity thus suggests not only the giving way of objective to subjective perception, but also the encroachment upon territorial Britain of a historical and cultural ambivalence that is represented as oceanic: the winds and waves . . . lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.10 It should not be surprising that Britain, whose annexation of oceans and territories across the seas was threatened early by the break-up of the home islands themselves, would express its crisis-oriented modernity in images of submersion and fluidity. Of particular interest here, however, are Woolf’s metaphors of the ocean as an uncontrollable universality and of the ungovernable synchronicity of the human universe as watery or oceanic. For even as these metaphors subvert imperial British dominion, so too do they harbour problematic associations between water, non-Anglo otherness and a ‘shapeless’, synchronic universe.

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Although it is by no means an exclusively British practice, this tendency to render the disorientation of modernity in tropes of submersion, or to correlate dislocated subjectivity with images of dark and entropic water, is quite pronounced in mainstream English modernism, some of whose contributors themselves crossed seas to become British citizens. We see it in the generative contrast between water as a controllable extension of national resources and water as arbitrary, ungovernable, primal–universal darkness that marks the opening and closing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Here, the Thames famously opens as ‘the beginning of an interminable waterway’, sailed upon by ‘messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’, but becomes, after Marlow’s recollection of colonial contact, the gateway to ‘an immense darkness’.11 The loss of imperialistic certainty is therefore associated with the mutual ascendance of water, the subjective mind and the primitive other. Similar ideas surround Mrs Moore’s burial at sea in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. After the ordeal of the Marabar Caves, during which Mrs Moore is ‘terrified over an area larger than usual’ as she imagines an arbitrary ‘universe [that] offered no repose to her soul’, she symbolically dies during her voyage back to England. Describing her burial at sea, Forster explicitly links the ocean, the arbitrary universe and the unknowable colonial other: ‘her body was lowered into yet another India – the Indian Ocean’.12 This problematic association is foreshadowed in the beginning of the novel, where Chandrapore’s ‘very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving’.13 D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, although an ‘inland’ novel, similarly uses inundation to mark the distinction between a presumptively solid, established culture and its sudden irrelevance amidst the ‘non-human . . . universe’.14 When Diana Crich drowns in a lake that ‘seems [to contain] a whole universe’, the lake is then drained with an atavistic roar, a ‘heavy booming noise of a great body of water’ that leaves ‘everything drowned within it, drowned and lost’.15 The contrast between controlling and being overwhelmed by a fluid universe is also central to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which vacillates between the arid sterility of culture and its inundation in the wrecking flows of modernity and time. After concluding that only the ‘controlling hands’ of a sailor ‘expert with sail and oar’ can redeem these levelling flows, the speaker salvages what he can from a deluge of cultural fragments, having ‘shored [them] against [his] ruins’.16 As Michael Gardiner puts it, ‘The Waste Land associates cultural death with the loss of control over water (the international space) [and thus] strongly recall[s] the loss of a sea-bound empire based on the Thames’.17 Eliot returns to these anxieties of a liquid, levelled world in the ‘The Dry Salvages’, wherein he implicitly reflects on his own Atlantic migration and concedes, but then aims spiritually to transcend, the ambivalent eternity of oceanic ‘wastage’: The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers [. . .] We cannot think of a time that is oceanless Or of an ocean not littered with wastage.18 Here again, the anxiety of being thrown from established history into universal and abstract time is expressed as submersion – a submersion not just in the ocean but

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also in a liquid world of pervasive cultural wreckage. While the ungovernable sea is thus a heretical counterpoint to territorial notions of progress and nation-states, it is also part of a negative reiteration of imperial space in which everything beyond the imperilled tradition is now seen as equally dark, fluid and ahistorical, without distinct materiality.

Ireland, Modernism and the Sea It would be an oversimplification to say that Ireland had a wholly different trajectory of oceanic modernity and hence a distinct aquatic idiom in its modernism. W. B. Yeats, for one, is no stranger to the poetics of watery negation, such as when ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ pits the ‘roof-levelling wind, / Bred on the Atlantic’ and the primal ‘frenzied drum’ of the ‘murderous innocence of the Sea’ against the solidity of tower and laurel, ‘Rooted in one dear perpetual place’.19 But there are also important differences between Yeats and his English contemporaries, especially when it comes to the dispossession and flight associated with the Irish Atlantic and the contested, discontinuous territorial traditions that Yeats has available to pit against the levelling wind and sea. These differences, and their broader relevance to Irish modernism, become increasingly evident the more we think about Ireland’s extensive, yet troubled, relationship with the seas. As Joe Cleary has pointed out, Irish modernity has characteristics of the British industrial–capitalist mode that partly incorporated Ireland, as well as of the colonial modernity more typical of European colonies, including ‘accelerated processes of social transformation and cultural hybridisation, . . . violent uprootings and diasporic migrations’, as well as social / political partition and internal dislocation.20 This duality is especially evident when we consider Irish history from a water-based perspective. Seen thus, Ireland is an island with a long premodern history of archipelagic and continental maritime connectivity that becomes enmeshed in an accelerated, uneven, global circuitry of goods and capital. Irish people experience traumatic losses into and because of those flows, but also establish myriad transatlantic relationships, scalar expansions and hybrid cultures. The island then develops nationalist formations that are, in many ways, inorganically focused on insularity. Throughout this history, Ireland’s island geography is, in some cases, conducive to a circuitry and connectivity whose primary medium was water, and in others conducive to the distancing and differentiation that fuel colonialism and nationalism. Regarding hybridisation and reciprocal exchange, it could be argued that migrations caused by Protestant oppression of Catholics, such as the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘flight of the wild geese’ to Spain, Austria and France, also led to a sea-connected Irish history, in so far as these displacements involved cultural intermingling and legacies of exchange with continental Europe dating back to the medieval era. Hence in the central Irish language poem of the eighteenth century, Eileen O’Connell’s Lament for Art O’Leary, O’Connell dignifies her slain husband Art, an officer in the Austrian Hussars, by celebrating his ‘slender foreign shoe’ and ‘suit of yarn / Woven over the water’.21 Translations of the ‘Lament’ by Thomas Kinsella and Brendan Kennelly omit these lines about imported goods, perhaps in support of nationalist narratives inclined towards the exilic nature of Irish migration. It is worth noting that although such references to Irish–European exchanges complicate exilic

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models, they also complicate Britain’s maritime–imperial boast of the archipelago’s independence. Under the Union (1800–1921), much of Ireland’s modernity was shaped by its involvement in the British maritime empire, especially in the island’s port cities and their hinterlands. Although we tend not to think of Irish writers as participating in the prolific eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maritime and sea adventure traditions in British literature, many Irish writers did so. Evidence ranges from an outburst of pirate novels that, as Andrew Kincaid has shown, occurred in Ireland under the Union, probably due to nostalgia for the actual piracy that predated English coastal surveillance,22 to Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), an early espionage novel in which British intelligence against Germany hinges on awareness of shifting tidal coasts, to John Mitchel’s 1854 Jail Journal, which chronicles the author’s epic penal deportation to Tasmania via a two-year confinement to ships between the Azores, Madeira, Bermuda and Cape Town. As Kincaid notes, such deportations, following the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 and the Fenian Rising of 1867, ‘produced a series of detailed transoceanic journals’ and hence a mid-nineteenth-century burst of Irish oceanic literature.23 In 1902, taking it for granted that Irish ports were major hubs of commerce and travel, Mackinder called the Irish Sea ‘a British Mediterranean’.24 As Nicholas Allen puts it, ‘the imperial archipelago was a tangled and multiple structure, a connective medium between world powers through which objects passed in promiscuous exchange’, reaching into the daily lives of Irish people ‘[in ways] that traditional categories of national identity cannot explain’.25 To be sure, many ships in the massive fleet of the Allan line – upon whose decks Eveline’s suitor, Frank, began his seafaring life in James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ – were built in and sailed from Ireland. This seaborne industry was not confined to eastern port cities like Dublin and Belfast, for Cork, Moville, Berehaven, Lough Swilly and others also had highly active ports. Galway was even proposed as a site for a major transatlantic port and was briefly able to claim the fastest transatlantic shipping line in the Isles, a fact to which Joyce humorously alludes in Ulysses when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus converse with an Irish sailor who decries the supposed English sabotage of the ill-fated Galway Line. Ireland’s participation in a global network of Edwardian capital and goods is, after all, what brings American apples, Smyrna figs, almonds, cocoa and port to the Morkans’ dinner table in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.26 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are also overflowing with evidence of Dublin’s saltwater connectivity. In A Portrait, there are Spanish and Portuguese students at Clongowes,27 Dante Riordan’s brother makes a fortune in African trade,28 Stephen’s aunt displays photos of the Harlem minstrel actress Mabel Hunter,29 Simon Dedalus gets cigars from ‘An American Captain . . . in Queenstown’,30 and a peasant girl sings the Brooklyn song ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’.31 In Ulysses, Molly prefers Malaga raisins, a newsagent tells Father Conmee of ‘a dreadful catastrophe in New York’,32 the American blackface performer Eugene Stratton is often referenced, Italians ‘haggl[e] over money’,33 and Bloom admires the exotic goods coming from ships in the Liffey quays, associating them with the sea routes that produce Molly, having brought her father to Gibraltar and back, betrothed to a Spaniard. None the less, as much as Ireland was actively integrated in maritime Britain, so too was its sea history one of dislocation, subordination and loss. This includes not only mass emigration before and after the Famine of the 1840s, but also legacies of artistic

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expatriation, disproportionate distributions of seaborne capital among Catholics and Protestants, English control of Irish coasts and ports from 1800 to 1938, and severe trade imbalances. Both Ian Friel, in his Maritime History of Britain and Ireland,34 and Christopher Harvie, in A Floating Commonwealth,35 point to Ireland’s lack of its own merchant marine and England’s political subjugation of Irish maritime industry and trade as key factors differentiating Irish modernisation from that of Scotland, Wales and England. But perhaps more disempowering than these material factors were their cultural resonances, for where Irish migrants were depicted in Atlantic literature, it was often with a remarkable degree of caricature and dehumanisation. Herman Melville’s rendition of Irish migrant labour in Redburn is a case in point: Flourishing their Donnybrook shillelahs, they looked like an irruption of barbarians [who went] capering on, merry as pipers. . . . When I thought of the multitudes of Irish that annually land on the shores of the United States and Canada [and] daily saw these hordes of laborers, descending, thick as locusts, upon the English corn fields, I could not help marvelling at the fertility of an island, which, though her crop of potatoes may fail, never yet failed in bringing her annual crop of men into the world.36 Because its Atlantic story is also defined by losses, lack of access, ethnic discrimination and coerced migration, Irish involvement with the seas never reached the level of an established tradition or naturalised norm whose potential loss could be felt as a spatial crisis. Therefore, the previously described shift in English literature from the oceanic dominion and ‘interpenetrated’ sea and land cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to modernist images of inundation, cultural wreckage and fluid vastness is less à propos of Irish experience. Indeed, even my previous examples of Ireland’s engagement in Britain’s oceanic culture, which included pirate nostalgia and deportation narratives, suggest a more consistently troubled relationship with water. Another factor working against the integration of sea and land was the nationalist tendency to elide existing maritime internationalism while constructing indigenous and insular notions of Irishness. Even as nineteenth-century nationalism drew on the Atlantic diaspora for support and dissemination, so too did its internal self-preoccupation often lead to a denaturalisation or inorganic forgetting of the island’s ties to the sea. A coastal interlude in Charles Kickham’s 1879 novel Knocknagow, which focuses primarily on corrupt land and rent systems under the Union, offers a telling example. Recounting a visit to Tramore strand by the tenant-farming Kearney family and the peasant protagonist Mat Donovan, the narrator observes the English tourists at that popular resort destination and sentimentally opines that land autonomy must precede oceanic aspiration: ‘Yes, pleasant memories of the sea are cherished in the homes of Tipperary. Yet who could ever look upon the sea without a sigh for the homes of Tipperary – and the homes of Ireland?’37 This tendency to view coasts as sites of loss and exclusion, and to turn away from sea contact in order to construct Ireland retroactively as a separate national territory, presages the popular Irish Renaissance metaphor of English capital as a wave or tide of Saxon corruption. Douglas Hyde, for example, stridently warned that ‘this island is and will ever remain Celtic to the core . . . [but] we must create a strong feeling against

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West-Britonism, for it . . . will overwhelm us like a flood’.38 Such tropes of modern, capitalist hegemony as a flood resonate more abstractly in Yeats’s metaphors of tidal destruction, such as the anarchic ‘blood-dimmed tide’ of ‘The Second Coming’39 and the deracinating ‘filthy modern tide’ of ‘The Statues’: We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked.40 There is some similarity between these figures of bitter inundation and Eliot’s metaphors of modernity as oceanic wreckage, and hence some kinship between English (or Anglo-American) and Irish efforts to divorce their island nations from the global flows of modernity. In Eliot, however, the ‘end[less]’, ‘drifting wreckage’ of time is more impersonal and ineluctably universal, an image that suggests a previous global dominion being replaced by an arbitrary universality.41 In Yeats, the levelling wreckage has universal properties, but it also betokens more immediate historical forces relating to Ireland’s subject and contested status, as well as to the rise of the modern middle class. The threatening ‘wind, / Bred on the Atlantic’ in ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, for example, implies a dynamic of colonial modernity, at the onset of the Anglo-Irish War, comprised of English aggression, capitalist modernisation, and the reactionary nationalist violence of men like John McBride, the ‘old bellows full of angry wind’.42 Moreover, instead of shoring the fragments of a previously established tradition, Yeats tries to construct against the wreckage an idealised structure signifying an alternate history that is still in process. In ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, this retroactive bulwarking comes in the form of the lone ‘obstacle’ to the screaming sea wind, the Ascendancy demesne of ‘Gregory’s wood and one bare hill’43: a symbol for an idealised, purely ‘bred’ Ireland that has never really existed.44 This ongoing conflict between sea and would-be nation may also be why the waters in Yeats’s poetry tend to be local and coastal, depicted as waves or tides raging against the shore, rather than riverine and pelagic as they are for Eliot. If, for Eliot, the whole universe is irredeemably merged and levelled by sea flows, as the Thames carries its debris into the English Channel at Margate, where ‘nothing [connects] with nothing’, then for Yeats a coastal battle still rages between global–imperial circulation and a counterfactual island that he imagines as putting up feudal, noble and racial resistance. There are even times when Yeats seeks to extend this imaginary Ireland towards and into the sea itself, as if to reconstruct a premodern Irish identity that encompassed land and water. In the early poetry, for example, where spectral fairies ‘weav[e] olden dances’ on the Sligo shore and ‘Fergus rules . . . / the white breast of the dim sea,’ the poet is arguably mystifying Ireland’s coasts and proximate waters as a way of reclaiming them from the industrial and mercantile modes that drove Britain’s maritime–imperial project.45 The ‘Introductory Rhymes’ to Responsibilities attempt this reclamation more explicitly. In them, Yeats lauds the maritime heritage of his great-great-grandfather Benjamin Yeats (a linen merchant), maternal great-grandfather William Middleton (a shipowner and trader) and grandfather William Pollexfen (investor in the Sligo Steam Navigation Company) for remaining unsullied by the tariffs and ‘huckster’s blood’ of those who traffic in baser saltwater economies:

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Old Dublin merchant ‘free of the ten and four’ Or trading out of Galway into Spain; Old country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend, A hundred-year-old memory to the poor; Merchant and scholar who have left me blood That has not passed through any huckster’s loin, [. . .] Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay; [. . .] I have no child, I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.46 Yeats here attempts to write an alternative history, incorporating land and sea, in which Irish bloodlines have crossed waters yet consistently resisted the levelling forces of imperial capital that move atop them. This reactionary gesture speaks to the paradoxical dynamic of Irish nationalism, observed by Emer Nolan, wherein universalist modernity at once inspires and invalidates alternative histories of national difference based on antimodern sensibilities.47 Another example of this paradox appears years later in ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’ (1938). Here, as Yeats decries the English maritime hegemony that foiled Casement’s plot to secure German ammunitions by sea in 1916, he again imagines Irish coasts and waters as mystically other to the scientific and political surveillance that characterise the modernised seas of Great Britain: O what has made that sudden noise? What on the threshold stands? It never crossed the sea because John Bull and the sea are friends; But this is not the old sea Nor this the old seashore. What gave that roar of mockery, That roar in the sea’s roar? The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door.48 The ‘it’ barred from crossing the ‘old sea’ alludes both to Casement, tried and hanged in London, and to his intercepted shipment of German guns in 1916. The caveat ‘But this is not the old sea’ seems to admonish British maritime hegemony, as do the occult mentality and counterfactual history that lurk in the mocking ‘roar in the seas roar’, suggesting that the Irish coast is a haunted, enchanted domain that John Bull’s empiricism cannot govern. These claims resonate in Yeats’s present as well, for 1938 marked Britain’s tentative return of the treaty ports – Berehaven, Lough Swilly, Cobh – to Éire after years of extensive public debate. Yeats’s waters are therefore not just symbols of an arbitrary universe but also sites of historically specific dispossession and conflict that raise the spectre of potentially alternative histories. Such defensive and fraught engagements with the sea are part of a larger tendency in Irish modernism to register the ways that the island is at once enmeshed in and estranged from water routes, or alienated from the archipelagic and global flows in

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which it participates. Many other works of the period suggest that as the pace of maritime connectivity and commerce accelerate, and as their scale expands, various sectors of Irish society are left at odds with these movements, unable to reconcile home and world, or island and archipelago, without loss, temporal and spatial displacement, or nationalist resistance. A central example is John Synge’s Riders to the Sea, wherein the trade routes and raging waters linking Connemara and the Aran archipelago are simultaneously the source of livelihood and destruction. Indeed, the short tragedy arguably serves as a microcosm of the larger island’s relationship with the sea – a relationship that, as Claire Connolly has recently proposed, is defined both literally and figuratively by rough crossings and ‘turbulent water’.49 Synge’s awareness of this paradoxical familiarity with and alienation from the sea also extends beyond Riders. As Cóilín Parsons has argued, Synge’s ethnographic The Aran Islands depicts islanders whose experiences with Atlantic emigration, trade and bilingualism have led to their ‘living in two linguistic worlds’ and to a phenomenon of ‘scale bending’ whereby they identify with multiple places and scales of orientation at once.50 These dislocations are also evident in The Playboy of the Western World, where local Mayo life is shot through with emigration, English surveillance, and travelling information from Dublin, London and America. The news that reaches Synge’s peasants ranges from sensationalist newspaper stories of urban murder to a local man ‘after coming from harvesting in the Liverpool boat’ with stories of the Viking skulls in a Dublin museum, an apt figure for a modernity in which the evanescent primitive has become an artefact and spectacle for the metropole.51 Importantly, the older Irish-speaking culture threatened by these circulations of modernity was not, for Synge, static and indigenous, but itself accustomed to mobility, on land as well as by sea. Hence the Widow Quin identifies with Christy’s peripatetic, romantic spirit, confessing that she is ‘his like’ because she has been often ‘looking out on the schooners, hookers, trawlers is sailing the sea, and . . . thinking on the gallant hairy fellows are drifting beyond’.52 Sara similarly compares Christy to ‘the outlandish lovers in the sailor’s song’.53 One of the tragic implications of the play is that, under British law, the coastal Mayo community cannot sustain this natural mobility, as the Widow Quin fears when she says ‘it’d be a pity surely to have your like sailing from Mayo to the Western World’.54 The idea that Christy might cross the Atlantic to avoid the British police suggests a clashing of scales in which state surveillance and forced migration supersede organic mobility. That clash remains unresolved as the play ends on an ironically conservative desire ‘to guard [our] little cabins’ – to secure local property by submitting to the Royal Irish Constabulary – while Christy departs for an uncertain destination, promising to go ‘romancing through a romping lifetime’ of travel.55 Another manifestation of modern Ireland’s simultaneous integration in and estrangement from the British Atlantic is ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Boyle’s romantically inflated memory of having steered ‘a manly ship, with the win’ blowin’ a hurricane through the masts . . . Sailin’ from the Gulf o’ Mexico to the Antarctic Ocean’56 is set in contrast to the immediacy of violence in the Irish Civil War. His wife Juno sarcastically articulates this contrast by saying that Boyle ‘was only wanst on the wather, in an oul’ collier from here to Liverpool’.57 Although such jabs are primarily a critique of dreamy idealism during times of material crisis, Boyle’s disputed captaincy and global travel also register Ireland’s discomfort with its

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maritime–transnational history, including its uncertainty of where to place that history relative to national concerns and sectarian violence and how to comprehend its entanglement of imperial participation and colonial subjection. Indeed, the main tragicomic event in the play – the Boyle family’s financial illiteracy regarding inheritance, which leads to their daughter’s betrayal by an Englishman who ferries home across the Irish Sea once he realises the family is broke – strongly evokes the tentative, imperilled inclusion of Catholic Ireland in the circuitry of archipelagic capital. However, no writer, and certainly no practitioner of modernism, was more acutely aware of that imperilled inclusion, and of Ireland’s related difficulty in reconciling national and international modalities, than James Joyce. A fitting example is the conclusion to the short story ‘Eveline’, wherein the title character, unable to decide between remaining at home to help her abusive father or uprooting to Buenos Aires via Liverpool with her seafaring and potentially nefarious paramour, stands paralysed on the docks by the North Wall as ‘all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’.58 This memorable tableau encapsulates Ireland’s paradoxical position in the Atlantic world. Although engaged in and surrounded by the expansive maritime world, the island’s populace also often finds that world a source of exploitation, estrangement and domestic retrenchment.59 The mythic basis of Ulysses is, of course, maritime, and although Joyce’s odyssey takes place on land, it is none the less thoroughly concerned with the ironic signatures of Ireland’s oceanic modernity. The opening chapters unfold along the coast amidst references to drowning (Stephen Dedalus teaches Milton’s Lycidas, an elegy for a friend drowned in the Irish Sea, and a man has recently drowned at Maiden Rock), failed sea travel (Stephen’s return from Paris, upon which he broods as he watches the Holyhead ferry leave imperial Kingstown pier) and imperilled maritime commerce (Mr Deasy’s diatribe against the Liverpool ring who supposedly sabotaged the planned transatlantic seaport in Galway). Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are both connected to water in ways that register Dublin’s paradoxical engagement in the maritime world. From his earliest days in A Portrait, Stephen has feared water or associated it with damaging experiences, but has also increasingly connected it with expatriation and aesthetic reverie: ‘like waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain’.60 Young men’s play in Dubliners and A Portrait often involves a journey to the sea or coast, as when Stephen and his friends come home ‘with the stale odours of the foreshore in their nostrils and the rank oils of the seawrack upon their hands and in their hair’.61 Such play recalls the young Joyce’s seaside residences at Bray Head and Craysfort Avenue while also foreshadowing the liberating potential of the coast in his work. To be sure, Stephen’s most intense reveries occur along the coast, as in the fourth chapter of A Portrait (‘on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea’62) and the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses. These scenes associate artistic contemplation with fluidity and thus subvert political ideologies that would aim to fix territories, borders and bodies: ‘His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea.’63 However, these visions also remain internalised and unexpressed; moreover, they are juxtaposed with landmarks of empire (Martello towers, Kingstown pier), images of enclosure and signs of environmental damage. In Ulysses, they are also laced with Stephen’s awareness of imperial

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subjugation (‘His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame’64) and his frustration over failed expatriation and internationalism: ‘The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven–Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.’65 Thus, even as Joyce’s preoccupation with fluid consciousness connects him to the subjective poetics of water in other modernist texts, so too are his uses of water engaged with the material challenges of Ireland’s colonial modernity. Bloom’s relationships with water exemplify a similar duality. He meditates on the aquatic nature of memory (‘like holding water in your hand’66), the antiterritorial Liffey (‘How can you own water really?’67), the economic impact of ferry routes and the potential development of Dollymount strand. He daydreams of farmlands in Jaffa shipping him ‘olives, oranges, almonds or citrons’ and, in a famous passage, muses reverentially about the universal properties and global reach of water.68 On the one hand, these thought patterns underscore Bloom’s fluid and mobile nature, his interest in Dublin’s links to maritime capital, and Joyce’s own political concern for the ‘isolation versus amalgamation’ of human life.69 On the other hand, Bloom’s immigrant background embodies the troubled relationship between extant oceanic internationalism and Ireland’s nationalistic reactions to empire: a product of sea and land migrations between ‘Szombathély, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and Dublin’,70 he is repeatedly ostracised from nation-centric cliques and victimised by anti-Semitism. This simultaneous inclusion and exclusion is echoed in the novel’s allusions to the failed transatlantic seaport and shipping line in Galway, a history that itself encapsulates Ireland’s alienated version of saltwater modernity. The actual history is that, in 1858, the priest and local developer Father Peter Daly teamed up with Manchester businessman John Orrell Lever, who had ties to the complex world of Liverpool shipping, to create the ‘Galway Line’ of transatlantic steamships. Were the line to be successful, it would help materialise the often-forecasted construction of a transatlantic seaport in Galway. Joyce wrote favourably of this potential construction during his visit to Galway in 1912, viewing it as a way to redeem Ireland’s premodern seafaring connections with Europe – a gesture reminiscent of Yeats’s and Synge’s aforementioned interest in a premodern, Irish-maritime cosmopolitanism.71 The first ship in the line, the paddle steamer Indian Empire, unfortunately struck the Margaretta Rock in Galway Bay in the early morning of 16 June 1858, damaging the hull and delivering a major blow to the confidence of would-be investors. When it was learned that two English pilots had boarded the ship, prior to the accident, to help navigate the harbour, rumours swirled that Liverpool interests had sabotaged the enterprise. Possibly related to the force of the impact, the ship lost a boiler and blew a piston on its transatlantic voyage, seriously hindering its all-important crossing speed.72 In the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, the keeper of a cabman’s shelter near the Custom House (the historical epicentre of Dublin’s involvement in international shipping) typifies these rumours in a conversation ‘lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping, coastwise and foreign’,73 with the ersatz sailing hero D. B. Murphy, as overheard by Bloom and Stephen: What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only rock in Galway bay when the Galway harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask the then captain, he advised them, how much palmoil the British government gave him for that day’s work, Captain John Lever of the Lever Line.74

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While Joyce is satirising nationalist sentiment here, he is also highlighting the difficult relationship between colonial history and international maritime modernity. This troubled relationship is evident elsewhere in the episode, such as when Stephen compares Irish trade to prostitution, for it maintains no autonomy in the exchange of goods: In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.75 These concerns re-emerge in ‘Cyclops’ in the Citizen’s tirade on the maritime trading autonomy that was once a sign of Ireland’s international vitality: ‘We had our trade with Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were pupped,’ the Citizen boasts: Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway. . . . And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again. . . . Our harbours that are empty will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay. . . . when the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to the fore.76 As Joyce well knew, the basic points here are valid, even though their racialised pronouncement is a fitting subject of parody. Arguably, the deepest problem with these well-rehearsed diatribes is that they reveal the paradoxes of the attempt to articulate anticolonial internationalism, for to make such a proclamation, the idea of the insular nation must be prized at the same time as international and transnational circulation, the ironies of which are evident in the fact that the Citizen’s pro-shipping cronies are in the same moment ostracising Bloom with xenophobic slurs. These paradoxes of oceanic proximity and distance, and various efforts to reconcile them, resonate throughout Irish modernism and into the later twentieth century. Samuel Beckett – whose works often feature coasts and ports, who crossed frequently between Europe and Ireland during his years of artistic development, and whose transformative moment of artistic self-discovery occurred near Dún Laoghaire pier – arguably draws his poetics of dislocation from cultural liminality, migration and unresolved attachment. The same is true of Elizabeth Bowen, whose works routinely involve the ferry routes between Ireland, Wales, England and France, as well as the coastal towns with which they are associated, and whose heroines are often torn between belonging and detachment. For Bowen, as for Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien, the waters between Ireland and continental Europe or England can also appear as a vast gulf, with the home island at once accessibly near and irreconcilably distant. Other examples from the later century include the exaggerated binary of domestic allegiance versus emigration to sullied, ‘rotten’ England in John McGahern’s The Dark (‘fail the exam, a second class ticket on the nightboat for Holyhead’77) and the remarkable simultaneity of oceanic proximity and alienation in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark. For Deane, signs of Derry’s Atlantic engagement are omnipresent, but they betoken discontinuity and foreignness, as when the narrator feels that his father, who works on a British naval base, is ‘going out foreign’ every time he leaves for work. Towards the end of the story, a British Army chaplain tries unsuccessfully to convince the Bogside boys at St Columb’s that the ‘wild rolling seas of the distant Atlantic’ are

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‘as vital a part of [their] domain as the very streets on which [they] walk’, an ironic claim that falls flat, given the unreconciled transatlantic ‘disappearances’ that haunt the community.78 Indeed, it may be this consistent and historically continuous nature of Ireland’s conflicted association with water that most distinguishes it from the more cataclysmic aquatic idiom that we tend to see in certain strands of Anglo-British modernism. The latter’s images of universal fluidity and negated oceanic control are heretical to empire, yet they also reiterate in the negative the maritime empire’s universal aspirations. In Ireland, where water has been heresy to notions of national purity or wholeness as regularly as the national idea has been antagonistic to circulation, the ironic simultaneity of insularity and connection, and the irresolution of local and global scales, appear more consistently throughout the long arc of modernity.

Notes 1. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, p. 78. 2. See Lloyd and O’Neill (eds), The Black and Green Atlantic. For Irish–Caribbean connections see Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities, and Donnell, McGarrity and O’Callaghan (eds), Caribbean Irish Connections. 3. Colley, Britons, pp. xvii, 11–14. Also see Pocock, Discovery, p. 37. 4. As Trevor Burnard notes, even when the scope of the British Atlantic contracted following the independence of the North American colonies, British historical identity remained constructed around the idea of ‘an independent, outward looking polity perched in the Atlantic Ocean’ – one separate from continental Europe and naturally predisposed to maritime and colonial endeavour. Burnard, ‘The British Atlantic’, pp. 111–36, p. 114. 5. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 11. 6. Hegglund, World Views, p. 112. 7. See Gilmartin, ‘The Perils of Crossings’, pp. 83–102; Carroll, ‘William Falconer and the Empire of the Deep’, pp. 15–25; and Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, pp. 8–9. Cohen proposes that this infusion also happened in other nations ‘across a transatlantic literary field’ (p. 8), but her claim that nineteenth-century sea fiction balanced ‘nationalist and internationalist imperatives’ suggests that the integration of sea and land cultures had a greater impact on collective cultural identity in imperial nations (p. 9). 8. Conrad, Typhoon and Youth, p. 89. 9. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 97; p. 44. 10. Ibid., pp. 134–5. 11. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 8; 76. 12. Forster, A Passage to India, p. 284. 13. Ibid., p. 4. 14. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 257. 15. Ibid., pp. 176–7. 16. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, line 431. 17. Gardiner, Cultural Roots, p. 32. 18. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, in Four Quartets, lines 38–41; 69–70. 19. Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, Collected Poems, lines 5–6; 15; 16; 48. 20. Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, pp. 1–22, 6–7. 21. O’Connell, Lament, lines 49–51. 22. See Kincaid, ‘Subverting the Waves of Capital’, pp. 177–99. 23. Kincaid, ‘Somewhere in Infinite Space’, p. 19. 24. Mackinder, Britain, p. 20.

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water in english and irish modernism 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

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Allen, ‘Ireland, Empire and the Archipelago’, pp. 2–3. Allen, Ireland, Literature and the Coast. pp. 63–5. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 55. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 265. Joyce, Ulysses, 10.89–90. Ibid., 16.350. Friel, Maritime History of Britain and Ireland, pp. 159, 214–15. Harvie, Floating Commonwealth, p. 97. Melville, Redburn, pp. 230–1. Kickham, Knocknagow, p. 401. Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, Collected Poems, line 5. Yeats, ‘The Statues’, Collected Poems, lines 28–30. Eliot, ‘Salvages’, lines 52; 38. Yeats, ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, Collected Poems, lines 56; 64. Ibid., lines 12; 3–4. As Marjorie Howes argues in Yeats’s Nations, Anglo-Irishness is, for Yeats, ‘a willful, imaginative response to the erosion of material power, the rupture of historical tradition and continuity, and the absence of a stable identity’ (p. 102). Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, Collected Poems, line 15; ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, Collected Poems, lines 9–11. Yeats, ‘Introductory Rhymes’, Collected Poems, lines 2–7; 13–14; 21–2. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, pp. xi–22. Yeats, ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’, Collected Poems, lines 1–10. Connolly, ‘Turbulent Water’. Parsons, The Ordnance Survey, pp. 144; 132. Synge, Playboy, pp. 73–118, p. 103. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., pp. 116–117. O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, pp. 63–148, p. 88. Ibid., p. 77. Joyce, Dubliners, p. 34. Sexual promiscuity and female sexual enslavement are associated with the Liverpool– Argentina route, with Buenos Aires being ‘the main destination of procured women’, as Katherine Mullin convincingly argues (James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity, pp. 56–82). Of course, domestic abuse excused and occluded by a nationalist emphasis on female purity and immobility is an equally poor option for Eveline. Given the historical scope and earlier successes of Irish migration to Argentina, Joyce probably sees its modern delegitimisation as part of the irony of the concluding tableau, where the Irish Sea becomes a barrier. See Barnwell, ‘Nineteenth Century Irish Emigration to Argentina’. Barnwell estimates 20,000 Irish emigrants to Argentina during the nineteenth century, with a likely high point of 2,500 in 1832 (p. 19). Joyce, Portrait, p. 242. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187.

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126 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

nels pearson Joyce, Ulysses, 2.246. Ibid., 9.952–3. Ibid., 8.610–11. Ibid., 8.93–4. Ibid., 4.195–6; 17.185–228. Berman, ‘Modernism’s Possible Geographies’, pp. 281–96, p. 289. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.534. As Joyce writes in Trieste’s Il Piccolo della Sera, ‘[t]he old decaying city would arise once more. Wealth and vital energy from the New World would run through this new artery into blood-drained Ireland’ (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, p. 203). Collins, Transatlantic Triumph, pp. 33–5. Joyce, Ulysses, 16.957–8. Ibid., 16.964–8. Ibid., 16.745–8. Ibid., 12.1296–1307. McGahern, The Dark, pp. 108; 136. Deane, Reading in the Dark, p. 207.

Bibliography Allen, Nicholas, ‘Ireland, Empire and the Archipelago’, The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea, series ed. John Brannigan, UCD Scholarcast (2013), (last accessed 13 June 2019). Allen, Nicholas, Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Barnwell, David, ‘Nineteenth Century Irish Emigration to Argentina’, paper delivered at the Columbia University Irish Studies Seminar, 1986, (last accessed 12 November 2018). Barry, Kevin, Night Boat to Tangier: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2019), p. 202. Berman, Jessica, ‘Modernism’s Possible Geographies’, in Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (eds), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 281–96. Burnard, Trevor, ‘The British Atlantic’, in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 111–36. Carroll, Siobhan, ‘William Falconer and the Empire of the Deep’, in Steve Mentz and Martha Rojas (eds), The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 15–25. Cleary, Joe, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–22. Cohen, Margaret, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Collins, Tim, Transatlantic Triumph and Heroic Failure: The Galway Line (Dublin: Collins Press, 2002). Connolly, Claire, ‘Turbulent Water: A Cultural History of the Irish Sea’, Irish Times (4 May 2019). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1988). Conrad, Joseph, Typhoon and Youth (London: Heinemann, 1966). Deane, Seamus, Reading in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1998). deCourcy Ireland, John, Ireland and the Irish in Maritime History (Dún Laoghaire: Glendale Press,1986).

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DeLoughery, Elizabeth, ‘Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity’, PMLA, 125:3 (2010), pp. 703–12. Donnell, Alison, Maria McGarrity and Evelyn O’Callaghan (eds), Caribbean Irish Connections (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015). Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1971). Eliot, T. S., ‘The Waste Land’, in Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1964), pp. 49–67. Forster, E. M., A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, 1984). Friel, Ian, Maritime History of Britain and Ireland (London: The British Museum Press, 2003). Gardiner, Michael, The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004). Gilmartin, Sophie, ‘“The perils of crossings”: Nineteenth-Century Navigations of City and Sea’, in Steve Mentz and Martha Rojas (eds), The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 83–102. Harvie, Christopher, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hegglund, Jon, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hobsbawm, E. J., Industry and Empire (New York: Penguin, 1978). Howes, Marjorie, Yeats’s Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hyde, Douglas, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, (last accessed 2 July 2019). Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1993). Joyce, James, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 2001). Joyce, James, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). Kickham, Charles, Knocknagow: Or, the Homes of Tipperary (Guernsey: Guernsey Press, 1988). Kincaid, Andrew F., ‘“Somewhere in Infinite Space”: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Oceanic Literature’, New Hibernia Review, 20:3 (2016), pp. 19–38. Kincaid, Andrew F., ‘Subverting the Waves of Capital: Piracy and Fiction in the Wake of Union’, in Amanda Tucker and Moira Casey (eds), Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015), pp. 177–99. Lawrence, D. H., Women in Love (New York: Penguin, 1976). Lloyd, David, and Peter O’Neill (eds), The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). McGahern, John, The Dark (New York: Penguin, 2002). Mackinder, Halford, Britain and the British Seas (New York: D. Appleton, 1902). Malouf, Michael G., Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). Melville, Herman, Redburn (New York: Random House, 2002). Mullin, Katherine, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). O’Casey, Sean, Juno and the Paycock, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 63–148. O’Connell, Eileen, A Lament for Art O’Leary, trans. Frank O’Connor (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1940). Parsons, Cóilín, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Pocock, J. G. A., The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Synge, J. M., The Playboy of the Western World, in Modern Irish Drama, ed. John P. Harrington (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 73–118. Woolf, Virginia, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, 1959). Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1989). Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996).

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Part II Heresies of Nationalism

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7 ‘A Fairy Boy of Eleven, a Changeling, Kidnapped, Dressed in an Eton Suit’: Precarious, Lost and Recovered Children in Anglophone Irish Modernism Margot Gayle Backus

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lthough critics have noted occasional prescient outbreaks of modernism in the English literary tradition, such as Jane Austen’s plunge into stream of consciousness during the strawberry-picking party in Emma, in Irish literature scholars have traced a far more persistent pattern of proto-modernism emerging in response to Ireland’s protracted experience of British imperialism. As early as the seventeenth century, as Sarah McKibben observes in this collection, Irish language writers responded to the violence of colonial modernity in ‘strikingly modern tropes of alienation and loss, proto-nationalist recalibration of identity, and prescient critiques of systems of authority and legitimation’ (‘Theorising Irish-Language Modernism’, p. 433 n37). Other critical work, including my own, has attributed similarly disruptive proto-modernist and modernist innovations in Anglo-Irish writing to the structural incoherencies imposed on Anglo-Irish children by their ambiguous place in Ireland’s settler colonial system of biological and ideological reproduction.1 The present chapter continues that effort by exploring the evolution of the literary faery changeling as a modernist response to the emergence of British white supremacy in the late nineteenth century, and the pressures that imperial whiteness exerted on the identity formation of educated, English-speaking children in Ireland.2 In Ireland, in the decades following the Famine, anti-British sentiment and Irish nationalisms intensified at the same time that linguistic, cultural and institutional anglicisation accelerated. As Andrew Gibson observes, by the late nineteenth century, Irish Catholic secondary schools such as Clongowes Woods College, attended by James Joyce and (fictitiously) by his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, had become ‘a point of confluence for the dominant ideologies of the [Catholic] Church and the [British] State’.3 Conversely, the ‘responsible gentry class’ that Parnell viewed as requisite to nationalism’s success, and which roughly corresponded to the make-up of turn-of-the-century cultural nationalist circles, was defined by an ‘English dimension and [an] almost total restriction to a privileged class’.4 Thus, starting in the late nineteenth century, Irish children from a range of ethno-sectarian backgrounds grew up in spaces increasingly riven with disavowed contradictions.5 Coming to consciousness in professedly (if variously) nationalist families and communities, yet possessed of a newly racialised imperial whiteness, educated Irish children

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from both sides of the coloniser / colonised divide found themselves irresistibly absorbed into the British imperium. So it was that William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, in many ways mirror opposites, both entered language as an anglicised realm that invisibly operated within and defined the parameters of a wide array of Irish nationalisms, or aspirational Irelands, all of which defined themselves in opposition to some version of Englishness. In short, both authors came of age torn between opposed but interpenetrating Irelands. In the words of W. H. Auden, in his famous elegy ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1940), ‘Mad Ireland hurt [Yeats] into poetry’ (line 34). It is my contention here that Yeats, Joyce and turn-of-the-century Ireland itself were ‘hurt into poetry’ by a very particular kind of ambient historical madness. And it was owing to the historical and structural features of their particular period’s madness that both authors’ writing evolved in response to one distinctive paradox, which could be described as the impossibility of being Irish without simultaneously destroying Irishness. Both responded to the inchoate pressures of British and Irish identity by transforming established literary and folkloric depictions of changelings into heretical representations of figures poised at an invisible threshold between incommensurable Irish orthodoxies. As Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have argued in the introduction to Geomodernisms, modernism could productively be reconceived as a network of ‘interconnected modernisms’, connected, most fundamentally, by their common response to what the authors term ‘modernity’s contagious rupture of histories’.6 When we consider ‘canonical white Anglo modernism’ as existing within this more historically and geographically open-ended web of geomodernisms, as Doyle and Winkiel observe, we can readily see that, like the more far-flung geomodernisms, Irish modernism, though a substantial contributor to ‘canonical white Anglo modernism’, bears the distinctive scars and fractures of its own violent collisions with modernity. Certainly, in the cases of Yeats and Joyce – and particularly in the specifically Irish trope of the faery changeling that the two high modernists share – we can more clearly identify one sense in which Irish canonical high modernism is, in fact, a particularly fraught contact zone, responding to especially intimate, and thus particularly painful, ‘clashes and reversals’, and ‘haunted by [distinctive] ghosts’.7

Anglicisation, Education and the Rise of Imperial Whiteness As the British Empire consolidated over the course of the nineteenth century, Britain’s middle classes increasingly adopted the longstanding practice of the British ruling classes, sending their male children away from their home places to preparatory and public schools that varied widely in terms of social prestige and academic rigour, but much less so in their cold, alienating, hierarchical and punitive atmosphere. George Orwell memorably describes the psychic impact of the widespread ‘practice . . . of sending [English upper- and middle-class] children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven’ in his autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys.8 Published posthumously, Orwell’s indictment of the British public school system reserves its greatest vitriol for the preparatory school to which he was sent in 1911, at the age of eight. Orwell vividly conveys the traumatising impact of the British Empire’s pedagogical isolation – generational and cultural – of its most wellborn sons:

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Your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than by fear, where you did not have to be perpetually on your guard against the people surrounding you. At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike.9 Central to my argument is the probability that, from the late nineteenth century onward, the British public school model that was increasingly emulated by day schools and boarding schools across the British archipelago was particularly harmful to Irish youths from all backgrounds.10 This is documentably true in the cases of Yeats and Joyce, whose earliest identities were shaped in Irish nests from which they were traumatically cut off through their abrupt transplantation into anglicised environments that were, in Yeats’s case, reinforced, and in Joyce’s, simply enforced, by their earliest schooling. In 1876, when Yeats was enrolled in London’s Godolphin Day School at the age of eleven, and in 1888, when Joyce was packed off to Clongowes Wood College at the age of six, both, in Orwell’s terms, were flung out of their ‘warm nest’ into ‘a tank full of pike’ that was not merely physically remote from their home places but which severed them from those homes in terms of identity and culture. The anglicising schooling experiences that informed Yeats’s and Joyce’s life-long literary preoccupations had much in common with each other, and with those of young boys from virtually every ‘British’ family with aspirations to influence and status – emphatically including (in various forms) the sons of Irish nationalists. In Ireland, however, the process of anglicisation (a range of processes designed to impose English language, culture and perspectives, and, for Catholics, a subliminal ethno-national propensity that came to be disparagingly termed ‘west Britonism’) was the product of a specific educational system with its own distinctive roots, reaching back to the sixteenth century. By the 1530s, as Mary O’Dowd has shown, ‘the success of [Tudor reforms in Ireland] . . . depended on the transformation of the Irish child’.11 England made dual diplomatic use of ‘male youth from politically elite families’, as hostages ensuring good behaviour on the part of their elders, and as anglicised lackeys on their return to Ireland. In subsequent decades the Tudor state ‘extend[ed] the anglicisation process to other young boys through state-funded schools’. The late sixteenth century witnessed grants of wardship that included a proviso to ensure ‘that the wards would ‘be brought up in learning, religions and English habits’. By the early seventeenth century, Trinity College Dublin had become the locus of systematic anglicisation, so that the separation of those young men who could be certified to hold proper English views from those who did not could be handled through the stigmatising academic processes of suspension and dismissal. Throughout the process of colonial settlement and entrenchment, systems were therefore put into place to empower and ensure the survival and reproduction of the anglicised subject. Conversely, the survival and reproduction of each such subject incrementally eroded the strength and coherence of indigenous Irish culture, not only linguistically, but epistemologically. By the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift and Brian Merriman made proto-modernist use of the folkloric changeling trope in both English and Muenster Irish, in ways that register outrage in response to growing tensions between British and anglicised patterns of biopolitical reproduction and

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the welfare of Irish society. The authors’ elaborate reinventions of supernatural (or laissez-faire capitalist) abduction in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and ‘A Modest Proposal’, and in Merriman’s The Midnight Court, fight against the tightening double-binds of accelerating anglicisation. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is horrified to realise that he has unwittingly contributed to the biopolitical reproduction of the British Empire (for which Yahoos are an objective correlative). At the end of ‘A Modest Proposal’, conversely, Swift’s narrator rails against the deplorable fate of those Irish children who fail to die in infancy, while Merriman, in The Midnight Court, envisions a faery abduction as a last-ditch effort on the part of the presiding spirits of Ireland and Irish-speaking women to compel Irish men to realign themselves with traditional Irish sexual and familial norms. Yeats’s and Joyce’s modernist reinterpretations of the folkloric and literary changeling emerged in response to an acute crisis that had exacerbated the longstanding contradiction between sturdy Irish children and a sturdy Irish culture. In mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the Great Famine pushed to new extremes the paradoxical relationship of Irish children’s survival to the survival of Irish culture. In the course of the Famine itself, and throughout its decades-long aftermath, impoverished adults caring for dependent children faced appalling double-binds. They could prioritise their children’s survival by entering the workhouse system, which would separate them from their children, or by ‘taking the soup’ that Protestant missionaries notoriously offered starving Catholics in return for their conversion. Or, if these parents had the means, they could improve their children’s chance to seek their fortune elsewhere through English-language schooling. Each such choice marginally improved children’s survival prospects, while incrementally depleting Irish vernacular culture. Famously, at the height of the Famine, many Irish Catholics opted to protect their culture by refusing to ‘take the soup’, even to save their children. In the decades following the Famine, however, the brutal opposition between the wellbeing of Irish children and Irish culture persisted, and in response, anglicisation accelerated, especially following the 1878 Intermediate Education Act, when the Irish Catholic Church adopted a British state-designated curriculum. Both Yeats and, subsequently, Joyce began their schooling during this period, when the survival of the children of an increasingly undifferentiated English-speaking middle class had become fully opposed structurally to the survival of Irish culture. Upon entering school environments in which ancient Roman and English history and imperial perspectives were glorified, and harsh treatment of the vulnerable was accepted, both Yeats and Joyce pined for the distinguishing sights, sounds, smells and gestures of the social worlds from which they had been uprooted. Both found traditional folk practices, as well as memories of singing and storytelling, to be powerfully redolent of an earlier identity and subject position that had, for each, been painfully and irresistibly supplanted by an ill-fitting new identity. This early, transformative rupture precipitated and shaped the later imaginative work of both authors, particularly in their repeated representations of magical transfigurations of children and youths perilously caught between mutually occluding worlds. Both authors, ‘hurt’ into song by a kind of ambient historical madness, retaliated in their writing by fashioning certain of the destabilising and liberatory effects of modernism described by Vicki Mahaffey in Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions. Mahaffey regards modernist representational strategies as not purely aesthetic but as what could be termed a mode of primal self-defence against interpellation. Above all, Mahaffey argues that high modernism constitutes a

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powerful and profoundly necessary mode of pedagogy. By courageously engaging modernism’s ‘formidable textual terrain’, individual citizens in modern societies – which display a frighteningly strong tendency toward uncritical group-think – can be forced out of a conditioned stance of ‘interpretive (or readerly) passivity’.12 Yeats and Joyce seem to have turned to increasingly complicated modernist versions of the changeling trope as one way of both depicting and resisting their own society’s particularly potent versions of modernising, miseducated passivity. As Declan Kiberd notes, Yeats would later recall that it was during his years of unhappy estrangement at the Godolphin School in London that he first found, in his memories of Sligo, ‘a dream landscape, a never-never-land’ for which he longed with ‘some old race instinct . . . like that of a savage’.13 Yeats thus first experienced himself as a (savage) native of an imaginary Ireland – the idiosyncratic nationalist identity that made him the poet he became – in response to the intense, and intensely sensory alienation he felt among his English schoolmates, particularly in response to their voices and the way they pronounced place names.14 Joyce, for his part, famously responded to the strangling double-binds (or nets) he encountered at Clongowes, Ireland’s most elite and anglicised Catholic school, by developing an antagonised, combative disidentification with both England and Ireland.

Yeats’s ‘Stolen Child’ Written in 1886, Yeats’s much-anthologised poem, ‘The Stolen Child’, responds to the intensification of the double-binds of colonial identity thrust upon English-speaking Irish children by staging the Irish child’s entrance into language as predicated on a choice that is irresistibly weighted in favour of cultural death. Figured as the child’s protective incorporation into a purified, eternal Ireland, Yeats’s faery abduction inverts and further complicates Swift’s lament, in ‘A Modest Proposal’, for the Irish children who survive, by converting the child / culture impasse I have described into an appealing celebration of a child’s impending death. Yeats’s faery abduction – which is also a seduction of both child and reader – is a four-stanza lyric account by a faery speaker who, in free indirect discourse, narrates the process by which a young child is lured away to the world of the fae. To persuade the child to enter this realm, the faery intersperses vivid descriptions of its natural beauty, abundance and ease with the insistent refrain that ‘the world’s more full of weeping than [the child] can understand’. The aesthetic, sensual and social appeal with which the poem imbues the faery world sets up a disturbing contradiction between the poem’s reassuring surface and its dark thematic implications. The faery’s appealing account of a primal Ireland, inhabited only by wild things and the fae, is, in one sense, a sort of distilled essence of the mythic purity, plenitude and beauty of precolonial Ireland. Thus, the child’s death (or, if we accept the faery’s terms, the child’s transformation) would be analogous to the child’s disappearing into a safely hidden essential Ireland, embodied in Yeats’s mythic, ahistorical ‘dream landscape’. Yet Yeats’s faery world also, paradoxically, exemplifies the anglicising view of Ireland and its children as blank slates, available, once culturally assimilated, for transformation into more amenable, romantic versions of imagined Irishness. This shadow side of the faery world’s surface appeal comes into focus only gradually and by implication. As with Swift and Merriman, the logic of ‘The Stolen Child’ reflects the relationship of the bearing and training of Irish children to the machinery

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of British imperialism. In the case of ‘The Stolen Child’, however, neither personal nor cultural security is to be found on either side of the faery / human divide. If the child’s death or disappearance into a faeryland, an alternate cultural episteme, initially promises to strengthen or even restore an imagined precolonial ‘never-never land’, Yeats takes pains gradually to undermine the reader’s confidence in this equation. By the poem’s end, reasonably sensitive readers must at least suspect that, in siding with the Sidhe, they have been colluding unwittingly with the forces of death. Over the course of the poem, Yeats figuratively allies the faeries with the very human travails from which they offer respite. The second stanza betrays a rhyming simultaneity between faeries chasing ‘frothy bubbles, / While the world is full of troubles’. In the third stanza, the faeries whisper in the ears of ‘slumbering trout’ to ‘Give them unquiet dreams’, and ‘lea[n] softly out’, perched on ‘ferns that drop their tears / Over the young stream’.15 These image sequences move ever closer to the faeries’ repeated cautionary refrain that the ‘human child’ should ‘come away’ because ‘the [human] world [is full] of weeping’. As the faeries successfully groom their human quarry, or as the human child falls securely under their sway, Yeats’s vision of the faery’s unpeopled, natural abode is increasingly haunted. Indeed, both Yeats’s pristine, precolonial faery realm and the appealing home place the child is leaving behind are increasingly, detectably contaminated with post-Famine trauma. Yet, the chilliness and the alien, inhuman character of the world where faeries dance in silence, mingling hands and glances, can really strike the reader as suspect only in the final stanza, with its warm and reassuring, mammalian, living bodies of lowing calves and bobbing mice, the warm hillside and the singing kettle on the hob – synecdoches for all the child is leaving behind – wreathed in a warm nostalgic haze. At one level, the child’s movements in the course of the poem can be neatly accounted for by a straight-up Lacanian reading. After all, each of the central images in the final stanza pointedly suggests the earliest embodied connections between the pre-Oedipal infant and his original caregiver, whose comforting presence is manifested, first and foremost, as tactile and aural. The child will hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast. Moreover, the poem’s final lines (‘From a world more full of weeping / than he can / understand’) condense all that the child is losing. The final stanza conjoins the infant’s sense of peace, or contentment, in response to the caregiver’s singing and breast, which, from the undifferentiated perspective of the pre-Oedipal infant, is his breast. Prior to entering the symbolic order, caregiver and child are, psychoanalytically, conjoined, so that the caregiver both is continuous with the infant’s rudimentary self, and constitutes his environment, as in utero. Following the child’s entry into the symbolic order, the properties of the primary caregiver are projected by the child on to the most comforting and engaging aspects of his domestic environment and immediate environs. Yet, although ‘The Stolen Child’ can be accounted for by a strict Lacanian reading, such a reading is considerably enriched if we bring to it an awareness of new pressures brought to bear on Irish children in the late nineteenth century.

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By the final stanza, when the ‘solemn-eyed’ child is depicted as ‘going’ rather than ‘coming’ with the faeries, not only is Yeats’s faery world newly associated with lack, rather than plenitude – as here, at last, we are made aware of all the child is leaving behind – but the human world is itself redolent of post-Famine melancholia. Yeats depicts the child’s home place through the lens of memory, as the poetic persona in the Anglo-Saxon ubi sunt thematic regards a ruined settlement. For instance, it is only in the child’s memory (since he is already turning away from his lost home) that we hear the ‘lowing / Of the calves on the warm hillside’.16 The calves, in particular, epitomise the contradictory significance of the possibly abandoned cottage. As young mammals grazing on a warm hillside, the calves evoke a sense of cosy pastoralism. Yet they are ‘lowing’, or calling, perhaps causing readers to wonder why there are no full-grown cattle among them, or reminding readers who have spent time on farms to recall momentarily the cries of calves that are being weaned. The calves thus evoke a sense of home and comfort, yet also hint at that most fundamental and painful of ruptures, between infant and mother. As a species, the cow, in Ireland, similarly embodies both continuity and rupture. The economic, social and cultural significance of cattle to the precolonial Celts can hardly be overstated, so the ongoing presence of young cattle grazing in the fields of an Irish homestead bespeaks traditional Ireland’s long-term survival. Yet the centuries-long process of dispossession and resettlement in Ireland that transformed a thickly forested landscape into interminable pasturage, held largely by Anglo-Irish and absentee British landlords and producing dairy and beef for export, has rendered the cow in post-Famine Ireland equally emblematic of colonial dispossession. Similarly, the ‘kettle on the hob’ exists only in memory, and can no longer ‘sing peace into [the child’s] breast’, yet it is unclear whether this is so because this appealing way of life will go on without the ‘stolen’ child, or whether the cottage itself is already abandoned. The latter possibility is almost too chilling to contemplate, as the image of an abandoned cottage is so closely linked to the innumerable dwellings left empty in the wake of the Famine. In ‘The Stolen Child’, then, the Irish child is poised between two ambiguous, ostensibly opposed worlds that are equally Irish, equally reflective of the Irish landscape and elements of Irish culture. Both are also equally devoid of human life in ways that suggest that they are (equally) haunted by the horrors of the still-recent Famine, and destabilised at the time of the poem’s writing by the Land Wars with their mass-scale evictions, threats and acts of retaliation against the worst landlords, and the Royal Irish Constabulary’s unpredictable, sometimes extreme, responses to any such resistance. In ‘The Stolen Child’, Yeats depicts an Irish child standing at a perilous and incomprehensible threshold, on the brink of disappearing from one (traditional, agrarian, depopulated) Ireland into an (imagined, and linguistically and culturally Other) Ireland from which there can be no return.

James Joyce’s Lost (and Recovered) Children If W. B. Yeats’s early experience of anguished alienation among English schoolchildren set fire to a mystical, fantastical Ireland in his mind, James Joyce was likewise ‘hurt into song’ at the even younger age of six, at Clongowes College, where he internalised an equally compensatory magical world inspired by ‘the majesty of the Church’, which filled him with a sense of awe and dread that never left him.17 Yet, Joyce’s father’s

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‘mocking anti-clericism’ left him torn and confused.18 Richard Ellmann’s analysis, accurate in outline, minimises the significance of Joyce’s internal reactions to the insuperable differences in Ireland’s contradictory (yet all purportedly nationalist) epistemologies. Indeed, in a series of famous passages in Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Joyce explicitly sets forth the pervasive and entangled nature of turn-of-the-century Ireland’s many contradictory nationalisms. In the earliest such passage, in Portrait, Stephen describes his constant immersion in books and writing, or communing with ‘phantoms’, as a means of shielding himself from the irreconcilable directives of his elders: He had heard about him the constant voices of his father and his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things . . . . When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement toward national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him to be true to his country and help to raise up her fallen language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, his schoolcomrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school.19 In this passage, Joyce works out in longhand what he will reiterate lyrically later in Portrait, and in the form of a caricature in the first chapter of Ulysses. In the final chapter of Portrait, Stephen, in a heated argument with Davin over nationalism, complains that ‘when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’.20 In ‘Telemachus’, which opens with Stephen back in Dublin, having suffered an evident malfunction in his initial attempt to fly by Ireland’s nets, he remains entangled, complaining to Joyce’s culturally discombobulated stage Englishman, Haines, that he is ‘a servant of two masters . . . an English and an Italian. . . . And [of] a third . . . who wants me for odd jobs’.21 Indeed, from the very dawning of his self-awareness in Portrait, Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, struggles to organise his perceptions with reference to contradictory Irish epistemes associated with his deeply Catholic mother, on one hand, and his anticlerical, anticolonial and deeply snobbish father on the other. In Portrait, throughout his infancy and his years at Clongowes, young Stephen is what Adam Phillips calls a frantic epistemologist, desperately seeking to read and understand the ‘signs and wonders’ that swirl around him.22 As in ‘The Stolen Child’, Portrait of the Artist, from its earliest pages, repeatedly emphasises the impact of two incommensurable perspectives as they shape the earliest impressions of its infantile proto-artist. Like Yeats’s ‘stolen child’, Joyce’s Stephen is precariously poised between two different Irelands, each associated with pleasure and grief, safety and danger, life and death. The story of the moocow emblematises both Celtic culture and imperial dispossession in Stephen’s earliest memory, simultaneously representing parental nurture and the transmission of Irish culture. His earliest sensory memories involve the distinction between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, and his earliest visual and olfactory memories consider the distinctions between his mother and his father. Thus, from his earliest consciousness, Stephen is

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presented as poised between two opposed registers associated with the figure of a cow, and a binary opposition between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, initiating a series of increasingly sophisticated oppositions that continue, even through Ulysses, dialectically to metaphorise Stephen in terms of his own soul, and, alternately, as a broader, transhistorical reservoir of affect and knowledge. By opening with ‘the moocow fable’, which appears to be an allusion to a nationalist myth in which Ireland is represented by a white cow, who abducts a child to train him in the manly arts of heroism,23 the novel echoes Yeats’s poem in its encoded reference to a child’s abduction into a supernatural realm which stands in opposition to the moocow’s more homely association with domesticity and the mother. The ‘moocow fable’ is also only the first in a series of actual or threatened abductions in Portrait, all of which are fraught with ethno-sectarian tensions pervasive in late nineteenth-century Dublin. In particular, Stephen’s entrance into Clongowes represents the one completed abduction in the narrative. By its nature, his sojourn in an alien, cold and inhospitable setting, where the violence of prior centuries lives on in ghostly forms, explicitly confounds the assured distinctions between Irish and British identity in which all the adults in Stephen’s world are passionately, if diversely, invested. By night, the unquiet dead of other centuries walk the castle’s corridors, and by day, the boys are egged on by their masters to compete, academically and athletically, as teams ‘York’ and ‘Lancaster’. Confused and lonely, Stephen wistfully recalls, as one can imagine Yeats’s stolen child might, his original home place, in contrast to the cold and isolating and silent world of Clongowes, thinking that at ‘his father’s house . . . the kettle would be on the hob’.24 If Portrait, and subsequently Ulysses, entail a series of narrowly evaded abductions of Stephen, who is, in Ulysses, allegorised as ‘the youth of Ireland’, Joyce justifies Stephen’s evasive manœuvres in both texts by representing Stephen’s soul as embryonic, and thus as excessively vulnerable to potentially fatal entanglements. Throughout Portrait, in particular, Stephen is engaged in a pro-life struggle to prevent either of Ireland’s two dominant national paradigms – the anglicised British imperial variant, or the Irish nationalist (and increasingly Catholic) variant – from subjecting his embryonic soul to a very late-term abortion. Meanwhile, in Ulysses, Stephen, now an Irish ‘soul survivor’, as Garry Leonard puts it, is subtly paired with that novel’s paradigmatic ‘stolen child’, Leopold and Molly Bloom’s infant son, Rudy. In Ulysses, the first in a series of depictions of the Irish child as poised between life and death is introduced in the ‘Nestor’ chapter, during Stephen’s comically disorganised lesson on Pyrrhus and Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. Stephen is mentally distracted from his teaching because he is pondering what direction his still embryonic writing career should take. When Stephen asks his students ‘Where do you begin’ in the day’s reading of ‘Lycidas’, a student calls out the line – ‘Weep no more’ – which recalls Yeats’s stolen child’s motives for going away ‘with a faery hand in hand’ – that is, to weep no more.25 Milton’s great elegiac volta also echoes a line from another Yeats poem that interweaves the themes of faery-land and death – ‘Who goes with Fergus?’ – which, like ‘Lycidas’, contains a stern directive to the grieving reader, to ‘no more turn aside and brood’.26 This latter directive recurs twice in the first chapter of Ulysses, triggered by the patronising advice of Buck Mulligan to the grieving Stephen, whose mother has recently died, to ‘give up the moody brooding’.27 Mulligan, in addition to playing the role of the Devil to Stephen’s Jesus, tempting him with the wealth and worldly success

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he might win by playing up to Haines, also plays the part of Yeats’s faery-seducer to Stephen’s precarious Irish child, inviting Stephen to come with him to Athens. Like Yeats’s stolen child, Stephen chooses to leave his home, but he leaves his faery tempter as well. In the following chapter, ‘Nestor’, Stephen gets lost in his own questions about ‘Lycidas’ when he is supposed to be teaching the poem to his students. He wonders how Milton posthumously revived the embryonic soul of Cambridge undergraduate, Edward King, and granted it immortality. Stephen recalls a cluster of similarly larval scholars, floating in the ‘studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve’ in Paris, before his mother’s final illness. In the womblike library, ‘sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night’, Stephen recalls ‘fed and feeding brains around me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers’.28 And, in their midst, he recalls his own emergent soul as his ‘mind’s darkness’, a ‘sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds’.29 Stephen connects the learning process – ‘thought’ – to the soul, which is, ‘in a manner, all that is: the soul is the form of forms’.30 In the mean time, in the classroom where Stephen stands wool-gathering, the inert souls of his students, like Milton’s ‘hungry sheep’, ‘look up, and are not fed’, a situation that, even in the hands of a better teacher, could not be easily rectified, since it is produced by the anglicised curriculum that ‘Lycidas’ itself represents. In any case, Stephen, himself both literally and figuratively unfed, has no inner surplus from which to nourish his students’ torpid inner lives. When Deasy hazards that Stephen ‘was not born to be a teacher’, Stephen responds that he is still ‘a learner’.31 His self-conception throughout Ulysses as a learner or apprentice is another way that Joyce calls attention to Stephen’s as yet unresolved dilemma, his ongoing failure to escape fully the nets of anglicised Irish identity. He has as yet, as he explains in his drunken encounter with British soldiers in ‘Circe’, to ‘kill the priest and the king’ in his head.32 However, although, as a lecturer on Pyrrhus and Milton, Stephen is ‘a disappointed bridge’, failing to reach his ‘welloff’ students as a cohort, he does reach one of them. Cyril Sargent – like Stephen himself, at Clongowes – is the runt of this particular litter. Although Stephen does engage in other quasi-pedagogical acts in Ulysses, including storytelling and a hybrid public lecture / performance piece on Shakespeare (concerning art as an alternative form of reproduction), his session with Sargent is the closest he will ever come to actual teaching. Importantly, he consciously directs his anomalous efforts to transmit knowledge (however futile33) toward the survival of an especially unprepossessing Irish child’s superlatively vulnerable soul. Importantly, the interaction between Stephen and Sargent visually and symbolically prefigures the interaction between Leopold Bloom and Stephen that precedes the reappearance of the novel’s paradigmatic changeling figure, Rudy Bloom, at the end of ‘Circe’. In ‘Circe’s’ final scene, Bloom defends the semi-conscious Stephen from British soldiers and looks after him, specifically recalling Stephen’s reflections in ‘Nestor’ that Sargent’s mother (who is merging, in Stephen’s thoughts, with Stephen’s own mother) ‘had saved [Sargent / Stephen] from being trampled underfoot and had gone’.34 Stephen responds to Bloom’s succour with ‘murmur[ed] fragments’ of ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ and, as Damian Love observes, the poem’s most melancholy phrase – ‘love’s bitter mystery’ – supplies ‘an unstated link’ between ‘Stephen’s grief for his mother to Bloom’s for his son’.35 Sargent is the one student who ‘linger[s]’ after the others have ‘broke[n] asunder’, leaping out of and over their chairs to get to the playing field.36 Sargent has stayed

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behind because he has, apparently, done his maths homework so poorly that Deasy has told him to write it all out again, and to show the results to Stephen. Joyce’s description of Sargent’s writing – ‘sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot’37 – implies that Sargent has literally blotted his copybook. By any standards, Deasy’s response to Sargent’s poor work is counter-productive; he requires Sargent to copy a series of problems off the board without understanding anything about them, conveying the impression that comprehension is not the point. Stephen shows himself to have some of the instincts of a teacher when he asks Sargent if he can solve the problems he has recopied. Sargent’s unabashed ‘no sir’, suggests that he is unaware that solving mathematical problems has anything to do with this process.38 Stephen decides on the spot to teach Sargent how to do the sums he was directed merely to recopy, after he considers how much work, care and good fortune have gone into Sargent’s survival even to this awkward, preliminary (‘ugly and futile’) stage in his development. The word ‘futility’ first occurs to Stephen when he touches Sargent’s copybook, in reference to the mindless scrivening routinely assigned to Sargent and his classmates – usually with Stephen’s own casual complicity.39 Stephen decides that both the situation and Sargent himself – the product of the materials on which Sargent’s soul has been nourished – are not only futile, but also ugly, when Sargent matter-offactly indicates that he cannot ‘do’ the equations he has copied out. With a mixture of repulsion and curiosity, Stephen inventories Sargent’s person, noting the boy’s ‘lean neck’, his ‘thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed’, as if Sargent himself is God’s own blotted copybook. And yet, Stephen muses, ‘someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart’.40 Here, we could say, Stephen does with Sargent the opposite of what Yeats’s faery does with the stolen child. First, he imaginatively reconnects the child to his mother, who is, in turn, emblematic of the original home from which the process of anglicising miseducation has traumatically separated him. He both envisions and symbolically, restoratively enacts the scenario of a parent figure who physically shelters her young from the world’s dangers: a scenario that will be writ large in ‘Circe’, with Stephen in the role of the protected child. In Ulysses’ climactic chapter, Bloom re-enacts the parable of the Good Samaritan, going far out of his way and venturing social capital that, as Margot Norris points out, he cannot spare, by repeatedly intervening on Stephen’s behalf.41 Like the traveller in the parable, Stephen, the dispossessed ‘youth of Ireland’, has been (or certainly feels himself to have been) robbed and abandoned by his alcoholic father and by Buck Mulligan. He also feels discounted by Dublin’s nationalist circles. Though a range of Dubliners with whom Stephen interacts (like the ‘pressgang’ in ‘Aeolus’) make a show of welcoming him as a favoured son, they none the less fail him because, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, they have no counsel to offer him.42 Bloom, for his part, has been subjected to a continuous stream of micro-aggressions and outright hostility by Stephen’s ineffectual elders. Thus, Bloom’s dogged determination to protect the erratic young artist shows him – if we turn to the Old Testament parable in which King Solomon awards parental custody to the mother most invested in an infant’s welfare – to be Stephen’s rightful parent. In ‘Nestor’, Stephen’s mentoring of Sargent prefigures in miniature Bloom’s ride or die commitment in ‘Circe’ to Stephen’s survival into full artistic maturity. And while Joyce’s description of Stephen’s transmission of knowledge to Sargent resonates with mischievous references to faery abduction, it should be clear that Stephen is

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now intervening in, rather than facilitating, an ongoing transgenerational process of cultural appropriation. Instead of leaving Sargent to get on with his miseducation in the classrooms and on the playing fields of Deasy’s pointedly anglicising school, Stephen thinks of Sargent, and himself, as material extensions of their (equally absent) mothers’ bodies, love and souls. And side by side with Sargent, whom Stephen views as, like himself, painfully and irrevocably severed from his mother and thus from his original home (which has become, psychoanalytically and socio-symbolically a haunted ruin), Stephen leads Sargent by the hand, into a dark, culturally and temporally distant world where imps dance according to ancient patterns. Although Joyce could be seen to be re-enacting Yeats’s faery abduction, and, for that matter, traumatically re-enacting his own experience at Clongowes, he is, in fact, taking the earliest steps toward undoing Sargent’s abduction, by starting to drain the vast reservoir of ignorance that Sargent’s miseducation has produced. By initiating Sargent into a transnational, transhistorical dance that, by its very existence in Ireland, and its irrefutable, millennia-old continuity across regions and belief systems, confounds the newfangled Occidental / Oriental binary on which British imperial whiteness is predicated, Stephen ‘solve[s] out the problem’.43 The problem that Stephen solves, with and through Sargent, could be expressed as the question of filial continuity, which anglicisation has catastrophically disrupted. Notably, he solves these problems, both of which constitute the Irish child as a crux, or a site of damaging discontinuity, by literally transmitting knowledge to a child. The symbols, as Stephen explains them to Sargent, move ‘in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters’. Stephen’s pen ‘dances’ among ‘the imps of fancy of the Moors’.44 He recalls two heretical medieval philosophers whose ‘imps of fancy’ live on in modern mathematics, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, as ‘dark men’ who live on in ‘the obscure soul of the world’, as ‘a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend’.45 Stephen asks Sargent if he understands, and asks him to work out the second problem himself. He watches as Sargent copies out the problem and then, ‘waiting always for a word of help’, moves ‘faithfully the unsteady symbols’.46 And as Sargent works on the problem with Stephen’s encouragement, ‘a faint hue of shame flicker[s] behind his dull skin’, as if his soul is uncomfortably, uncertainly reviving in response to their shared efforts.47 As Bloom reflects in ‘Calypso’, while he surveys a garden described in terms that could easily be ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’, rewritten as scatological pastiche, ‘dirty cleans’. In ‘Nestor’, Stephen makes use of this principle – that dirty cleans – by using heresy to mend the inevitable harm he has done to Ireland by the apostasy that has been indispensable to his own soul’s survival. To feed Sargent’s starved soul, Stephen draws on and transmits to him ‘heresies’ that have survived across the ages. He does this in the same spirit in which he sang ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ to his dying mother in lieu of the prayer for which she pleads, and which he could not provide. In both cases, Stephen uses heretical materials – or materials that were considered heretical, in the case of ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ – to make concrete amends for the pain that his own personal heresies – committed in self-defence – have caused his mother, and as amends, also, for the inevitable problems that his stubborn refusal either to die, or to internalise some version of Ireland’s emergent anglicised orthodoxy, has posed for Irish culture itself. Stephen thinks: ‘like him was I . . . my childhood bends beside me’, and he sees that ‘the sum was done’.48 Joyce signals to the reader that some profound, if as yet

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indecisive, exchange between two souls has occurred in the course of Stephen’s ministrations to the unpropitious Sargent when Stephen directs his young charge to ‘get [his] stick and go out to the others’. Here, Joyce / Stephen restates in the vernacular the final lines of ‘Lycidas’, in which Milton describes an uncouth swain, who is both the poet and Edward King, as having symbolically completed the apprenticeship that King’s premature death had interrupted, as rising and ‘twitch[ing] his mantle blue’ and departing for ‘fresh woods / and pastures new’. By initiating Sargent into the timeless morrice dance of dark, heretical Moors, Stephen has given the boy a new map of the world that might, in time, allow him to find his own way out of the impasse that restricts them both. In both Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Joyce repeatedly connects the refusal of his alter ego, Stephen, to abjure his apostasy, with Yeatsian allusions and language. Especially in Ulysses, ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ becomes a leitmotif, closely associated with Stephen’s most scathing memories of his mother’s terrible death, the very memories that impel him to do what he can for Sargent, on the grounds that another mother had loved and sacrificed for him. Unlike ‘The Stolen Child’, which creates a sense of suppressed tragedy specifically owing to the absolute separation of the faery and the human world, ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, which ultimately instigates Rudy’s return, celebrates the ecstatic dissolution of boundaries between the worlds. Yeats’s poem, which originally appeared as a song in the controversial 1899 Irish Literary Theatre production of his play The Countess Cathleen, had had a powerful influence on the young Joyce. When Joyce’s devout Catholic classmates and instructors at University College Dublin condemned as heresy the play’s celebration of a noblewoman who barters her soul to demons to feed her starving people, Joyce ‘went with’ Yeats, taking the poem up as a sort of talisman and setting it to music. In Ulysses, Joyce has Stephen play and sing ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ to comfort his dying mother, just as, in ‘The Countess Cathleen’, the song is sung to comfort the dying Countess. By analogy, Stephen’s mother has traded away her soul to the Catholic Church, a malignant but potent spiritual force, to preserve her children. And Stephen, unwilling to repay her sacrifice in the only coin she can accept – his own like sacrifice – instead repays her with a song that promises, upon her death, a return to the wild, starry, mythic world beyond our mortal sphere. Although Stephen’s mother could never have consciously accepted such a heretical account of death as a portal into a mysterious broader nature, Stephen clearly believes that his dying mother unconsciously understands and is comforted by the song’s message, which ‘she wanted to hear’.49 ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ recurs in what is arguably Ulysses’ culminating scene, when Stephen’s murmured phrases invoke the return of Bloom’s painfully lost infant son, Rudy. As with all Joyce’s most incandescent effects, Rudy’s manifestation derives its uncanny power from innumerable connections to patterns that run through and beyond Ulysses. Ranking high among these connections is the description of Rudy as ‘a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit’. The figure of Rudy, described in these terms, constitutes the symbolic return of the stolen child, heralding the breach of the absolute separation that anglicisation has invisibly imposed. Just as, in ‘Telemachus’, in which Stephen recalls a dream of his mother, who had ‘silently . . . come to him’, and as in ‘Nestor’, in which Sargent ‘came forward slowly,

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showing an open copy book’,50 Rudy Bloom likewise appears ‘slowly . . . holding a book in his hand’.51 Rudy is distinguished from the ghostly May Dedalus and the embryonic Cyril Sargent by his display of an active literacy, as he fluently reads ‘from right to left’. Simultaneously faery and human, returned changeling and returned kidnap victim, anglicised public schoolboy and fluent reader of Hebrew, Rudy’s return symbolically offers a radical alternative to the anglicised versions of Irishness that have left Bloom, as an insufficiently white Irish child, unwanted by either British or Italian masters, and isolated and incapacitated Stephen owing to the imperiously pressing and contradictory demands of too many masters.

Notes 1. In addition to my The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, Joseph Valente’s Dracula’s Crypt offers a compelling argument that Bram Stoker’s Dracula should be seen as a work of modernism owing to its complex and idiosyncratic responses to the impossible contradictions of Stoker’s Anglo-Irish subject position. 2. As Saree Makdisi argues, in order to reorganise England from nation into empire, the English themselves had to be racially homogenised through a new form of nationally normative whiteness. Ambiguously a part of, and apart from, an emergent Occidental Britishness that was redefining ‘the colonized other . . . within the regimes of representation’ (Hall, ‘The Local and the Global’, p. 174), Irish children, at the end of the nineteenth century, found themselves embroiled in an invisible, high-stakes and ultimately unwinnable culture war. 3. Gibson, ‘“That Stubborn Irish Thing”’, pp. 92–5. 4. Ibid., p. 89. 5. Roy Foster gives an example of such an identity contradiction from W. B. Yeats’s childhood. Though Yeats’s Anglo-Irish Protestant family removed itself early from Sligo to London, once in London the nascent poet learned from his father to view the English as inferior to the Irish; ‘English people’ were not ‘intelligent or well-behaved unless they were artists’ (W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. I, p. 26). Andrew Gibson, in ‘“That Stubborn Irish Thing”: A Portrait of the Artist in History’, elegantly captures an obverse set of identity contradictions in Joyce’s childhood, noting: ‘as Stephen’s hornpipe indicates, he is also dancing to another tune within Parnellite culture, a concept of gentility whose roots are elsewhere [than indigenous Irish culture]’. Of Parnell, Gibson observes: ‘The great obstructer of English interests in politics was also inclined to sustain them in culture’ (p. 90). 6. Doyle and Winkiel, ‘Introduction: The Global Horizons of Modernism’, p. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 3. 8. Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, p. 294; Kindle loc. 4261. 9. Ibid., p. 268; Kindle loc. 3905. 10. In a collection titled Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad, A. J. Angulo collects essays examining the role of education and socialisation in the cultural production of ignorance. For the purpose of this chapter I am using Angulo’s term, miseducation, to describe the disabling effects of British schooling on Irish subjects. 11. O’Dowd, ‘Early Modern Ireland and the History of the Child’, p. 30. 12. Mahaffey, Modernist Literature, p. 5. 13. Kiberd, ‘Yeats, Childhood and Exile’, p. 127. 14. Ibid. 15. Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, in Collected Poems, lines 21–2; line 32; line 34; line 35; lines 36–7, italics added. 16. Ibid., lines 43–4.

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precarious children in anglophone irish modernism 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 30. Ibid. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, p. 88. Ibid., p. 220. Joyce, Ulysses, 1.638, 641. Phillips, On Flirtation, p. 41. See Gifford, Joyce Annotated, pp. 131–3. Joyce, Portrait, p. 15. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.56–7. Ibid., 1.240, 265. Ibid., 1.235–6. Ibid., 2.69–72. Ibid., 2.72–4. Ibid., 2.74–5. Ibid., 2.403. Ibid., 15.4436–7. Ibid., 2.139. Ibid. 2.146–7. Love, ‘Sailing to Ithaca’, p. 8. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.123, 120. Ibid., 2.129. Ibid., 2.138. Ibid., 2.133. Ibid., 2.140. Norris, Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses, pp. 131–2. Joyce, Ulysses, 7.625. Ibid., 2.151. Ibid., 2.155–7. Ibid., 2.158–60. Ibid, 2.163–4. Ibid., 2.164–5. Ibid., 2.168–73. Ibid., 1.251. Ibid., 2.123–4. Ibid., 15.4957–9.

Bibliography Angulo, A. J., Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Ariès, Phillippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Random House, 1962) (original 1962 copyright by Jonathan Cape). Backus, Margot, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the AngloIrish Colonial Order (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: First Mariner Books, 2019), pp. 26–55. Bubb, Alexander, Meeting Without Knowing It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, ‘Introduction: The Global Horizons of Modernism’, in Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (eds), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

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Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce: The First Revision of the 1959 Classic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Froud, Mark, The Lost Child in Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Gibson, Andrew, ‘“That Stubborn Irish Thing”: A Portrait of the Artist in History’, in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (eds), Joyce, Ireland, Britain (Miami: Florida University Press, 2006), pp. 85–103. Gifford, Don, Joyce Annotated (Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley Press, 1982). Hall, Stuart, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), pp. 183–7. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (1916; London: Penguin, 1992). Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Kiberd, Declan, ‘Yeats, Childhood and Exile’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammels (eds), Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), pp. 126–45. Leonard, Garry, ‘Soul Survivor: Stephen Dedalus as the Priest of the Eternal Imagination’, Joyce Studies Annual (2015), pp. 3–27. Love, Damian, ‘Sailing to Ithaca: Remaking Yeats in Ulysses’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 36:1 (2007), pp. 1–10. Lowe-Evans, Mary, Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989). Mahaffey, Vicki, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). Makdisi, Saree, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Milton, John, Milton’s Lycidas (London: Palala Press, 2015). Norris, Margot, Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). O’Callaghan, Katherine, ‘Joyce’s “treeless hills”: Deforestation and its Cultural Resonances’, in Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan (eds), Memory Ireland, Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), pp. 95–111. O’Dowd, Mary, ‘Early Modern Ireland and the History of the Child’, in Maria Luddy and James M. Smith (eds), Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 28–45. Orwell, George, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, in George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Faults: Narrative Essays (Boston: First Mariner Books, 2009), pp. 245–95; Kindle edn loc. 3573–4272. Phillips, Adam, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Valente, Joseph, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (UrbanaChampaign: Illinois University Press, 2001). Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996).

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8 Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration and the Unfinished Business of Modernism Sarah L. Townsend

I

n Irish literary modernism, the symbolic and ideological romance of soil tends to eclipse the pragmatics of property ownership. Consider the number of characters in early twentieth-century drama who renounce their material ties in order to forge a more sensuous or metaphysical attachment to the land. In W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Michael Gillane abandons a lucrative marriage and comfortable home in order to recover the poor old woman’s green fields through blood sacrifice. In Padraic Colum’s The Fiddler’s House (1907), Maire Hourican abandons a lover to accompany her wandering artist father on the open road. In J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Nora Burke follows a tramp who assures her that dwelling in the open air is preferable to remaining under the roof of a miserly and vindictive husband. Each of these characters seeks freedom and spiritual succour in enchanted ground, whereas those they leave behind exhibit a far more proprietary relationship to the land upon which they dwell. The dramatic conflict between these two modes of habitation derives from a longstanding tension within the Irish terrestrial imagination. Historically, land has been depicted in Irish writing and political rhetoric either as soil (which conveys its symbolic and social aspects) or as property (which describes its material and legal dimensions). Cultural nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to embrace the former as a rallying cry, drawing on soil’s organic and natal associations to conceptualise the nation-in-waiting, while land reformers insisted on the priority of property, thereby transforming the scope and scale of native property ownership. Ultimately, it was soil that became a dominant trope within Irish literary modernism. Its appeal lay in the alternatives it furnished to the administered terrain of colonial modernity: tradition, lineage, intuitive knowledge and communal forms of sociality. Conceived as ‘a sacred possession, mystically owned by the dispossessed’, soil furnished Irish culture with an inalienable source of re-enchantment.1 Property does not disappear from the literary record, however. This chapter excavates a neglected strand of rural drama, stretching from the early twentieth century to the post-World War II period, that endeavours to reconcile terrestrial sentiment to the acquisition and defence of Irish property. The protagonists of these plays defend their unblinkered and pragmatic pursuit of land ownership as compatible with, rather than anathema to, their contemporaries’ patriotic allegiances to the soil. Against the

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orthodoxies of cultural nationalism, these works posit material security – as well as spiritual inheritance – as a foundation for a vital and durable future. Restoring rural drama to the corpus of Irish modernism also enriches our understanding of the movement’s geographic and aesthetic breadth.

Soil and the Nationalist Imagination Although the ideological rallying cry of soil would become enshrined in the archive of Irish cultural nationalism, the origins of the motif derive from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political economy, which endeavoured to diagnose the deviance of the Hibernian national character in terms of the people’s relationship to land. The Irish, economists argued, were too closely attached to the biological materiality of the earth and thus had been tainted with the primitive and unhygienic habits that soil, or dirt, fostered. For instance, the fact that Ireland’s peasantry relied upon potatoes as a subsistence crop and dietary staple, rather than consuming bread like the English working classes, was taken as evidence of their base and uncultured ways: ‘[B]ecause it comes right out of the earth, haphazardly shaped, like a clot of dirt, but virtually ready to eat . . . the potato’ – like the Irish bodies and habitations it sustained – ‘was rhetorically associated by its opponents with physical wretchedness, filth, and infirmity’.2 Part of the aversion was undoubtedly racial, a reaction against the savage carnality ascribed to colonised subjects, but it also stemmed from recognising in the Irish a different and potentially disruptive relationship to bodily need. Here was a peasantry inured to the logics of Victorian political economy. Decried frequently for their ‘want of wants’, the Irish peasantry remained alarmingly contented with the level of bare subsistence that the hearty potato made possible.3 The problem of fecund soil was also a problem of fecund bodies: sufficiently nourished and thus capable of satisfying their own basic needs, the Irish would continue reproducing an outsized population, all the while remaining inured to the disciplinary coercions of wage labour or capitalist exchange.4 By the eve of the Famine, soil had become synonymous for economists with land made alien and impervious to British influence. The terrestrial matter that, in an earlier era, signified sheer wretchedness now came to index the Irish peasant’s disconcertingly intimate and sensuous proximity to the land. A tidy mnemonic for marking colonial difference, soil circulated in early and mid-Victorian discussions about Ireland with remarkable consistency. As Elaine Hadley puts it, ‘One cannot overemphasise the extent to which the Irish were almost universally portrayed as organic components of the Irish soil.’5 The substrate still bore negative associations, to be sure. According to Hadley, it supplied a ready justification for ongoing colonial dispossession: because the Irish were congenitally embedded in the materiality of the land, so the argument went, they could never attain the distanced rationality and abstraction that property ownership demanded. The motif of soil, and of the hearty potato that emanated from it, also anchored an influential moralist strand of mid-century political thinking in Britain that considered Irish poverty, especially the cataclysm of the Famine, as a fitting Providential punishment for an indolent population.6 Yet, even as policymakers like Charles Trevelyan, who oversaw the Famine relief works starting in 1846, interpreted the potato blight as a divine rebuke of Ireland’s monocultural mode of production, another set of soil-based associations had begun to circulate.

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As the locus of political power in Britain started shifting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from the landed gentry to a newly enfranchised populace, and as proprietary possession became less important for social stability than cultivating in citizens liberal qualities of ‘self-possession’, assumptions about the terrestrial proximity of the Irish likewise started to shift.7 Liberal reformers began to reappraise the Irish attachment to the land, long considered a liability, as a potentially improving force that might instil in the peasantry virtues of rationality and restraint they had been thought incapable of attaining. For instance, Sara Maurer has shown that John Stuart Mill’s support, starting in the 1840s, for small agricultural holdings in Ireland was grounded in the conviction that ‘soil, topography, and climate dictat[ed] the owner’s behavior’, essentially cultivating the peasant as much as the crops he or she tended.8 At the same time that reformers were turning from punitive to increasingly paternalistic attitudes about the terrestrial attachments of the Irish, the writers of the Young Ireland movement began drawing on the organic and natal imagery of soil to conceptualise the nation-in-waiting. In their speeches and poetry, and the pages of their newspaper the Nation, whose stated aim was ‘To create and foster public opinion in Ireland, and make it racy of the soil’, writers like Thomas Davis, John Mitchel and James Fintan Lalor converted the long-maligned motif of soil into a virtue and ideological rallying cry.9 That Irish nationalists and British liberals should find a shared currency in the idea of soil speaks to its considerable flexibility. As Seamus Deane explains, Soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past generations have returned. It is a political notion denuded, by a strategy of sacralization, of all economic and commercial reference.10 This symbolic conception of Irish land appealed to Irish and British thinkers alike because it effaced the messy contradictions of proprietorship. Young Irelanders could draw upon soil as a sign of national solidarity without becoming entangled in land’s fraught double status as a material possession claimed by individuals and a communal heritage shared by all. Meanwhile, British landowners who were concerned about increasing state and commercial encroachments upon their property rights gleaned in the motif of Irish soil the vestiges of a feudal proprietary autonomy that was disappearing at home.11 Their nostalgic co-opting of colonised territory as a timeless terrestrial preserve adhered to what Maurer calls a ‘perverse logic of inalienability’: ‘If Irish land could not be estranged from its owner by hundreds of years of British state interference, then surely it could be considered equally immune to the alienating forces of the [capitalist] marketplace.’12 Paradoxical and self-interested though it was, the landowners’ thinking none the less illustrates the vast range of soil’s romantic appeal, its capacity to conjoin otherwise antithetical perspectives through a shared telluric claim. The Irish Land Wars proceeded in a different rhetorical register. The symbolism of soil held considerably less appeal for the Land League, which focused its attentions on legal and procedural arrangements that soil could never facilitate. While the First and Second Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 paved the way for a distinctive form of coproprietorship between landlord and tenant by codifying the so-called Ulster Custom, a customary tenant right common in many parts of Ireland, the League’s attentions turned quickly to large-scale redistribution. It was the legal language of individual

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proprietorship, not the figurative language of terrestrial essence, that mediated the political rhetoric of the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in the passage of a significant milestone for peasant ownership, the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903 (extended in 1909), which facilitated the widespread transfer of land from landlords to tenantscum-owners. Yet, despite its political legacy, the discourse of land proprietorship seldom features in accounts of early twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have attempted to account for this absence by suggesting that property becomes eclipsed by the motif of soil during the Celtic Revival precisely because the Land Wars were so successful in redistributing land and social power. On the one hand, newly propertied peasants had been liberated from their most pressing material concerns and could now turn their energies toward pursuing a sense of national purpose through art and culture; as George Moore put it in 1899, ‘Having gained property, formerly landless people ask, “What is property for?”’13 Soil offered one conduit for contemplating the meaning of the land the Irish had secured. Meanwhile, writers from an increasingly dispossessed Ascendency class contemplated their imperilled dependence upon the Irish soil or else anchored themselves in the romantic consolations of terrestrial essence.14 As Adrian Frazier argues, the rapid revolution in Irish property ownership, set in train by [the Land] acts, is the main social cause of the Irish Revival . . . Indeed, if there is something Irish about Irish modernists, one of the most distinctively national traits is that they were living through a period when the material basis for their own social class was melting away.15 Just as it had accommodated both British liberalism and Irish nationalism in an earlier period, the flexible symbolism of soil appears to have bound together the otherwise antithetical terrestrial preoccupations of a new early twentieth-century Irish landholding class searching for meaning and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy they had succeeded in displacing. This account of soil’s literary–cultural dominance is plausible enough, especially in so far as it aligns with the larger story of modernity as a condition of alienation and modernism, the aesthetic reckoning with or sublimation of that alienation. Irish literary modernism, we might say, vibrates with the legacies of nineteenth-century nationalism’s fraught terrestrial attachments. The essentialism of soil re-emerges, for instance, in the anthropological investigations of Revivalists like W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, and in high and late modernist writers like James Joyce, Seán Ó’Faoláin and Samuel Beckett. 16 Traces of its enchanting qualities appear, too, in the sublimity of blood sacrifice espoused in the poetry, oratory and drama of Yeats and Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, Constance Markievicz and Terence MacSwiney.17 Nevertheless, proprietary thinking persists in twentieth-century literature in ways that remain unacknowledged. The Wyndham Act did not so much settle the issue of Irish ownership as it opened up new questions about what it meant to possess native land, questions that would be debated in both public life and art for decades to come. Acknowledging the continued role that property plays in mediating the twentiethcentury terrestrial imagination requires, however, that we look to authors and texts typically excluded from mainstream accounts of Irish modernism. In the rural drama examined later in this chapter, the discursive relationship between property and soil proves less

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a standoff between mutually exclusive conceptions than an ongoing negotiation between two potential futures. Through their attempts to reconcile telluric sentiment to the acquisition and defence of property, and to balance the traditions of communal habitation with the pragmatics of private ownership, these plays also challenge our understanding of Irish modernism’s political and aesthetic priorities.

The ‘Irish’ in Irish Modernism One of the oft-remarked ironies of modernist studies is the degree to which writers from Ireland helped define and canonise a literary movement in which their nationality remains, to this day, a qualifier. A number of Irish authors were hailed as exemplars of international modernism from the start: foundational critics like Frank Kermode and Hugh Kenner were among the first to embrace the work of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, followed by a steady succession of subsequent scholars. The social make-up and stylistic register of this trio speaks to the overwhelmingly metropolitan and avant-garde leanings of modernist criticism. Meanwhile, other Irish writers have been much slower to gain admission to the ranks of literary modernism. Although the study of Irish modernism has expanded considerably, the process of extricating it from ‘the old solidities of “modern English literature” and “European high modernism”’ has been slow and painstaking.18 For instance, until fairly recently, the Celtic Revival was considered antimodernist. As Rónán McDonald explains, it was only with the rise of cultural studies and a renewed historicism in the 1980s and 1990s that the Revival came to be seen not as modernism’s antithesis but ‘as an incubatory moment of it, its anti-modern ideology of a piece with the modernist disdain for bourgeois values and prefabricated realist forms’.19 Since then, a number of revivalists like Gregory, Synge, George Moore, Æ and Pearse have been resituated within the modernist camp; their influence has also been traced to the work of late modernists like Flann O’Brien, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Mártín Ó’Cadhain. Nevertheless, the Revival retains a tenuous relationship to the field of Irish modernism, one that continues to affect where and how critical attention is directed. As Paige Reynolds explains, ‘Irish revivalism and international modernism are two intersecting sets, and the term “Irish modernism” describes the sizeable and significant site of common ground shared by these two movements.’20 Common ground is not necessarily even ground, though. Modernism continues to enjoy enormous prestige within literary criticism as a dominant historical and aesthetic category (it appears not only to have survived the challenge posed by postcolonial and minority traditions but to have accrued a renewed currency via the ever-expansive category of ‘global modernism’). The ‘modernism’ in Irish modernism has exerted a far greater influence on the critical shaping of the field than has the Revival. In practice, this has meant that many bodies of writing that do not hew to a metropolitan or avant-garde aesthetic, including the Revival’s peasant realist fare, have been sidelined or sequestered in order to make a stronger case for Irish literature’s modernist credentials. Despite a laudable spate of recovery work by scholars, the literary-critical conversation about early twentieth-century Ireland remains dominated by those authors and texts that advance the account of Irish modernism.21 One consequence of modernism’s critical hegemony is the eclipsing of land politics in the literature of this period. Instead, a slim, very skewed variety of soil-oriented thinking has come to stand in misleadingly for the era’s terrestrial imagination.

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If the critical dominance and metropolitan predilections of modernism are to blame in part for the obscuring of property in Irish literary history, so too is the factionalism of early twentieth-century letters. Because Yeats’s calculated mythologising set the terms for how the Revival would be (and, in some ways, still is) understood, certain writers who challenged his vision on aesthetic or political grounds have been sidelined in accounts not only of the Revival but also, subsequently, of modernism.22 Most notable in this respect is Daniel Corkery, who openly criticised the elitism and anglicisation of the Ascendancy revivalists in his literary and scholarly writing, advocating instead for a nativist cultural agenda anchored in aesthetic realism, the Irish language and the land. Enda Duffy notes, ‘Corkery is commonly cited today as the starred example of the fundamentalist, insular strain in Irish literary criticism,’ a reputation cultivated at times by the author’s exaggerated rejection of the Revival, and yet one that belies the complexity and range of his career.23 Corkery and the fellow ‘Cork realists’ associated with him (including two of the playwrights discussed below, T. C. Murray and Lennox Robinson) have been reduced to subordinate straw-man figures in many a study of early twentieth-century theatre, despite notable affinities to and collaborations with Yeats and other modernist counterparts.24 As a result of their dismissal, some of the best examples of property-oriented thinking in Irish drama have faded from our collective view. More broadly, the obscuring of property stems from a longstanding antagonism between modernism and realism that has held firm despite the geographical expansion of modernist studies in recent decades. Although the new modernist studies, animated by the influence of postcolonial theory, has acknowledged the significant diversity of modernity’s global expressions since the 1990s, it nevertheless shares with its predecessors a profound suspicion of realism. As Jed Esty and Colleen Lye claim, modernist criticism ‘cannot fully shed the original and sedimented attachment to metropolitan avant-gardism’.25 There are deep-seated reasons for the aversion to realism in both global modernist studies and in Irish criticism. For the former, the totalising logic of literary realism is the embarrassing product of an imperial world system that metropolitan modernists and Third World writers alike have sought to resist; for the latter, it is a fraught formal legacy bequeathed by English literary influence.26 However, to dismiss realism as naïve or ideologically complicit is also to deny the aesthetic range of peripheral modernisms. ‘[T]he metropolitan example remains the definitive prism through which we recognize aesthetic innovation,’ argue Esty and Lye. ‘This unequal aesthetic relation replicates and reflects, we think, the still-persisting impasse between racial / national particularisms and European universalism.’27 In the case of Irish drama, this discrepancy in aesthetic prestige can be gleaned, for instance, in the habitual tendency to juxtapose the cosmopolitan achievements of the Abbey Theatre’s early years with the ‘anemic and doddering’ realist fare, as Brinsley MacNamara put it in 1913, produced during the Theatre’s subsequent decades.28 In fact, rural plays were better received and better integrated into the varied theatrical landscape of early twentieth-century Ireland than criticism often admits. Although rural Irish drama may seem, from the vantage of high modernism, like a smattering of small regional movements, it was actually situated both institutionally and formally at the heart of the nation’s theatre scene. Led by playwrights from Cork and Belfast, two thriving hubs in the theatrical touring circuit, rural dramas were produced on major stages at home and abroad, including at the Abbey Theatre, where they often shared

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the bill with more prototypically modernist works.29 Rural plays proved especially popular with audiences who sought material from ‘outside the circles of the Abbey’s Anglo-Irish elite’.30 They flourished, in particular, under the influence of Lennox Robinson, who served as the theatre’s manager from 1910 to 1914 and from 1919 to 1923, and many of the works discussed below premiered at the Abbey during his tenure. The historical prevalence of these plays, which far outstrips the scholarly attention devoted to them today, reminds us that Irish theatrical modernism included a wide array of aesthetic modes beyond avant-garde experimentalism and may be defined better by attributes like metatheatricality or attention to politics than by any given style.31 Indeed, in so far as they work to syncopate the perennial attachments of soil and the nascent demands of property ownership, rural plays exemplify the distinctively Irish approach to modernism that Terry Eagleton has termed ‘the archaic avant-garde’, wherein writers ‘[blend] the archaic with the absolutely contemporary, squeezing out the dreary continuum between them’.32

Staging Property T. C. Murray’s play Birthright (Abbey Theatre, 1910)33 offers a good example of the temporal consciousness that Eagleton describes: the play adapts the story of Cain and Abel to examine the terrestrial politics of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism. The tragic events that unfold on stage are set into motion thirty years earlier, when returning emigrant Bat Morrissey buys a small County Cork farm with money earned in America. Although the intervening years have proven successful – one of first beneficiaries of the First and Second Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, Bat transforms his humble purchase into thriving farmland – the unspoken indignities endured along the way breed in him a bitterness that poisons his familial relationships. Bat resents that his athletic and artistic elder son Hugh will inherit the farm over his harder-working younger son Shane without recognising the sacrifices that both men have made to ensure its survival. Particularly painful is the fact that Shane is preparing to leave for America in several days. The departure will deprive Bat of his most valuable labourer, but it also recapitulates the barely referenced yet still raw trauma of his own forced emigration decades before. Early in the play, Bat professes his love for the farm in terms that echo nineteenth-century writers’ descriptions of the soil-entrenched Irish: ‘The sweat o’ my body an’ my life is in every inch o’ land.’34 What distinguishes Birthright from its literary predecessors, however, is its frank consideration of what it will take to maintain that land in the years to come. Murray’s play forecasts the devastating ends to which the pressures of ownership drive Irish proprietors, including a personal hardness that rivals that of their former landlords. The terrestrial attachments that eventually drive Bat to disinherit his firstborn son recur throughout rural drama of the period. Murray’s later play, Aftermath (Abbey Theatre, 1922), features a widow, Mrs O’Hegarty, who reels from the loss of the family farm decades earlier. ‘Mother’s never got over it,’ her son Myles notes. ‘She’s always heartsick looking up there.’35 Upon learning that the new owner, Mary Hogan, may be interested in marrying her son, Mrs O’Hegarty works quickly to derail Myles’s budding romance with a schoolteacher from the city. Murray’s matriarch readily mortgages her son’s happiness for the sake of the family’s repossession of the land, an objective she tries but fails to instil in him. ‘Aren’t you a farmer’s son

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yourself?’ she implores Myles. ‘Didn’t your father’s father, and all his seed, breed and generation live on the land? The love o’ the soil should be as strong in you as it is in me. ‘Twould be against nature if it wasn’t so!’36 Mrs O’Hegarty clings to the conviction that ‘nature’, that genetic predisposition binding individuals to the land, will resolve the temporary accidents of property ownership. Yet, other plays like Rutherford Mayne’s Red Turf (Ulster Literary Theatre, 1911) see their protagonists disabused of such fantasies. In Red Turf, the young farmer Mary Burke is forced to defend her inherited land against the legal claim of an encroaching neighbour, Michael Flanagan. Unlike the O’Hegarty family in Aftermath, who lose their farm through implied mismanagement, Mary is stripped of her land by the colonial state apparatus, which furnishes her opponent with a survey map proving the disputed territory belongs to him. In the ultimately fatal standoff between Flanagan, who believes he has purchased his claim to the property, and the Burkes, who insist upon their hereditary right to ‘land that [Mary’s] father and [her] father’s father had from time was’, Red Turf dramatises the fundamental conflict underpinning Irish terrestrial politics.37 At work in Mayne’s play are two competing claims to the land, one grounded in timeless telluric right, the other secured through profit and proprietary vigilance. The same conflict between natural and acquired rights structures the hereditary dispute at the centre of Birthright. Murray’s play, which unfolds in a rural community newly energised by the communal spirit of revivalism, opens with a recounting of Hugh’s heroics in the local hurling match. While Bat’s peers discover in the cultural revival a form of sustenance beyond the material – ‘The sight o’ your son to-day would be giving you a kind of feeling’ a neighbour muses, ‘that your best cows and your heaviest pigs could never give you’ – Bat dismisses such activities as indulgent pursuits that ‘[take] people away from their work an’ [put] notions into their heads’.38 In Birthright, the natural bonds of native tradition fostered by the Celtic Revival are pitted against the hard-nosed pragmatism of the small farmer. Bat considers the cultural movement a kind of unnatural affliction that corrupts the local youth, at times emphasising its feminising influence – he paints Hugh as a scholar–gentleman who faints at physical exertion – and, at others, its coarser effects like drunkenness and brawling. Notably, his characterisation borrows from both sides of what Joe Valente calls ‘the metrocolonial double-bind’ of masculinity, that rhetorical strategy wherein Victorian thinkers would point to either Ireland’s gentlemanly restraint or its brute strength (depending on what the occasion required) as evidence of the country’s unmanliness and unfitness for self-rule.39 In his monomaniacal drive to preserve private property, Bat begins not only to echo the ideological rhetoric of colonial rule but also to replicate its destructive patterns of individualism and antisocial isolation. In addition to spurning the communal bonds represented by the hurling match, Bat flouts the expected inheritance practice of primogeniture when he demands at the end of Act I that Hugh emigrate in Shane’s stead. Historically speaking, it would not have been unusual to leave the farm to a second-eldest child; as scholars have shown, while primogeniture was widespread in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century a number of practices had taken hold, including ultimogeniture and a return to partible inheritance.40 Nevertheless, it is clear that Bat has raised his sons to expect primogeniture as the traditional pattern of succession. ‘Ever since I was a child ’twas told to me that this place would be mine,’ Hugh protests, even as Shane counters that

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‘’Tis the man’s work an’ not the reckoning of his years that makes the right!’41 Doubly embittered by his sudden disinheritance and impending exile, Hugh notes that Bat has become as merciless as the Ascendancy landowners he replaced: ‘’Tis the hard landlord that gives only three days’ notice. Well, ’tis many a better man has travelled the same road before.’42 The tragedy of Murray’s play is that Bat feels obligated to choose between his sons, precluding any reconciliation between Hugh’s tradition-bound notion of terrestrial right and Shane’s meritocratic conception of ownership. In the ultimate confrontation, when Hugh is beaten to death, Hugh repeatedly calls Shane a ‘grabber’, a pointed reference to farmers who were ostracised by the Land League for taking over an evicted neighbour’s land. More than mere insult, Hugh’s wording is a sign that the fraternal bonds secured in Irish soil have been severed, and that the very practices of succession designed to ‘insulate heirs from the full play of market forces’ have been supplanted by ruthless economic competition.43 Whereas Murray pushes the conflict between soil and property to its most tragic end, other drama of the period stages the endurance of the family as a proprietary unit, though such survival often entails painful compromises. For instance, in Susanne Day and Geraldine Cummins’s 1914 play Fidelity, marriage enables healthy farm succession but does so at the expense of romantic and terrestrial devotion.44 In the play, bachelor farmer Larry Macarthy is torn between his promise to marry the penniless Maggie Moynihan, who has been away for seven years earning her dowry in America, and the prospect of a match with Katie Drinan, the daughter and future heir of a prosperous grazer. Larry’s equivocation is brought to an abrupt halt by the unexpected return of his betrothed, whose incomparable beauty has been ravaged, conveniently enough, by the intervening years of hard labour. Thus relieved of his attachment to Maggie, Larry turns his attention to pursuing Katie’s promising assets in the play’s final moments. In Fidelity, the abandonment of Maggie functions as the collateral damage of rural wealth consolidation. A tragic Cathleen ni Houlihan figure, ‘tall, well-made, once slender, but now almost emaciated . . . [and] made old before her time’, Maggie willingly endures exile and physical hardship for love of Larry and of the land she will never get to share with him.45 Lennox Robinson’s Harvest (Abbey Theatre, 1910) features a similar sacrificial figure in Mary Hurley, the sole daughter of a County Cork family who rescues her father’s indebted farm with money earned in London. She and her brothers emigrated years ago, which should have made it possible for the farm to thrive under the care of the eldest son, Maurice, were it not for his brothers’ years of extravagant spending on their educations and aspirational lifestyles. In Harvest, outward migration functions as an economic release valve even as it saps the countryside of its resources and vitality. The local youth depart at the prodding of their schoolteacher Mr Lordan, who thinks he is engaging in a more noble type of cultivation. ‘Isn’t that a harvest to be gathering’, he muses, ‘from the seeds I sowed long ago in the little schoolhouse up in the hills? . . . the boys and girls who are scattered over the world are my monument.’46 In Harvest, the agricultural rhythms of rural life have been fundamentally denatured: Mr Lordan’s metaphorical harvest contributes to the region’s depopulation, thus compromising literal harvesting of the land, while earnings from what turns out to be Mary’s prostitution in London save the family from eviction. At the end of Robinson’s play, Maurice prepares to marry his longtime love, and his father settles into old age, neither man any the wiser about the sacrifice Mary has made to ensure their livelihood. Harvest captures the wilful ignorance that, according to Mary Daly, characterised the Irish attitude toward emigration well

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into the Free State era: by providing ‘a safety valve for both the state and Irish society . . . [emigration] enabled Ireland to cling to the myth that it could remain a predominantly rural society’.47 Thanks to the deus ex machina of Mary Hurley’s secret prostitution, the family farm may endure well into the next generation. Yet, the price of its survival, which no one will admit, is the irreparable alienation of Mary and her emigrant siblings from the homeland to which they know they can never return. Of all the rural plays from the early twentieth century, Padraic Colum’s The Land (Abbey Theatre, 1905) comes closest to reconciling soil and property. The play unfolds in the Irish midlands on the day the Wyndham Act takes effect, as a group of farmers prepare to make an offer on their land. They are led by the successful Murtagh Cosgar, whose dedication to his work has driven away all but one daughter and one son, who intends to marry a landless woman, Ellen Douras. Although Murtagh bears a grudging respect for Ellen’s father, Martin, an intelligent and principled former revolutionary, he refuses to sanction the marriage, much less to grant the couple a house and land of their own. His hardness is underwritten by both a deep love for the land and the difficulties he has endured to secure it. On the morning of the purchase, he muses, ‘Them that come after us . . . isn’t it a great thing that we’re able to pass this land on to them, and it redeemed for ever? Ay, and their manhood spared the shame that our manhood knew.’48 Yet, the same terrestrial longing that motivates Murtagh’s purchase also inspires in him a queer and destructive possessiveness. Murtagh believes that his family is ‘[f]rom this day out . . . planted in the soil’, but his legacy hinges upon Matt’s willingness to abide by the terms of his inheritance.49 Although Matt has already begun, like his father, to speak about the land with the intimacy of a lover – he tells Ellen, ‘I’ve put my work into the land, and I’m beginning to know the land. I won’t lose it’ – he is reluctant to sacrifice marriage for its sake.50 The father–son relationship in Colum’s play is structured by an incestuous terrestrial attachment, which admits no room for the distractions of romantic love. Although Murtagh claims to object specifically to Matt’s union with Ellen, it is clear that he is threatened by the very prospect of his son’s independence. ‘No one could care for you as I care for you,’ he warns Matt. ‘I know the blood between us.’51 Ultimately, his miserliness drives Matt to emigrate to America with Ellen. Unable to reconcile his intimate devotion to the land with the generosity needed to sustain the family line, Murtagh finds himself alone with property that has become its own end. Colum’s play closes as Murtagh and Martin, two ageing men, sit beside an empty hearth and arrange a match between their remaining children, Sally and Cornelius, a couple that exhibits little of Matt and Ellen’s promise. The Land stages a triumphant turning point in the history of Irish proprietorship, but it also forecasts the self-destructive, penurious patterns that will continue to compromise rural demographic health in the decades to come. As emigration offers increasingly attractive prospects to ambitious and intelligent young people like Matt and Ellen, who want nothing short of ‘the world before [them]’, those who are less capable remain to inherit the land.52

Rural Land and European Integration The unresolved tensions of rural property ownership that preoccupied early twentiethcentury playwrights reappear in mid-century drama amid a new wave of depopulation and land agitation. Although Ireland’s emigration rates had been climbing steadily in

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the 1930s and 1940s, they reached record levels in the 1950s. During the first half of the decade, the population fell by over 2 per cent due entirely to outward migration, and employment in the agricultural sector plummeted; during the second half, emigration rates rose even higher, surpassing those of the nineteenth century.53 One of the most searing assessments of these demographic trends appears in Seamus de Burca’s play The Boys and Girls are Gone (1950; Gate Theatre, 1961), whose setting in 1910 draws explicit parallels between early-century inheritance patterns and the post-World War II emigration crisis.54 In the play, prosperous landholder and widow Margaret Nowlan attempts to arrange a lucrative match for her only son, Rick, who wishes to marry the family’s servant. Her ruthless acquisitiveness previously drove her daughter to emigrate to America, and by the end of The Boys and Girls are Gone, Rick follows suit. Although Mrs Nowlan is atypical in terms of gender – she wed a landless man and has managed the farm on her own – she exhibits the property hunger of many of her male counterparts, so determined to become a large cattle farmer that she drives away competitors and heirs alike. It is her exiled daughter, visiting for the first time in twenty years, who foresees the Pyrrhic victory of the Land War: ‘The country is looking better since the Land League days and the cabin is going, but where are the people?’55 That question reverberates in two other mid-century inheritance dramas, Pauline Maguire’s The Last Move (Abbey Theatre, 1955) and John Murphy’s The Country Boy (Group Theatre Belfast, 1959), both of which trace the self-sabotaging practices that have spurred rural depopulation.56 In The Last Move, ageing farmer John Thomas Egan has retained control of his property, but his eldest son Mike is middle-aged and disinclined to wed, even though only a lucrative marriage will save the farm from financial ruin. In The Country Boy, the younger son of farmer Tom Maher, Curly, prepares to join his elder brother in America due to similar familial dynamics. Both plays portray a rural economy that has been compromised as much from without as from within. Non-inheriting children and those disinclined to farm are driven to the cities or abroad for lack of educational and professional opportunities, while those of the younger generation who commit to working the land are hampered by delayed inheritance, late marriages and a lack of rural investment. The Last Move and The Country Boy manage to end comedically through the crucial interventions of women: in the former, young Dublin visitor Tess falls in love with Mike and returns to marry him, conveniently bearing an inheritance from her late father, who was country-bred; in the latter, Tom’s American daughter-in-law supplies the financial and emotional support that ultimately prompts him to relinquish the farm and enables Curly to stay. Yet both happy endings are dependent upon urban and overseas resources, while local solutions to the land problem remain in short supply. In addition to emigration, a new threat to farmers surfaced in the postwar period: the purchase of agricultural land by foreign nationals. According to Mervyn O’Driscoll, rural fears of a foreign takeover were fuelled by two developments at the national level, the Lemass administration’s courting of foreign direct investment starting in 1959 and Ireland’s application in 1961 to join the European Economic Community. The prospect of European integration, in particular, reignited long-simmering rural grievances about native property rights and fuelled ‘populist accusations that a new dispossession was underway’.57 Grassroots movements like the Save the West campaign in the 1960s provided one outlet for protesting against what were considered neglectful or damaging state priorities, but incidents of agrarian violence also rose.58 One of the most

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astute assessments of the era’s rural mindset appears in John B. Keane’s play The Field (Olympia Theatre, 1965), where the sale of a small plot of land foments the aggression of farmer Thady ‘Bull’ McCabe, who holds grazing rights on the property and is determined to purchase it at a reduced rate. Bull intimidates his neighbours into rigging the auction in his favour, and when England-based businessman William Dee arrives and outbids him, Bull and his son Tadhg beat him to death later that night. Bull’s violent acquisition of the field and the community’s complicity in covering up the murder are often read as an indictment of rural greed, and the play certainly emphasises the claustrophobic insider mentality of small-town society. Yet, as the longer trajectory of Irish land politics and rural drama makes clear, Bull is also the product of a systemic failure to ensure that those who love and labour for the land are able to remain on it. The spectre of the law looms throughout The Field. The local sergeant files in and out, first investigating the death of a donkey and, later, Dee’s murder. Bull is also repeatedly reminded about the seller’s legal right to determine her price and Dee’s legal right to make an offer. What infuriates Keane’s protagonist is the fact that there is no equivalent apparatus for recognising his own rights to the land, which are grounded in lineage and labour. ‘I watched this field for forty years and my father before me watched it for forty more,’ he insists.59 ‘By all rights ’tis our property.’60 Bull also believes he deserves a reduced price because his cattle have enriched the soil, a claim that may seem spurious but finds historical precedent in the Land League’s demands that improvements to the land be compensated. Much of Bull’s animosity toward his competitor is fuelled by a dread of foreign encroachment. Dee hails from Ireland but emigrated to England years ago; furthermore, his plans to convert agricultural land into a base for his concrete business mark him as an outsider and earn him a slew of epithets: ‘an oily son-of-a-bitch’ and a ‘foreign cock with hair-oil and a tie-pin’, ‘imported landgrabber’, ‘robber’.61 The community’s sense of economic vulnerability is not misplaced; as the reviewer of a 1987 production put it, ‘how could the Bull McCabe fit comfortably into the tarmacadam of EEC-subsidised farming?’62 Yet, the violence in the play erupts from more than just material grievance. Bull expresses the same feeling of abandonment – by the legal establishment, Church and State, all of which have sold out the small independent farmer – that reverberates throughout all the plays discussed in this chapter. The Field furnishes no sustainable resolution to the conflict between natural and legal land rights. Like so many of his modernist predecessors, Bull McCabe struggles to translate his intimate proximity to the soil into an inalienable proprietary claim. His complexity as a character inheres in the combination of his tender stewardship of the land and the violence he inflicts on those who wish, literally and figuratively, to pave over it. ‘I know every rib of grass and every thistle and every whitethorn bush that bounds it,’ he insists. ‘This is a sweet little field, this is an independent little field that wants eatin’.’63 Although temporarily successful, Bull’s brand of nativist protectionism will prove ultimately futile against the inexorable tide of Common Market agricultural priorities and dispossession through foreign-led industrialisation. In his last-ditch crusade to fulfil the natural destiny of an ‘independent little field’, Keane’s farmer anticipates the nostalgia that suffuses late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary narratives about Irish farming in the era of European Union agricultural policy.64

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Irish Literature and Global Modernism Restoring rural realism to the study of early and mid-twentieth-century Irish literature yields, as we have seen, a more accurate and aesthetically diverse understanding of how writers processed people’s changing relationship to the land in the aftermath of the Land Wars, through independence, and on the brink of European integration. But what is at stake in doing this work under the rubric of modernism? Why extend the term rather than navigate around it? Reading Irish realism as co-extensive with experimental modernism is a way of insisting, for one, on the national and regional specificity of literary production. Indeed, the metropolitan and avant-garde predispositions of modernist criticism proceed from a broader tendency to treat literary development as a uniform, universal process. A study like Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters offers a case in point: the book traces minor literatures’ acquisition of literary prestige by charting their progression through a series of aesthetic and formal stages. Within this schema, oral literature, mythology, folklore and drama comprise important intermediary steps in the development of a national literature, but ultimately literary success is defined by writers’ ability to transcend both political content and realist aesthetics.65 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the formal experimentalism of Joyce and Beckett index, for Casanova, the apotheosis of Irish literary development, which is to say the achievement of what she terms ‘an almost absolute autonomy’.66 That high modernism operates here as both pinnacle and terminus of minor literature – its crowning accomplishment and the point at which its very distinctiveness dissolves – says a great deal about criticism’s persistent difficulty in accounting for the specificity of non-metropolitan literatures. In order to correct the shortcomings of ‘universal’ models like Casanova’s, what we need are not new or alternate categories so much as a thorough consideration of what categorisation accomplishes and what it obscures. Irish rural realism furnishes a valuable prism for reassessing the categorical utility of modernism within peripheral literary cultures. By tracing the continuities between early and mid-twentieth-century Irish rural drama and avant-garde writing of the period, the present chapter seeks to offer several broader interventions in the study of global modernisms. First, it asks that the category of modernism be not so much more capacious as better attuned to variation and the reasons for that variation. For instance, not all modernisms demonstrate the realist and naturalist undercurrents, nor the attention to land, that characterises the Irish tradition: why?67 Second, the chapter challenges the assumption that literary development progresses in a single, linear and periodisable fashion, rather than along multiple concurrent, intersecting and / or overlapping paths.68 Third, it acknowledges, in concert with recent scholarship, the material, legal and utilitarian preoccupations of literary modernism that emerge alongside its transcendent impulses, especially in colonised and postcolonial societies.69 Finally, it reopens linkages across the historical experience of modernity that are foreclosed by narrowly bound conceptions of modernism. Early twentieth-century Irish literature emerges from a much longer search for terrestrial anchoring against the forces of modernity: it bears keenly the memory of nineteenth-century dispossession and the struggle for land reform, and it also anticipates unresolved questions about native possession that come to the surface decades later amid the pressures of European integration. These historical entanglements do

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not compromise the validity of Irish modernism; rather, they may comprise some of its most distinctive features.

Notes 1. Deane, Strange Country, p. 78. 2. Gallagher and Greenblatt, ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination’, p. 113. 3. ‘Ireland in 1834’, p. 2; ‘Land Commission in Ireland’, p. 478; Walsh, Sketches of Ireland, p. 52. 4. On the potato’s role in mediating discussions of Ireland’s resistance to governmentality, see Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, pp. 26–48. 5. Hadley, Living Liberalism, p. 242. 6. Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics, pp. 114–22; Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, pp. 24–5. 7. Hadley, Living Liberalism, p. 238. 8. Maurer, The Dispossessed State, p. 58. 9. Qtd in Duffy, Young Ireland, p. 23. 10. Deane, Strange Country, p. 71. 11. While the concept of property in English law originally referred to individual land ownership, it began accruing a wider set of meanings and claimants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, effectively weakening the power and autonomy of landholders. See Bailkin, The Culture of Property, pp. 4, 15–17. 12. Maurer, The Dispossessed State, p. 10. 13. ‘Irish Literary Theatre’. 14. For instance, Deane reads the circulation of soil in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a meditation on the waning fortunes of the absentee landlord in Ireland. Deane, Strange Country, pp. 89–94. 15. Frazier, ‘Irish Modernisms’, p. 121. For a similar argument, see Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, pp. 98–103. 16. See Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival; Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival; and Quigley, Empire’s Wake. 17. See Cole, At the Violet Hour, pp. 143–58; Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama; and Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. 18. Castle and Bixby, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 19. McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival’, p. 51. 20. Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, p. 8. 21. For a numerical study of the uptick in studies of Irish modernism since the 1990s, see Castle and Bixby, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 22. For an account of the Revival’s consolidation within literary history, see McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival’, pp. 52–6. 23. Duffy, ‘Critical Receptions’, p. 200. Duffy credits L. M. Cullen’s 1969 article, ‘The Hidden Ireland: Re-Assessment of a Concept’, for securing Corkery’s literary-critical reputation as the antithesis of Revivalist modernity. 24. For instance, Corkery embraced the theatrical proto-modernism of European dramatists like Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck (Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, p. 150), while Lennox Robinson co-founded the Dublin Drama League with Yeats in 1919 to bring experimental European theatre to Ireland (Clarke and Ferrar, The Dublin Drama League). 25. Esty and Lye, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now’, p. 275. 26. While a number of scholars have countered Irish literature’s alleged inferiority to English realism by emphasising writers’ prescient modernity (see Kelleher, ‘“Wanted an Irish

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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Novelist”’), others have detailed the internal forms of resistance that characterise Irish realism (for examples, see Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, and Mullen, Novel Institutions). Esty and Lye, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now’, p. 273. McNamara, ‘The Abbey Theatre’, p. 4. Contemporary scholarship has largely upheld this derisive attitude toward the Abbey’s peasant drama. Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, p. 147. Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre, p. 54. Levitas, ‘Modernist Experiments in Irish Theatre’, p. 111. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, p. 279. Indicates location and year of first known production. Murray, Birthright, p. 35. Murray, Aftermath, p. 17. Ibid., p. 30. Mayne, Red Turf, p. 109. Murray, Birthright, p. 31. Valente, The Myth of Manliness, pp. 19–25. Kennedy, ‘Farm Succession’. Murray, Birthright, pp. 51–3. Ibid., p. 52. Kennedy, ‘Farm Succession’, p. 136. Day and Cummins’s co-authored play Broken Faith premiered at the Abbey in 1913. There is no record of Fidelity’s production, although ‘[their] plays were not reviewed, [so] this does not mean that one did not take place’ (Sihra, ‘Introduction’, p. 14). Day and Cummins, Fidelity, p. 12. Robinson, Harvest, p. 19. Daly, The Slow Failure, pp. 138–9. Colum, The Land, p. 97. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 120. Daly, The Slow Failure, pp. 183–4. First published in 1950, the play enjoyed several small productions in the 1950s before its Gate début and the publication of a second edition, both in 1961. De Burca, The Boys and Girls are Gone, p. 20. The only surviving copy of Maguire’s play is an undated RTÉ [Raidió Teilifís Éireann] radio drama typescript. O’Driscoll, ‘A “German Invasion”?’, p. 529. Varley and Curtin, ‘Defending Rural Interests’, pp. 69–74. Keane, The Field, p. 112. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 125, 135, 136. Madden, ‘J. B. is in from the Cold’, p. 17. Keane, The Field, p. 112. See Mara, ‘The Political Ecology of Food and Hunger’. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 225–32. Ibid., p. 315. For a related discussion, see Joyce, ‘Naturalism and the Literary Politics of Irish Modernist Fiction’.

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68. On the literary critical penchant for periodisation, see Hayot, ‘Against Periodization’. On the multiple developmental paths of Irish literature, see Townsend, ‘The Drama of Peripheralized Bildung’. 69. See Spoo, Modernism and the Law; Saint-Amour, Modernism and Copyright; and Rubenstein, Public Works.

Bibliography Bailkin, Jordanna, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Bigelow, Gordon, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Castle, Gregory, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Castle, Gregory, and Patrick Bixby, ‘Introduction: Irish Modernism, From Emergence to Emergency’, in Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 1–24. Clarke, Brenna Katz, and Harold Ferrar, The Dublin Drama League 1919–1941 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979). Cleary, Joe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Cole, Sarah, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Colum, Padraic, Harvest and The Land, in Three Plays: The Fiddler’s House, The Land, Thomas Muskerry (1905; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916), pp. 79–137. Connolly, Claire, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Daly, Mary, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Day, Susanne R., and G. D. Cummins, Fidelity, 1914, unpublished MSS, Geraldine Cummins Collection, Cork City and County Archives, U206/24/204. De Burca, Seamus, The Boys and Girls are Gone, 2nd edn (1950; Dublin: P. J. Bourke, 1961). Deane, Seamus, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Duffy, Charles Gavan, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 1840–1845 (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1884). Duffy, Enda, ‘Critical Receptions of Literary Modernism’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 195–205. Eagleton, Terry, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995). Esty, Jed, and Colleen Lye, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 73:3 (September 2012), pp. 269–88. Frazier, Adrian, ‘Irish Modernisms, 1880–1930’, in John Wilson Foster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 113–32. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination’, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 110–35. Hadley, Elaine, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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Harris, Susan Cannon, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Hayot, Eric, ‘Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time’, New Literary History, 42:4 (Autumn 2011), pp. 739–56. ‘Ireland in 1834’, Dublin University Magazine, 5:25 (January 1835), pp. 1–16. ‘Irish Literary Theatre, Interesting Speeches’, Daily Express (12 May 1899). Qtd in Frazier, ‘Irish Modernisms, 1880–1930’, p. 121. Joyce, Simon, ‘Naturalism and the Literary Politics of Irish Modernist Fiction’, in Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism, pp. 111–27. Keane, John B., The Field, in Ben Barnes (ed.), Three Plays: Sive, The Field, Big Maggie (1965; Cork: Mercier Press, 1990), pp. 91–167. Kelleher, Margaret, ‘“Wanted an Irish Novelist”: The Critical Decline of the NineteenthCentury Novel’, in Jacqueline Belanger (ed.), The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 187–201. Kennedy, Liam, ‘Farm Succession in Modern Ireland: Elements of a Theory of Inheritance’, in John Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast, 1999), pp. 116–42. ‘Land Commission in Ireland’, Dublin University Magazine, 25:148 (April 1845), pp. 471–86. Levitas, Ben, ‘Modernist Experiments in Irish Theatre’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 111–27. Lloyd, David, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). McDonald, Rónán, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 51–62. MacNamara, Brinsley, ‘The Abbey Theatre: Is it on the Decline?’, Irish Independent (9 May 1913), p. 4. Qtd in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 117–21. Madden, Aodhan, ‘J. B. is in from the Cold’, Irish Press (7 July 1987), p. 17. Maguire, Pauline, The Last Move, unpublished TS, RTÉ [Raidió Teilifís Éireann] Radio Scripts Collection, University College Dublin, P261/2268. Mara, Miriam, ‘The Political Ecology of Food and Hunger (1950 to the Present)’, in Malcolm Sen (ed.), Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Maurer, Sara L., The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Mayne, Rutherford, Red Turf, in Selected Plays of Rutherford Mayne, ed. Wolfgang Zach (1911; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000), pp. 103–13. Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mullen, Mary L., Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Murray, T. C., Aftermath (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1922). Murray, T. C., Birthright, in Selected Plays of T. C. Murray, ed. Richard Allen Cave (1910; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), pp. 27–57. Murphy, John, The Country Boy (Dublin: Progress House, 1960). O’Driscoll, Mervyn, ‘A “German Invasion”? Irish Rural Radicalism, European Integration, and Irish Modernisation, 1958–73’, The International History Review, 38:3 (2016), pp. 527–50. Quigley, Mark, Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

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Reynolds, Paige, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Robinson, Lennox, Harvest, in Two Plays: Harvest and The Clancy Name (1910; Dublin: Maunsel and Company, 2011). Rubenstein, Michael, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Saint-Amour, Paul K., Modernism and Copyright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sihra, Melissa, ‘Introduction: Figures at the Window’, in Melissa Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 1–22. Spoo, Robert, Modernism and the Law, annotated edn (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Townsend, Sarah L., ‘The Drama of Peripheralized Bildung: An Irish Genre Study’, New Literary History, 48:2 (2017), pp. 337–62. Trotter, Mary, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). Valente, Joseph, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). Varley, Tony, and Chris Curtin, ‘Defending Rural Interests Against Nationalists in 20th-c. Ireland: A Tale of Three Movements’, in John Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast, 1999), pp. 58–83. Walsh, John Edward, Sketches of Ireland Sixty Years Ago, rev. 2nd edn (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1849).

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9 Ireland’s Philatelic Modernism Julieann Veronica Ulin

T

he opening of the first duty-free shops in the world in Shannon Airport in 1947 prompted calls to promote Ireland’s air travel industry through an international airmail stamp. As one letter writer to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs (DPT) bemoaned, The world’s first free airport has been opened and we are one of the only countries in the world which has not struck an air mail postage stamp! Please have a look at the crude ‘thing’ we use to indicate air mail postage . . . . Would it not have been fitting to have issued a new air mail stamp on the day of the opening of the ‘World’s first free Airport’?1

When airmail stamps began to be issued a year later, their design (which continued until 1965) hardly evoked either the duty-free commerce that would prove influential worldwide or the international connections facilitated by Dublin and Shannon airports. Instead of a plane, the stamps featured the angel Victor flying a banner reading ‘Vox Hiberniae’ (Voice of Hibernia) over key Irish spiritual landmarks in each of the four provinces: Glendalough in Leinster; the Rock of Cashel in Munster; Croagh Patrick in Connacht (Plate 12); and Lough Derg in Ulster. With the exception of the Rock of Cashel design, where a quick glance might allow the sleek wings of the angel to be mistaken for those of a plane, the technological achievement of air travel yields entirely to the flight of the mythological angel and epistolary communication to an ancient Irish ‘voice’ carried throughout – though curiously not beyond – Ireland’s borders. The effect is a stamp that registers the aesthetic primacy of the spiritual version of the nation and its inward-looking vision rather than its global connections and its industrial and technological achievements. A 1948 recipient of a letter bearing an Irish airmail stamp would perceive a land dominated by the ancient and the spiritual, whose most international-facing stamps remained as insular as its heavily criticised domestic ones. The letter writer who called for a stamp to recognise modern Ireland as a nation of innovation saw it answered in the form of a stamp that emphasised that it would be as an ancient and Christian nation that Ireland would be transported into the future. The humble postage stamp may appear an odd focal point for this volume’s consideration of the heresies and orthodoxies of Irish nationalism. Yet the story of Ireland’s stamps sees them function first as a revolutionary projection of an independent Irish nation that served as a fundraising incentive for organisations seeking the overthrow of the British presence in Ireland, then as the first globally circulating sign of the transition to the Irish Free State government, and finally as a state-sanctioned artistic representation of the nation. In the various forms of essays (proposed stamps) designed by Fenians,

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Sinn Féin propaganda labels banned by the British Post Office, overprinted British stamps signalling the birth of the Irish Free State, and official postage from the Free State and the Republic of Ireland, stamps became the most widely circulating symbols of a contested nation. While a number of extensive studies by philatelists and postal historians of Ireland trace the history of its stamps from the transitional postal period of 1922–5 to the present, these studies focus on the stamp’s form, composition, design, circulation numbers, and value for collectors.2 They avoid interpretative assessments of the stamps’ symbolic representations of the nation and the attendant debates accompanying the choices behind them.3 The present chapter explores the significance of postage stamps in modern Ireland’s material and visual culture by drawing upon a number of previously unexamined sources to consider how stamps shift from their role as symbolic representations of a nationalist heresy (in the unofficial propaganda stamps’ imagination of an independent Ireland) to their promotion of a nationalist orthodoxy in the aftermath of the foundation of the Free State. The DPT’s files show that Ireland’s official stamps, while occasionally acknowledging the country’s transnational connections or marking industrial developments such as the Shannon Scheme, primarily focused on Ireland’s deep past in terms of design and subject. As Luke Gibbons argues, romantic Ireland persisted in visual representations long after its expiry date in literature: If the energies of the word were directed towards competing versions of the nation during the Revival, it is not surprising that the dream-quality of images [was] harnessed to invest the state with a mythic aura following the disillusionment of the Civil War.4 Ireland’s postage stamps offer a good case study in this respect, not only because they promoted the traditional, archaic, mythic and visual elements of the Celtic Revival even as they represented the uniform, mass-produced products of the state, but also because of their failure to commemorate the foundation of the Free State in contrast to their frequent acknowledgement of 1916.5 Given the widespread debate that any new stamp issue elicited, any attempt to mark the emergence of the state would undoubtedly provoke controversy over the disunity that followed. By advancing the orthodox (state-sanctioned) vision of Ireland, the postage stamp could deny ‘the great contradictions of society’, in contrast to Irish literary modernism, which arguably could contain ‘competing versions of the nation’.6 It is worth being cautious about such a claim, however, given Ireland’s history of unauthorised stamps and the ways in which later official stamp designs such as the airmails insisted upon the presence of Ireland’s deep past even in its most future-facing stamps. As Gibbons notes, In seeking to account for distinctive strands in Irish modernism, the recourse to Celticism became a standard trope, but, from a postcolonial position, this might be reconceptualised as an assertion of peripheral modernism, attesting to the power of marginal cultures to negotiate, with different degrees of success, the terms of their own diverse engagements with dominant international styles and, indeed, new realignments of cultural capital under globalisation.7 If the state’s insistence on the presence of the Celtic, Catholic, nationalist and Irish-language elements on its official postage represented such an ‘assertion of peripheral modernism’

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through resisting ‘dominant international styles’, the paucity of its postage issues asserted a moral resistance to the international philatelic market. Files from the DPT and the Department of Finance reveal the degree to which the lack of new postal designs was viewed as a means to set Ireland apart from other small economies such as Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Moreno and Luxembourg in explicitly moral terms. Until the early Free State policy regarding stamp issues was changed in 1959, catering to a global philatelic market was seen as tantamount to engaging in gambling or prostitution. Debates in the Oireachtas, and coverage and editorials in the Irish press, capture the national and international scrutiny to which the stamps were subject and, perhaps surprisingly, the passionate responses their issue elicited. A belief in the ability of postage stamps to shape both the ideology of its citizens and the perception of Ireland abroad recurs in debates over the representation of Catholicism and nationalism, the commemoration of Irish history, and whether stamps should be designed with a domestic or international audience in mind. As what W. B. Yeats termed the ‘silent ambassadors of national taste’, the resolutely backward-facing and insular state-issued postage stamps through the period of the 1950s provided a key case study for a team of Scandinavian designers in 1961 to critique the state of modern art in Ireland and to call for major changes in investment to facilitate the development of a modern Irish design aesthetic.8 Philatelically, an independent Ireland came into existence well before 1922. The famous forger S. Allen Taylor’s 1867 ‘Fenian Essays’ were designed to mimic official postage issued from an imagined ‘Republic of Ireland’ and to capitalise on rising sentiment in support of Irish independence in the aftermath of a planned Canadian invasion. These designs for proposed stamps drew heavily upon Celticism and the traditional iconography of romantic Ireland. The 1-cent essay depicts a harp interlaced with shamrocks and encircled with a legend reading ‘Republic of Ireland’. The 3-cent essay features a similar internal image purporting to be from ‘Repub. Hiber’. The 24-cent essay with the ‘Republic of Ireland’ legend features the winged maiden harp with the Latin ‘Libertas et Natale Soum’ (Liberty and my Native Land) on an oval belt bordered by four shamrocks. In projecting an Irish nation, these three essays depict and facilitate transnational connections through their use of US currency and English and Latin inscriptions. The 1- and 24-cent essays would later feature on Ireland’s 1967 Fenian centenary stamps, incorporating these previously illegitimate designs into the official postage of the state and acknowledging the Fenians’ ability to imagine a future Ireland as an independent nation with official capacities (Plate 13).9 Though officially useless as stamps, the Fenian essays and propaganda labels designed to look like stamps enacted a kind of heresy, gesturing toward a potential alternative nation and publicly challenging the empire that issued Ireland’s official postage. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sinn Féin used propaganda labels alongside official British postage as a public and profitable act of protest. In announcing such labels in his 4 January 1908 edition of Sinn Féin’s newspaper, editor Arthur Griffith instructed that a label be affixed to all correspondence of Sinn Féiners as a visible sign that this is Ireland. We recommend it to be placed on the envelope in the opposite corner to that of the revenue stamp. The revenue will carry the correspondence, the Sinn Féin stamp added will spread Sinn Féin propaganda and will help to bring about the one thing Sinn Féin needs to make it win this land from end to end – a daily paper.10

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In forcing the official revenue stamps to circulate its message, Sinn Féin not only imagined a national postal authority in a future independent Ireland but transformed the envelope into a contested territory in which the British monarchy represented on the official postage enabled the circulation of a fundraising source for a group seeking its overthrow in Ireland. In response to the Sinn Féin labels, the British Post Office banned their use on the front of envelopes on 21 July 1908.11 Despite the ban, the use of similar labels and charity stamps expanded in the period after 1916, and collections such as the University of Notre Dame’s Wolf Collection record the microbattles fought on the surface of the envelope. An example from the Wolf Collection shows a postal official responding to the presence of three labels by carefully positioning the official cancellation mark so as not to appear to legitimise the imposters (Plate 14). In another example from 1920, the two official 1/2d George V British postage stamps are interrupted by two 1916 Sinn Féin labels. The sender chose to turn one of the British stamps upside down, accomplishing in miniature an ‘overturning’ of the monarchy (Plate 15). Charity stamps sought to raise funds and awareness through the sale of labels in the style of postage stamps. Profits from the Irish White Cross Society’s 1922 design, for example, aided wounded Irish Republican Army (IRA) soldiers and victims of the Black and Tans. The label depicted a grieving widow and her children surrounding the body of her husband as their now roofless home burns in the background (Plate 16). The image of the family in the foreground of the now uninhabitable house deliberately recalls Famine-era scenes of eviction and destitution. Here the child urges his mother to look upward at the white cross, signalling the Society’s ability to provide relief to families in these circumstances. Mail circulation enabled such ‘postage’ to increase awareness, generate funding and solidify existing transnational networks. Prior to the foundation of the Free State, propaganda labels and charity stamps used the official form of the postage stamp to subvert the ruling government by generating funds to support its overthrow or calling attention to its abuses. At the same time, in choosing to utilise the specific shape and form of a stamp, these labels allowed the recipient the fantasy of an independent Ireland that issued its own official postage. The first Free State stamps issued to the public on 17 February 1922 announced the foundation of the Provisional Government of Ireland with an Irish-language overprint Rialtas Sealadac na hÉireann 1922 on British stamps featuring King George V (Plate 17). The announcement of the new government on higher-value ‘Seahorse’ stamps saw the Irish language ‘overwrite’ the image of King George V alongside an image of Britannia triumphantly riding her chariot over the waves. The overprints immediately became a collector’s item for philatelists and Irish emigrants due to their outsized symbolic status as the first globally circulating representation of the transition from the English to the Irish government. The Postmaster General started a dedicated branch to sell to collectors with an eye toward ‘catering for the philatelists’, an initial embrace of the economic promise of the international philatelic market that would vanish in 1927. A half-century after their issue, the Irish Times stamp column attributed ongoing collectors’ interest in the overprints to the manner in which they captured the political declaration of independence: [the] overprint, in Gaelic lettering, completely defacing the head of King George V. Ireland, which had been using British stamps since they were introduced in 1840, was now proclaiming its independence with these overprinted labels.12

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A similar effect had been achieved by painting the red postboxes green following independence: From a nationalist viewpoint, there was something satisfying about seeing the letters VR (Victoria Regina) or ER (Edwardus Rex) painted green. In terms of identity formation, the psychological impact of independence was made most apparent by such minor yet significant alterations.13 An enthusiastic columnist noted the potentially lucrative profits for the state from international sales of the ‘minor yet significant’ sign of the overprinted postage: We fancy that no Irish–American home will feel itself complete without a full set [of overprints] in a glass case on the drawing room mantelpiece. It is possible that the Free State may be able to finance the building of the new General Post Office from this source alone.14 In their capacity to register and publicly circulate an image that accomplishes a linguistic and legislative overwriting of the British monarch, the overprinted stamps became an affordable souvenir of the moment in which the postcolonial meets the post.15 As visual representations of the Irish Free State, the four definitive (or permanent) postage stamps issued by the new government retained some of their illegitimate predecessors’ capacity to invite the imagination of an alternative, unpartitioned nation. These stamps drew heavily upon traditional symbols and elements featured in Sinn Féin and Gaelic League propaganda labels and mastheads.16 ‘Map of Ireland’ appeared on 6 December 1922 on the one-year anniversary of the Treaty (Plate 18). The stamp featured a blank map of the entire island, an uncanny image that disturbed collectors with its ‘impression of emptiness’ and ‘inartistic’ design.17 One critic remarked that the map ‘stares at one with an uncomfortable vacancy’.18 The political implications of the map’s blankness and its absence of any internal border ‘caused a lot of comment because it depicted a map of the whole of Ireland, and no border was drawn to show the existence of the Six counties’.19 Unsurprisingly, given James Joyce’s interest in postage stamps, the missing border did not escape his notice. In a 1924 letter to Harriet Weaver, Joyce highlighted the stamp’s geopolitical implications by calling it ‘a philatelic curiosity. A territorial stamp it includes the territory of another state, Northern Ireland.’20 While the stamp aesthetically disappointed collectors, in depicting the entire island it satisfied the contingent that rejected the establishment of Northern Ireland. The three stamps that followed, the ‘Sword of Light’, ‘Celtic Cross’ and ‘Arms of the Provinces’, had strong associations with revolutionary and nationalist organisations.21 ‘An Claidheamh Soluis’ (The Sword of Light) was the title of the Gaelic League weekly edited by Pádraig Pearse. The stamp design by J. J. O’Reilly raised some objections for how its violent appearance overshadowed its association in Irish folklore with education and progress.22 In a letter to The Irish Times, a critic of the stamp argued that the ‘Sword of Light’ design gave ‘an entirely wrong and undesirable impression’, forcing him ‘to tell friends in other countries that it is not a lethal weapon enveloped in a flame, and that no brandishing in triumph or threat is intended’.23 The other two stamps in the series were no less complex in their symbolic associations. Lily Williams designed ‘Celtic Cross’ based upon her earlier design for a Sinn Féin propaganda

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label.24 The ‘Arms of the Provinces’ stamp includes all four provinces, making no distinction between the Red Hand of Ulster and the other three coats of arms. These four stamps would receive the brunt of criticism from collectors in the years that followed for their use of insular symbols and for the duration of their run as the nation’s permanent set until 1968. If the initial set of state stamps drew upon a mythic and revolutionary set of associations that led to the establishment of the Free State, concern within the government over how stamp designs might serve political agendas or sow division led to the development of an extremely conservative philatelic policy and to very different aesthetic choices for Ireland’s coinage designs. In a letter of 4 October 1923 to President of the Executive Council W. T. Cosgrave, Attorney General Hugh Kennedy warned that postage stamp designs could be used to advance the particular agenda of a specific Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. The design of postage stamps, Kennedy noted, was a matter ‘of national importance’, given their capacity to circulate globally and ‘attribute to the Executive Government views or ideas which they would not desire to make the subject of this kind of propaganda’.25 While Yeats professed in his autobiography, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, that he had ‘always looked down upon the [collectors of] postage stamps’, in the aftermath of Ireland’s independence his adolescent dismissal of philately gave way to a deep concern over the power of stamps to circulate potentially divisive national symbols to an international audience.26 By 1926–8, the time when Yeats as senator was serving as chair of the committee to design the Free State’s coinage, his decisions reflect his reservations about the images chosen for the Free State’s first postage series. In an address to the Senate of 3 March 1926, Yeats stated, The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste. . . . Two days ago I had a letter from an exceedingly famous decorative artist, in which he described the postage stamps of this country as at once the humblest and ugliest in the world.27 Yeats’s objection here appears chiefly aesthetic, and would be echoed nationally and internationally for decades to come, but his alignment of postage stamps with an international position and his advocacy of very different designs for the nation’s coinage betray an anxiety over the political implications of the Free State’s first philatelic issues. In Yeats’s account, the coinage committee’s decisions to ‘avoid patriotic emblems altogether’ at the advice of the Society of Antiquaries and to reject religious or political figures from Irish history indicated a clear desire to coin less divisive ambassadors.28 Yeats’s endorsement of apolitical designs that featured ‘national products – say a horse, a bull, a barley sheaf, a salmon, a fox or hare and a grey hound’ – signal his rejection of symbols linked with religion and nationalism.29 That Yeats worked on the coinage with an eye toward the postage stamps appears clear in his letter to Lady Londonderry after the first meeting of the coinage committee, in which he pledged that ‘If we succeed I shall try to get something done about the stamps.’30 In marked contrast to the Free State definitives, the Percy Metcalfe designs chosen by the coinage committee garnered significant national and international praise as exemplary works of modern craftsmanship. Yet these designs also generated controversy within some sectors precisely because they avoided the traditional and recognisable symbols

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featured on the stamps. Indeed, the discussions surrounding the coinage designs indicate the influence that representative symbols for the nation were seen to have over the mental and spiritual development of its citizens. Minister for Finance Ernest Blythe was asked to defend the case that ‘the design of a pig and her litter and other farmyard animals is calculated to inspire the public as to the standard of Gaelic culture that National Ireland is striving for today’ and ‘whether something more in keeping with the Christian glories of Ireland should not be substituted’.31 Blythe replied that the designs had been chosen upon the advice of the Society of Antiquaries, ‘who, while advocating the retention of the harp, strongly opposed the use of hackneyed symbols such as round towers, sun-bursts and shamrocks’. A resolution issued by the Cathedral Chapter of Tuam stated that the designs were ‘utterly unsuited for the coinage of this ancient Christian nation’, and an Irish priest declared in the Irish Independent that If these pagan symbols once get a hold, then is the thin edge of the wedge of Freemasonry sunk into the very life of our Catholicity, for the sole object of having these pagan symbols instead of religious emblems on our coins is to wipe out all traces of religion from our mind, to forget the ‘Land of Saints’ and beget a land of devil-worshippers, where evil may reign supreme.32 Ireland’s stamps in the post-independence period made no effort to avoid the religious and nationalist symbols and subjects rejected by the coinage committee. As a number of critics of Irish stamps noted, the nationally circulated coins, with their focus on native animals, appealed more to an international audience, while the globally circulated stamps remained committed to more obscure and insular designs. Following the series of four definitives, it would be seven years before the state issued a commemorative stamp: namely, 1929’s centenary commemoration of Catholic Emancipation featuring Daniel O’Connell. The majority of images featured on commemorative stamps in the first thirty years focused on Catholic subjects and figures; in addition to Catholic Emancipation, these included the International Eucharistic Congress (1932), the Holy Year (1933), Father Matthew and his temperance movement (1938), Edmund Ignatius Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers Institute (1944), and Holy Week (1950).33 The other major subject for the first thirty years was the cause of Irish independence. These included 1937’s stamp featuring the Irish Constitution, the centenary of the birth of Parnell and Davitt (1946), the 150th anniversary of the death of Wolfe Tone (1948), international recognition of the Republic (1949), and two separate philatelic acknowledgements of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1941, the first an overprint ‘In Memory of the Rebellion of 1916’ on two of the definitives (‘Map of Ireland’ and ‘Celtic Cross’), and the second a stamp showing a volunteer fighter outside the General Post Office. Of the twenty-one subjects commemorated in the first thirty years, eleven expressly focused on Catholicism or Irish independence.34 Aside from the addition in 1937 of a fifth definitive stamp, ‘St. Patrick and the Pascal Fire’, symbolising the triumph of Christianity over the Druids, the permanent set remained unchanged until 1968, a key complaint of advocates for a more varied and profitable philatelic policy. The paucity of new issues resulted from a policy adopted by the DPT in 1927 which reflected the belief that philatelic profit posed a moral challenge to the state. The DPT actively rejected the international philatelic market by refusing to limit the sale of commemorative stamps and by failing to withdraw stamps after an initial print

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run, key factors determining value for collectors. The conservative policy that emerged in the early years of the Free State with respect to stamp production quickly became an established orthodoxy in the DPT, with the aim of differentiating Ireland morally from other small economies which profited through producing stamps with limited runs or, more controversially, deliberately producing stamps with errors to drive up the demand by collectors. Internal DPT and Department of Finance memos capture a 1928 episode that demonstrates how the DPT viewed Ireland’s philatelic policies as a moral issue for the state. When Stanley Phillips, director of the famed stamp company Stanley Gibbons Ltd of London, made an offer of IR6,000 for the DPT’s collection of early cancelled overprinted stamps and permanent issues affixed to telegraph and other post office forms, internal DPT correspondence recommended that the stamps ‘be not sold but destroyed forthwith’.35 As to the reasons, the DPT gave the following 1. It is not in keeping with the dignity of the State to resort to such measures to raise Revenue. . . . So far as it is known no other State has ever sold cancelled stamps. 2. The sale of the stamps would besmirch the reputation of Irish stamps which so far have had an unblemished record. An expansion of this memo in a letter to the Department of Finance on 26 June emphasised Ireland’s superiority to countries that sought to profit by its philatelic issues: So far as it is known no country of repute has ever adopted this course, and it is not desirable that Saorstát Eireann should descend to the level of Countries like Liberia, Hayti, or the smaller South American Republics, the stamps of which bear a very unenviable reputation. When the Department of Finance continued to urge the sale through the following year, the Secretary for the DPT, M. R. Heffernan, wrote directly to Minister of Finance Blythe on 29 May 1929 to emphasise again the DPT’s belief in the unseemliness of dealing with the philatelic market: To my mind the trading side of philately is of a somewhat dubious nature and therefore a State Department should hesitate before entering into trading relations with the various interests concerned. . . . Juggling with the philatelic market is not desirable or dignified for a State department. It would place us on par with certain States of doubtful financial probity which have made use of their stamp issues to gain revenue from philatelic sales. . . . The art of philately is largely an artificial one with no fixed or permanent basis of values. A 22 October 1929 memo confirms that instructions had been given for the stamps to be destroyed. The link between stamp collecting and a speculation-based market was at the core of the DPT’s reluctance to issue new stamp designs or to limit existing stamps runs. In conflating Ireland’s philatelic and national reputation, the Department viewed its policies governing stamp production as protecting Ireland from associating with countries

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courting a speculative market.36 The columnist below is even more explicit in linking excessive stamp production with moral licence, viewing the creation of numerous aesthetically pleasing stamps as akin to prostitution: Penurious nations often turn their stamps into sources of hidden revenue. While the Great Powers are content to allow unsightly bits of perforated paper to disfigure the correspondence of their citizens, smaller countries seek to attract the eye of collectors by beautiful designs, embellished in rich colours. . . . In these islands, if our postal issues are ugly, let us be thankful that the authorities do not prostitute their departments to unworthy sources of income, and that, by their leisurely habits, they allow us plenty of time in which to become familiar with infrequent changes.37 Here Ireland is praised for aligning itself with the ‘Great Powers’ by issuing ‘ugly’ and ‘unsightly’ stamps that ‘disfigure’ envelopes; the creation and circulation of aesthetically striking designs to solicit ‘unworthy sources of income’ are viewed as the desperate actions of destitute nations. For some, the inferior status of Irish postage stamps and the low number of new issues were evidence not of Ireland’s alignment with the ‘Great Powers’ but of the lingering legacy of colonialism. Writing directly to de Valera in 1952, Gerald T. Griffin, an Irish–American philatelist, accused Ireland of imitating Great Britain in its conservative stamp policy: ‘In thirty years of issuing stamps, only one set of stamps for regular postage has been issued. In this, your land has shown an affinity to the British homeland tradition of extreme conservatism in stamp-issuing.’ Griffin provided a suggested list of figures to honour in a new definitive set with the twin goal of allowing the world to ‘become intimate with these names . . . and turn these names over in their minds and seek to know more of what roles they played in world history’ and to enable Ireland to cease being a lackey to Great Britain with respect to slavish imitation of her conservative stamp-issuing policies. Let her be like this great, proud, free land of America, where so many of Erin’s sons and daughters found refuge from the tyranny of imperialism, and lustily and pridefully honour her glorious heroes with many frequent stamp issues. Almost a decade later, Minister for Industry and Finance J. Lynch echoed this criticism of Ireland’s ‘slavish imitation’ of Great Britain’s philatelic policies at the expense of its own potential tourist industry: There is a great opportunity for postage stamps showing historical personages or scenic views. If properly designed and properly distributed, they would greatly increase tourist interest in our country. So far as I know, every nation in the world, except our neighbour across the water, Great Britain, does it. Is it that we are in the shadow of Great Britain in some way in this? I hope not.38 The emergence of a conservative, inward-looking policy regarding postage stamps, despite their former radical history, stifled the development of an artistic commodity that many in the Dáil and press argued had the potential to advertise Ireland to

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a burgeoning tourist industry and generate a dependable revenue stream to support state initiatives. Records of criticisms levelled at the Department in the press and in letters through the 1950s show national and international frustration with the quality of Ireland’s stamp designs, its minimal output, and its obscure and inconsistent process for approving designs. Letters to the Department railed against Ireland’s ‘hideous’ and ‘unpopular’ philatelic production and the DPT’s disinterest in using this internationally circulating commodity to advertise Ireland’s scenic beauty, educate global collectors on Irish history, and connect with its emigrant population desiring ‘to see the scenic beauty of the Irish countryside portrayed on a new set of pictorials’.39 Collectors not only urged the design of better stamps but included illustrations for suggested issues and enclosed exemplary stamps from other countries, urging the DPT to look beyond Ireland’s borders toward international philatelic design trends. The 1950s saw regular calls in the press and in Dáil debates for the development of a modernised, outwardfacing stamp design policy and a reconsideration of how Ireland might mimic – rather than disparage as immoral – economies such as Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Moreno, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium that actively sought revenue from stamp sales. The economic crisis of the 1950s and the appointment of Ministers of Posts and Telegraphs willing to consider stamps a significant, influential and profitable element of the country’s visual culture precipitated a departure from the philatelic policies and precedents set in the early years of the Free State. Upon assuming the role of Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in July 1951, Erskine Childers was confronted by Trinity College Dublin Professor Stanford about the quality of Ireland’s stamp issues, as well as the obscure process through which designs were chosen. Stanford stated that ‘inferior stamps suggest an inferior country’ and called the design of postage stamps ‘a matter of honour of the country and a genuine cultural matter’, adding that they were ‘one of the best and cheapest advertisements that the country can get’.40 Childers agreed that variation, and particularly getting away from ‘the sword and shamrocks’ featured in the permanent issues, was desirable and blamed the Department of Finance for its reluctance to fund new stamp designs. Michael Keyes, who assumed the post after Childers in 1954, likewise placed the blame for Ireland’s stamp issues on the Department of Finance, which he termed ‘the most pessimistic administration in Europe’ for its view that the expense of issuing new postal designs failed to justify them.41 Like Childers, Keyes objected to the symbols used in the definitive series and specifically to the four-province stamp, noting that ‘it consists of closely interwoven shamrocks and the fewer closely interwoven shamrocks we have on our stamps the better for the future of this country’. Calls in the press to modernise Ireland’s stamp designs in the mid-1950s appeared alongside articles about unemployment and emigration, and understandably focused on the potential economic benefit through revenue from collectors and through using stamps to advertise Ireland’s scenery and support its growing tourist industry. A series of letters to the press in the spring of 1956 suggested that Ireland could relieve the burden on its agricultural industry and on emigrants abroad by treating stamps as cultural exports with the capacity to generate IR£10 million in revenue. A modernised stamp design policy that invited philatelic sales could depict a contemporary Ireland of science, industry, international conferences, and ‘the development of State enterprises’. 42 Desmond Shanahan, director of Shanahan’s Stamp Auctions, suggested that the stability of revenue sourced from stamps would balance the instability of Ireland’s

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agricultural industry, citing countries in South America similarly subject to fluctuations in weather and in demand for crops in which ‘the only sure, stable and always reliable source of income and foreign exchange there are stamps’.43 A change in philatelic policy, he writes later, would lead to ‘increased prosperity and lower taxes’.44 The following year, Monica Sheridan demanded that Ireland look abroad to create an economic model for Irish stamp production, based upon countries that viewed stamps as a means to attain funding to support social and cultural institutions. Sheridan argued that stamps could facilitate the rebuilding of cultural institutions such as the Abbey Theatre, reduce the burden on Irish taxpayers, and, most radically of all, eliminate dependence on Irish emigrants’ money from abroad: Let our Government look around, and see what other countries are doing in this line. We are fifty stamp-years behind the times. High-flown language on political platforms about a united Ireland and the Irish language will not fill the bellies of our unemployed men. Stamps will make money, and they will make money AT HOME. This is surely a better thing to do than to balance our budgets on the remittances of our emigrants who couldn’t get a decent living in the country where they were born.45 Sheridan’s demand that Ireland redesign its stamp policies based upon examples from other nations and take steps to engage the philatelic market abroad shifts not only their audience but their function. Viewed thus, stamps attain significance less for how they serve as a reminder to the nation of the past but for their economic potential as an international export capable of supporting that nation in the present. The changes in Ireland’s philatelic policy on 26 June 1959 were celebrated by international stamp collectors and within the Irish government. When Seán Lemass announced his government in late June 1959, Michael Hilliard took over as Minister of the DPT. In Hilliard’s first address to the Dáil Éireann, he praised the change in philatelic policy that had been initiated under his predecessor as signalling a departure from the policies in place since 1927. The GPO would no longer maintain stocks of obsolete stamps, would institute a maximum sale period of six months for commemorative stamps issued, and non-commemorative stamps pulled from circulation would be available for only three months. The announcement that the GPO would no longer hold existing stocks of older definitive issues or past commemorative stamps after 1 October 1959 led to ‘an upward trend in Irish stamps’ from Europe, as well as ‘heavy buying from the United States’.46 Deputy Sweetman, a former Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, praised the departure from the belief that ‘any country which makes money out of selling stamps for collecting purposes is a country to be despised. Unfortunately, from 1927 that was the outlook in relation to philately in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.’47 He hoped the ‘new outlook’ would lead to aesthetically pleasing designs to ‘ensure that any issue we make is an issue worthwhile collecting’ and to stamp issues that reflected Ireland’s transnational connections. Deputy Russell echoed this last point, recommending that stamp issues focus not exclusively on Irish history but on world events in which Ireland participated. The Guinness stamp issued that same year was viewed by collectors as a key point of departure, given its emphasis on Irish industry, though National Archives files show the care with which the announcement of the stamp was managed in such

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a way as to emphasise Arthur Guinness’s achievements rather than his best-known product.48 In The Irish Times, the DPT received praise for ‘getting away from the Brian Boru tradition in giving us the Guinness postage stamp’.49 The opening of Irish design to international evaluation a few years after this policy change allowed its postage stamps to achieve consideration as national commodities with the power to alter perceptions of Ireland abroad and represent Ireland’s achievements in modern industrial design. Following the Irish government’s charge to Córas Tráchtála (the Irish Export Board) to consider how to improve the state of design in Ireland, five Scandinavian industrial designers compiled a report after a two-week visit in April 1961. This report faulted Irish schools for failing to cultivate skills such as drawing and working with materials, concluding that ‘the Irish schoolchild is visually and artistically among the most undereducated in Europe’.50 The committee stressed the importance of bringing the local and the international together through the creation of an Irish design institute that would educate Irish designers in modern techniques through student exchanges between Ireland and other international institutes. The Scandinavian Design Report (1961) also addressed Irish stamp design, recognising stamps as key cultural exports comparable to other Irish products such as Irish linen, Donegal tweeds, glassworks and pottery. Stamps were listed alongside public buildings and office furniture as opportunities for the government to raise the standard of design. The committee defended the inclusion of postage stamps in a report aimed at improving Irish design for the purposes of export as follows: We have decided to include in this report a detailed examination of the Irish postage stamp for we feel that the inclusion of a demonstration of the study and evaluation of such a design problem may be of value. Quite apart from this we are aware of good reasons for such an inclusion. First, because postage stamps are the first Irish-manufactured products that many people see and in this way are capable of conveying a good or bad impression of Ireland. Secondly, as a commodity handled by nearly all the people in the State, they are a profound factor in the moulding of public taste. Thirdly, they are a case in point where the Government by direct intervention can set standards for public design. The Irish coinage is an admirable example of such intervention. Finally, although not so important as the other points, we understand that many countries derive considerable revenue from the sale of attractive postage stamps.51 As an additional indication of their importance, the postage stamps comprised the only images reproduced in the report. Echoing forcefully arguments that had been made for decades in the Irish press and in the Oireachtas, the report criticised the stamps for their fluctuating sizes, inconsistent methods of printing, and artistic merit; specific stamps were singled out for being ‘very bad’, ‘poor’, ‘childish’, ‘insignificant’, ‘timid’, ‘deplorable’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘artistic failures’.52 In terms of designs crafted to generate popular appeal, only the 1916 stamp and the Gaelic Athletic Association stamp appeared to the committee as ‘what some people may find interesting’.53 The committee viewed the quality of Irish stamps as a lost opportunity and the result of treating designers in government departments as an afterthought rather than an integral aspect of the development of a visual culture.

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The Irish, the report concluded, had developed in literature, theatre and the spoken word ‘rather than creation by hand or machine and the visual arts – the other side of human activity in civilisation’.54 The present chapter elucidates some of the reasons for the failure in visual arts in terms of Ireland’s stamp design. The revolutionary history of nationalist propaganda labels and the symbolic ‘overwriting’ of the British monarchy gave way to sporadic issues focused on a singular vision of Ireland as a Catholic nation and designs indebted to insular and traditional symbols. A DPT policy that viewed the international stamp-collecting market as immoral and the Department’s wariness about potential conflicts over commemorative choices further stifled developments in design. The Scandinavian Design Report urged a willingness to look to international stamp designs for new techniques and possibilities, and encouraged visual arts that made a broader use of Ireland’s deep and varied past. Referencing their experience visiting the National Museum, the committee noted that, in their evaluation of Irish visual art, the motifs from the Celtic and early Christian times are very domineering. . . . If people wish to draw inspiration from the past, they should study the Book of Kells, the stones of Clonmacnoise, and so on, where they will find sources of simple drawings and color compositions which would be quite natural to use, because they are almost modern, and because the reproduction of their character is a practical proposition.55 To develop modern Irish design, the committee urged, singular sources for inspiration would need to be abandoned in favour of a willingness to take a multiperspectival view of Ireland’s past. In recommending the foundation of an Irish design institute, the report cautioned against methods of design instruction that promoted a singular vision or influence in favour of one that ‘will ensure fair representation of the various forces and outlooks alive in Ireland at any given period’.56 As we have seen, the official and unofficial stamps of Ireland alternated between nationalist heresy and orthodoxy. Precisely because they were the most widely circulated symbols of the Irish nation, seen by every citizen and as well as by international stamp collectors, Irish stamp designs provoked strong responses. Indeed, even in today’s world where the sight of postage stamps may be far less frequent, the demand and controversy surrounding Ireland’s 2017 issue of a Che Guevara stamp showed that the issue of a commemorative stamp still has the power to generate strong debate. From 1922 to 1961, government debates, the press, and letters to the DPT reveal heated arguments about stamp design and its implications for the economic and ideological status of the nation, as well as the commemoration of its history. While the DPT’s policies strived to differentiate Ireland from other small economies by emulating the postal policies of Great Britain rather than catering to an international philatelic market, the 1950s backlash against the early philatelic policies set forth in 1927 emerged from a public interested in stamps not as romantic and mythic symbols of the nation but as profitable modern advertisements for a growing tourist industry. Stamp design in Ireland registered the shifting relationship between the national and the international. In contrast to the achievements in literary modernism that Ireland attained in negotiating these influences, the restrictive philatelic policies of the period quelled the

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revolutionary energies of the early designs, preventing the postage stamp from reaching similar heights in the realm of print culture and modern design.

Notes 1. ‘Various Requests for New Issues of Postage Stamps’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, COM/G 8755/50. 2. See also Freeman and Stubbs, Handbook; Mackay, Eire; Dulin, Ireland’s Transition. 3. A notable exception to these more specialised studies is Brian P. Kennedy’s wide-ranging chapter ‘The Irish Free State 1922–1949: A Visual Perspective’, pp. 132–52, which argues for the significance of visual markers of independence such as postage stamps for the emergent state. In King and Sisson, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture, postage stamps make a number of brief appearances. 4. Gibbons, ‘Modalities of the Visible’, p. 21. 5. In a series of letters to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs in 1947 and 1948, John Murphy criticised it for its failure to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the state, suggesting that the decision not to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary with a postage stamp was politically motivated. There is a clear disparity between the extensive commemoration of 1916 and the comparative philatelic absence of 1922. See ‘Various Requests for New Issues of Postage Stamps’. 6. King and Sisson, Ireland, Design, pp. 133, p. 21. 7. Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’, pp. 128–46, p. 140. 8. Pearce, Senate Speeches, p. 105. 9. A similar, though more controversial, decision in 1972 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state commemorated with a stamp honouring the first postage stamp issued by the Free State. For a more specialised overview of political labels and stamps, see Mackay, Eire, pp. 53–63. 10. Qtd in Strachan and Nally, Advertising, Literature, and Print Culture, p. 105. 11. ‘[T]he Postmaster General has deemed it necessary to issue instructions that, after the 31st of July, any letter or packet observed in the post bearing on the front a private label in any way resembling a postage stamp shall be returned to the sender.’ British Post Office, Post Office Notice No. 6: Use of Labels Resembling Postage Stamps (21 July 1908). 12. ‘The First Irish Stamps Fifty Years Ago’, Irish Times (24 February 1972). 13. Kennedy, Irish Free State, p. 134. 14. ‘Irish Stamps’, Irish Times (15 February 1922). 15. At present, the overprint remains by far the most valuable of the Irish stamps for collectors, with the rarest specimens of these, such as Scott #45 with the accent on ‘Saorstát’ missing, for example, valued at up to $14,000. 16. For further details see O’Reilly, ‘Sinn Féin Labels’, p. 413. 17. ‘World-Wide Demand for Free State Stamps’, Weekly Irish Times (23 April 1927). 18. ‘An Irishman’s Diary: Postage Stamps’, Irish Times (29 October 1929). 19. ‘The First Irish Stamps Fifty Years Ago’. 20. Joyce, Letters I, p. 213. For more on Joyce’s interest in and incorporation of postage stamps see Ulin, ‘Philatelic Ulysses’, pp. 51–85, and John Nash’s discussion of Joyce’s uses of the overprints in Finnegans Wake in Chapter 4 of James Joyce and the Act of Reception. 21. The Map of Ireland stamp was designed by James Ingram, The Sword of Light by J. J. O’Reilly, Celtic Cross by Lily Williams, and Arms of the Provinces by M. M. Girling. ‘New Irish Stamps’, Irish Times (3 February 1923). 22. ‘New Free State Stamp’, Irish Times (21 April 1923). 23. ‘Free State Stamps’, Irish Times (10 March 1926).

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24. ‘A Free State Stamp: The Celtic Cross Design’, Irish Times (16 March 1923). 25. ‘Issue of Commemorative Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, TAOIS/ s13241. 26. Yeats, Reveries, p. 69. 27. Pearce, The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, p. 105. 28. Ibid., p. 161. 29. Qtd in Foster, Yeats, p. 333. 30. Ibid., p. 332. 31. ‘Ceisteanna – Questions. Oral Answers. Designs for New Coinage’, Dáil Éireann Debate, 2 August 1927. 32. ‘Coinage (Dimensions and Designs) Regulations, 1969: Motion for Annulment’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 68: 4 (27 May 1970). 33. The early example of the stamp commemorating the International Eucharistic Congress (1932) demonstrates the Department of Posts and Telegraphs’ awareness of the potentially controversial choice in returning to a Catholic subject so soon after the stamp commemorating Emancipation (‘Eucharistic Congress Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, G10137/32). The stamp design, featuring the Badge of the Eucharistic Congress designed by the Archbishop, went ahead, despite the objection of the Department of Finance. The Irish Press and the Irish Independent reported the close coordination between the Archbishop and Cosgrave to enable the stamp’s design and production. 34. Irish social and cultural organisations so honoured in this period included the Royal Dublin Society (1931), the Gaelic Athletic Association (1934), the Gaelic League (1943) and the Young Irelanders (1945). Exceptions to these trends include the stamp honouring the completion of the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme (1930), a stamp honouring the 150th anniversary of the US Constitution (1939), the mathematician William Hamilton (1943), the 300th anniversary of the death of Annals of the Four Masters compiler Michael O’Clery, and poets Mangan (1949) and Moore (1952). 35. ‘Stamps – Philatelic, Question of Sale of Overprinted Irish Stamp on Telegram Forms’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, G 823/53. 36. This idea persisted even as Ireland’s philatelic policies changed in 1959. ‘Guinness Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, TAOIS/s 2831. 37. ‘Postal Issues’, Irish Times (28 March 1930). 38. ‘Tourist Traffic Bill, 1961 – Second and Subsequent Stages’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 54:16 (2 August 1961). 39. ‘Various Requests for New Issues of Postage Stamps’. 40. Post Office (Amendment) Bill, 1951 – Second and Subsequent Stages’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 39:17 (11 July 1951). 41. ‘Committee on Finance, Vote 54, Posts and Telegraphs’, Dáil Éireann Debate, 152:2 (6 July 1955). 42. ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (26 May 1956). 43. Shanahan, ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (1 June 1956). 44. ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (8 June 1956). 45. Sheridan, ‘Balance your Budget’, Irish Pictorial (29 March 1957). 46. ‘Change of Philatelic Sales Policy Welcomed by Collectors’, The Revealer, 52 (September– October 1959), p. 430. 47. ‘Committee on Finance, Vote 55, Posts and Telegraphs (Resumed)’ Dáil Éireann Debate, 176:10 (16 July 1959). 48. ‘Guinness Postage Stamp’. 49. McCaba, ‘The Guinness Stamp’, Irish Times (25 July 1959). 50. Franck et al., Design in Ireland, p. 49. 51. Ibid., p. 30.

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180 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

julieann veronica ulin Ibid., pp. 31, 32, 33, 34. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 54.

Bibliography ‘A Free State Stamp: The Celtic Cross Design’, Irish Times (16 March 1923), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘An Irishman’s Diary: Postage Stamps’, Irish Times (29 October 1929), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. British Post Office, Post Office Notice No. 6: Use of Labels Resembling Postage Stamps (21 July 1908). ‘Ceisteanna – Questions. Oral Answers. Designs for New Coinage’, Dáil Éireann Debate (2 August 1927), (last accessed 12 October 2020). ‘Change of Philatelic Sales Policy Welcomed by Collectors’, The Revealer, 52 (September– October 1959), p. 430. ‘Coinage (Dimensions and Designs) Regulations, 1969: Motion for Annulment’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 68:4 (27 May 1970), (last accessed 12 October 2020). ‘Committee on Finance, Vote 54, Posts and Telegraphs’, Dáil Éireann Debate, 152:2 (6 July 1955), (last accessed 12 October 2020). ‘Committee on Finance, Vote 55, Posts and Telegraphs (Resumed)’, Dáil Éireann Debate, 176:10 (16 July 1959), (last accessed 12 October 2020). Dulin, C. I., Ireland’s Transition: The Postal History of the Transitional Period 1922–1925 (Dublin: MacDonnell Whyte, 1992). ‘Eucharistic Congress Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, G10137/32. Foster, Roy, Yeats: A Life, Volume 2: The Arch-Poet. 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Franck, Kaj, and Erik Herlow, Åke Huldt, Gunnar Biilmann Petersen and Erik Chr. Sørensen, Design in Ireland: Report of the Scandinavian Design Group in Ireland (Dublin: Córas Tráchtála, 1961). Freeman, F. F., and T. T. Stubbs, Handbook Provisional Issue Irish Free State Stamps (Dublin: Mint Stamp Company, 1922). ‘Free State Stamps’, Irish Times (10 March 1926), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. Gibbons, Luke, ‘Modalities of the Visible’, in Linda King and Elaine Sisson (eds), Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922–1992 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011), pp. 19–25. Gibbons, Luke, ‘Visual Modernisms’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 128–143. ‘Guinness Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, TAOIS/s 2831. ‘Irish Stamps’, Irish Times (15 February 1922), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Issue of Commemorative Postage Stamp’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, TAOIS/s13241. Joyce, James, Letters I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1966).

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Kennedy, Brian P., ‘The Irish Free State, 1922–49: A Visual Perspective’, in Raymond Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy (eds), Ireland: Art into History (Dublin: Town House, 1994), pp. 132–52. McCaba, Alasdair, ‘The Guinness Stamp’, Irish Times (25 July 1959), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. Mackay, James A., Eire: The Story of Eire and her Stamps (London: Philatelic Publishers, 1968). Nash, John, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ‘New Free State Stamp’, Irish Times (21 April 1923), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘New Irish Stamps’, Irish Times (3 February 1923), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. O’Reilly, Gerald, ‘Sinn Féin Labels’, The Revealer, 50 (May–June 1959), p. 413. Pearce, Donald R. (ed.), The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1960). ‘Postal Issues’, Irish Times (28 March 1930), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Post Office (Amendment) Bill, 1951 – Second and Subsequent Stages’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 39:17 (11 July 1951), (last accessed 12 October 2020) Shanahan, Desmond, ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (1 June 1956), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. Sheridan, Monica, ‘Balance Your Budget with Postage Stamps’, Irish Pictorial (29 March 1957), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (26 May 1956), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Stamps as Revenue Raisers’, Irish Times (8 June 1956), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Stamps – Philatelic, Question of Sale of Overprinted Irish Stamp on Telegram Forms’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, G 823/53. Strachan, John, and Claire Nally, Advertising, Literature, and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922 (New York: Palgrave, 2012). ‘The First Irish Stamps Fifty Years Ago’, Irish Times (24 February 1972), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. ‘Tourist Traffic Bill, 1961 – Second and Subsequent Stages’, Seanad Éireann Debate, 54:16 (2 August 1961), (last accessed 12 October 2020). Ulin, Julieann Veronica, ‘Philatelic Ulysses’, Joyce Studies Annual (2018), pp. 51–85. ‘Various Requests for New Issues of Postage Stamps’, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, COM/G 8755/50. ‘World-Wide Demand for Free State Stamps’, Weekly Irish Times (23 April 1927), ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times and the Weekly Irish Times. Yeats, W. B., Reveries over Childhood and Youth (New York: Macmillan, 1916).

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10 Modernism Against / For the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan Shan-Yun Huang

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n a map from Atlas of Prejudice titled ‘Europe According to the Future 2022’, the British Isles are marked in three regions: ‘Passive Aggressive Kingdom’ occupies what is now England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland becomes ‘Kilt Republic’; and on the left, in the place and shape of Ireland, is an island marked ‘Taiwan’.1 The joke is that the two diminutive islands, Ireland and Taiwan, are both too close for comfort to dominant continents. If Ireland may be seen as the Taiwan of Europe, then Taiwan may also be seen as the Ireland of Asia. Both Ireland and Taiwan are ‘small islands adjacent to powerful neighbours with whom they have had complex histories’, while ‘contested subjectivities and identities’ and the struggles over democracy and human rights characterise both islands’ histories, politics and cultures.2 Although these islands are widely separated, with little direct contact between them, similar experiences of colonialism connect the two, not least for people with nationalist aspirations.3 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish Home Rule inspired Taiwanese nationalists under the Japanese colonial regime to seek local governance.4 More recently, Taiwanese language enthusiasts have evoked the revival of the Irish language in their own attempt to establish a distinct national identity through a national language.5 The present chapter probes the concept of nation through the Ireland / Taiwan connection and examines a distinct literary phenomenon in postwar Taiwan: the Modern Literature Movement in the 1960s. In this decade, James Joyce provided a major inspiration for young Taiwanese writers, his influence plainly perceptible in the pre-eminent Modernist works of the movement, Pai Hsien-Yung’s Taipei People (Taibeiren, 1971) and Wang Wen-hsing’s Family Catastrophe (Jiabian, 1972).6 Wang became the major representative of the Modernists during the Nativist Literature Debate in the 1970s, and his adoption of modernist techniques earned him an important place in the canon of Taiwan literature.7 In a literary career spanning half a century, Wang has often been referred to as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’,8 an epithet that requires some clarification. Focusing on Wang’s role in Modernist literature in Taiwan, the present chapter strives to answer the following questions: what insights may be gained by comparing modernisms in Ireland and Taiwan – via Joyce and Taiwan’s Joyce – with regard to individual authors, nations, and the relationship between modernism and the nation? How does such a comparison advance the conversation about global modernism?9 The chapter is divided into four sections. The first explores the historical context of postwar Taiwan and delineates the interweaving influences of colonialisms that generated the country’s identity crisis. This crisis fuelled Taiwan’s Modernist literature, just

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as a similar national crisis fuelled Joyce’s revolution of the word. The next section traces the conflict between Taiwanese Modernism and Nativism through the controversy about Wang’s Family Catastrophe, showing how Joyce was enlisted both to praise and to censure Taiwan’s Joyce. The third section reflects on how changed times and perceptions of the nation have made it possible to re-evaluate both Wang’s and Joyce’s heretical engagement with nationalism, while the last section spells out the implications of this re-evaluation for global modernism.

Postwar Taiwan, Modern Literature, James Joyce In ‘Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made’, Arif Dirlik succinctly remarks that ‘Taiwan’s historical formation may be viewed as a succession of colonialisms.’10 In the decades following World War II, Taiwanese society was torn between the internal colonialism of Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) rule and the neocolonial presence of the United States of America. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, Taiwan was retroceded to China in 1945, not to the Qing Empire from which it was severed in 1895, but to the Republic of China (ROC), governed by the KMT. The KMT government was determined to de-Japanise and re-Sinocise Taiwan because its inhabitants and culture were considered contaminated by the Japanese. In practice, the measures for nationalist purification did not look very different from those of the Japanese coloniser. For instance, Japan did not extensively enforce the use of its national language in Taiwan until 1937, after forty-two years of colonial rule, but the KMT promptly started the National Language Movement, a Mandarin-only monolingualism that banned Japanese.11 Local resentment towards the provincial administration grew quickly, leading to the incident of 28 February 1947 known as 2–28. This local protest against ill treatment by KMT officials incurred island-wide military suppression, followed by strict, large-scale political surveillance. In 1949, the KMT lost the mainland to the Chinese Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan, bringing to the island millions of people, including soldiers and refugees. These mainland settlers were called Mainlanders, as opposed to local / native Taiwanese. Anxious to consolidate its control over this last stronghold, the KMT declared martial law (1949–87) to facilitate political suppression and implemented cultural policies to reinforce its ideology: namely, the ROC declared itself the sole legitimate government of all China – including the mainland occupied by communists and the so-called Free China under its control, and the KMT was the guardian of traditional Chinese culture.12 Government-sanctioned combat literature became the dominant form of literary production in the 1950s. This genre featured stories of anti-communist struggle and nostalgia for the lost mainland. Its anti-communist propaganda was meant to enlist residents in Taiwan, Mainlanders and local Taiwanese alike, in the nationalist fight to recover the mainland. In the early years of the Cold War, the quasi-colonial KMT government found a powerful ally in the US, which had tremendous influence on the formation of postwar Taiwan.13 As a rising neocolonial power in East Asia, the US had occupied Japan and fought the Korean War before it collaborated with the willing KMT government to fortify Taiwan against possible communist invasion from the mainland. With America’s military and economic aid came modern Western culture and its irresistible promise of power and progress, which was quite at odds with the KMT’s self-assigned role as the protector of traditional Chinese culture. When the quasi-colonial KMT rule and the

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neocolonial US hegemony that bolstered it converged on an isolated island, they created social and cultural fragmentation, as can be seen in the following account by Shu Shih, who calls the 1960s in Taiwan ‘an age of hysteria’: In this hysterical siege of intellect, literary-minded youth became voyeurs. . . . They peeped into the current state in Taiwan, the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain, Cultural Revolution in China, student movements in Tokyo, Paris, the US, genocide, Prague Spring, and such major events in the world, through whisper, gossip, Time magazine and Newsweek with parts blotted out, torn down, or even missing entire pages. . . . In the eeriest manner, they peered into the ongoing Vietnam War through American soldiers in the pubs in Keelung, Taipei and Kaohsiung. In cafés, they listened to the idiosyncratic music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the like, experiencing hippy, hallucinogenic, Zen and even transcendental meditation.14 Shih goes on to claim that ‘this voyeuristic culture, the war prolonged by martial law, and the voyeur’s anxious, convulsive and fragmented psyche’ contributed to the ‘inner and outer conditions’ for the development of Modernism in the 1960s.15 Thus Shih implies that Modernism in Taiwan originates in a personal and national identity crisis, as manifested in the confused voyeur’s ‘fragmented psyche’. Pai Hsien-Yung also connects the postwar generation’s identity crisis to divisions in the nation. In 1960, he co-founded the enormously influential Modern Literature, a monthly literary magazine, with fellow students from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. Pai later recalls that the founding members of Modern Literature came from ‘complex and diverse backgrounds’, but they ‘all came from the generation brought up after the war’, which, for Pai, means the generation cut off from their parents’ worlds.16 For students of Mainlander background, the old world of their parents on the mainland had ‘long since collapsed’. Yet it still imposed antiquated values from which the younger generation struggled to break free. Similarly, for students native to Taiwan, the Japanese colonial period of their parents had ‘disappeared never to return’. Their education in Chinese was different from their parents’ education in Japanese, so they too had to struggle for ‘new political and cultural identity’.17 Owing to these special circumstances of Taiwan’s history, the postwar generation suffered a ‘serious identity crisis’ and was ‘forced . . . to build a new set of values that adhered to the reality in Taiwan’.18 For this generation, questions like ‘What is China?’ and ‘What does it mean to be Chinese?’ were complicated, first of all, by the clash between the old China on the mainland and the new China in Taiwan, the former existing only in memory, and the latter overwhelmed by the glittering modern West represented by the US. All Taiwanese residents would have difficulty answering questions about their national identity, whether they belonged to the Mainlanders who had lost China or to the native Taiwanese who had recently been repatriated as Chinese. For there was a huge rift – created by the convergence of colonial forces – between the KMT’s official nationalist discourse and ‘the reality in Taiwan’ in which people lived. This rift resembles the one caused by colonialism in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, which left the Irish existentially perplexed and searching for national self-definition. In Ireland, the Revival arose to address the national identity crisis, followed by modernism, which challenged many Revivalist positions. This process happened in reverse order in postwar Taiwan, where modernism took the lead.

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By the 1950s, magazines featuring modernism like Modern Poetry and Literary Review, had already appeared, but it was Modern Literature that led to the flourishing of the Modernist movement in the 1960s. In its inaugural issue, the editors of Modern Literature published a manifesto, an intriguing short piece bristling with tensions between the traditional and the modern, as well as between China and the West. The editors expressed dissatisfaction with traditional Chinese literature, which they regarded as inadequate for the representation of their modern existence: We have no desire to live in the paralyzed mind-set of the good old days. We must acknowledge our backwardness; in the realm of new literature, even though it is hardly an empty space, it is at least a desolate scene. If the rich legacy of our ancestors cannot be put to good use, then it becomes an obstacle to progress. . . . We feel that the artistic forms and styles of the past are no longer sufficient to represent our artistic feeling as modern people. Therefore, we have decided to experiment, explore, and create new artistic forms and styles. . . . We respect tradition, but we do not need to imitate it or fiercely abolish it. However, by necessity we must carry out some ‘constructive destruction’.19 The young editors criticised the ‘backward’ Chinese literary tradition, which must be overcome by means of the oxymoron ‘constructive destruction’. What the editors called the ‘forms and styles of the past’ broadly refers to Chinese literature, or more specifically to nationalist propaganda like combat literature and what later came to be known as ‘Mainstream Literature’: that is, literature produced by mainstream literary agents who followed the KMT’s cultural policies.20 Modernists, on the other hand, resisted stifling cultural practices that catered to a repressive, nationalist politics and saw traditional Chinese literature – whether tinged with nationalism or not – as unfit for the representation of the postwar Taiwanese experience. The rise of the Modern Literature Movement signalled not only resistance to the KMT’s nationalist discourse but also the urgent need for literary innovation to account for the convergence and inevitable collision between colonial Taiwan and post-imperial, republican China after fifty years of separation. In renouncing the national literary tradition, Modernists also rejected the concept of nation integral to that tradition, as promoted by the government. Acknowledging their country’s ‘backwardness’, Modernists were keen to learn from the West, and this proWestern stance distanced them further from the nation. They determined ‘to translate and to systematically introduce recent schools and trends in Western literature, criticism, and thought by selecting representative examples of each’.21 Thus they publicised the leading lights of Western Modernism, especially novelists, along with radical new systems of thought like Freudian psychology and existentialism. Joyce, in particular, ‘received special treatment from his Chinese admirers’ when Dubliners was, for the first time, translated into Chinese in its entirety.22 His writing influenced the works of Wang Wen-hsing and Pai Hsien-Yung, members of the Modern Literature clique who later matured into important literary figures in their own right. Pai’s short story collection Taipei People (1971) is directly modelled on Dubliners,23 and Wang’s Family Catastrophe, published the following year, is even more Joycean on both thematic and stylistic levels. Evidently, Taiwanese writers in the 1960s found a kindred spirit in Joyce, who uses language as a means of resistance against cultural and political regimes, be they

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Irish or English, nationalist or colonial. Like Joyce, these writers sought to address sociocultural fragmentation and the identity crisis it caused, characteristically modernist themes that were complicated by local histories of colonialism in both Ireland and Taiwan half a century later. Taiwanese Modernists embraced Joyce’s works as an inspiration for their struggle, as indeed did writers in other former colonies who have drawn inspiration from Irish writers.24 If echoes of Joyce may be found in Taiwanese Modernist writers, how do these echoes contribute to an understanding of individual authors or of the connection between modernism and nation-building? Some answers to this question may be found in the works of Wang Wen-hsing, Taiwan’s Joyce, and the critical responses to his works in the cultural milieu of 1970s Taiwan.

Nativism versus Taiwan’s Joyce: On Family Catastrophe The Modernists so keen on resisting old forms very quickly became the target of another wave of resistance owing to rapidly changing circumstances in Taiwan. In the early 1970s, the ROC suffered a series of diplomatic setbacks and severe international isolation, exacerbating Taiwan’s longstanding national identity crisis.25 In response, Nativism rose up amid the cry for a ‘return to Xiangtu’, meaning that the Taiwanese should stop seeking political and cultural deliverance from the West and refocus their attention on Xiangtu, which literally translates as ‘countryside (xiang) and soil (tu)’ and figuratively denotes the homeland. As the Nativists strove to cultivate patriotism to resist Western influence, they attacked Modernist literature as a Western import and instead championed Nativist (Xiangtu) literature.26 As A-chin Hsiau observes, ‘the promotion of [Nativist] literature was a reaction to post-war Taiwan’s political and economic dependence on foreign powers, particularly the US’. Inevitably, it was ‘also a reaction against cultural Westernization’.27 The main principles of the Nativist movement in literature included the ‘use of the Taiwanese dialect, depiction of the plight of country folks or small-town dwellers in economic difficulty, and resistance to the imperialist presence in Taiwan’.28 Nativist writers also tended to favour the realist mode as befitting the themes of their works.29 Some traits of Nativist literature may also be found in the Irish Revival: for instance, the incorporation of dialect in J. M. Synge’s use of Hiberno-English. Much as the Revival was at odds with the modernist Joyce, in Taiwan Nativist ideology clashed with the Modernists’ Western aesthetics. As the pre-eminent Modernist, Wang Wen-hsing bore the brunt of the Nativist onslaught when he published Family Catastrophe, which appeared in serial form in Chung-Wai Literary Monthly from September 1972 to February 1973. As befits a Joycean text, Wang’s novel caused critical commotion even before it was published in book form later in 1973. The plot traces a deteriorating father–son relationship as the protagonist Fan Yeh grows up, takes a teaching job in a university, becomes the breadwinner of the family and abuses his ageing father, whom the son has banished from the family home. On the thematic level, the novel launches an outspoken challenge to Chinese tradition, culminating in Fan’s diatribe against the Chinese family system, which goes on for several pages. Fan castigates the family as ‘one of the most unreasonable institutions in the world’, created for ‘economic necessity . . . [and] the need to “store grain for the lean times, rear sons for old age”’, which shamelessly camouflaged itself with the ideology of

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‘filial piety’. He then explains ‘why family members cannot thrive and live peaceably with each other in today’s Taiwanese society’ and furiously vows not to marry, or not to have children if married, for he is ‘determined to discontinue this line of descent bearing the name of Fan’.30 Fan’s individualism – heretical in Chinese culture – is so unwavering that it threatens to destroy the traditional family. In addition to its unorthodox plot, Family Catastrophe also challenges tradition at the formal level. Traditional Chinese narratives tend to be linear and straightforward, but Family Catastrophe has two intersecting narrative lines juxtaposing the past and the present in 172 ‘semiautonomous minichapters’.31 The 157 chapters that recount Fan Yeh’s past life since childhood are designated by Arabic numerals, while the fifteen chapters marked by letters of Roman alphabet delineate Fan’s search for his banished father in the present time. The intricate structure of the novel – deliberately fragmented yet meticulously ordered – produces a textual tension that mirrors the strained relationship in the Fan family, consisting of Fan Yeh, his parents, and an elder brother from his father’s previous marriage. They are in constant struggle with one another, but all are kept in place – reluctantly and not without rebellion – by the rule of family. The tension is exacerbated by Wang’s language, which produces a strong defamiliarising effect through its quirky syntactical structures and playful rearrangement of Chinese characters: the mixture of classical and vernacular Chinese; tediously long sentences; reversal of common word order in phrases; repetition of the same parts of speech in a sentence; and use of phonetic symbols and Roman letters to convey sounds, to name just a few.32 James C. T. Shu, writing in 1980, sums up the critical debate about Family Catastrophe: sympathetic to [the novel] or not, critics all have justifiably trained their attention on its two most conspicuous aspects, namely its formal innovation (particularly in its daring manipulation of the Chinese language) and its iconoclastic reexamination of the Chinese family system.33 Critics have also emphasised the resemblance of these formal innovations to those of Joyce. Yuanshu Yan, Wang’s colleague at National Taiwan University, perceives Family Catastrophe as ‘a combination of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.34 He also comments that ‘Joyce’s fiction is most admired for its “sense of immediacy”, and a similar sense of immediacy permeates Family Catastrophe.’35 By immediacy, Yan means the ‘vivid intensity’ that makes readers ‘hear the sounds and see the characters and objects’. Like Joyce and Hemingway, who create new modes of representation to achieve that intensity, Yan claims, Wang aims for ‘precision of presentation’ but not necessarily ‘beauty of expression’.36 One example occurs at the beginning of the novel, when the father leaves home: 他直未再轉頭，直走到巷底後轉彎不見。 (Straight without turning his head, he walked straight to the end of the alley, turned and disappeared.37) In this sentence, there are two occurrences of zhi (直), which by itself means ‘straight’. But zhi has a different meaning if coupled with another character: yizhi (一直), meaning ‘all

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the while’. In the first occurrence, the semantically proper use should be yizhi, but Wang deliberately omits yi, so that both meanings are suggested: all the while, the father does not turn his head, and he keeps the direction of his head straight. In the second occurrence, there is no ambiguity about zhi in zhizhou (直走), ‘to walk straight’. Yet, because the first occurrence already brings up the idea of ‘all the while’, the second occurrence invariably takes on that meaning as well: the father walks straight, and he walks all the while. The repetition of zhi therefore describes an old man walking straight ahead and non-stop for the length of the alley until he suddenly ‘turned’ (zhuanwan 轉彎) and ‘disappeared’ (bujian 不見) at the end of the alley, vividly demonstrating the father’s determination to leave and never to return. Moreover, of the sixteen characters in the sentence, twelve are used to describe the manner of the father’s prolonged walk, the last four for his turn and disappearance. This creates a contrast that signals how his disappearance from the alley – and from his family home in the alley – happens all of a sudden. In this instance, Wang uses homographic Chinese characters to create layers of meanings and employs the numbers of characters to manipulate the pace of events as he sets up an atmosphere germane to the plot. These are arguably the more basic tricks of his stylistic repertoire, but they already showcase Wang’s Joycean meticulousness with language. The critic Hanliang Chang maintains that Fan Yeh’s search for the lost father harks back to Stephen Dedalus’s quest in Ulysses. Chang remarks that Family Catastrophe symbolises the intellectual exile of the modern Chinese, who are fatherless because they have lost contact with tradition. Or worse, their tradition is itself homeless because it is exiled from the homeland, like the father banished from home.38 If Wang’s themes reflect those of Joyce’s Portrait, his stylistic innovations resemble those of Ulysses, creating a soundscape with bold type, underlines, obsolete Chinese characters and new coinages. For example, to fit different contexts, Wang assigns slightly different sounds to the common expletive le (了) by putting in its place other characters (勒, 嘞, 嚛) or even phonetic symbols (ㄌㄜ). This precision in sound, Chang claims, resembles what Joyce does with Davey Byrne’s yawns, first as ‘Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!’ but later as ‘Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!’.39 But Chang also likens Family Catastrophe to A Portrait in that the levels of linguistic complexity reflect the protagonist’s mental development, as they do in A Portrait, which begins with childish utterance and ends with the highly wrought style of Stephen’s diary entries.40 In Family Catastrophe, Chapter 1, we see Fan Yeh’s first utterance as a child: ‘“big, big, door, man, man”, he pointed to the words he recognised on shop signs’.41 This monosyllabic naïvety contrasts sharply with Fan’s tirade against the family, in which the speaker, now a grown-up, disenchanted intellectual, fortifies his invective with incisive analysis of Chinese tradition and Taiwanese society. Indeed, Joseph Lau, a founding member of Modern Literature, declared that ‘Family Catastrophe might as well be retitled The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rebel’.42 These responses from Wang’s contemporaries show why the novelist has come to be known as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’. While championed by some, however, ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’ was denounced by others. One Nativist critic, for example, tacitly referring to Wang, derided the kind of intellectual who shuts himself ‘deep within his own labyrinth and flounderingly tr[ies] to attach himself to a Western author’: Having chanced to hear about some Western writer in the bookstalls, or by word of mouth, . . . he’d swallow the author’s words whole like a date, pit and all, without any critical or skeptical reflection. He’d publish an article brimming with

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high expectations and self-confidence, referring to himself as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’ or ‘Taiwan’s Lawrence’, and patterning himself after one or the other in every thought and gesture. How absurd!43 Wang himself recognised how his affinities to Joyce had aroused the ire of his Taiwanese contemporaries. In the preface to the 1978 reprint of Family Catastrophe, he notes that critics saw this book as ‘immoral’: ‘it had broken with tradition, the written words had ceased to be understandable – had become Ulyssified’.44 As the word ‘Ulyssified’ implies, when Taiwanese people in the 1970s talked about Joyce, they usually had in mind the formal innovations and difficulties of Ulysses, along with its emphasis on aesthetics and probably its author’s withdrawal from politics.45 None of these features fostered an appreciation of Taiwan’s Joyce, because aestheticism was largely regarded as artistic escapism in the island’s atmosphere of national crisis in the 1970s. With his supposed attack on national traditions, Taiwan’s Joyce became the scapegoat of the patriotic Nativists, who were never predisposed to approve of Modernist literature and its ‘escapist, decadent, and “ivory tower” mentality’.46 They also saw the scandalous father–son conflict in Family Catastrophe as blasphemous against the traditional family and Confucian moral codes. The Oedipal theme of the son banishing the father was regarded as imposing Western ideas on Chinese society; the experimental language did not help alleviate the offence but was seen as the author’s high-handed disregard for common readers. In addition to anti-Confucianism and pretentious intellectual elitism, Wang was also accused of ‘brutalizing the Chinese language’.47 These attacks recall early criticism of Joyce. For instance, in Irish Literary Portraits (1935), John Eglinton claims that ‘Joyce rejoiced darkly in causing the language of Milton and Wordsworth to utter all but unimaginable filth and treason.’48 An unsigned review of Ulysses in the Times Literary Supplement notes that Like the lunatic whose speech degrades into a set of arbitrary sounds . . . Mr Joyce has played with language – it is perhaps the last development of the Irishman’s habit of inventing new languages which shall not be English – until it has become his private construction.49 Joyce was also accused of maligning his nation when he called Dublin ‘the centre of paralysis’ and Ireland ‘a country destined by God to be the everlasting caricature of the serious world’.50 Along the same lines, his antinationalism seems quite evident in his parodic portrayal of the Citizen, the ultra-nationalist modelled on Michael Cusack, in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses. Wang did not speak against nationalism as directly as Joyce did, although his transnational artistic practice implied a scepticism about the self-sufficiency of the nation. But Wang was sharply critical of nationalist literature, as he reveals in his landmark speech, ‘Nativist Literature: Its Merits and Demerits’, delivered in February 1978 during the Nativist Literature Debate.51 Wang acknowledged that Nativist literature had made a positive contribution to the overall development of literature in Taiwan, but he insisted that its ‘literary dogma’ was almost completely fallacious. Therefore, he proclaimed, ‘I am all for the writings of [Nativist literature], but I am absolutely against its literary autocracy.’52 He went on to denounce the four failings of Nativist literary

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dogma: the conviction that literature must serve society, the dumbing-down of literature, formulaic writing, and intolerance to other types of writing.53 Wang’s speech to an indifferent or even hostile audience could be compared to Stephen Dedalus’s disquisition on aesthetic theory in Stephen Hero. After he finishes, Stephen is confronted by Hughes, a nationalist teacher of Irish language based on Patrick Pearse: [Hughes] declared . . . that the moral welfare of the Irish people was menaced by such theories. They wanted no foreign filth. . . . Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country – you must first have a nation before you have art. . . . If [the Irish people] were to have art let it be moral art, art that elevated, above all, national art.54 Just substitute Mr Daedalus with Mr Wang, Irish with Taiwanese, and Hughes’s attack could readily apply to Wang. Like the defenders of Family Catastrophe, Wang based his arguments on Western aesthetics and ideas of artistic freedom, which could never be reconciled with the Nativists’ nationalist conception of literature. As long as the Nativists were anti-Western, xenophobic and nationalist, their opponents were forced to challenge the apotheosis of the nation. Needless to say, Wang’s speech provoked vicious Nativist attacks on its author.

Joyce Against / For the Nation: Comparing Ireland and Taiwan Towards the end of the 1970s, the Nativists split into two camps: the China-centric and the Taiwan-centric. After Taiwan’s prolonged separation from the mainland, political reality dictated that, for most people on the island, their native land was Taiwan, not the China that existed only in the Mainlanders’ memory. Therefore, the Taiwan-centric Nativists seized the limelight and went on to proselytise for a Taiwanese national consciousness in the following decades. They reinterpreted the Nativist Literature Debate as a conflict between an emergent Taiwanese national identity and the Chinese national identity imposed on the people in Taiwan, in contrast to the ‘intense Chinese nationalism’ that promoters of Nativist literature once espoused.55 But this transformation of Nativism did not change the orthodox view in literary criticism, which favoured Nativism over Modernism, and any re-evaluation of postwar Taiwan literature has taken place only quite recently. As Fang-ming Chen, a literary historian previously on the Nativist side, candidly admits, ‘now that all the fury [of the 1970s] has subsided, it is time to restore the true face of literature’ and destigmatise Modernist literature.56 In a recuperating effort, Kuei-fen Chiu argues that both Modernism and Nativism are the product of the anxiety-driven ‘West complex’ confronting postwar Taiwan, and both are indispensable to the development of Taiwan literature.57 Chiu indicates that in promoting ‘learning from the West’, many Modernists acknowledged the backwardness of Taiwan’s literary scene, but their works often illustrated ‘local Taiwanese characteristics’ that might go beyond the authors’ beliefs and intentions.58 In her more recent work, Sung-sheng Chang also advocates the understanding of Taiwan’s Modernist literature as ‘a locally based institution’.59 In other words, the Modernists could be – and, indeed, were – local, indigenous even in spite of themselves.

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Taiwan’s Modernists might therefore be understood as Nativist sans nationalism. As such, the Modernists are simultaneously for and against the nation, in that their engagements with Taiwan’s particular circumstances reveal contrasting conceptions of the nation. Unlike the Nativists, the Modernists differentiated national culture or cultural identification from political nationalism. This differentiation was already perceptible in the manifesto of Modern Literature, where Modernist declarations were sandwiched between patriotic sentiments. The editors began by identifying themselves as young people motivated by their ‘concern about the future of Chinese literature’. Towards the end, they proclaimed themselves ‘Chinese intellectuals’ with ‘an ardent love’ for their country. They ‘take pride in being Chinese, even though [their] country is at this moment facing a crisis of survival’.60 Clearly, despite their professed selfreproach of backwardness and dependence on the West, the Modernists had a latent nationalist motive of reviving Chinese culture, a motive that can be detected in (or imputed to) Family Catastrophe. Hanliang Chang, for instance, argues that Wang tries to give the Chinese language a ‘family catastrophe’ so as to renew its life by extending and improving it.61 This undertaking to save the national language is also an act of revitalising the nation and its culture. Here the Ireland–Taiwan analogy is again useful: Taiwan’s Joyce is an undercover Revivalist. This is the Taiwanese version of ‘the tale of two Joyces’: the internationalist, modernist Joyce and the Irish Joyce.62 For a long time, Joyce was canonised for his modernist aesthetic practices, while the more political or national aspects of his works were largely neglected. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, however, Joyce criticism took a political turn, and studies that focused on Joyce’s representation of history, nation / nationalism and (post)colonialism began to appear.63 This political approach, informed by postcolonial studies, has rectified a glaring omission in Joyce studies by offering ‘ways of articulating nationalism . . . and modernism as interdependent rather than opposed phenomena’.64 In Joyce, ‘an interest in aesthetics’ does not ‘preclude an engagement with nationalism’.65 A related critical turn in Irish studies has been to reconsider the relation between the Revival and modernism, which used to be perceived as polar opposites. By longstanding critical consensus, the Revival was a form of ‘cultural nationalism that encouraged an insular aesthetic traditionalism’, whereas modernism represented ‘a broadly progressive commitment to aesthetic innovation, outward-looking internationalism, and a repudiation of . . . nationalist mentalities’.66 Yet both movements may be seen as ‘an outgrowth and an expression of modernity’ in colonial Ireland, and as such they work interdependently.67 As Joe Cleary claims, viewed in a ‘larger historical context, the Irish Revival might be seen less as the diametric antithesis of modernism than as its discursive sibling’; or in Carol Taaffe’s words, they are ‘mirror images of each other’.68 In Taiwan, Nativism and Modernism are produced in different phases of the same national identity crisis, and both are symptomatic of Taiwan’s postwar, quasi-colonial modernity. As in Ireland, Taiwan’s Nativism and Modernism may be seen as ‘discursive siblings’ to each other. Similarly, realism and modernism are no longer regarded as incompatible opposites, as exemplified by recent re-evaluations of Wang Wen-hsing. Early critics identified realism as central to Family Catastrophe, but they had no chance to elaborate this point because of the controversy about the novel’s modernism. Shu maintains that Family Catastrophe is ‘a modernist text which nevertheless strives after realism’, while Lau praises it as ‘a realist novel of the first rate’.69

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Yan repeatedly emphasises that Family Catastrophe is Zhen (real, authentic), in that Wang’s Joycean ‘sense of immediacy’ depicts real, authentic emotions and lives.70 More recently, Grace Hui-Chuan Wu challenges the binary of realism and modernism, and attempts to ‘re-think the domesticity of Wang’s father–son narrative [in Family Catastrophe] as a practice of social realism’.71 Since realism is the necessary condition for Nativist literature, in effect, Wu plays with the possibility of reading Family Catastrophe as a piece of Nativist work. Her study is significant not so much because it provides a new reading strategy but because it reclaims an earlier critical view and tries to tease out its potentiality, showing how Family Catastrophe blurs the customary division between Modernism and realism. In fact, Wang’s blend of realism and modernist language experiments affirms his affinity to Joyce, for Joyce is a Modernist realist, even in the radically innovative Ulysses. Joyce once told Arthur Power that ‘In realism you get down to facts on which the world is based . . . in Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.’72 Peter Brooks explains that Ulysses does not repudiate realism but develops it: ‘It develops techniques for a better matching of writing to experience of the world, to the transitory but crucial sense perceptions that more traditional forms of writing tended to censor or summarize.’73 This comment also applies to Family Catastrophe. Paradoxically, Wang achieved through Westernisation and the example of Joyce the quintessential Nativist feat of a ‘return to Xiangtu’, to the native land. His Xiangtu, even though it was called China during the three decades following World War II, was, in fact, firmly situated in Taiwan. Wang had been attacked for promoting Westernisation and betraying his national culture, and had been derided as Taiwan’s Joyce who blindly and slavishly imitated a foreign master, but his novel concerns his nation as closely as any Nativist work.

Modernism: From Local to Global The re-evaluation of Wang Wen-hsing and Taiwanese Modernism highlights how the ever-changing conception of national identity may bear upon the practice of literary criticism. Comparing Ireland and Taiwan brings individual authors into sharper relief and deepens our understanding of literary production in each nation. As we have seen, a similar colonial identity crisis motivated Joyce’s and Wang’s modernist endeavours and their mutual resistance to the oppressive politics of nationalism. We have also seen how critical studies belatedly uncovered (or recovered) the complex engagement with the nation in their respective works. The traits Joyce and Wang have in common offer an expanded framework to reconceptualise the relationship between modernism and the nation in transcultural or even global terms. Moreover, the analogy between two dyads – modernism / Revival in Ireland and Modernism / Nativism in Taiwan – shows how seemingly opposing phenomena are better understood as expressions of the same larger cultural formation: that is, of modernist engagements with colonial modernity. Comparing Irish and Taiwanese modernisms raises further questions about the study of global modernism. The first question involves methodology or, more specifically, the ‘scale and form’ of global modernist study: how such a transnational study might ‘coordinate macro-level analyses of the world-as-system . . . with particularized attention to individual cultural objects or moments within them’.74 Admittedly, this can be an impossible task, but to come close to such a coordination, this study follows

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a Chinese proverb, ‘dachu zhuoyan, xiaochu zhuoshou’. The literal meaning is ‘eyes on big, hands on small’, but a more appropriate translation here is ‘Train your eyes on global principles but put your hands on local details.’ Local details about Taiwan and Ireland provide more contexts that enable the articulation of global principles for modernist engagements with the nation. Interactions of this kind between various contexts – Irish, Taiwanese and more – will move us closer to the ultimate task of addressing ‘the world as the context of interpretation’.75 A further question has to do with the diffusionist model of global modernism, which sees modernism as a Euro-American creation that spread to the rest of the world. This model presumes a hierarchy differentiating the original and the copy, so that writers in non-Western countries become mere imitators of the great Western modernists. Susan Stanford Friedman faults this model for setting up a ‘misleading binary’ of the West as modern and the Rest as traditional, with the implication that the Rest struggles to shake off its traditionalism to become modern, which means ‘becoming Western’.76 Because Westernisation is equated with betraying one’s own culture, Wang was attacked for promoting it. None the less, in the end Wang does not ‘become Western’. Through Westernisation, Wang became truly native and in the process he even indigenised the West. He is, after all, Taiwan’s Joyce. Wang’s example supports Friedman’s argument that non-Western modernisms are ‘different, not derivative’: like Western modernisms, they are ‘hybrid, evidencing signs of traveling modernism that have transplanted and become native’.77 However, the idea of indigenisation is also based on the differentiation of the original and the copy, even though the copy might attain equal status with the original. To challenge this value system, Jacob Edmund suggests that we recognise ‘the centrality of the copy to modernism in toto’, for the anxiety caused by Westernisation is not just ‘a response to Western hegemony but . . . part of a general anxiety about the copy, new media, and globalization, an anxiety equally present in the appropriative poetics of Pound or Joyce’.78 The problem lies in the mystique of the original and the consequential denigration of the copy or the imitation. The story of Taiwan’s Joyce suggests that there is nothing shameful in imitating and assimilating influences from the West, or anywhere else, because such cultural cross-fertilisations are essential to modernism.

Coda Near the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus claims that ‘the shortest way to Tara is via Holyhead’.79 To reach the heart of Ireland, or as he envisions the task, to forge the uncreated conscience of his race, Stephen has to leave Ireland. The point is not where he goes to but the necessity of leaving Ireland in order to get back to it. With that claim, Stephen becomes a potential comparatist. In the same spirit, and as the Joycean echoes in Taiwan have suggested, maybe the shortest way to Formosa is via Erin.

Notes 1. Tsvetkov, Atlas, p. 123. 2. Scott, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

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3. The word ‘similar’ is used very broadly to designate how experiences of colonialism constitute the national identity on each island. Differences exist, of course. For example, Ireland had one colonial master but Taiwan has had quite a few since the seventeenth century: Dutch / Chinese co-colonisation in the seventeenth century; Japanese imperialism (1895–1945); internal colonialism under the Kuomintang government (1947–87); and the US-led Cold War with its global deployment strategies (Liao, ‘Modern Taiwan Literature’, p. 360). 4. See Huang et al., ‘Lin Hsien-Tang’s Taiwanese Home Rule Movement’. 5. See Li and Mac Mathúna, ‘A Comparative Study’, and Tiu, ‘Can State Save a Minority Language?’. 6. Honouring established practices, Pai’s and Wang’s full names appear in surname-first order. Other names in Chinese are adjusted to surname-last to go with English usage. 7. For an up-to-date and knowledgeable critical overview of Wang’s work, see Sciban’s introduction in Reading Wang Wenxing, the first book-length study of Wang in English. In the current study, ‘Modernism’ and ‘Modernist’ with capitalised first letter refer specifically to Taiwanese Modernism in the postwar period, while ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ without capitalisation refer to general modernist formations. 8. For example, analysing Wang’s experimental style in his longer novel Backed Against the Sea I & II (1981, 1999), Tseng outlines Wang’s artistic development and claims that Backed is indeed Wang’s Ulysses, as Family Catastrophe is his Portrait (‘The Void’). 9. For a brief review of recent studies on global modernism, see Jaillant and Martin, ‘Introduction: Global Modernism’. 10. Dirlik, ‘Taiwan’, p. 8. Liao made a similar claim in recognising ‘the multifaceted constituencies and effects of colonial modernity’ as a major factor constituting modern Taiwan writers (‘Modern Taiwan Literature’, p. 360). 11. Hsiau regards the policy as ‘less merciful’ than its Japanese precedent since it rendered the generation educated in Japanese, many of whom were intellectuals and established writers, suddenly ‘illiterate under the rule of the motherland’ (Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 55). 12. The epitome of this stance is the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement in 1966, which Chiang Kai-Shek launched to counter the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution taking place earlier on the mainland. 13. Hsiao-ting Lin argues that ‘the United States, from the government organisation down to various individuals . . . had played a crucial role in the formative years of this state’ (Accidental State, p. 12). See also Shih and Liao, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4. 14. Shih, Critical Essays, pp. 305–6. Original material in Chinese, translation mine. 15. Ibid., p. 306. 16. Pai, ‘Historical Background’, p. 133. 17. Ibid., pp. 133–4. 18. Ibid., p. 134. 19. Editors of Modern Literature, ‘Introduction’, p. 192, italics added. 20. S. Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 6. 21. Editors of Modern Literature, ‘Introduction’, pp. 191–2. 22. Lee, ‘Modernism’, p. 14. 23. Stories in Taipei People first appeared in Modern Literature and were later published in collected form. A couple of studies in Chinese have compared it with Dubliners. For one such study in English, see Hillenbrand, ‘Voices of Empire’. 24. Halloran names the Nigerian Chinua Achebe and the Trinidadian Mustapha Matura (James Joyce, pp. 27–8). Other examples from the Caribbean are George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin was likened to Joyce’s A Portrait by early reviewers (Brown, Migrant Modernism, pp. 78–9), while Walcott explicitly recognises the influence of Irish literature on him as ‘very intimate’ (Hirsch, Interview with Derek Walcott, pp. 288–9).

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

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See Eastley, ‘Walcott, Joyce, and Planetary Modernism’ for a recent comparative study of Walcott and Joyce, and see McGarrity’s Washed by the Gulf Stream for a more extensive treatment of the relation between Irish and Caribbean literatures. The setbacks include territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands (also known as the Senkaku Islands) with Japan in 1971; Taiwan’s expulsion from the United Nations later the same year; and Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, which signalled a US rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China and dwindling support for Taiwan. Japan cut off diplomatic ties with the ROC in 1972, while the US did the same in 1978. Xiangtu can be a noun or an adjective. In this study, ‘Nativist’ and ‘Nativism’ are used in Xiangtu’s place to avoid confusion. Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 72. S. Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 149. Tuo Wang, one of the major Nativist writers, even claimed that the so-called Nativist works were ‘realist literature, not Nativist literature’ (‘It is Realist Literature, Not Nativist Literature’, p. 280). Wang, Family Catastrophe, pp. 231–5. S. Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 114. See Ou-yang, ‘The Structure and Syntax of Family Catastrophe’. Shu, ‘Iconoclasm in Wang Wen-hsing’s Chia-Pien’, p. 179 Yan, ‘Take Pains to Read, Take Care to Evaluate’, p. 246. Ibid., pp. 243–4. Ibid., p. 245. Wang, Family Catastrophe, p. 5. Dolling’s translation is semantically correct (‘He walked straight ahead without looking back, all the way to the end of the alley, and disappeared’), but since Wang does not subscribe to common uses of Chinese, I provide my own translation to come closer to the nuances in Wang’s original language. H. Chang, ‘A Discussion on the Language Used in Family Catastrophe’, p.124, translation mine. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 135. Wang, Family Catastrophe, p. 22, translation mine. Lau, ‘Past Decade of Taiwanese Literature’, p. 13, translation mine. Song, ‘Cold Ashes’, p. 235. Wang, ‘Preface’, p. 194. For the development of Joyce studies in Taiwan, see Yu-Chen Lin, ‘Joyce on the Eastern Edge’. S. Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 18. Ibid., p. 114. See pp. 112–18 for a survey of early criticisms on Family Catastrophe. Qtd in Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, p. 1. Dated 23 January 1937. Deming, James Joyce, p. 251. Joyce, Selected Letters, p. 83; Critical Writings, p. 168. The Nativist Literature Debate (1977–8) was fought between anti-Nativists, who attacked Nativist works as communist proletarian literature, and Nativists, who claimed that literature should be based on nationalism and compassion for the lower classes. It was more than an innocent debate on literature, as the former group was pro-American politically and economically, while the latter is anti-imperialist and anticapitalist. Wang, ‘Nativist Literature’, p. 518, translation from Chang et al., Columbia Sourcebook, p. 298. Wang, ‘Nativist Literature’, pp. 518–27, translation mine. Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 103. Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, pp. 74–5.

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196 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

shan-yun huang Chen, A History, p. 534, translation mine. Chiu, ‘Taiwanese Literary Production’, pp. 198–9, translation mine. Ibid., p. 260. S. Chang, ‘Building a Modern Institution of Literature’, p. 130. Editors of Modern Literature, ‘Introduction’, pp. 191, 192. H. Chang, ‘A Discussion’, p. 141. Taaffe, ‘Irish Modernism’, p. 782. For such studies, see Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History; Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses; Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism; Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire; Attridge and Howes, Semicolonial Joyce, to name just a few. Attridge and Howes, Semicolonial Joyce, p. 11. Begam, ‘Joyce’s Trojan Horse’, p. 203. Cleary, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Post-colonial, p. 176. Cleary, ‘Introduction’, p. 12; Taaffe, ‘Irish Modernism’, p. 785. Shu, ‘Iconoclasm’, p. 189; Lau, ‘Past Decade’, p. 10. Yan, ‘Take Pains to Read’, pp. 243–7. Wu, ‘Family Catastrophe and the Making of Taiwanese Modernity’, p. 128. Power, Conversations, p. 98. Brooks, Realist Vision, p. 201. Davis and Hensley, ‘Scale and Form’. Bush, ‘Context’, p. 76. Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism’, p. 434. Ibid., p. 432. Edmund, ‘Copy’, p. 108. Joyce, A Portrait, p. 273.

Bibliography Attridge, Derek, and Marjorie Howes (eds), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Begam, Richard, ‘Joyce’s Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization’, in Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (eds), Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 185–208. Boehmer, Elleke, Empire, the National, and the Post-colonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Brown, J. Dillon, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). Bush, Christopher, ‘Context’, in Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz (eds), A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 75–95. Chang, Hanliang, ‘A Discussion on the Language Used in Family Catastrophe’ (Qiantan Jiabian de wenzi), Chung-Wai Literary Monthly, 1:12 (1973), pp. 122–41. Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, ‘Building a Modern Institution of Literature: The Case of Taiwan’, in Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), pp. 116–33. Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, Michelle Yeh and Ming-Ju Fan (eds), The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

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Chen, Fang-ming, A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature (Taiwan xinwenxue shi) (Taipei: Linking, 2011). Cheng, Vincent, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Chiu, Kuei-fen, ‘Taiwanese Literary Production Under the Translation Drive: Dialectics Between Modernist and Nativist Literature, 1960–1980’ (Fanyi qudonglixia de Taiwan wenxue shengchan: 1960–1980 xiandaipai yu xiangtupai de bianzheng), in Jian-zhong Chen, Fenghuang Yin, Kuei-fen Chiu, Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang and Liang-ya Liou, Essays on Taiwan Literary History (Taiwan xiaoshuo shilun) (Taipei: Rye Field, 2007), pp. 197–273. Cleary, Joe, ‘Introduction’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–18. Davis, Thomas, and Nathan Hensley, ‘Scale and Form; or, What was Global Modernism?’, Modernism / Modernity Online Forum, (last accessed 13 October 2020). Deming, Robert (ed.), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1970). Dirlik, Arif, ‘Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made’, boundary 2, 45:3 (2018), pp. 1–25. Duffy, Enda, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Eastley, Aaron, ‘Walcott, Joyce, and Planetary Modernism’, Caribbean Quarterly, 64:3–4 (2018), pp. 502–20. Editors of Modern Literature, ‘Introduction to Modern Literature’ (1960), in Chang et al., The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 191–2. Edmund, Jacob, ‘Copy’, in Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz (eds), A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 96–113. Fairhall, James, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Friedman, Susan Standford, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space / Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism / Modernity, 13:3 (2006), pp. 425–43. Gibson, Andrew, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Halloran, Thomas, James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity: A Study of the Development of Postcolonial Irish Identity in the Novels of James Joyce (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2009). Hillenbrand, Margaret, ‘Voices of Empire in Dubliners and Taipeiren: Titles, Taiwan, and Comparability’, in Shu-Mei Shih and Ping-Hui Liao (eds), Comparatizing Taiwan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 190–216. Hirsch, Edward, and Derek Walcott, ‘An Interview with Derek Walcott’, Contemporary Literature, 20:3 (1979), pp. 279–92. Hsiau, A-chin, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Huang, Fu-San, Sam Huang and Conor Mulvagh, ‘Lin Hsien-Tang’s Taiwanese Home Rule Movement as Inspired by the Irish Model’, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, 4 (2012), pp. 65–88. Jaillant, Lise, and Alison Martin, ‘Introduction: Global Modernism’, Modernist Cultures, 12:1 (2018), pp. 1–13. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (1916; London: Penguin, 1992). Joyce, James, Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975). Joyce, James, Stephen Hero (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963). Joyce, James, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959). Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Walter Gabler (1922; London: Bodley Head, 1984). Lau, Joseph, ‘The Past Decade of Taiwanese Literature (1965–1975) – with Remarks on Wang Wen-hsing’s Family Catastrophe’ (Shinianlai de Taiwan xiaoshuo: 1965–75 – jianlun Wang Wen-hsing de Jiabian), Chung-Wai Literary Monthly, 4:12 (1976), pp. 4–16.

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Lee, Leo Ou-Fan, ‘“Modernism” and “Romanticism” in Taiwan Literature’, in Jeannette L. Faurot (ed.), Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 6–30. Li, Khin-Huann, and Liam Mac Mathúna, ‘A Comparative Study of Language Movement in Taiwan and Ireland’, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, 4 (2012), pp. 176–88. Liao, Ping-Hui, ‘Modern Taiwan Literature’, in Gunter Schubert (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Taiwan (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 359–72. Lin, Hsiao-Ting, Accidental State: Chiang Kai-Shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Lin, Yu-chen, ‘Joyce on the Eastern Edge: Globalization, Localization and Joyce Studies in Taiwan’, in John Nash (ed.), Joyce’s Audiences (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 99–109. McGarrity, Maria, Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Ou-yang, Zi, ‘The Structure and Syntax of Family Catastrophe’ (Lun Jiabian zhi jiegou xingshi yu wenzi jufa), Chung-Wai Literary Monthly, 1:12 (1973), pp. 50–67. Pai, Hsien-Yung, Taipei People, trans. Pai Hsien-Yung and Patia Yasin (1971; Taipei: Changyou, 2000). Pai, Hsien-Yung, ‘The Historical Background to the Founding of Modern Literature and Its Spiritual Orientation – Foreword for the Reissue of Modern Literature’ (1988), Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, 40 (2017), pp. 131–42. Power, Arthur, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974). Sciban, Shu-ning, and Ihor Pidhainy (eds), Reading Wang Wenxing: Critical Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). Scott, John McNeil, ‘Introduction’, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, 4 (2012), pp. 1–5. Shih, Shu, Critical Essays on Cross-Strait Literature (Liangan wenxue lunji) (Taipei: Xin-di, 1997). Shih, Shu-mei, and Ping-hui Liao, ‘Introduction: Why Taiwan? Why Comparatize?’, in Shu-Mei Shih and Ping-Hui Liao (eds), Comparatizing Taiwan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1–10. Shu, James C. T., ‘Iconoclasm in Wang Wen-hsing’s Chia-Pien’, in Jeannette L. Faurot (ed.), Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 179–93. Song, Zelai, ‘Cold Ashes in the Heart: The Tragedy of Taiwanese Literature’ (1981), in Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley (eds), Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals (Armonk, NY: East Gate, 1992), pp. 232–9. Taaffe, Carol, ‘Irish Modernism’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 782–96. Tiu, Hak-Khiam, ‘Can State Save a Minority Language?: On Ireland’s Language Revitalization’, Taiwan International Studies Quarterly, 4:4 (2008), pp. 21–47. Tseng, Li-Ling, ‘The Void of Modernity: In-between Family Catastrophe and Backed Against the Sea’ (Xiandaixing de kongbai: Jiabian, Beihaideren qianhou shangxia zhijian), Chung-Wai Literary Monthly, 30:6 (2001), pp. 161–72. Tsvetkov, Yanko, Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection, 2nd and extended edn (N.P.: Alphadesigner, 2017). Wang, Tuo, ‘It is Realist Literature, Not Nativist Literature – A Critical Analysis of Nativist Literature’ (1977), in Chang et al., The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 280–4. Wang, Wen-hsing, Family Catastrophe, trans. Susan Wan Dolling (1972; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). Wang, Wen-hsing, ‘Nativist Literature: Its Merits and Demerits’ (1978), in Tiancong Yu (ed.), Essays on Nativist Literature (Xiangtu wenxue taolunji) (Taipei: Yuanjing, 1980), pp. 515–46.

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Wang, Wen-hsing, ‘Preface for the New Edition of Family Catastrophe’ (1978), in Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley (eds), Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals (Armonk, NY: East Gate, 1992), pp. 194–5. Wu, Grace Hui-Chuan, ‘Family Catastrophe and the Making of Taiwanese Modernity’, Journal of Modern Literature, 38:4 (2015), pp. 126–46. Yan, Yuan-Shu, ‘Take Pains to Read, Take Care to Evaluate: Family Catastrophe’ (1973), in Chang et al., The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, pp. 242–7.

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11 Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy Kathryn Conrad

W

hen one attempts to examine Oscar Wilde’s politics, particularly in The Importance of Being Earnest, with any degree of earnestness, one feels dangerously near to missing a joke. Critically celebrated, both now and during his lifetime, more for his paradoxes than his politics, Wilde was less than consistent in his own political self-presentation and declarations, describing The Soul of Man Under Socialism, for instance, as being about ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one wants to call it’.1 But, as Peter Kuch has argued, ‘Wilde’s level of engagement with contemporary social and political issues needs to be more widely appreciated’.2 This chapter takes a step toward recognising Wilde’s political engagements by examining his most famous play – described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’3 – which seems amongst the least amenable to political analysis.4 In this chapter, however, I want to read Earnest not only as a kind of heretical response to Victorian social expectations, made particularly poignant by Wilde’s own disgrace, but also in dialogue with the experience of the Irish in London in the late Victorian / early modernist period. Declan Kiberd has convincingly argued that Earnest offers ‘the revolutionary ideal of the self-created man or woman’ as a ‘parable of Anglo-Irish relations and a pointer to their resolution’, crafted in large part as Wilde’s response to his position as an Irishman in London.5 While I agree that Earnest offers such an ideal, the play also bears witness to the dangers of presenting this ideal as available only to a certain class of people. In Earnest, Wilde alludes to revolutionary direct action, particularly the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881–5 and the French anarchist activities of the 1890s. In the process, Wilde reveals the complicity of the British aristocracy in the catastrophically destructive violence waged by the marginalised, as well as at least some sympathy with their motives. Hearkening back to earlier revolutionary activities in ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ (1881), Wilde writes But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea, – And give my rage a brother——! Liberty!6 The passionate rage of physical-force nationalism and anarchism, as he suggests in and through Earnest, has an alternative: the liberty of critique available through aesthetic performance.7

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A Disturbing and Disintegrating Force Wilde declared his politics infrequently, and resisted being pinned down; none the less, he offered hints in his work of his interest in contemporary political questions. Wilde made his initial foray into explicitly political issues in his first play, Vera, or the Nihilists, printed in 1880 and premiering in New York three years later, a play whose ‘sentiments’ Wilde himself described as ‘avowedly republican’.8 The play, set in Russia and loosely inspired by Russian socialist and revolutionary Vera Zasulich, implies Wilde’s sympathy both with the motivations of Nihilists and with the transformative potential of a reform-minded and enlightened imperial Russia – a seeming contradiction that Richard Ellmann has described as Wilde’s ‘aristocratic socialism’.9 Ultimately, however, the play seems to encourage individual passionate self-sacrifice over any specific political school of thought, prefiguring in some ways W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, and appearing to confirm both Ellmann’s suggestion that Wilde had less a specific political aim than a ‘general hatred of tyranny’, and Wilde’s own claim that his was a play ‘not of politics but of passion’ and dealt with ‘no theories of government, but with men and women simply’.10 His best-known political essay is The Soul of Man Under Socialism, published in 1891. This text celebrates individualism, suggesting that the state is only ‘to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities’ and nothing else.11 Critic Allan Antliff calls the essay an ‘anarchist–individualist credo’ and asserts that it was read as such by anarchist artists who followed, many of whom cited Wilde’s aphoristic claim that ‘the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all’.12 Certainly, by the time he had written The Soul of Man, Wilde’s socialism – or ‘Communism, or whatever one wants to call it’ – was, by his own admission, Utopian and not entirely practical. Lest we dismiss Wilde’s anarchism solely as a synonym for artistic freedom, however, it is worth noting that Wilde was, according to George Bernard Shaw, the only literary man in London to sign Shaw’s petition in support of the anarchists of the Chicago Haymarket riots in 1886.13 And, as Wilde told an interviewer later in 1894, ‘I think I am rather more than a Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe, but, of course, the dynamite policy is very absurd indeed’.14 That said, Shaw – sometimes critic, sometimes friend – writes that ‘Wilde was a conventional man: his unconventionality was the very pedantry of convention: never was there a man less an outlaw than he’.15 Although Shaw overstates Wilde’s conventionality, Wilde – the Oxford man, son of a knighted surgeon, and friend of the gentry – was, of course, willing and able to move freely in upper-class English circles. Yet he was never entirely of them, as Shaw, a fellow Irishman, understood well.16 We might therefore be justified in reading both Wilde’s political engagements and his seeming ambivalence through an Irish lens, one tinted by his own particular familial history. Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane ‘Speranza’ Wilde, was an articulate and outspoken supporter of Irish political and cultural nationalism, especially known for her support of the Young Ireland movement, and an unconventional patron of the arts, a role which would attract many London artists and writers to her home in Dublin but hardly endear her to the British aristocracy. Although Wilde’s father, William, was a knighted surgeon, he was also both an Irish nationalist and an Irish folklorist, and, perhaps just as significantly, himself the subject of a sexual scandal and libel case that marginalised

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his family socially in Dublin.17 Wilde himself was sympathetic to Irish nationalism, and Kiberd suggests that ‘Oxford strengthened in Wilde the conviction that an Irishman only discovers himself when he goes abroad’.18 Ellmann concurs that Wilde ‘rediscovered himself as an Irishman’ when he was on tour in the United States,19 where he spent some time with the escaped Fenian, journalist and poet John Boyle O’Reilly, and was identified frequently as ‘Speranza’s boy’.20 He gave speeches in which he identified with Irish nationalism, such as his 1882 St Patrick’s Day lecture in St Paul, in which he blamed the British occupation of Ireland for the suppression of Irish art and looked forward, like many of his fellow Irish cultural and political nationalists, to a day when Ireland would take the ‘proud position she once held among the nations of Europe’.21 In his biting 1889 review of Froude’s The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, Wilde commented that ‘to mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England’s weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic’22 – a claim meant to refer to the maturing of Irish revolutionary doctrine abroad, but that could as easily apply to Wilde himself. Oscar Wilde’s own Irishness was thus both an important and complex part of his identity and a liability. He may have sung the praises of the Irish nationalist poets while in America amongst diasporic Irishmen, but he had already lost his Irish accent quickly and deliberately at Oxford, finding himself, in Kiberd’s terms, ‘wavering between two extremes’ of Irishness and Britishness.23 The Irishness of Wilde and his family, in other words, allowed – or forced – Wilde to occupy a space simultaneously inside and at the margins of Victorian high society. This political ambivalence is captured by ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ – published in 1881, possibly written the year before, and, according to a letter to W. B. Yeats in 1894 when Yeats was editing a collection of Irish poetry, one of two poems that Wilde felt best represented his poetry.24 The sonnet begins with condescension toward revolutionary political actors – Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know, – but moves toward sympathy.25 In the first half of the sonnet, Wilde aligns ‘democracies’, ‘reigns of terror’ and ‘anarchies’, suggesting, in the second term of the triad, some anxiety about the potentially repressive outcomes of the pursuit of liberty, at least by woeful know-nothings. But Wilde’s ‘wilder passions’ and ‘rage’ here find a brother in the ‘roar’ of ‘liberty’, ‘delight[ing]’ his soul despite his lack of ‘love’ for the ‘dull[-eyed]’ ‘children’ who profess it: For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved – and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things. (lines 8–14) Wilde takes care here to distinguish his ‘discreet soul’ from the ‘dissonant cries’ of the mob, gesturing instead toward an aesthetic anarchism anchored in individualism.

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When he admits to being ‘with’ the ‘Christs that die upon the barricades . . . in some things’, then, we might wonder in which things is he ‘with them’? With which passions does his ‘discreet soul’ identify? With which martyrdoms does he ally himself? One can read the ‘passions’ of the revolutionaries in ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ echoed in Wilde’s support of the goal, if not all of the methods or persons, of broader radical movements for political reform but also, more specifically, his sympathy with the Fenian movement. But the poem provides an inkling of the ‘passions’ that would later set him at odds with the Marquess of Queensbury, the cantankerous father of Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, passions that led to his arrest, trial and conviction under the recently created legal category of ‘gross indecency’. We might, in short, read Wilde’s desire for ‘liberty’ here as a desire for sexual liberty, but I mean something slightly more. Edward Carson’s speech in Queensberry’s defence makes it clear that Wilde transgressed not only sexual but also class lines; the audience laughed when Carson ironically proposed that Wilde had such a magnanimous, such a noble, such a democratic soul . . . that he draws no social distinctions, and it is exactly the same pleasure to him to have a sweepingboy from the street – if he is only interesting – to lunch with him or to dine with him, as the best educated artist or the greatest littérateur in the whole kingdom.26 In De Profundis, Wilde described the thrill of spending time with those lower-class men as ‘feasting with panthers’27 – ‘panthers’ who may have their parallel with those roaring and dangerous know-nothings of ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ who reflect his ‘wilder passions’. Wilde, in short, expressed his politics on both a micro and a macro level. Vicki Mahaffey has described the politics of Wilde, Joyce and Yeats as ‘micronationalist’, a term she defines as a concentration on highly local and sometimes submerged features of a country, a person, or a text that are never taken as ‘representative’, but which instead initiate an expansive and energizing process of connection (as opposed to a movement of consolidation).28 Elsewhere, she suggests that micronationalism is a way of ‘shattering . . . into component parts’ and, in so doing, ‘revealing the interplay of forces that produce such categories’ as ‘manhood and nationhood’.29 Wilde indeed appeared to see the work of the artist as potentially explosive and disruptive of consolidated power, as ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ implies; he claimed in The Soul of Man, ‘Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force’.30 And I would further contend that, in The Importance of Being Earnest, he makes connections between texts, disruptive or marginalised bodies, and bombs in order to show the impact that all three potentially have on social and political stability, even as he ultimately prefers the aesthetic approach to challenging this stability.

The Earnest Materiality of Texts, Bodies and Bombs I have chosen to focus on groupings of three elements within the play, thanks to the subtitle of the play: ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. Christopher Craft and

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Mahaffey have noted the way in which Wilde evokes the trivial not only in its contemporary sense but also in its more obscure sense: that is, the trivial as ‘placed where three roads meet’.31 Craft writes that, ‘etymologically speaking, the trivial is the locus of a common or everyday convergence: a site where paths (of meaning, of motion, of identity) cross and switch, a pivot in which vectors . . . enter in one direction and exit in another’.32 Craft cites the pun on E(a)rnest as one such figurative locus, where the man’s name (Ernest), earnestness and Urning/Uranian (an early sexological construction of homosexuality) meet, and he refers to Victoria Station as a material locus of these three terms. Since Craft’s exploration of Wilde’s trivium focuses on the ways in which homosexual activity is both evoked and masked, he does not flesh out the particular ways in which Victoria Station operates as a crossroads or meeting point, except to note that baby Ernest enters and Jack leaves, with help from Miss Prism. But texts, bodies and bombs all meet at Victoria Station. The cloak-room at Victoria station is itself, as Lady Bracknell suggests, a site that might ‘conceal a social indiscretion – has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now’ (Act I).33 The ambiguous word ‘cloak-room’ could refer to either a left-luggage area, a coat room or a lavatory in British English.34 Cloak-rooms, in the latter sense of the word, were a common choice for men’s anonymous sexual trysts; Lady Bracknell’s comment about social indiscretion thus implies that the cloak-room in Victoria Station provides a meeting point of a bodily kind.35 Victoria Station also brings together texts and bodies: most obviously, Jack Worthing was, as a baby, exchanged for Miss Prism’s three-volume novel there. But why bombs? Jack Worthing first speaks of bombs to Algernon at the end of the second act, shortly after Gwendolyn and Cecily have discovered his and Algernon’s subterfuge with the name ‘Ernest’. Jack notes cattily that ‘the only small satisfaction I have in the whole of this wretched business is that your friend Bunbury is quite exploded’36 – Bunbury being, of course, Algernon’s fictional alias that parallels Jack’s ‘Ernest’. Let us take a detour into the significance of ‘Ernest’, then, before examining the explosion of Bunbury and its relationship to Victoria Station and bombs. ‘Ernest’ is itself a linguistic meeting point, a resonant pun, as Craft has argued, and the heterosexuality of the play Earnest ‘requires not so much that the heroes seek women as that they seek access to women, legitimacy, and wealth through the assumption of an overdetermined signifier [Ernest], a magical term whose power lies in its capacity to trigger fetishistic “vibrations”’.37 Craft’s insight into ‘Ernest’ encourages us to examine the economies of Earnest, the ways that women, legitimacy and wealth, as well as names, symbols and signs, circulate in the play. As Craft argues, Earnest is a ‘play whose deepest insistence is that individual and collective identities are based upon, and secured by, the most arbitrary of constructs: terms, terminations, termini, terminologies’.38 But I would further suggest that ‘Ernest’ itself functions not just as a signifier that eventually and absurdly stabilises when Jack discovers his paternal name in a book (the published Army lists) and he is reinscribed under the Name of the Father, as Craft has put it.39 ‘Ernest’ also functions as earnest (that is, ‘money, or a sum of money, paid as an initial installment, esp. for the purpose of securing a bargain or contract’40), in so far as the name itself is offered to secure a contract: in this case, most obviously, a marriage contract, but also, as Craft puts it, ‘legitimacy and wealth’. Jack Worthing’s

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own worth in this society is less secure than that of Ernest; how appropriate, then, that Jack’s first name is generic and his last name is a diminutive of ‘worth’ that evokes the small value of a farthing or shilling.41 The signifier ‘Ernest’, in other words, like all signifiers, may well have an arbitrary value, but it also has a material efficacy that cannot be denied. The name ‘Ernest’ is compelling not only for Jack but for Algernon as well, whose own name may itself gesture too clearly toward hidden sexual practices. Algernon’s real-world namesake may have been Algernon Charles Swinburne, the much beloved sensual poet of Oxbridge undergraduates; or it may have been Algernon Burke, whose information would eventually keep the Marquess of Queensbury from the stage door of St James Theatre at the first performance of Earnest.42 The original four-act version of the play, however, indicates yet another candidate for a namesake: Algy: But my dear child, do you mean to say you could not love me if I had some other name? Cecily: What name? Algy: Oh, Any name you like – Algernon, for instance – Cecily: But I don’t like the name of Algernon. Algy: Well, my own sweet darling, I really can’t see why you should object to the name of Algernon. It is not at all a bad name. In fact, it is rather an aristocratic name. Cecily: I fear it must be. I have often come across it in the newspapers in connection with rather painful cases. Cases that judges and magistrates have had to decide unfairly.43 Perhaps the most notorious Algernon of the London newspapers – and in the London courts – appearing ‘in connection with rather painful cases’ would have been Algernon Allies, a chief witness in the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal, where a number of prominent men, including Lord Arthur Somerset and rumoured (albeit without much evidence) to include Prince Albert Victor, were accused of procuring young men, most of whom were otherwise employed as telegraph boys, for sex. Once the Cleveland Street brothel was uncovered, the proprietor of the brothel, Charles Hammond, and Lord Somerset both escaped abroad.44 Two of the men involved who remained in England, George Veck and Henry Newlove, were convicted and sentenced to several months’ hard labor under the Labouchère Amendment of 1885, which added ‘gross indecency’ to the crimes of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 – the same law under which Wilde was prosecuted only a few months after the first performances of Earnest and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.45 While ‘Ernest’ may have offered, as Craft has argued, a somewhat abstract pun that gestured toward homosexuality to a small subset of Wilde’s audience, ‘Algernon’ in the context of the original play may have suggested homosexual scandal to a larger portion of it. Earnest’s Algernon, whose Bunburying allows him a kind of mobility, may thus be well advised in his move to shed a signifier that, arbitrarily though none the less effectively, links him to the kinds of practices he might himself be attempting to disguise. Whereas ‘Ernest’ is called into being by the end of the play when the name is (re)grafted on to Jack, however, ‘Bunbury’ is ‘quite exploded’. Bunbury has been read by Craft and others46 as alluding to a number of activities, including the

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homosexual activity taking place outside of the confines of the ‘ordinary decencies of family life’, to put it in Lady Bracknell’s words. Craft elaborates on the function of Bunbury: Of course the gay specificity of such allusiveness was technically unspeakable: non nominandum inter Christianos. Refusing to chafe under this proscription, Wilde inverts it by inserting Bunbury into the text behind the ostentatious materiality of an empty signifier, a punning alias whose strategic equivocation between allusion and elision had already announced, a century before Foucault’s formulation, ‘that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plunderings, disguises, ploys’.47 The ‘ostentatious materiality’ of Bunbury, I would argue, is much like the materiality of Ernest, functioning as a means by which the men in the text are able to move and thrive in Victorian high society while hiding practices and desires that would threaten their secure place therein. Bunbury is only ‘exploded’ by Algernon when he is ready to marry Cecily and is committed to the new name of Ernest: Algernon. [Airily.] Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Lady Bracknell. What did he die of? Algernon. Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. Lady Bracknell. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?48 While the ‘explosion’ of Bunbury is figurative – Algernon next exclaims that Bunbury has been ‘found out’ and then simply that he has ‘died’ – the allusion here is to a far less banal, and far more literal, death. The first audiences of Wilde’s play would have certainly heard the explosive ‘revolutionary outrage’ that Lady Bracknell evokes as the work of political dynamiters. From its patenting by Alfred Nobel in 1867, dynamite was part of the arsenal of weapons for both Fenians and anarchists in London, elsewhere in Europe and in the US. In London, the most sustained bombing campaign was that of the Fenians. Directed in large part by exiled Irish revolutionaries in the US, the campaign began at Clerkenwell in 1867 and then was waged consistently – and reported on constantly – from 1881 to 1885 as part of the movement for Irish national independence.49 The bombs were directed not only at sites associated with policing but also at symbolic and infrastructural targets. Lady Bracknell’s response thus makes a connection between Bunbury’s demise – which is also effectively the demise of a freedom based in the privileges of masculinity and social class in Victorian aristocratic society – and the infrastructural disruptions provided by revolutionary bombs. At this particular crossroads, then, the ‘explosion’ of Bunbury and Algernon’s subsequent loss of mobility subtly draws attention to the potential for a more profound disruption – not only of infrastructure but also, potentially, of life – that could be effected by the socially, economically and politically marginalised.

The Line Is Material And yet, the ‘explosion’ of Bunbury is not even the most evocative allusion to revolutionary dynamiters. For that, we must return to Lady Bracknell’s response to Jack

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Worthing when he reveals that he has ‘lost’ his parents. Jack informs Lady Bracknell of the source of his adoptive parentage: Jack: The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.50 He also notes that he was found ‘in a hand-bag – a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it – an ordinary hand-bag in fact’.51 When Lady Bracknell asks where the handbag was found and is informed that it was discovered at ‘the cloak-room at Victoria Station . . . the Brighton Line’, she replies: Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial. . . . To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion – has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now – but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society.52 What does it mean to be bred in a handbag, after all? Perhaps it means that one is on the move, unfixed in one’s allegiances, living out of a suitcase. Wilde lived out of a handbag on many occasions – during his trips to the Continent, during his travels in America, even during his own trips to the seaside resort of Worthing. A handbag claimed in a cloak-room by a gentleman going to Worthing itself would have had specific resonances for Wilde, whose own trips to this seaside resort meant, on the one hand, spending time with his family (and, indeed, writing The Importance of Being Earnest), and on the other, meeting up with Bosie and the young men whose sexual attentions both Wilde and Bosie shared.53 The bag functions as a symbol of a surface identity that appears conventional and acceptable but that may hide repressed desires and activities. The handbag thus serves as a kind of Bunbury, a material symbol of the cultural and semiotic system that allowed men like Jack, Algy and Thomas Cardew – and Bosie and Wilde – freedom of movement in and through Victorian aristocratic society. But the bag is not only a symbol. It is, first and foremost, a bag; the ‘ostentatious materiality of the empty signifier’ Bunbury, now exploded, has been replaced by the ostentatious materiality of the empty handbag. It has circulated in the fictional history of the play as a real item, and returns to the stage as an actual bag. The handbag, open for inspection on stage, now blessedly empty, would also resonate with a wider London audience that would remember reports – in both senses of the word – of infernal devices left throughout railway stations just over a decade before, the violence of which might indeed be said to ‘remind one of worst excesses of the French Revolution’. In this reading, the ‘particular locality’ where the handbag is found – the Brighton line of Victoria Station – is indeed ‘material’, despite Lady Bracknell’s insistence otherwise. Fenian dynamiters planted a bomb that exploded in the cloak-room of the Brighton line

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Figure 11.1 The Disastrous Explosion at Victoria Station’, The Graphic, 1 March 1884. From author’s collection. of Victoria station on 26 February 1884, just a little over a mile from Oscar Wilde’s own residence at the time in Chelsea (Figure 11.1). Victoria Station is in central London, the station nearest to Buckingham Palace and one that contains both rail and underground lines; the attack on the station was thus focused on both a symbol of British power and the disruption of its actual infrastructure.54 The symbolism was also more pointed in so far as the attack occurred in the newer portion of the station, the terminus of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (the ‘Brighton line’), used most often by those with the means to travel to the coast.55 The attack focused, in other words, on disrupting the movement of the social, political and economic elite. Wilde himself may not have been able to resist the further symbolism: Victoria was the station at the centre of a straight line between his home on Tite Street and St James’s Theatre, where The Importance of Being Earnest would have its premiere.56 The ordinary bag that Jack so carefully describes further connects the play to the bombing: the Victoria Station bomb was disguised in a handbag known as a Gladstone bag – most certainly an ordinary bag, with handles. 57 Gladstone bags were named after Liberal politician and Prime Minister during the bombing campaign, William Ewart Gladstone, who supported the Irish Coercion Act that gave the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland freedom to practise internment without trial of political agitators, but who also supported Irish tenant rights and eventually proposed Irish Home Rule, the latter in part an attempt to pacify the more radical revolutionary wing of the Irish nationalists. The man who was responsible for teaching Irish Fenians in exile how to make bombs in Brooklyn, Professor Mezzeroff, in concert with Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, specifically addressed at least one article to Gladstone, further tightening the connection between the Gladstone bag and the Fenian bomb it carried.58 To ‘marry into a cloak-room, and

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form an alliance with a parcel’, then, would be associated not only with ‘social indiscretions’, but with political and revolutionary ones – in other words, to be Irish. Jack’s connection to a bag found in the cloak-room of the Brighton Line of Victoria Station would link him with the Irish Fenians; in that connection, Wilde would gesture not only outside the theatre, but outside the confines of a parochial nationalism and toward a more international revolutionary discourse with which the Fenians themselves had been linked in the press (as well as to the new genre of the ‘dynamite novel’ spawned by that discourse).59 As Wilde’s play comes to a close and Lady Bracknell is interrogating Jack about Cecily’s background, she asks whether Cecily is ‘connected with any of the larger railway stations in London? I merely desire information. Until yesterday I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origin was a Terminus.’60 The snide comment, of course, refers back to Jack’s supposed ‘origins’ in the Victoria Station terminus. But the reference to a Terminus (with a capital T) would also have been evocative of another much more recent political event. In February of 1894, the anarchist Emile Henry left a bomb in a Paris restaurant, a bomb that killed one person and injured twenty more. The restaurant was located at the Gare SaintLazare, a Parisian railway terminus; and the restaurant itself was known as the Café Terminus. For Wilde to have identified, even in passing, with anarchists in the aforementioned 1894 interview – after a major terrorist attack and after the perpetrator was guillotined – was a profoundly radical gesture. Of course, Wilde’s identification came with a disavowal: he said that ‘the dynamite policy is very absurd indeed’. It is worth noting, however, that the policy is what he considered absurd; that is, it is not necessarily the idea of a radical and disruptive revolutionary act he disavows, but its particular approach. And even this reading presumes that ‘very absurd indeed’ is a complete disavowal – a fairly large presumption about a writer known for paradox. The statement that Emile Henry offered to the jury could stand as a strong political reading of Earnest: I had lived in circles entirely imbued with current morality. I had been accustomed to respect and even to love the principles of fatherland and family, of authority and property. ... I had been told that life was easy, that it was wide open to those who were intelligent and energetic; experience showed me that only the cynical and the servile were able to secure good seats at the banquet. I had been told that society’s institutions were founded on justice and equality, and all around me I could see nothing but lies and treachery. Each day I shed an illusion. Everywhere I went, I witnessed the same miseries among some, and the same joys among others. I was not slow to understand that the grand words I had been taught to venerate: honour, devotion, duty, were only the mask that concealed the most shameful basenesses.61 It is difficult to read these words and not see at least an echo of Wilde’s experience – moving among conventional Britons and puncturing their ‘established morality’ and hypocrisy with witty epigrams, trenchant critique and unconventional experiences, perpetuating ‘outrages’ on ‘the ordinary decencies of family life’. Still, even as the

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handbag in the play gestures outward to other approaches, Wilde’s own approach was to deploy the explosive text, to offer a performance of disruption rather than fully to endorse a violent material one. Earnest seems to celebrate, on one hand, ‘personal identity as a matter of performance and textuality rather than natural fact, and explored and refined tactics for selffashioning in light of that recognition’, as Kerry Powell has noted and others such as Craft, Mahaffey and Kiberd have also suggested.62 But the handbag, an ordinary container that hides what it contains, suggests Wilde’s criticism of the Victorian British tendency to allow self-fashioning only under the guise of the conventional, to suppress and hide what was seen as unacceptable, marginal, foreign or disruptive. Earnest thus provides a slightly different way to read the oft-quoted preface to the second edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, wherein ‘all art is at once surface and symbol’, ‘those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril’, and ‘those who read the symbol do so at their peril’.63 In its allusions to the Victoria Station bombing, Earnest suggests that the ‘peril’ that occurs when one goes beneath the surface might well be literal. Victorian society may function quite effectively when, like Lady Bracknell, one chooses to accept conventional surfaces. But beneath such a surface, outside of the context of a pleasurable evening at the St James Theatre, one might find not a three-volume novel, a baby, or even the personal items of a charitable old man on his way to a seaside resort. One might find a bomb; and the wages of accepting the conventional at face value may well be death.

With Them in Some Things Political readings of Wilde’s play have perhaps suffered from the elision of Wilde and Algernon, for it is all too easy to identify Algernon, the witty Bunburyist who celebrates paradox and play, with Wilde himself. Just as he did in Dorian Gray, however, Wilde writes versions of himself throughout this play.64 Jack is more conventional than Algy, but his conventionality is in part a response to the instability of his origin story; he has to conform in order to survive, and even then, he cannot overcome his unconventional origins (in a conventional bag) until the absurd ending of the play wherein he discovers that he has been ‘E(a)rnest’ all along. What he is until that moment in the play is, as Wilde himself was, a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victorian society. Jack is reintegrated through the comedy of the resolution of the strange coincidence. Though, as Lady Bracknell notes, ‘in families of high position strange coincidences are not supposed to occur’,65 Jack is reintegrated through the comedy of the resolution of the strange coincidence, and all is well; but the disenfranchised man who has done everything he is supposed to do to fit in and is still rejected, seen as Worthing but not worthy, still haunts the ending of the play, a real-life echo that is resolved in art but not in life.66 In short, Ernest gets a happy ending, but Jack, like Wilde, does not. Wilde wrote Earnest with no knowledge of his trials to come, although the play in retrospect seems remarkably prescient. What Wilde offers is a celebration of the individual artist, a satire of the subterfuge required in Victorian England to live one’s life fully, and a gesture toward the explosive consequences of a system that encourages the repression of difference, of marginal identities and desires. And of those who would choose literally to explode such a system? As Wilde wrote of martyred revolutionaries fifteen years earlier, ‘God knows it I am with them, in some things’.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Wilde, The Soul of Man, p. 257. Kuch, ‘Wildean Politics – “or Whatever One Wants to Call It”’, p. 371. Wilde to George Alexander, The Complete Letters, p. 597. By ‘political’, I suggest the traditional meaning, encompassing that which deals with government and the state. The Importance of Being Earnest has often been explored for its politics of gender and sexuality: see note 46 below. Ian Christopher Fletcher analyses Wilde’s engagement with imperialism in the play in ‘The Soul of Man Under Imperialism’, pp. 334–41. The most extensive political analysis of the play has been undertaken by Declan Kiberd in ‘Oscar Wilde – The Artist as Irishman’, in Inventing Ireland. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, pp. 44, 43. Wilde, ‘Sonnet to Liberty’, Complete Works, p. 25. Ibid. Wilde to Clara Morris, Complete Letters, p. 97. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 121. Ibid., p. 121; Wilde to Marie Prescott, Complete Letters, p. 214. Wilde, The Soul of Man, p. 268. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, p. 8ff.; Wilde, The Soul of Man, p. 282, italics in original. G. Bernard Shaw (with Frank Harris), Memories of Oscar Wilde, p. 16: ‘I tried to get some literary men in London, all heroic rebels and skeptics on paper, to sign a memorial asking for the reprieve of these unfortunate men. The only signature I got was Oscar’s.’ Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 290. Shaw, Memories, p. 28. Shaw’s memories come in the form of a letter to Frank Harris, and the comment comes in the context of Shaw’s attempt to explain why Wilde resisted Harris’s strong suggestion to leave for France before the trial. Shaw suggests that the prospect of ‘a voyage with Captain Kidd [that is, Harris]’ was ‘more terrifying to a soul like Oscar’s than an as yet unrealised possibility of a sentence of hard labor. . . . You [Harris] were a born outlaw, and will never be anything else’. Shaw writes that Wilde’s ‘Irish charm, potent with Englishmen, did not exist for me’ (Memories, p. 16). See especially R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 10–15. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 37. R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 195. Coakley, Oscar Wilde, p. 183. ‘Oscar Wilde’, Daily Globe, p. 1. See Wilde, ‘Mr. Froude’s Blue Book [on Ireland]’, in The Artist as Critic. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 34. Wilde to W. B. Yeats, Complete Letters, p. 605. Wilde, ‘Sonnet to Liberty’, Complete Works, p. 25. Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, pp. 253–4. Wilde, De Profundis, Collected Works, p. 145. Mahaffey, States of Desire, p. 5. Ibid., p. 4. Wilde, Soul of Man, p. 272. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘trivial’, A.I.3. See Mahaffey, States of Desire, p. xi, and Christopher Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, p. 39. Christopher Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, p. 39. Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest, p. 19. See OED, ‘cloak-room’: ‘cloak-room system’. See Humphrey, Tearoom Trade.

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212 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

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kathryn conrad Wilde, Earnest, p. 44. Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, p. 25. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 23, 25–6. A longer scene recounting in detail the ransacking of the family library in order to restore the ‘order’ of Jack’s re-entry into proper society is part of the original four-act version of the play and includes characters perusing, among other things, a copy of The Green Carnation and Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. See Wilde, The Definitive Four-Act Version, p. 190. OED, ‘earnest’, n.2. OED, ‘-ing’, suffix 3. ‘The Scarlet Marquis [sic] made a plot to address the audience on the first night of my play! ! Algy Burke revealed it and he was not allowed to enter. He left a grotesque bouquet of vegetables for me!’ Wilde, letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, The Oscar Wilde Collection of John B. Stetson, Jr., p. 56. Wilde, The Definitive Four-Act Version, p. 142. See especially H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal. Wilde alludes to the Cleveland Street scandal in The Picture of Dorian Gray when he has Basil Hallward mention ‘Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name’ (see Bristow, ‘Introduction’ to Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. xxi; the quotation comes from p. 127 of this edition), and Dorian Gray itself was disparaged by the reviewer of the Scots Observer, who suggested that the story would appeal to ‘none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’ (‘Reviews and Magazines’, p. 181). Radical Liberal Henry Labouchère’s shrill denunciations of the government for what he thought was a conspiracy to hush up the scandal pepper the Parliamentary debates from this period. Labouchère wanted the law to be applied equally to all involved, and was particularly upset that Hammond and Somerset were allowed to escape (see especially House of Commons Debate, Hansard). See, for instance, W. H. Auden, ‘An Improbable Life’; Fineman, ‘The Significance of Literature’; Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics; Behrendt, Oscar Wilde; Robbins, Pater to Forster; Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody. Alan Sinfield, however, suggests in Out on Stage that the tendency to read Bunburying as clear code for homosexual activity is based on the construction of queerness that emerged after the Wilde trials, not before (pp. 27–8). Craft, Alias Bunbury’, p. 27. Lady Bracknell’s response is not part of the full four-act version of the play; Wilde added it when he was asked by George Alexander to shorten the play to three acts. Wilde, Earnest, p. 49. For a particularly rich and nuanced account of the Fenian dynamite campaign, see Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters. Wilde, Earnest, p. 19. Ibid. Ibid. This trip is the subject of Edmond’s Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer. An explosion at the Charing Cross underground station occurred the previous autumn. Other attempts were made on Charing Cross and Paddington Stations, discovered within days of the Victoria explosion. Over the next year, Fenian dynamiters would target St James’s Square, Scotland Yard, Westminster, the House of Commons and the Tower of London. See Dennis, Cities in Modernity, where he discusses Victoria Station in the context of Earnest, suggesting that the mention of the Brighton line was in part to ‘emphasize [Jack’s] respectability’ (p. 123).

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56. The play was written for George Alexander; Wilde would thus have anticipated that the play would premiere at St James’s. 57. Reuters, London (26 February 1885). 58. Mezzeroff, Prof., and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, ‘Dynamite Against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization’. Gladstone (for whom the bags were named) eventually supported Home Rule, in part to pacify the more radical revolutionary wing of the Irish nationalists. The man who was responsible for teaching Irish Fenians in exile how to make bombs in Brooklyn specifically addresses at least one article to Gladstone. 59. Barbara Melchiori cites a report offered by a Reuters journalist of ‘conclave of dynamite conspirators’ held in Paris on 23 February 1885, shortly after the Dynamite Revolutionary Section of the Irish Revolutionary Party met and issued a manifesto earlier that month. The international conclave of dynamiters was said to include Irish revolutionaries from the UK and the US, including the Invincibles (convicted of killing Lord Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1882), as well as Russian Nihilists. The report was, as Melchiori suggests, ‘extremely useful to novelists who wanted to write topical novels on the subject’ (Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, pp. 46–7). See also Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, and Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature. 60. Wilde, Earnest, pp. 49–50. 61. Emile Henry’s defence, in Woodcock, The Anarchist Reader. 62. Powell, Acting Wilde, p. 101. 63. Wilde, ‘Preface’, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). 64. ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps’ (Wilde, Letters, p. 352). 65. Wilde, Earnest, p. 56. 66. Ibid.

Bibliography Antliff, Allan, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Auden, W. H., ‘An Improbable Life’, in Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Random House, 1973). Behrendt, Patricia Flanagan, Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1991). Bristow, Joseph, ‘Introduction’ to Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). ‘cloak-room’: ‘cloak-room system’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, (last accessed 2 November 2020). Coakley, Davis, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House, 1995). Craft, Christopher, ‘Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest’, Representations, 31 (1990), pp. 19–46. Denisoff, Dennis, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Dennis, Richard, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). ‘earnest’, n.2, Oxford English Dictionary Online, (last accessed 2 November 2020). Edmond, Antony, Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath (Stroud: Amberley, 2014). Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988). Fineman, Joel, ‘The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest’, 15 (1980), pp. 79–90.

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Fletcher, Ian Christopher, ‘The Soul of Man Under Imperialism: Oscar Wilde, Race, and Empire’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 5:2 (2000), pp. 334–41. Holland, Merlin (ed.), The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003). Houen, Alex, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). House of Commons Debate, Hansard, 341.1523–611 (28 February 1890), (last accessed 13 October 2020). Humphrey, Laud, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (London: Duckworth, 1970). Hyde, H. Montgomery, The Cleveland Street Scandal (London: W. H. Allen, 1976). ‘-ing’, suffix 3, Oxford English Dictionary Online, (last accessed 2 November 2020). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Kuch, Peter, ‘Wildean Politics – “Or Whatever One Wants to Call It”’, Irish Studies Review, 13:5 (2005), pp. 369–77. Mahaffey, Vicki, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Melchiori, Barbara, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Mezzeroff, Prof., and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, ‘Dynamite Against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization’, Fenian Brotherhood Collection, Brooklyn: The Catholic University of America, n.d., pp. 3–23. Ó Donghaile, Deaglán, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). ‘Oscar Wilde’, Daily Globe (St Paul) (18 March 1882), p. 1, reproduced at ‘St. Patrick’s Day 1882’, (last accessed 13 October 2020). Powell, Kerry, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ‘Reviews and Magazines’, Scots Observer (5 July 1890). Robbins, Ruth, Pater to Forster 1873–1924 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Shaw, G. Bernard (with Frank Harris), Memories of Oscar Wilde (New York: Brentano’s, 1918). Sinfield, Alan, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Whelehan, Niall, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Wilde, Oscar, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (Boston: John W. Luce & Co., 1905). Wilde, Oscar, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (New York: Bigelow, Brown & Co., 1909). Wilde, Oscar, letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, n.d., The Oscar Wilde Collection of John B. Stetson, Jr., Anderson Galleries auction sale pamphlet (New York, 1920), p. 56. Wilde, Oscar, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings by Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). Wilde, Oscar, The Definitive Four-Act Version of The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, ed. Ruth Berggren (New York: Vanguard Press, 1987). Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

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Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wilde, Oscar, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Woodcock, George (ed.), The Anarchist Reader (Waukegan, IL: Fontana Press, 1986). Zatlin, Linda Gertner, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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Part III Aesthetic Heresies

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12 Modern Irish Poetry and the Heresy of Modernism Eric Falci

P

atrick Kavanagh’s sonnet ‘Epic’ condenses many of the tendencies, torsions and contradictions that striate modern Irish poetry, especially in the period between what we might call, too glibly, the ‘age of Yeats’ and the ‘age of Heaney’. It is a World War II poem, although it was not published until 1951 (in The Bell) and is premised upon a concerted decision to look away from global events – what it refers to as ‘the Munich bother’ and what was called ‘The Emergency’ in neutral Southern Ireland – by elevating a quite local clash.1 The poem begins with a declaration: ‘I have lived in important times, places.’ This emphatic claim, which draws from and spoofs Yeatsian high rhetoric, is deflated over the course of the poem’s octave, which details ‘a local row’ over property boundaries between two families, the Duffys and the MacCabes, in ‘Ballyrush and Gortin’ (both townlands near Kavanagh’s native Inniskeen). Miniaturising the larger border dispute on the island of Ireland, this anecdote of neighbourly strife is then massively rescaled in the sestet, which doubles down on the octave’s ironic asymmetry by dating this local row to the same year as ‘the Munich bother’. Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, which helped to precipitate the start of the war, is simply a reference point used to fix the year of the local feud. Reconsidering his priorities, the speaker momentarily doubts his focused attention on the skirmish between the Duffys and the MacCabes until the voice of Homer helpfully sets him right again: ‘He said: I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance.’ There is much that is worrying about these final lines. Given over to Homer, they reassert the value of the local but do so by turning from the Irish context to ancient Greece. The hubris of the final line relinquishes the distance from Yeats gained at the beginning by taking up a Yeatsian posture unironically. Aiming to escape the gravitational pull of Yeats’s style, the poem finds itself drawn back in. The final lines also set into motion a troubling set of analogies. The ‘local row’ has four distinct referents – the Duffy–MacCabe tiff, the ongoing uncertainties of the Irish border, the German invasion of the Sudetenland and the Trojan War – and the poem draws energy from their incommensurability. These quite different events – ‘important places, times’ – are incomparable but still can be juxtaposed, their formal parallelism belied by their substantive unlikeness. The more troubling potential analogy emerges when Homer’s ghost licenses the poet’s local-mindedness by alluding to the ‘Gods’ who assert their will. The ‘Gods’ has a handful of referents, or at least points in several directions: the deific characters in Homer’s epic, the author ‘Homer’, the very

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ungodlike characters in Kavanagh’s poem, the poet Kavanagh and Hitler. If it was awkward but possible to set the incompatible ‘places [and] times’ next to one another, then doing the same for the agents or catalysts – the gods – of those ‘important places, times’ is simply awkward. Following the referential and analogical structure of the poem compels one to entertain a reading in which the encouragement that ‘Homer’s ghost’ provides for the speaker is premised upon an implicit alignment of Homer, Homer’s gods, Kavanagh’s local figures, Kavanagh and Hitler. This, one imagines, is not exactly what Kavanagh was going for. Working both in and against the ideology of the early Irish Free State, the still influential discursive and symbolic predilections of the Revival, and the legacy of Yeats, ‘Epic’ aims to instantiate Kavanagh’s polemical distinction between the provincial and the parochial in order to assert the vitality of local Irish matters without falling back into Revivalist mythmaking. But its counterRevivalist gist gets scrambled as it moves to take in local, Irish and international conditions all at once, and the poem gets caught up in its own figural machinations. In this, it is a representative text in the body of Irish poetry as it developed in the middle third of the twentieth century. This middle period, lasting from the 1930s into the 1970s, has been difficult to grapple with, and several different literary-critical narratives have been offered, each with its own measure of explanatory power. One narrative emphasises the difficulty that Irish poets – Kavanagh, Austin Clarke and Louis MacNeice are usually the protagonists – had emerging from Yeats’s shadow and the different paths they took in order to do so. Another reads backwards, positioning these middle-period poets as crucial precursors whose wrangling with the legacy of Yeats freed up later poets to leverage their gains without the overweening Yeatsian edifice shadowing their every step: this is the ‘ignorance’ into which, according to John Montague, Kavanagh ‘liberated’ them.2 A third narrative positions Samuel Beckett’s pseudonymous 1934 review in The Bookman, titled ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ and published under the name ‘Andrew Belis’, as the talismanic tea-leaf that not only explained the binary that structured poetry of the time – roughly, between backward-looking, staid ‘antiquarians’ and modernist poets who were aware of ‘the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object’ – but also uncannily predicted the quite conservative tendencies of Irish poetry in the decades that followed.3 In this critical narrative, a small but vital group of poets who began publishing in the 1930s – Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Beckett himself – create what Beckett called ‘the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland’.4 However, these experimental formations – Beckett, Devlin and Coffey in the 1930s; Trevor Joyce, Catherine Walsh and Maurice Scully in recent decades – have been heavily and systemically marginalised, left to push against a hegemonic mainstream that eschews most of modernist poetry’s conceptual and technical experiments, leavening Yeatsian lyric power with Kavanagh’s winningly slipshod style and MacNeice’s cosmopolitan bearings while remaining committed to traditional forms and conventions. In all of these cases, the Irish poetry of the middle decades of the twentieth century is subjected to a kind of diachronic imperative: it is made to matter primarily for what it can tell us about poetry in Ireland before and after it. These are not the only ways of understanding the genealogy of modern poetry in Ireland, and each of them misses key dynamics, figures and texts. And, of course, none of these accounts is entirely right. Nor, however, are they entirely wrong. The

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outsize presence of Yeats on the Irish literary scene through the 1930s and his monumentalisation after his death (and, to be sure, during his life) significantly shaped the course of poetry in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Similarly, the way in which mid-century poets were positioned by later writers as enabling antecedents is key to understanding those earlier writers, especially when such strategic positioning was part of what might be understood as a rediscovery or recovery of the earlier figures (such as Trevor Joyce’s and Michael Smith’s centring of Brian Coffey and the 1930s poets in the Lace Curtain and The New Writers’ Press projects). But, however we might arbitrate between the schemes sketched above, the middle phase remains somewhat cryptic, filled with intriguing but inscrutable texts, gapped or attenuated careers, and uneven, oddly shaped œuvres. In addition to the literary-historical dynamics at work, material and ideological conditions in Ireland in the early decades of independence did not augur well for the production of poetry. Censorship, the lack of hospitable periodicals, the dearth of publishing opportunities on the island, the limitations on printing supplies during and just after the war, the conservative mindset of the Irish Free State and its cultural apparatuses – these all explain a great deal about the literary scene and the fortunes (or misfortunes) of poetry in the middle decades. Several writers pursued other genres, as with Beckett or, for a time, Clarke, or devoted much of their energies to other art forms, such as Rhoda Coghill. Several took up careers that steered them away from poetry to some degree, as with MacGreevy’s stint as Director of the National Gallery or Devlin’s career in the Irish diplomatic corps. So, it is not surprising that this middle period has been understood as a kind of interregnum during which poets were trying to absorb the legacy of Yeats while unknowingly laying the groundwork for the largescale and multifarious renaissance in Irish poetry in the late twentieth century. Of course, such a teleological arc rigs the game, obscuring the actual unfolding of poetic projects and careers in the middle decades of the century and telling us little about the shapes that those projects took. If we bracket the larger literary-historical narrative – which considers this period either in the light of what came before (Yeats, high modernism, the Irish Literary Revival) or as a precursor of what would come after and so relegates it to the perhaps unenviable space of a literary-historical middle – and attempt to understand the work on its own terms and in its own time, then what emerges is a widespread but scattered effort to instantiate poetic forms that not only might suffice to the complexities of the historical moment but that might also constitute an intervention in the conceptual and compositional dynamics that shaped modernist poetics more broadly. Which brings us back to ‘Epic’. Kavanagh’s slyest gesture occurs in plain sight: titling the poem ‘Epic’ is relevant (considering the late turn to the Iliad), ironic (considering the unepic quality of the local skirmish) and generically ridiculous: ‘Epic’ is a sonnet. Kavanagh’s crossing of lyric and epic contorts both genres, and so intervenes in the broader reconceptualisation of genre that typifies modernist poetics, for one might understand the development of Anglo-American modernist poetry in terms of its dialectical undoing and rebraiding of lyric and epic. Poundian Imagism encourages condensation, a lyric density stripped of Victorian lyricism, and Yeats takes part in this project from Responsibilities (1914) onward, even as he maintains traditional forms of meter, rhyme and stanza – his ancient salt. Eliot’s ‘epic’ poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a deeply compressed text, especially after Pound’s revisions. The condensed

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epic poem, the lyric–epic, would feature in British and Irish poetry for the rest of the century, as in David Jones’s The Anathemata (1952) or Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966). On the other hand, Pound’s own epic, The Cantos, is a massive text driven by a compositional impulse that is drawn from, and developed out of, a form of lyric concentration spurred by the Poundian ideogram. Irish poets in the period at hand tended not to experiment with the kind of large-scale, multivolume Poundian epic trajectories that feature in American modernist poetry – Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s The Maximus Poems, Zukofsky’s A – but one of the ways in which they did intervene within these broader currents was by attempting to find poetic shapes that neither rested comfortably within a well-made lyric mould – whether Yeatsian, imagist, objectivist or New Critical – nor aspired to epic. Often, this resulted in an alternate modality of long poem, one that deliberately draws into its orbit a generic model outside of lyric and epic, and sometimes outside of poetry altogether. There is a surprisingly robust cache of such long-but-not-epic poems in this middle period of modern Irish poetry, and in the remainder of this chapter I will canvas the group more broadly and then focus on several examples in order to understand their inner workings and to suggest that this cache constitutes the formal core of a modernist Irish poetry. If, to return to my earlier hypostatisations, during both ‘the age of Yeats’ and the ‘the age of Heaney’ what was heretical about modern Irish poetry was modernism itself, in that both of these periods favoured traditional lyric forms and stances, then the work I will trace here is differently heretical, neither able to fit within a trajectory of modern Irish lyric nor quite assimilable to the more familiar forms of modernist technique and experiment. At issue here is not simply the criterion of length. Yeats wrote long poems, as did Clarke, as did Heaney, although in those cases their lengthiest poems are sequences built out of lyric parts or – in the case of early Yeats and Clarke – straightforward narrative poems of some length. The poems that I am including in this group tend to be much longer than a typical lyric, often comprising a full volume, but they also experiment by embedding other generic, narrative or discursive structures within their unfolding. They are, thus, inscrutably long or at least inscrutably constructed, and their multiple patterns or frames tend to be internally wrenched. Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (1942), for instance, reproduces and enlarges the asymmetry that structures ‘Epic’. Once again, a reader must register and reckon with the discrepancy between the poem’s title – referring to the civilisational catastrophe of the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century – and its content – the relatively small-scale parabolic story of the bachelor farmer Patrick Maguire. Rewiring the Revivalist peasant topoi so as to expose the multifarious hardships of Irish rural life, Kavanagh’s poem frames itself as an anti-Bildungsroman in verse episodes. Maguire is caught in each of those nets that Stephen Dedalus aims to evade, and the poem outlines not his development, nor even his decline, but his absolute stasis: He circles round and round wondering why it should be. No crash. No drama. That was how his life happened. No mad hooves galloping in the sky, But the weak, washy way of true tragedy – A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.5

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It is not only that Kavanagh embeds the Bildungsroman frame – at one point explicitly, and ironically, describing Maguire in Dedalian terms: ‘he came free from every net spread / in the gaps of experience’ – so as to negate its teleological structure.6 The Great Hunger is not only an anti-Bildungsroman but also a scrambled one. Maguire’s life is an instance and epitome of stasis – but that stasis is unhinged even from the calendar. The poem’s fourteen episodes are not chronological, a point that Kavanagh underlines by giving his protagonist’s age three times: Maguire is ‘sixty-five’ in section II, ‘thirty-four or five’ in section VIII and ‘forty-seven’ in section XI.7 To riff on Vivian Mercier’s famous line about Waiting for Godot: in The Great Hunger, Patrick Maguire does nothing and gets nowhere, and he does so in the wrong order.8 The dual formal pressure that underwrites The Great Hunger – a series of largely anecdotal lyric episodes pinned to a stagnant Bildungsroman – is replicated at the level of the poem’s historical investments: titled after the central trauma of modern Irish history, part ecological disaster and part colonial genocide, it none the less euphemises that title by linking it to Patrick Maguire’s own personal stasis, which of course represents for Kavanagh broader cultural and political conditions in mid-century Ireland. The poem’s symbolic freight splays across distant historical moments, its title naming a historical event to which the poem cannot refer, and its scrambled form split along competing generic conventions. Like Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, Sheila Wingfield’s Beat Drum, Beat Heart (1946) is both shaped by and offset from its historical context. Wingfield, who, the year after Beat Drum, Beat Heart was published, became the Viscountess of Powerscourt, the most eminent of the old Anglo-Irish Ascendancy estates, published eight volumes of poetry and three memoirs during her complicated and privileged life. Alex Davis gives some sense of her complex position: as the ‘hybrid’ scion of an English father and an Anglo-Irish mother, and the wealthy wife of an impecunious Ascendancy peer, she felt both at home in and yet rigorously excluded from the cultural and political life of independent Ireland. This sense of dislocation is coupled to the actual dislocations undertaken throughout her life, what Davis describes as ‘her translocational residence in Britain, Ireland, Bermuda during the Second World War and subsequent summers, and, finally, as a tax exile in a pink-painted suite of hotel rooms, in Switzerland’.9 She had her greatest successes in the literary world in the 1940s and 1950s, appearing in several important anthologies and finding regular publishing opportunities, with her early collected volume – A Kite’s Dinner: Poems 1938–1954 – a Poetry Book Society Choice. However, Wingfield’s career did not flourish after the 1950s, she tended to be overlooked by most poets in Ireland, and many of her later volumes were subsidised – only sometimes with Wingfield’s knowledge – by her wealth. More generally, it is important to keep in mind the occluded place of women writers within this period of Irish literary history, as Anne Fogarty makes clear: Even a cursory glance at the work of Rhoda Coghill, Mary Devenport O’Neill, and Blanaid Salkeld, to list but a few almost forgotten names, indicates that Irish female modernism belongs to a literary past which is even more irrecuperable than that of the supposed lost generation of male poets in the period. To triumphantly

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reinstate their work by seeing it as part of a diffuse but coherent literary context which embraces male and female writing alike, would involve a self-blinkering and premature denial of the unremittingly androcentric and fragmented nature of the Irish modernist literary scene. Consequently, Fogarty continues, it would be facile to claim that the poetry produced by men and women in Ireland of the thirties should be seen as torn halves of the same whole. The lost work of Irish women poets cannot simply be salvaged and added victoriously to the imaginary, capacious, and all-embracing museum of national literary tradition.10 While hopefully avoiding the critical pitfalls that Fogarty delineates, I do think it is worthwhile considering Wingfield’s Beat Drum, Beat Heart as part of a quite diffuse and only slightly coherent cache of mid-century Irish long poems that move among and reconfigure several key nodes within modernist aesthetics. Beat Drum, Beat Heart is Wingfield’s second volume and her only foray into the long poem. Separated into four sections – ‘Men at War’, ‘Men at Peace’, ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Women at Peace’ – Beat Drum, Beat Heart cannot but be read, at least in part, as a commentary on the just-ended Second World War. Indeed, the volume opens in the midst of the hectic moment when war is declared: Shouts rang up the street War War it has come Like leaves they were blown.11 The poem’s first movement then tracks the peacetime lifeworld that the war has ended – ‘all this is gone, a lost age’; ‘war / Rescinds what mattered, rends each form’ – and outlines the effects of war upon various parts of the populace throughout Ireland and Britain.12 And yet, Wingfield suggests in the notes to the poem that all except for ‘six lines’ were written ‘many years before World War II’.13 Indeed, the contemporary historical references in the poem – Mao’s Long March, the Spanish Civil War – come from the 1930s or earlier. So, like ‘The Great Hunger’, Beat Drum, Beat Heart reposes on a temporal or historical crux. The prayer-like passage that ends the first section enacts this contradiction: ranging over scenes of war and grief, it prays ‘by’ those scenes that such destruction will never occur again, concluding, ‘I swear, / I pray, never again.’14 If we follow Wingfield’s note, however, and understand the poem to have been written before the war, then this final prayer – appearing as it does in a volume published in 1946 – comprises something like a counter-factual speech act, and the poem more generally toggles between its prewar composition and its postwar publication: thus, ‘Men at War’ is neither a World War II text nor not one, just as ‘Men at Peace’ seems to limn the aftermath of a war that began after the poem was written. However, it is the formal and figural shifts that most thoroughly propel the volume’s insistent sense of vertiginous dislocation. What distinguishes Beat Drum, Beat Heart is its formal heterogeneity. The only other long texts within the larger body of twentiethcentury Irish poetry that move among so many verse and stanza forms and discursive

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and modal registers are John Montague’s The Rough Field (1972), Paul Muldoon’s Madoc (1990) and Maurice Scully’s Things that Happen, an eight-book project published over twenty-five years (1981–2006). Beat Drum, Beat Heart does not feature The Waste Land’s mixture of metrical and free verse or its amalgam of shored fragments, but it does move constantly among verse forms and stanza shapes – most of them metered, and many of them rhymed – which, if it does not mark it as an instance of high modernist formal transgression, certainly sets it apart from most long poems in the modern Irish tradition.15 While Wingfield’s poem does not aspire to The Waste Land’s technical range, Eliot’s poem is, in a number of ways, the modernist text to which Beat Drum, Beat Heart most directly speaks. If, as I suggested earlier, one way to understand the course of modern poetry (although certainly not the only one and perhaps not the primary one) is as a dialectical interplay of lyric and epic trajectories, then another way is as a project to reconfigure the relation between the past and the present, or between myth and history. Of course, we have a name for such a reconfiguration, one given us by Eliot. Of Joyce’s use of Homeric parallels in Ulysses, Eliot writes: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.16 Eliot’s ‘mythical method’, first sensed by Yeats and fully activated by Joyce, is a form of allegorical side-shadowing: antiquity’s supposed shapely order both lights and refracts modernity’s ‘futility and anarchy’. Of course, underlying Eliot’s method is an arc of historical decline: the chaos of contemporary history’s ‘immense panorama’ has to find its value by way of historical juxtaposition, a process in which it will always fail to measure up to the classical past that Eliot privileges. In Eliot’s major enactment of the ‘mythical method’, The Waste Land, not only are contemporary avatars of antique figures always lesser versions of their precursors – a sort of typological decay – but also a centripetal symbolic force is asserted on the various emanations of those figures. Eliot describes this process in The Waste Land’s famous note on Tiresias: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.17

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Under this reading, The Waste Land is not a ‘heap of broken images’ or a set of fragments shored against ruins, but an act of systemic symbolic reduction.18 In this version of the ‘mythical method’, the poem is not a gallery of ‘different voices’, as the poem’s original title had it, but a mechanism by which to control modernity’s flux by placing it all within the ken of Eliot’s central ‘personage’, Tiresias. Of course, The Waste Land does not read like an orderly monologue, and the fractious dynamism of the text’s surface nearly always obviates the dictum embedded in the note on Tiresias. But the poem’s generative matrix is premised upon this act of attempted alignment and assimilation of disparate scenes, figures and topoi. The melancholic or tragic thrust of the poem is due not only to modernity’s ‘futility and anarchy’ as compared to the past, but also to the fact that the compositional and formal method devised for the poem is bound to reproduce and magnify that gap at every moment. Wingfield’s Beat Drum, Beat Heart is a reversal or scattering of The Waste Land’s ‘mythical method’. Eliot was an important poet and critic for Wingfield: in her second memoir, Sun Too Fast (1974), Wingfield declares that her two favourite critical books are Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925, 1932) and T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920).19 And while Beat Drum, Beat Heart unfolds along quite different principles than those of The Waste Land, Wingfield’s poem contains a mythical substrate that inflects its forward motion. Operating alongside and athwart the poem’s largely impersonal voice that speaks in the language of abstraction – ‘Men’, ‘Women’, ‘War’, ‘Peace’, ‘Love’ – is a regular stream of local references that coalesces into something like a symbolic centrifuge: a disparate gallery of classical and biblical figures, Irish myths, and historical references. So, as the principal arc of the poem moves impersonally among generalised scenarios and types, the text’s counter-arc of local episodes – from myth, from legend, from history, from the recent past – unmoors the larger compositional frame. Beat Drum, Beat Heart features no focalising point like Eliot’s Tiresias. Rather, the long poem’s seemingly orderly and even schematic pattern is continually upended by the variety of materials that it is made to hold, in terms of both the multifarious verse forms that comprise it and the heterogeneous set of figures and references that populate it. This feature of the poem is most pronounced in ‘Men at War’, which, like the other three sections of the volume, moves between an impersonal third-person poetic narrator, dramatic monologues (usually in the voice of an imagined or historical soldier) and a communal voicing, as in this passage, in which the collective military subject is both killer and victim: We are a madness, shrill over the ground, We are the bass notes’ melancholy; We are the men who pulled Lorca Between shrubs, beyond night-shadowed houses; We are a man dragged and killed on the outskirts Of a town in Spain.20 As Alex Davis has suggested, this double-facing passage indicates the ideology underlying the poem: ‘Beat Drum’s pacifism is tied to a conception of human existence in which the shuddering violence of instinctual behaviour is central.’21 As ‘Men at War’ replays its primal scene of men on the battlefield and alternates between presenting the

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soldiers as tragic heroes and as mere agents of large-scale violence, the text’s referential field proliferates. Battles, locations and wars appear briefly and are then immediately dropped: Crécy, Lepanto, the Euphrates, Pompey, the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish Rebellion in 1798, General Allenby’s campaign in Palestine and Sinai during the Great War, the Venetian–Genoese Wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the Battle of Troy are all mentioned in the first section. Similarly, ‘Men at War’ features a string of cameos, few of them lasting more than a line or so: Caesar, Lorca, Cassandra, the Inca, Jacob of Aldgate, Samson, Alexander the Great, T. E. Lawrence, Brian Boru and Sir John Chandos. At times the reference is apposite, and for the most part they all function as examples, but they do not function as ‘personages’ in the Eliotic sense: they neither compound into symbolic unities nor coalesce within the poem’s discursive structure (as in Eliot’s suggestion that the different characters in The Waste Land ‘melt[] into’ one another). If the intended effect of The Waste Land’s mythical method is to align the poem’s fractured surface with its deep structure, then Wingfield’s enumeration of references in Beat Drum, Beat Heart reverses this effect. What appears to be the poem’s overarching argument towards unity and repetition – one soldier is like all soldiers, one war repeats the others, each section title offers a typological abstraction – is deconstructed at the surface, as a series of references to various soldiers, wars and moments of historical or mythical strife become, well, simply a series of references with no formal logic binding them together. That this contradictory double motion structures Beat Drum, Beat Heart is clear in one of the poem’s most explicit gestures to The Waste Land, in the middle of a section from the perspective of broken soldiers ‘stumbling in retreat’: How strange, these gables over us and roofs In blackness where The rain pours from the guttering, The splashed filthiness of hoofs. Cards lie scattered in a tomb. Someone picks them up and sees Instead of Queen and Jack, Hector, Judith and Lahire, Lancelot, Alexandre, Who should have never left the womb. French. Throw ’em back.22 Amidst the rubble and waste of the battleground is a scattering of French cards, which, like many of the references in the poem, are picked up and then immediately discarded. We might understand this passage as an inversion of the Madame Sosostris passage in The Waste Land. Whereas Madame Sosostris’s ‘wicked pack of cards’ functions as an ‘objective correlative’ of the poem’s figural method and presents the ‘personages’ who, in various guises, will crowd the poem, the cards found by the ‘someone’ in Beat Drum, Beat Heart are textually useless: they offer no mechanism of articulation or correlation, and so can easily be left behind.23 Even as the volume moves away from scenes of war, and as the field of figures and references thins out, the basic desire to articulate disparate realms is both indulged in and ironised. In one of the central set-pieces of ‘Men at Peace’, this impulse is spatialised

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in the description of ‘the seventh Lord Powerscourt’s making of the Italianate terraced part of Powerscourt garden’, as Wingfield informs readers in the notes to the poem.24 (The seventh Lord Powerscourt served from 1844 to 1904.) The various marbles and statues purchased for the garden – having travelled to Ireland ‘from Naples or the Baltic Sea’ – make for an incongruent set of objects as they sit in ships at a Dublin quay, awaiting their transport to Powerscourt: Amazon and warrior, Head of pagan empress, or Apollo with his sun’s horns That workmen think their Saviour’s thorns.25 Once completed, the garden will comprise a miscellany of cultures and myths within its carefully plotted grounds, just as the poem stages an incommensurability between its local manœuvres and its thematic or argumentative thrust. And indeed, one of the major turns that the book takes is away from what one speaker in the final section, ‘Women at Peace’, calls ‘heroic / Lies and allegory’: Let us stop heroic Lies and allegory. Too many Statues have baton and blank eyes Directed over the market-place; Even the emblems – eagle, winged lion – Of Evangelists, fail To convince me: I prefer A plover in a field, The cat curled in a grocer’s shop.26 What occurs here is a subtle generic exchange: instead of allegories and emblems, which are central to the quasi-epic discourse that Wingfield deploys throughout much of the volume, we are given lyrically minded images: the pastoral ‘plover in a field’ and the Prufrockian ‘cat curled’.27 More generally, the third and fourth sections move into a more recognisably lyric register. Even as multiple voices remain active in the final sections, an ‘I’ much more frequently comes to the fore, and the poem concludes with an apostrophic prayer to ‘random Fate’, asking for, among several other things, the kind of fractured and difficult wholeness that the poem, at least at one level, has been seeking: Hold me, Pour back my soul, let me know Life the unfinished: so Reflood the desolate ebb: Renew me, make me whole.28 The speaker ends with a plea that also functions as an implicit confession. What is sought is exactly what the poem has attempted and then refused to provide: wholeness, unity, congruence among levels. What the speaker asks for is what the discursive substructure and adapted Eliotic method of the poem will not provide.

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Like ‘The Great Hunger’, Beat Drum, Beat Heart is organised around a lurch or wobble, one that ramifies through nearly every aspect of the form, including the title, which reverses the phrases’ typical order (drum beat, heart beat – with a possible echo of Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps). And like ‘The Great Hunger’ (and, for that matter, like ‘Epic’), this wobble is often most pronounced when considering the text’s generic investments, especially along the spectrum from lyric to epic as it was being remade by modernist poets. There are a number of other relevant poems that feature these same kinds of chimeric and mobile structures, and we could turn – in addition to poems mentioned earlier – to Thomas MacGreevey’s ‘Crón Tráth na nDéithe’ (1934), Blanaid Salkeld’s The Fox’s Covert (1935), Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), Denis Devlin’s ‘The Heavenly Foreigner’ (1950), Eugene Watters / Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s The Week-End of Dermot and Grace (1964) or Austin Clarke’s Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966). Likewise, we might look to Montague’s The Rough Field or Thomas Kinsella’s move from a more recognisable style of mid-century formalism to the open, quasiserial work of Notes from the Land of the Dead (1973) for later instances of Irish poets reckoning with the aesthetic matrix of the modernist long poem by entwining or rerouting the generic relays that lay within it. By way of conclusion, I will turn briefly to one of the latest reflexes within this scattered gallery of mid-century forms, a text that, like Kavanagh’s and Wingfield’s, tarries in the nexus of history and myth. Brian Coffey’s Death of Hektor (1979) is one of two long poems that he wrote late in his career, the other being the much longer Advent (1975). Both of these poems trace different lines of thought developed in Coffey’s earlier long poem, Missouri Sequence (1962), and each is steeped in Coffey’s Catholicism and his neo-Thomism, especially in the work of Jacques Maritain, with whom Coffey studied in Paris in the 1930s. Unlike Advent, an eight-part poem of 1,114 lines modelled on the canonical hours of devotion that comprises an extremely protracted meditation and prayer, Death of Hektor consists of fifteen short sections (none longer than twenty-five lines) in variable stanza shapes. Like the poems I have examined so far, Death of Hektor enacts its own ‘mythical method’, one embedded in its formal unfolding rather than in any isolatable theme and produced in part by Coffey’s active resistance to his major modernist precursors. At several key points in the sequence, Coffey offers an immanent critique of Eliot, Joyce and Pound, and in particular their respective aesthetic constructions of historical knowledge. The poem begins with an oblique unrigging of the fundamental mechanism of the ‘mythical method’, as described by Eliot: the manipulation of ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. The opening section of Death of Hektor puts this mechanism into question: Of what we are to Hektor

Nothing to say

Of Hektor to us What scant return from turning back even a twenty year29 Coffey deconstructs Eliot’s presumption of a two-way ‘continuous parallel’ between the past and the present by first pointing out that the ‘mythical method’ works only in one direction, since there is ‘nothing to say’ about ‘what we are to Hektor’, and then by opening

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up an investigation into the only direction in which it can work: ‘Of Hektor to us’, in my reading, carries an implied question mark, one that is silently carried over from the phrase’s source in Hamlet (‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’ II, ii, 530). The next lines consider just how much is lost – or how little gained – from the attempt to bring the near past (‘a twenty year’) into the present. The remainder of this section works several angles of this question before adding a further counter-temporal loop in the final lines: ‘A vantage point in unrecorded past / supposes Hektor seen from ages off.’30 What is thrown into question here is not only the directionality of such mythical methods, but also the kinds of subjective positions from which they can occur. Coffey offers an impossible projection: that of a subjective position in the ‘unrecorded past’ that fully accords with the position presumed by the Eliotic ‘mythical method’, which requires a ‘vantage point’ in the present that can do the work of ‘manipulating the continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. It is as though, for Coffey, responding to the central question – what is Hektor to us? – requires not only a backward-looking perspective but also something like a backward-looking perspective that is also foreseeing: one that exists in the ‘unrecorded past’ and can see and foretell this future question asked from ‘ages off’. Later sections approach this perspectival dilemma by rebutting the terms of two other modernist methods. In section two, Coffey underscores our historical situatedness: We can not hold time fast in our sights as if judging events in a moment unique like hill-top watcher taking Battle in at a glance31 Broadly speaking, this passage works against Romantic notions of poetic and historical subjectivity, especially as they emerge out of Enlightenment ontology and epistemology. But, more specifically, Coffey has Pound’s model of historical poetics in his sights. One of the ways that the Cantos includes history is by staging historical moments as though they are happening in a stadium or arena, with readers positioned as spectators and the poet as an unseen conductor.32 Such a method makes a bid for objectivity while silently assuming subjective mastery. In section six, Coffey extends this critique to Joyce, suggesting that Homer, even though nothing is known of him, is immanent to his work: Homer where born where buried of whom the son what journeys undertaken not known His work abides witness to unfaltering sad gaze constrained A harp he uses background for verses sung He pared no fingernails not indifferent not masked33 Opposed to Stephen Dedalus’s theory of the artist as one who ‘remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’, ‘Homer’ is situated within the work, even as nothing is known about the historical figure known as Homer.34 It is only after Coffey introduces – without reconciling – these problems of historical knowledge, subjective agency and aesthetic form that he is able to turn more directly to the mythic material of the Iliad. From the sixth section forward, Homer’s story is much more squarely at the centre of the poem, whereas the first five sections are concerned with querying the philosophical

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problems that will necessarily underlie any such narrative or lyric retrieval of the Homeric narrative. Unhappy with earlier versions of modernist literature’s ‘mythical method’, the poem must first theorise its own version before reconsidering the implications of Hektor’s death. The final sections of Death of Hektor stage a critique of Achilles while wrapping in references to contemporary war and violence. At the same time, the latter sections are also more recognisably lyric than the first five: the controlling voice is more easily delineated, the images and anecdotes are more luminous, and the perspectival texture of each poem is more certain. We might even say that the final sections, by offering relatively unproblematic scenarios of what Hektor is ‘to us’, fail to keep faith with the rigorous deconstructive framework established in the first sections. Which brings us back to the larger terms of this chapter. The long poems that I have examined here – as well as those that I have merely mentioned, along with a number of poems that I have inevitably missed, to be sure – constitute a diffuse strain of Irish modernism that neither abides by the antimodernist dicta of Yeats nor simply mimics the methods of more familiar forms of high modernist poetry. Such poems are heretical in multiple vectors and to multiple aesthetic dogmas. Indeed, it is often the case that the most intriguing moments occur when these poems refuse to keep faith with themselves.

Notes 1. Kavanagh, Selected Poems, pp. 101–2. All quotations from the poem are taken from these pages, lines 9, 1, 14, 11, 13–14 and 12. 2. Montague, The Figure in the Cave, p. 233. 3. Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, p. 70. 4. Ibid., p. 76. 5. Kavanagh, Selected Poems, pp. 41–2, part XIII, lines 50–6. 6. Ibid., p. 19, part I, lines 27–8. 7. Ibid., p. 22, part II, line 8; p. 30, part VIII, line 33; and p. 34, part XI, line 16. 8. In a review of the play that appeared in The Irish Times on 18 February 1956, Mercier wrote that Beckett ‘has written a play in which nothing happens, twice’ (‘The Uneventful Event’, p. 6). 9. Davis, ‘From Samarkand to Switzerland’, p. 343. 10. Fogarty, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’, pp. 209–10. 11. Wingfield, Collected Poems, p. 19, part I, lines 1–3. 12. Ibid., p. 20, part I, line 43; p. 22, part I, lines 125–6. 13. Ibid., p. 180. 14. Ibid., p. 32, part I, lines 455–6. 15. Consider, in contrast, the interminable terza rima of MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel (1954), the largely isomorphic stanzas of Clarke’s Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), the relatively stable six-stress line of Coffey’s Advent (1975), the foursquare tercets of Heaney’s ‘Squarings’ (1990) or the variable tercets of Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ (1994). 16. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, pp. 478–9. 17. Eliot, The Collected Poems, p. 72. 18. Ibid., p. 53, line 22. 19. Wingfield, Sun Too Fast, p. 121. 20. Wingfield, Collected Poems, p. 24, part I, lines 184–9. 21. Davis, ‘Wilds to Alter’, pp. 346–7. 22. Wingfield, Collected Poems, p. 29, part I, line 361; p. 30, part I, lines 376–86.

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232 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

eric falci Eliot, The Collected Poems, p. 54, line 46. Wingfield, Collected Poems, p. 181. Ibid., p. 37, part II, lines 58 and 62–5. Ibid., p. 62, part IV, lines 76–84. This shift is much clearer in the revised version of the poem that appears in Wingfield’s later Selected and Collected volumes than it is in the 1946 text. In that version, the passage begins, ‘The ground, says another / Has too many statues: / Equestrian forms with bird droppings, / Commemorating someone / With baton and blank eyes / Directed over the market place’ (Beat Drum, Beat Heart, p. 61). Wingfield, Collected Poems, p. 72, part IV, lines 424–8. Coffey, Poems and Versions, p. 151, section 1, lines 1–4. Ibid., p. 151, section 1, lines 22–3. Ibid., p. 152, section 2, lines 10–12. See, for instance, the end of Canto IV: ‘And we sit here . . . / there in the arena’, a selfreflexive figure that appears in a few related versions a handful of times throughout the early Cantos (Pound, The Cantos, p. 16, lines 127–8). Coffey, Poems and Versions, p. 156, section 6, lines 1–5. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, p. 233.

Bibliography Alderman, Nigel, and C. D. Blanton (eds), ‘Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 13:1 (2000), Special Issue. Beckett, Samuel, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934), in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 70–6. Bernstein, Michael André, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Blanton, C. D., Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Coffey, Brian, Poems and Versions, 1929–1990 (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1991). Collins, Lucy, ‘“I Knew What It Meant / Not to Be at All”: Death and the (Modernist) Afterlife in the Work of Irish Women Poets of the 1940s’, in Paige Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 23–34. Collins, Lucy, Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology, 1870–1970 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). D’Arcy, Kathy, ‘“Almost Forgotten Names”: Irish Women Poets of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s’, in Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (eds), Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008), pp. 99–124. Davis, Alex, ‘From Samarkand to Switzerland: Sheila Wingfield’s Demystifying Modernism’, Cambridge Quarterly, 46:4 (2017), pp. 325–43. Davis, Alex, ‘“Poetry is Ontology”: Brian Coffey’s Poetics’, in Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (eds), Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 150–72. Davis, Alex, ‘“Wilds to Alter, Forms to Build”: The Writings of Sheila Wingfield’, Irish University Review, 31:2 (2001), pp. 334–52. Eliot, T. S., The Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (1963; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991). Eliot, T. S., ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ (1922), in Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (eds), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 476–81.

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Fogarty, Anne, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’, in Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (eds), Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 209–31. Fogarty, Anne, ‘“The Influence of Absences”: Eavan Boland and the Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry’, Colby Quarterly, 35:4 (December 1999), pp. 256–74. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (1916; London: Penguin Books, 1992). Kavanagh, Patrick, Selected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996). Keatinge, Benjamin, and Aengus Woods (eds), Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010). Mays, J. C. C., ‘Passivity and Openness in Two Poems by Brian Coffey’, Irish University Review, 13:1 (1983), pp. 67–82. Mercier, Vivian, ‘The Uneventful Event’, Irish Times (18 February 1956). Montague, John, The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989). Moriarty, Dónal, The Art of Brian Coffey (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000). Mulhall, Anne, ‘“The Well-Known, Old, but Still Unbeaten Track”: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Irish University Review, 42:1 (2012), pp. 32–52. Perrick, Penny, Something to Hide: The Life of Sheila Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008). Pound, Ezra, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970; New York: New Directions, 1996). Schreibman, Susan, ‘Irish Women Poets 1929–1959: Some Foremothers’, Colby Quarterly, 37:4 (2001), pp. 309–26. Smith, Stan, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005). Sullivan, Moynagh, ‘“I Am Not Yet Delivered of the Past”: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld’, Irish University Review, 33:1 (2003), pp. 182–200. Sullivan, Moynagh, ‘“The Woman Gardener”: Transnationalism, Gender, Sexuality, and the Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld’, Irish University Review, 42:1 (2012), pp. 53–71. Wingfield, Sheila, Beat Drum, Beat Heart (London: The Cresset Press, 1946). Wingfield, Sheila, Collected Poems, 1938–1983 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Wingfield, Sheila, Poems, ed. Lucy Collins (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2013). Wingfield, Sheila, Sun Too Fast (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1974).

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13 Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement Kelly Sullivan

I

n 1930, Harry Clarke, suffering from advanced tuberculosis and overwork, finished a commission to represent the Irish State. His Geneva Window would be the Irish gift to the International Labour Organisation building in Geneva, and as Clarke proposed, it represented, in his dramatically coloured stained-glass panels, work by the best Irish writers of the twentieth century: a visual reminder of the achievements of the Irish literary revival. Yet many considered Clarke’s window heretical. He chose to illustrate scenes of drunkenness and sexuality, focusing on women enjoying sexual freedom, and crowning the window with the seemingly more traditional images of Saint Joan (from George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan) and Saint Brigid (from Lady Gregory’s The Story Brought by Brigid).1 Irish state officials, dismayed at his depiction of languid bodies, sexualised and androgynous figures, and drunken bawdiness – and perhaps subconsciously alarmed by the juxtaposition of religious icons alongside compromising scenes from contemporary literature – rejected the window. In a scandal with echoes of the Playboy riots two decades earlier, Clarke’s work was unceremoniously hidden away by the Irish state, deemed insulting to, and unrepresentative of, Irish values and life. The artist died before the controversy over his most scandalous window had been resolved. With the window’s infamous rise and fall, and Clarke’s untimely death at forty-one, the era of the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland reached its radical apex and came to an end. The Geneva Window represents the most notorious case of Irish visual art coming up against conservative state values. Yet this tension between conservatism and innovation, replicated in Arts and Crafts work combining innovative aesthetics with traditional materials, provides a fundamental productive impetus contributing to modernism. The stormy relationship of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement to the modernising anticolonial and postcolonial Free State has yet to be fully explored. Functioning in parallel with the Irish Literary Revival and self-help movements, the Arts and Crafts movement both reflected and challenged cultural nationalist views; its artisans helped develop an idiom that signified ‘Irish’ at home and abroad, even as they rejected or adapted tired Celtic tropes overused in the nineteenth century. Arts and crafts people working in stained glass, tapestry and sculpture, as well as architecture and even urban planning, helped shape the new state physically and aesthetically. As a part of a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revival of Irish forms, the Arts and Crafts movement and the Irish Literary Revival form part of an incubation in which artists and writers sought adequate means of expressing social contradictions, including rising

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capitalism and urban poverty, conservative religious values and political violence, folk culture and empirical science, inherent in the destabilised experience of rapid technological and cultural change associated with modernity.2 Such contradictions, constitutive of modernism, were especially apparent in Ireland as it reasserted national identity and fought colonial rule. Art historians have generally failed to acknowledge the applied arts as part of Ireland’s push toward modernism – indeed, one recent critic sees the Arts and Crafts movement as ‘antithetical’ to modernism.3 But recognising these contradictory forces underlying a national identity in visual art enables us to see that Arts and Crafts artists, often working for conservative venues like Catholic churches and state buildings, sometimes produced heretically radical art that both spearheaded Irish modernism and laid the ground for future innovations. In this chapter, I trace the background of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, particularly its connections to Celtic Revivalism and the symbolism often associated with an ‘unbroken’ Irish past, to show how these connections influence Irish visual modernism. Although the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland had links with the philosophies and aesthetics of the English movement, particularly through the theories of John Ruskin and William Morris, Irish artists worked with a different set of anti- and postcolonial conditions, producing an original vision for a modern Ireland. Changes in art instruction in Ireland involved a renewed focus on applied arts, including metalsmithing and stained glass, and much ground-breaking and important Irish work comes through these media. Harry Clarke and Wilhelmina Geddes made some of the most innovative stained glass in this period, and glass produced by Sarah Purser’s An Túr Gloine studios contributed to a sense of national pride in Irish prowess in this medium. The tapestries and printed materials made by the Cuala Press and Dun Emer Industries – both women-run productions – provided surprisingly modern designs in very traditional forms. Finally, the Celtic interlace and the animalistic patterns painted by Sister Concepta Lynch, a nun in the Dominican convent in Dún Laoghaire in the early twentieth century, exemplify a vernacular modernism inflected through traditional symbols used in new and potentially heretical ways. As Justin Carville suggests, critical work on Irish visual culture has not yet paid enough attention to the complex connection between the materiality of the visual and the different spaces through which it operates in Irish society.4 By investigating the applied art made for institutional, religious and domestic patrons, the present chapter strives for a richer understanding of visual arts modernism in Ireland.

The Irish Arts and Crafts Movement and the Celtic Revival The period 1880 to 1930 coincides with the dates often accorded to European modernism, but it also corresponds to the era of the Irish Revival in a variety of fields including art, folklore, agriculture, the study of antiquities and history, language, and of course literature. As Jeanne Sheehy, Nicola Gordon Bowe, Paul Larmour, Vera Kreilkamp, Marjorie Howes and others have argued, these various revivalist movements complemented and enhanced each other, contributing to a sense of the ‘revival’ of Ireland’s past even as artists, scholars and writers pursued new and innovative ways of representing the Irish nation.5 ‘The Arts and Crafts movement provided a material form for the ideas of the literary revival,’ argues Howes, and most aspects of Irish Revivalism contributed to cultural nationalism.6 Although Arts and Crafts movements

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in England, the United States and other small European nations, including Hungary and Finland, often seem to share aesthetic and stylistic attributes with each other, these movements were also motivated by unique philosophies linked to cultural nationalism, politics and different responses to modernism.7 English art in the nineteenth century viewed the medieval past as a high point of culture. The Gothic Revival shaped new architecture and design, and the concept of the highly skilled medieval craftsperson was central to the English Arts and Crafts philosophy. Bowe argues that the Irish movement was ‘as much an ideology as a style. It involved the attitude of the artist, craftsman or designer to materials, process and technique, production, iconography, way of life, even dress, and relationship to society.’8 The most avant-garde artists and writers sought a foundation in an Irish aesthetic or cultural history but worked toward innovative forms of expression. As Howes summarises the best of the Literary Revival, they ‘deliberately eschewed mere patriotism or propaganda; they wanted to produce literary works that would be aesthetically accomplished and innovative, and at the same time authentically and distinctly national’.9 Working under slightly different conditions because of the limitations inherent in commissioned pieces, many Arts and Crafts workers used traditional Irish motifs or themes but created surprisingly novel and distinctive works of art. Although Irish Arts and Crafts workers initially drew upon the Gothicism of the English movement, they soon looked to a specifically Irish past as a way of signalling a distinct national idiom and asserting Irish artistic and cultural independence.10 Critical work of the last two decades increasingly views the Irish Literary Revival as integrally connected to modernism, but scholars have been slower to grant Irish visual culture similar attention.11 Tom Walker argues that Victorian Ireland had a developing culture of art criticism, and that the intellectual and aesthetic work of the Irish arts press and cultural communities of the 1880s laid the groundwork for modernism in the country.12 Among other important developments of the latter half of the nineteenth century was the opening of the National Gallery of Ireland (1864), the Belfast Art Gallery and Museum (1890), the Crawford School of Art and Gallery in Cork (1885), and a variety of arts education institutions, many of which promoted craft and applied arts.13 Central to the Arts and Crafts movement was the reorganisation of art education in Dublin, with the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (1877) (formerly the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Design) designed to promote specifically Irish forms of craftwork.14 Figures central to Arts and Crafts studied at this school, including Harry Clarke, Austin Molloy, Michael Healy and Ethel Rhind. In 1903, one of the leading stained-glass figures in England, A. E. Child, took up a position as instructor in stained glass at the school, shaping a generation of Irish artists. Despite the nationalistic assertion of art culture at the turn of the century, much of the writing and critique of this period reveals anxieties about both current Irish art production and its connections with an existing art tradition, concerns that were also central to the Irish Literary Revival. Tom Walker argues that this ‘unease’ around a developing art culture in the 1880s provided the intellectual breeding ground for the Revival and modernism itself in the country, engaged, as practitioners were, with both tradition and innovation.15 The need to find or invent a continuity with the past connects the Celtic Revival both to the medievalism of the English Arts and Crafts movement and to modernism itself. Perry Meisel defines modernism, concerned though it is with newness, as a condition of belatedness, and argues that ‘strong modernist texts both thematize and

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dramatize the reality of coming too late to a tradition’.16 In their search for an ongoing Irish aesthetic and culture, Irish Revivalists and artists working in a nationalist vein worried about coming belatedly to their own culture and to their moment of modernity. The political and revolutionary pressures of twentieth-century Ireland produced in Irish Arts and Crafts, as in the Literary Revival, an anxiety to create art in a national idiom that also acknowledges and responds to the ‘crisis of modernity’.17

Searching for Symbols: The Celtic Revival Jeanne Sheehy argues that nineteenth-century Irish art was not ‘strong enough’ to produce a unified style that suggested national identity, so instead artists had to turn to recognisably Irish symbols like the shamrock, the round tower, the harp and the Irish wolfhound; to Irish subjects and myths; or to copies of ancient artefacts.18 The last of these closely aligns with the later tenets of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. In copying and reworking motifs from stunning ninth-century objects discovered in the nineteenth century, including the Tara Brooch and the Ardagh Chalice, metalworkers revived skills that showed premodern Irish craftsmen to be leading experts in these technologies (Figure 13.1). The firm of George Waterhouse, for example, made

Figure 13.1 Lithograph drawing of the Tara Brooch, from Henry O’Neill, Fine Arts and Civilization of Ireland (Dublin: George Herbert, 1863). Image from archive.org

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detailed replicas and adapted versions of the Tara Brooch, marketing them as ‘national ornaments worn by princes and nobles’, and Edmond Johnson made highly skilled replicas and new designs based on the Ardagh Chalice, creating objects in the ‘Celtic style’ (Plate 19).19 These nineteenth-century metalworkers and jewellers indicate how the ‘rediscovery, replication, and promotion’ of antique Celtic objects allowed Revivalists to reconstruct the past materially using modern technologies.20 In effect, they promoted the idea of an uninterrupted Irish culture, even as they repurposed and adapted Celtic motifs for nineteenth-century sensibilities. The nineteenth century saw a spate of guidebooks designed to promote Irish motifs and to emphasise the significance of antiquities. Decorative arts workers found inspiration for design in these guidebooks. Henry O’Neill published Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland (1857) and The Fine Arts and Civilization of Ireland (1863), both of which provide reproductions of early Irish art, including the Tara Brooch and high crosses that later became ubiquitous in cemeteries in Ireland and in England, Canada and the United States.21 Margaret Stokes hoped her Early Modern Art in Ireland (1887) would give a ‘native character’ to contemporary Irish design.22 The illuminated gospel books created between the fifth and eighth centuries were available to a wider audience with the advent of better printing methods and lithography. The Book of Kells and The Book of Durrow, both in the library at Trinity College Dublin, provided examples of Celtic interlace, zoomorphic figures and floral motifs. Soon these figures and distinctive calligraphic styles appeared on Irish documents, certificates, bookplates and illustrated books as a way of signalling the uniqueness of an Irish manuscript tradition, particularly in a period of increasing interest in the handmade book. By 1912, Heinrich Dolmetsch’s Ornamental Treasures beautifully reproduced many images from manuscripts so they could in turn be copied by contemporary artists.23 Such illuminations, replicated and modified into ‘Celtic design’, also played into a Victorian fascination with ornament. Books like Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) offered scores of patterns, displayed so that they could be copied and disseminated as part of industrial design, resulting in a profound disconnection between the original meanings of figures and lines in Celtic work and their application as ornament. As Michael Camille points out, in the Celtic world out of which such images and styles came, there was no concept of ornament; instead, these figures were highly symbolic and, in the case of the earlier metalwork, pagan.24 That such symbols were adapted into early Christian liturgy through illumination shows that they had a continuous cultural significance that worked alongside religious meaning in the Celtic world. But by the time of the nineteenth-century Revival, artisans either did not know about or deliberately discounted the paganism of such images in their ‘rush to appropriate them as pure pattern’ and in their desire to claim religious associations with early Christian Ireland.25 Camille claims that the consumers of these goods, particularly metalwork jewelry, ‘probably had not the faintest idea that they were wearing tribal symbols redolent of animal and fertility magic. The objects were neutralized or domesticated for modern consumption.’26 Despite the quality and skill that Johnson and others brought to metalwork, much of the early Celtic Revival art suffered from overuse of this ‘neutralised’ imagery and interlace, symbols of Ireland that became ubiquitous by the late nineteenth century. Given the appropriation of symbols of the Irish nation by the British government that nationalists wanted to escape, the use of harps and shamrocks in decorative art for buildings,

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Figure 13.2 Streetlamp, Kildare Street, Dublin, after 1892. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

lampposts, boxes, book covers, gravestones and a huge variety of other objects began to feel like ‘a shallow, sentimental and ineffectual’ nationalism (Figure 13.2).27 Irish Revivalists working at the end of the nineteenth century regarded the agglomeration of these symbols as ‘lip service paid to an Irish identity by the royal family and by the Viceroy and Castle officials’28 and began seeking a way to ‘make it new’.

Arts and Crafts Modernism? In early twentieth-century Ireland, at a time of anticolonial nationalism, artists and writers faced an anxiety around cultural belatedness linked to the project of creating modern art without jettisoning aesthetic tradition. Nicola Gordon Bowe describes the Irish Arts and Crafts in the context of the same social and cultural forces that, in part, helped shape international modernism: In Ireland, the movement was as much concerned with political, social and cultural ideology as the making of beautiful, functional, materially fitting objects and, in Dublin, with a passionate striving for individual, ‘modern’ visual expression based on glorious past achievement in craftsmanship, set against an urban backdrop of decay, unemployment and disease.29

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Like their literary revivalist counterparts, these artists wanted to modify, yet not abandon, the recognisable visual tradition established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; more than this, they contributed to a nationalist cause striving to assert a continuous cultural heritage, as if to emphasise Ireland’s modernity without allowing for a break during repeated invasions and periods of colonial rule. Meisel describes modernism itself as a fantasy of origins, as ‘in all its historical manifestations, the recurrent desire to find origins or ground despite the impossibility of ever doing so for sure’.30 Similarly, Terry Eagleton links some aspects of nationalism to modernism, describing Ireland’s anti- and postcolonial legacy as an ‘archaic avantgarde’ because ‘it looked forward to a modernized, modestly industrialized Ireland with its traditional culture preternaturally intact’.31 He reads nationalism as in part ‘a response to a modernizing process that seems to have escalated out of control, not least in its shattering impact on a still largely traditional social order’, and sees the recourse to culture as an alternative form of belonging for colonised people left out of the political society they desire to shape.32 This results in a condition endemic to modernism itself: the anxiety of belatedness fundamental to modernism. As Eagleton describes it, cultural nationalism ‘arose, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the very traditional order it struggled to re-create, and so was always radically belated’.33 This form of cultural nationalism, like modernism and like the English Arts and Crafts, reacted against mass production, the soullessness of modernity, and the cultural products and political forces of modernisation that Irish intellectuals associated with Britain. At the same time, this cultural nationalism looked backward to a remote antiquity, uncontaminated by colonialism, as a way of shaping an aesthetic and literary future.34 As Vera Kreilkamp asserts, these artists turned to a distant pre-conquest past in their search for themes and images expressing their country’s claims for the future. This look backward played a significant role in shaping literature, music, popular culture, and the visual arts during Ireland’s seemingly unstoppable passage to modernity.35 The apparently conservative choice, then, of recalling a pre-conquest monastic past for images and art – as the Celtic Revivalists had done – in fact quietly countered British stereotypes and assumptions about an intractable and uncivilised colony.36 In effect, the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, like the Literary Revival, blended the antiquarian work of the nineteenth century – representative of pre-conquest Ireland, even if inaccurately so – with the present moment of revolution, political change and postcolonial conditions.37 Work by artists like Harry Clarke shows how modern Ireland, particularly in urban centres where applied arts training took place, produced a new emphasis on the Gothic that inflected earlier Celtic Revival design. Gothic elements signalled a veneration for the skilled artist–craftsperson and a rejection of mass production and consumption, but also implicitly recalled the troubling conditions of modernity, including widespread poverty, disease, tenement housing, and the upheavals of postcolonial revolution and war.38 By the early twentieth century, the Gothic tradition in both literature and visual arts addressed a sense of decay and ‘degeneration’ linked to urban poverty and poor housing conditions, the peripheral and borderland associations of anticolonial struggle, and the sense of the haunted and the uncanny often viewed as manifestations of repressed sexuality and restrictive power structures.39

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Founded in 1894, the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland held occasional exhibitions from 1895 until 1925. It was the 1904 exhibit, at which the Dun Emer Guild and An Túr Gloine presented work, that showed a new direction for Irish art.40 In 1909, the group reorganised itself with goals that synched with other ‘self-help’ movements in early twentieth-century Ireland, including the cooperative movement.41 The Society aimed for a broad national base, organising a Guild of Art Workers to promote ‘united self help’ and bring the work of individual artists to a broader purchasing public.42 Such commercial-minded networking, although apparently antithetical to Arts and Crafts ideals of finely made objects that venerate the skilled artisan in opposition to mass production, none the less parallels the simultaneously practical and romantic tenets of Irish cultural nationalism and modernism: self-promotion for a small nation alongside an anxious reaction to the crisis of modernity. Another factor changing the quality of work in the 1904 exhibition was the increased support of the Catholic Church in using Irish artists for stained glass and church fittings.43 With the relatively recent event of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a spate of church building across the country. W. B. Yeats and Edward Martyn encouraged the use of Irish manufacture in church construction, thus establishing an ongoing association between Arts and Crafts work in Ireland and ecclesiastical or state institutions. These associations are one reason why, to this day, the Arts and Crafts movement seems linked to conservatism – despite the sometimes radical work these artists achieved. Unlike the English Arts and Crafts where there was a well-established bourgeois class willing to support handmade items, Irish designers and craftspeople did not have a large consumer base. The material reality of decorative and applied arts in the country meant that the venues and commissions for Irish art – rural churches, private ecclesiastical buildings, government offices – contribute to their relative obscurity. Those looking for a prominent fine art modernism in early twentieth-century Ireland might be disappointed44; but conversely, a visit to a small parish church in a remote part of Ireland may yield surprisingly avantgarde stained glass. As Luke Gibbons notes of Harry Clarke, the proliferation of detail and technical virtuosity involved in this art create an ‘intricate modernism’ linked to the abundance of James Joyce’s prose.45

Arts and Crafts and the Irish Church Two Irish churches serve as examples of the developing and increasingly modernist art of the period: Loughrea Cathedral, circa 1902, and the Honan Chapel, completed in 1916. St Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway, was architecturally under way when Edward Martyn convinced bishops to use Irish artists in its decoration. The result is the first building in Ireland considered to be of Arts and Crafts style. The same year, Martyn and Sarah Purser established An Túr Gloine, and employed A. E. Child, a leading English stained-glass artist now teaching at the Dublin Metropolitan School. The glass studio made most of the windows in the cathedral. The Dun Emer Guild made twenty-four embroidered banners of Irish saints ‘in the medieval style which was revived by William Morris’, based on simple, brightly coloured, almost primitive designs by artists including Jack B. Yeats and Mary Cottenham Yeats.46 The Dun Emer Guild, founded by Evelyn Gleeson along with Susan and Elizabeth Yeats (sisters to the poet W. B.) was important as a craft workshop set up explicitly by and

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for women. The cooperative focused on embroidery, tapestry and weaving, and fineart printing through Elizabeth Yeats’s work with what eventually became the Cuala Press.47 Howes reads the figures depicted on the Loughrea banners as integrally linked to the Literary Revival’s treatment of a history of defeat and oppression as spiritually transformed into heroism and even triumph. The saints ‘gesture toward mythic types’ and are symbols of ‘dignified action’ in the face of adversity.48 Among many other Irish-designed elements, Loughrea features interior metalwork and woodwork by W. A. Scott, one of the leading architects of the period, including wrought-iron lights with Irish inscriptions (Figure 13.3). The Gothic-influenced, handcarved figures and grotesques adorning the pews were carved by local craftsmen (Plate 20). The overall effect of Loughrea is more Victorian eclectic than the kind of Arts and Crafts style that prefigures clean modernist lines, but Loughrea represents a significant shift in ideology in early twentieth-century Ireland. As the curate, Father Jeremiah O’Donovan, pronounced in 1901 in an address to young priests at Maynooth, it is they who would be responsible for the revival of Irish arts because they would control so much church decoration.49

Figure 13.3 Wrought iron lamp with Irish inscription, possible attribution W. A. Scott, Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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The Honan Collegiate Chapel, Cork, may be the only Irish public building entirely conceived and built in Arts and Crafts style, and it is ‘the most complete extant expression of Irish Arts and Crafts practice’.50 Yet the building also evinces a latent modernism, particularly in its simplified, streamlined design, derived from the medieval architectural style of Hiberno-Romanesque. This revived style, with its resonances of an authentic Irish architectural style developed to create a sense of historic continuity, derives from churches built just before the Anglo-Norman invasion, which were themselves built to evoke the Golden Age of Christianity in Ireland in the fifth to seventh centuries (Figure 13.4).51 Although the Honan Chapel draws on medieval sources, it adapts these sources for contemporary purposes. This chapel also marks a movement away from the Victorian emphasis on ornament, so prized by Celtic Revivalists, with its spare and restrained exterior and interior showcasing the work of local craftspeople.52 The Honan collection includes vestments and textiles by the Dun Emer Guild, and metalwork designed by W. A. Scott and made by the firm of Edmond Johnson, as well as a fine collection of stained-glass windows, nine of which were made by Harry Clarke with another eight produced by An Túr Gloine. The Honan Chapel windows were Clarke’s first major commission, and many regard them as his finest. They represent one of the clearest instances of the convergence of

Figure 13.4 James F. McMullen, exterior of Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1915–17. Image from John Robert O’Connell, The Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork (Cork: Guy & Co. Limited, 1916). Image from archive.org

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traditionalist and modernist elements in Irish Arts and Crafts work. Using the iconography and symbolism of Irish saints, these windows adapt well-known images to an entirely original vision in a modernist-inflected Celtic revival. Clarke’s St. Brendan (1916) window, for example, uses Celtic interlace not simply as a decorative element but as an evocation of the stalactites the saint encountered on his travels (Plate 21). He dresses Brendan in pampooties (sandals) like those worn by the Aran islanders, a detail familiar to viewers who have read J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands or seen his plays at the Abbey Theatre, and familiar to Clarke from drawing trips to Inishmore (Plate 22).53 His St. Gobnait (1916) design employs details of the saint’s life, including her beekeeping. Clarke makes use of both the decorative patterning of honeycombs in Gobnait’s cloak, as well as stylised bees that punctuate the light at intervals, creating a sense of movement and abstraction in this Gothic-inflected window (Plate 23). Gothic influence makes itself felt in small narrative details showing thieves attacked by the bees, as well as a group of plague victims, one of whom has Clarke’s face and bears his initials and the date of the window’s completion (Plate 24).54 This small selfportrait indicates Clarke’s modernist interest in individual subjectivity, slyly worked into a Gothic art form pioneered by unnamed craftspeople. His use of expressive faces and hands amidst patterned backgrounds shows the influence of Symbolist and modernist European artists, including Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.55

Irish Stained Glass The early Arts and Crafts work of Loughrea Cathedral (1902) provided the foundation for innovative and exceptionally high-quality stained-glass production in Ireland. Because there was no tradition of stained glass in the country before the eighteenth century, the artists at An Túr Gloine and those of the Arts and Crafts movement used the symbols and forms of the Celtic Revival, along with medieval glass-working methods, to produce highly original work. Like their counterparts in other media, glass artists focused on the detail, colour and pattern of illuminated manuscripts and on the intricacy of early Celtic metalwork. They often depicted Irish saints, many of them ‘rediscovered’ as subject matter for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century churches.56 Martyn and Purser worked together to establish the Tower of Glass studios as part of the Revivalist self-help movement’s focus on Irish-made products as vital to independence.57 The hope was that training Irish artists to produce original and high-quality stained glass would improve the poor products made from patterns by Munich-based firms and imported into Ireland. The outcome was some of the most significant and original work in Ireland in any medium, and the finest stained glass of the twentieth century. Stained-glass artists from this period, including Michael Healy, Catherine O’Brien, Sarah Purser, Harry Clarke, Wilhelmina Geddes and Evie Hone, shaped the trajectory of applied arts in Ireland and beyond. Alongside setting up the Tower of Glass, Purser helped to set the trend for Irish women artists to study in France; these women, in turn, brought modernist influences back with them to Ireland.58 Purser studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1870s before returning to Ireland and founding An Túr Gloine. Although she worked primarily as a portrait painter, she made some glass herself, including, for Loughrea Cathedral, a small St. Brendan window completed in 1903 (Plate 25). This window uses colour and uneven pieces of leaded glass to present a traditional view – St Brendan

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voyaging across the sea – in a surprisingly abstract manner, showing the early influence of modernism in stained glass, which at the time tended toward the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau. Wilhelmina Geddes was trained in the Belfast School of Art, and Purser invited her to join An Túr Gloine in 1911, after seeing book illustrations that Geddes exhibited at the 1910 Arts and Crafts Society exhibition in Dublin.59 Geddes remained with the Studios until 1925, after which she worked in London. Like Clarke, Geddes was exceptionally knowledgeable about Irish mythology, ecclesiastical history and folklore; she researched all her subjects thoroughly and used visual and cultural allusions throughout her work.60 Both she and Clarke also worked in pen and ink for book illustrations and other commercial commissions, their designs conveying powerful narrative movement through visual imagery. Geddes’s muscular human figures and aggressive use of leading give her ecclesiastical windows an expressionist and modernist force. Like other stained-glass artists, much of her work consisted of commissions for churches in Ireland and England, as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Belgium. In 1930, Geddes completed a commission to depict scenes from Ulster legends for a window in a new building housing the Belfast Art Gallery and Museum. Her eightpanel The Fate of the Children of Lir offers a bold interpretation of pre-conquest Irish culture (Plate 26). The panels suggest a narrative movement not unlike our contemporary graphic novels, offering a pictorial view of the pre-Christian (and pre-invasion) legend of the children of Lir, chieftain of the Tuatha de Danaan, who were transformed into swans by their jealous stepmother.61 Stylistically reminiscent of the best medieval stained glass, Geddes’s human figures and swans show organic forms carefully fitted to tight-cropped frames and balanced by decorative patterning which meticulously avoids any suggestion of Celtic ornamentation. The artist’s use of vertical and horizontal lines – both for leading and for the arms of figures, staffs and robes – contrasts with the organic shapes and movements suggested by the swans, waves, clouds and figural gestures encased within leaded glass pieces. The result is a sense of tension created by movement and rigidity, echoing the entrapment the children face. According to Bowe, this design ‘epitomizes the ideals of the Irish Arts and Crafts Society: to translate ancient Ireland into a modern, accessible idiom’.62 The Fate of the Children of Lir likewise represents the visual arts equivalent of the Literary Revival, and might be likened to Clarke’s Geneva Window as a pictorial interpretation of Celtic Revival modernism. Evie Hone studied stained glass with Geddes in the 1930s, and notably worked first as a painter, studying Cubism in Europe with Alfred Gliezes and André Lhote, along with her friend and fellow modernist painter, Mainie Jellett. Her Cubist paintings represent some of the first modernist fine art in Ireland. It was only around 1932, near the conclusion of the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland, that Hone turned to stained glass, perhaps in conjunction with her conversion to Catholicism.63 Typical of her stained glass is the St. Brigid window completed for Loughrea Cathedral around 1942. Like her mentor, Geddes, Hone’s glasswork studiously avoids the visual markers of the Celtic Revival – passé by the 1940s when she produced it – and instead pursues a bold, stylised image of the saint, with a background of vividly coloured and abstract architectural designs. The figures of the patron saint and the impoverished child she feeds nearly fill the frame, in contrast to the more architecturally rigid saints produced by artists earlier in the century. Hone’s My Four Green Fields, commissioned by the Irish government’s Department of Industry and Commerce for the Irish Pavilion at

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the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, now occupies a prominent place in Government Buildings (Plate 27). This immense, vibrantly coloured window uses elements of Irish symbolism, including the harp, the red hand of Ulster and the shamrock, in a fragmented series of panels reminiscent of modernist collage. These legendary symbols, established or revived during the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival, modified and then rejected during the Arts and Crafts movement, now return to represent – in a space of modernist bricolage – the Irish Free State. The window’s visual prominence in Government Buildings attests to its acceptance by successive administrations, and its success in visually representing a modern, postcolonial Ireland.

Conclusion: Arts and Crafts Heresies The success of Hone’s My Four Green Fields contrasts sharply with the rejection by the Irish state of Clarke’s Geneva Window in 1931. Róisín Kennedy points out that this rejection was ‘badly managed and insensitive’, revealing the Free State’s philistine attitude towards visual art and culture, and its puritanical strictures on sexuality.64 Clarke’s defiance in depicting figures from literary works already banned by the government, and his imaginative interpretations of scenes of drinking and sexuality, pushed the limits of what a state- or church-sponsored art movement could accomplish under the Free State. The Geneva Window differs scandalously from the tradition of 1930s public works murals depicting industry, arts and other state achievements important to the image of nationhood promulgated by the governments commissioning them. Indeed, the Irish state’s eventual gift to the International Labour Organisation was Irish Industrial Development, a mural by Seán Keating completed in 1960. Seán Ó’Faoláin, writing as a representative of the Irish Arts Council in 1959, deplored the cartoons for Keating’s mural, likening it to ‘a piece of poster work of a very high class nature intended for propaganda [. . . like that] still being produced as Soviet art’.65 Ó’Faoláin goes as far as to suggest that a ‘perfectly blank wall’ hung with an Irish-produced tapestry would be preferable to what he viewed as nationalist puffery. If Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window pushed the limits of what the Irish state would accept by connecting the heretically modern with traditional Arts and Crafts skill, another lesser-known work similarly pushes the use of Celtic ornament to its limits in a religious context: the tiny chapel decorated by Dominican nun Sister Concepta Lynch in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. Inspired by early Irish book illumination, Sister Concepta applied these designs to walls and ceiling – indeed, to virtually every available surface of the chapel – creating a sense of symbolic order arising out of a chaotic modernist overload of information. Lynch began the project in 1919 and stopped work in 1936. It remains incomplete (Plate 28). Lynch’s father had produced illuminated book addresses in the Celtic Revival style in the nineteenth century and trained her in this work.66 But her application of designs derived from The Book of Kells and elsewhere shows an intensity of vision and an adaptation of a well-known symbolic form, long since coopted for ornamental use, applied in an original way. Her chapel offers one little-known example of what Sheehy calls the rare assimilation of Early Christian art in the Irish style to ‘a wholly modern and personal vision’.67 The Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, for all its parallels to the Irish Literary Revival and other self-help movements of the early part of the twentieth century and the early years of the Irish Free State, is not, in the end, primarily ‘modernist’ art. The Moderns,

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a 2011 exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, argued that Ireland did experience a modernist art movement that encompassed painting, sculpture, book design and architecture, but most of this work was produced in the 1920s to the 1970s, evincing a later modernist flowering.68 Similarly, Sheehy argues that ‘the Irish Revival did not pass on a living tradition in art as it did in literature’.69 As the newly formed Irish Free State turned toward increasingly conservative and censorious measures, the very institutions that had briefly supported a flourishing and diverse group of art workers began to see cultural nationalist work as heretical. The Arts and Crafts Society officially disbanded in 1925 and An Túr Gloine ceased to produce glass in 1944. Although the Harry Clarke Studios continued to the 1970s, his skilled former student, Richard King, who emigrated to the United States, has garnered more attention than his Irish contemporaries. But the flourishing of Irish applied arts in the early years of the twentieth century reveals a brief but profound visual arts reaction to the pressures of political and social change, postcolonialism and modernisation. As scholars of global modernism widen their view of what constitutes the avant-garde, the variety and very instability of Irish visual art of the first half of the twentieth century proves itself modern.

Notes 1. Róisín Kennedy suggests that Clarke’s depiction of women both reflects ‘the objectification of woman by the predominantly male authors of the texts’ and shows them as ‘self-possessed and forceful beings’. ‘Precious Gift’, p. 86. 2. Walker, ‘Culture of Art’, p. 306. See also McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, p. 51. 3. O’Byrne, ‘Irish Modernism’, p. 13. O’Byrne acknowledges the significance of Arts and Crafts artists, naming Clarke in particular. 4. Carville, ‘Terra Infirma’, p. 14. 5. See Sheehy, Rediscovery; Bowe and Cumming, Arts and Crafts Movement; Larmour, Arts and Crafts Movement; and Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’. 6. Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’, p. 45. 7. See Bowe, Art and the National Dream. 8. Bowe, ‘Irish Arts and Crafts’, p. 172, qtd in Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’, p. 45. 9. Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’, p. 46. 10. See Larmour, Arts and Crafts Movement, p. 1. 11. See Rónán McDonald, ‘Revival and Modernism’, and Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’. 12. Luke Gibbons also argues for the importance of George Moore’s art writing from the 1870s as part of the ‘modernist turn’. ‘Visual Modernisms’, p. 128. 13. Larmour, Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 90–104; Kreilkamp, ‘Introduction’, p. 10; Tom Walker, ‘Culture of Art’, p. 309. 14. Bowe, ‘Preserving the Relics’, p. 60. See John Turpin’s A School of Art in Dublin for a history of the institution. 15. Walker, ‘Culture of Art’, p. 311. 16. Meisel, Myth of the Modern, p. 8. 17. McDonald, ‘Revival and Modernism’, p. 52. 18. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 9. 19. Waterhouse & Co., Antique Irish Brooches, p. 7, qtd in Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, p. 2; Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, p. 4. 20. Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, p. 2.

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21. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 73. 22. Qtd in Larmour, Arts and Crafts Movement, p. 4. Tom Walker briefly treats Stokes in relation to a ‘modern formalist vocabulary’, ‘Culture of Art’, p. 313. 23. Camille, ‘Domesticating the Dragon’, p. 16. 24. Ibid., pp. 6–8. 25. Ibid., p. 8. 26. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 27. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 92. 28. Ibid. 29. Bowe and Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movement, p. 77. Qtd in Sullivan, ‘Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze’, p. 9. 30. Meisel, Myth of the Modern, p. 4. 31. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 287. 32. Ibid., pp. 286, 288. 33. Ibid., p. 288. 34. Ibid., p. 281. 35. Kreilkamp, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 36. Ibid., p. 13. 37. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 279. 38. See Sullivan, ‘Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze’. 39. See Killeen, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction; and Sullivan, ‘Clarke’s Saints’. 40. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 155. 41. See P. J. Mathews, Revival. 42. Larmour, Arts and Crafts Movement, p. 79; ‘united self help’ in the ‘Report of the Council for the Year 1910’, p. 209. Also see Sheehy, Rediscovery, Chapter 9. 43. See Wilson, Arts and Crafts Revivalism’, for an analysis of what she terms the ‘brief duration’ of Irish Arts and Crafts ecclesiastical art, particularly in St Brendan’s cathedral, Loughrea, and the Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork. 44. There was a significant interest in Cubism in early twentieth-century Ireland, and many others have written about fine art modernism. For an overview, see Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernism’; on Cubism, see Arnold, Mainie Jellett. 45. Gibbons, ‘Cloistral Silverveined’, p. 340 and passim. 46. Lily Yeats, qtd in Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 157. 47. Seidel, ‘Celtic Revivals and Women’s Work’, p. 24; Andrew Kuhn, ‘The Irish Arts and Crafts Edition’, pp. 153–6. 48. Howes, ‘Arts and Crafts’, p. 49. 49. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 156. 50. Teehan, ‘Items of Extraordinary Beauty’, p. 73. For a full history of the art and architecture of the chapel, see Teehan and Heckett (eds), The Honan Chapel. 51. Ó’Carragáin, ‘Truly and Sincerely Irish’, p. 96 and passim. 52. Ibid., p. 94. 53. For an extended reading of the Honan Chapel windows and Clarke’s work and life, see Bowe, Harry Clarke. 54. Sullivan, ‘Clarke’s Saints’. 55. Sullivan, ‘Clarke’s Saints’, p. 128; Bowe, Harry Clarke, p. 30. 56. Bowe, ‘The Tower of Glass’. 57. McDonald summarises the ‘taxonomic shifts’ in study of the Irish Revival that now recognise the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, the cooperative league and other movements as helping reshape our understanding of Revivalist ideology, p. 57. See P. J. Mathews, Revival, for more on the significance of the ‘self-help’ movements in the Irish Revival. 58. O’Byrne, ‘Irish Modernism’, p. 11.

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59. Bowe, ‘Jewel in the Crown’, p. 119. See Bowe, Geddes, for a full consideration of this artist’s life and work. 60. Bowe, ‘Jewel in the Crown’, p. 122. 61. For a description of the window’s narrative elements, see Bowe, ‘Jewel in the Crown’, p. 124. 62. Ibid., p. 124. 63. Barber, Art in Ireland, pp. 62–7. 64. Kennedy, ‘Precious Gift’, p. 73. 65. Ó’Faoláin, Arts Council, letter to Thekla Beere. 66. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 170. 67. Ibid. 68. There are many important sources for the history of Irish art in the twentieth century. Enrique Juncosa and Christina Kennedy provide a significant recent intervention with the exhibition and catalogue for The Moderns. For an overview of visual arts modernism in Ireland, see Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’, and for the place of Harry Clarke in that movement, see Gibbons, ‘Cloistral Silverveined’, and Sullivan, ‘Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze’. There are several histories of Irish art in the twentieth century that reference or theorise Irish modernism, including S. B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism; Dorothy Walker, Modern Art in Ireland; Fiona Barber, Art in Ireland Since 1910; and Bruce Arnold, Mainie Jellett. 69. Sheehy, Rediscovery, p. 188.

Bibliography Arnold, Bruce, Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Barber, Fiona, Art in Ireland Since 1910 (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). Bowe, Nicola Gordon (ed.), Art and the National Dream: The Search for Vernacular Expression in Turn-of-the-Century Design (Sallins, Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 1992). Bowe, Nicola Gordon, Harry Clarke: The Life and Work, 4th edn (Dublin: The History Press, 2012). Bowe, Nicola Gordon, ‘Preserving the Relics of Heroic Time: Visualizing the Celtic Revival in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene (eds), Synge and Edwardian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 58–83. Bowe, Nicola Gordon, ‘The Irish Arts and Crafts Movement (1886–1925)’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1990–1), pp. 172–85. Bowe, Nicola Gordon, ‘“The Jewel in the Crown”: The Art of Stained Glass in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, 1903–1930’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 117–26. Bowe, Nicola Gordon, ‘The Tower of Glass: An Túr Gloine and the Early 20th Century Stained Glass Revival in Ireland’, Building Conservation (2008), (last accessed 14 October 2020). Bowe, Nicola Gordon, Wilhelmina Geddes, Life and Work (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015). Bowe, Nicola Gordon, and Elizabeth Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1885–1925 (Sallins, Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 1998). Camille, Michael, ‘Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-invention of Early Irish Metalwork’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival, 1840–1940 (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, 1992), pp. 1–19. Carville, Justin, ‘“Terra Infirma”: The Territory of the Visible and the Writing of Ireland’s Visual Culture’, in Claire Bracken and Emma Radley (eds), Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts (Cork: Cork University Press, 2013) pp. 13–28.

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Eagleton, Terry, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (New York: Verso, 1995). Gibbons, Luke, ‘“Cloistral Silverveined”: Harry Clarke and the “Intensely Modern”’ (Afterword), in Angela Griffith, Marguerite Helmers and Róisín Kennedy (eds), Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (Sallins, Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2018), pp. 331–42. Gibbons, Luke, ‘Visual Modernisms’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 128–43. Howes, Marjorie, ‘The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Irish Literary Revival’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 45–55. Juncosa, Enrique, and Christina Kennedy (eds), The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011). Kennedy, Róisín, ‘The Geneva Window: A Precious Gift, Never Given’, in Angela Griffith, Marguerite Helmers and Róisín Kennedy (eds), Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (Sallins, Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2018), pp. 73–99. Kennedy, S. B., Irish Art and Modernism 1880–1950 (Dublin and Belfast: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery / Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1991). Killeen, Jarlath, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Kreilkamp, Vera (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2016). Kuhn, Andrew, ‘The Irish Arts and Crafts Edition: Printing at Dun Emer and Cuala’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 153–64. Larmour, Paul, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press, 1992). McDonald, Rónán, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 51–62. Mathews, P. J., Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2003). Meisel, Perry, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism After 1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). O’Byrne, Robert, ‘Irish Modernism: The Early Decades’, in Juncosa and Kennedy (eds), The Moderns, pp. 9–13. Ó’Carragáin, Tomás, ‘“Truly and Sincerely Irish”?: The Medieval Sources for the Architecture of the Honan Chapel’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 87–99. Ó’Faoláin, Seán, Arts Council, letter to Thekla Beere, Department of Industry and Commerce (5 February 1959). Arts Council Archive, (last accessed 14 October 2020). ‘Report of the Council for the Year 1910’, Irish Architect and Craftsman (6 May 1911), p. 209. Seidel, Linda, ‘Celtic Revivals and Women’s Work’, in T. J. Edelstein (ed.), Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival, 1840–1940 (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, 1992), pp. 22–43. Sheehy, Jeanne, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830–1930 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). Sullivan, Kelly, ‘Harry Clarke’s Modernist Gaze’, Éire-Ireland, 47:3 (Fall/Winter 2012), pp. 7–36. Sullivan, Kelly, ‘Harry Clarke’s Saints, Sinners and Self-Portraits’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 127–39. Teehan, Virginia, ‘“Items of Extraordinary Beauty”: The Honan Chapel and Collection’, in Kreilkamp (ed.), The Arts and Crafts Movement, pp. 73–85. Teehan, Virginia, and Elizabeth Wincott Heckett (eds), The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004).

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Turpin, John, A School of Art in Dublin Since the Eighteenth Century: A History of the National College of Art (London: Gill & McMillan, 1995). Walker, Dorothy, Modern Art in Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997). Walker, Tom, ‘The Culture of Art in 1880s Ireland and the Genealogy of Irish Modernism’, Irish Studies Review, 26:3 (2018) pp. 304–17. Waterhouse & Co., Antique Irish Brooches (Dublin: Waterhouse & Co., 1872). Wilson, Ann, ‘Arts and Crafts Revivalism in Catholic Church Decoration: A Brief Duration’, Éire-Ireland, 48:3&4 (2013), pp. 5–48.

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14 The Insurgent Romance and Early Cinema in Ireland Matthew Brown

How much I like films I like – but I could like my films better. I like being distracted, flattered, tickled, even rather upset – but I should not mind something more; I should like something serious. I should like to be changed by more films, as art can change one: I should like something to happen when I go to the cinema.1 –Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’ (1938)

T

he Dublin premiere of the film Man of Aran (1934) on 6 May 1934 at the Grafton Street picture palace was a pivotal event, an instance of political life and international film production intermingling to screen both an aesthetic and an ascetic mythology for the Free State. After the premiere, The Irish Times reported that President de Valera attended, as did members of his Executive Council and other glitterati such as Eoin MacNeill, W. B. Yeats, members of the cast, and diplomats from Europe and the Americas: a gathering that brought to light the global financing and Free State self-fashioning that underwrote film production in Ireland through much of the twentieth century.2 The British-produced film was directed by Robert Flaherty, an American documentary filmmaker well known for the modernist ethnography Nanook of the North (1922), and featured actors local to the Aran Islands. Stylistically, Man of Aran employs a combination of documentary-looking footage, dramatic landscapes, staged scenes and a jaunty score to dramatise daily life on Inishmore, though its aspirations are more allegorical than observational, evident in the film’s opening intertitle: ‘In this desperate environment the Man of Aran, because his independence is the most precious privilege he can win from life, fights for his existence, bare though it may be.’ The film’s main action involves a group of fisherman in a currach involved in ‘two long days of struggle’ hunting a basking shark ‘to win the shark’s oil for their lamps’, a sequence that unfolds as a life-or-death communal effort with more than a few symbolic resonances for a 1930s Dublin audience who came of age during the revolutionary era. Trading in the sentimental pleasures of romantic primitivism – ‘It was a lie – but what a lie!’ observes a later film scholar3 – Man of Aran was instantly popular, The Irish Press reporting that between 45,000 and 50,000 people saw it during its three-week run in the Grafton Cinema before it moved to the Carlton: ‘“It broke all records”, the manager of the Grafton told an IRISH PRESS reporter yesterday, “and attracted a new type of cinemagoer, largely people who are dissatisfied with the ordinary Hollywood films.”’4

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The immediate response to Man of Aran seems to indicate that cinema about Ireland and Irish matters had finally arrived on the international scene, offering an alternative to the ‘ordinary Hollywood films’ through the pleasures of a ‘taxidermic cinema’, which ‘seeks to make that which is dead look as if it were still living’, as Fatimah Tobing Rony describes Nanook of the North.5 In Flaherty’s cinema more generally, Katherine Groo observes, ‘[b]eneath their cinematic skins, one finds a batting of grasses and leaves, bodies and limbs arranged just so in a lifelike fantasy of struggle and survival’.6 Man of Aran was arguably the first blockbuster film about Ireland that staged a backward, taxidermic vision of the nation and one that, paradoxically, signified modern Ireland within mainstream global cinema for decades to come. Though Man of Aran received mostly positive reviews from the international press in the months following its opening, which motivated the Irish government to produce an Irish-language short film to accompany each screening, Oidhche Sheanchais (‘Storyteller’s Night’), initial reviews in Ireland were more circumspect. The day after the premiere, the cinema correspondent for The Irish Times reports that ‘[Mr. Flaherty’s] film is a very fine one, and certainly is the best film which has been made in this country’ but also bemoans the film’s use of English instead of Irish dialogue and its subordination of plot and characterisation to an incessant theme, ‘the obstinate persistency of man’.7 In the ground-breaking Cinema and Ireland (1988), both Kevin Rockett and Luke Gibbons separately observe how Flaherty’s romance delivers a convenient screen memory. For Rockett the film and its reception ‘reinforced the retreat from 1930s social and economic reality’: namely, the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932–8)8; for Gibbons the film’s emphasis on the family’s ‘spartan lifestyle’ would have appealed to de Valera and his cabinet, who took advantage of the resurgence of ‘the more austere, rigorist elements of Irish romanticism which were reasserting themselves in the grim economic conditions of the 1930s’.9 The film premiere represented, too, a culminating moment for Irish national cinema in so far as it formalised a certain cinematic tone. Ruth Barton concludes: What is clear, looking back over the early history of images of Ireland and the Irish, is that we can discern a movement from diversity to containment, from a celebration of modernity . . . to an assertion of religious and cultural unity.10 Aesthetic ideology translates into an ascetic ideology in Flaherty’s film and so the film’s romantic inclinations must be weighed against the seriousness of what they obscure; the disenchanted view was later taken up by the documentary How the Myth Was Made (1978) by George C. Stoney and the punishing drama The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) by Martin McDonough. When gazing at the divided reception history of, arguably, one of the most famous late modernist films, what comes into focus is that Flaherty’s antimodern docu-fantasy distilled the tensions elicited by cinema in and about Ireland during the first two decades of the twentieth century, productions that seemed to cultivate the ‘low’ pleasures of sentimentality and kitsch, and to bypass the serious mandates of experimental film formulated by the European avant-garde and modernist aesthetics more generally. Though not writing directly about Ireland, Elizabeth Bowen’s delight in the limbic thrills of cinema in her essay ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’ (1938) captures this reception history,

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which holds that cinema’s various amusements were not transformative but altogether lacking, in need of ‘something more’, ‘something serious’ to be considered art. Bowen reiterates not so much the highbrow / lowbrow divide familiar to modernist studies but suggests that distraction, flattery, comedy, melodrama and suspense are heresies against high modernism. But what if these ‘unserious’ emotions express that ‘something more’ demanded by Bowen, particularly in the context of filmmaking in Ireland during the revolutionary era? One way to answer this question is to explore how these pleasures in early Irish cinema signify, also, a ‘capacity for change’. A central preoccupation of Irish writing in the 1910s and 1920s was how individual change can be plotted within larger social transformations through the formal deliberations of art, as we see dramatised in Sean O’Casey’s instinctive rebellions, James Joyce’s recursive epiphanies, W. B. Yeats’s maddening gyres, Bowen’s plots of stalled development and Samuel Beckett’s disintegrating narrators. Early cinema in Ireland reflects, I think, this preoccupation with imagining transformative energies within a colonial–revolutionary context through a recurring cinematic form: the insurgent romance.11 Made in the 1910s and set usually in late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Ireland, insurgent romances are politico-erotic dramas that rebel against their genre protocols and demand a weirder and wilder accounting. They are genre films with a twist, exercises in what Laura Frost calls ‘unpleasure’, an experience different from pleasure in so far as it describes ‘gratification attained through tension, obstacles, delay, convolution, and pain, as opposed to accessible direct satisfaction’.12 My focus is less on how early Irish cinema has been received or fit into the broader political contexts of the 1910s – topics masterfully covered by film scholars including Ruth Barton, Denis Condon, Martin McLoone, Gary D. Rhodes and Kevin Rockett, among many others – but rather on why the distracting, flirtatious, comedic and melodramatic gratifications of these films ask to be taken very seriously. Starting in 1910, shortly after Joyce and a group of Italian investors opened the Volta Electric on St Mary’s Street, Dublin’s first dedicated cinema house, there was a complex working relationship between nationalist feelings, which pervaded Irish cultural life, and film production. Because cinema had not yet established itself as an autonomous art form, as film historian Denis Condon explains, it should be interpreted as an ‘intermedial formation’: that is, as part of other established cultural practices that were premised on visuality, such as tourism, theatre and public events.13 In the 1910s, cinema was, like these other attractions, a scopic pleasure, and so it follows that many early productions were intermedial melodramas that expressed a popular nationalism familiar to theatre and musical hall performances. They meant to appeal to a wide range of audiences, both within Ireland and in America. Many of these early films used intertitles to expand the range of this appeal, a form of ‘virtual tourism’ that created a proximity between an international audience and the Irish locales.14 Witness, for example, one famous intertitle in the 1911 production The Colleen Bawn: ‘The bed used in this scene belonged to Daniel O’Connell and was occupied by him.’ Two production companies – the Kalem Company, based in New York, and the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI), an indigenous film company started in March 1916 right before the Easter Rising – were essential to the development of fiction films in Ireland during the 1910s, while a third, the General Film Supply, focused mainly on non-fiction works. Both Kalem and the FCOI released productions that adapted material from

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popular nineteenth-century poems, novels, plays, musical ballads and popular history, mostly of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions (that is, ‘rebel-and-redcoat’ melodramas), which partially explains why some viewers hold them at a distance from modernist aesthetics. Otherwise put, films produced by Kalem and the FCOI are not traditionally considered ‘masterpieces of modernist cinema’ because they lack, apparently, the characteristics that define the modernist film archive, such as radical experimentation. They aspired to produce popular genre films that, unlike the defamiliarising strategies of the European avant-garde, traded in intermedial conventions available to filmmaker and audience alike.15 Shot on location in Ireland, a first for an American film company, the Kalem films were spearheaded by Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier who, from 1910 to 1915, with Kalem and other production companies, created a series of increasingly ambitious films that established many of the cinematic tropes that influenced film production in Ireland for more than a decade. Olcott was born in Toronto to Irish parents, while Gauntier hailed from Kansas City, Missouri, first meeting Olcott in New York when they both worked for Kalem. Together, they boarded the S.S. Baltic in August 1910 with George Hollister, their cameraman, and Ada Liggett, Gauntier’s mother; after a week’s crossing, they landed in Queenstown (Cobh), Cork, and began shooting the one-reel fiction film The Lad from Old Ireland (1910) and the travelogue, now lost, An Irish Honeymoon (1910). Stunning shots of Ireland to match the dramatic effects of their scenarios were, arguably, what Olcott and Gauntier sought during their first trip – a form of cinematic ‘autoexoticism’ that anticipates Flaherty’s films16 – which Gauntier detailed later in a serial memoir published by Woman’s Home Companion: [I]ndeed our trouble was in selecting which of the quaint cottages we would use, for the landscape was universally bewitching. Our final choice was most fortunate, for there we found a dear old dame of eighty years whom Mr. Olcott immediately requisitioned for the grandmother of the picture. The hens scratched in the cobblestone dooryard, fat geese waddled about, and two clean white pigs, beloved members of the household, wandered in and out of the open door.17 This initial trip by the Kalem Company fostered, as Tony Tracy notes, the ‘stockcompany model’ that allowed Olcott, director and lead player, and Gauntier, scenarist and also lead player, ‘to mix personal and professional relations within a collaborative and highly creative context’.18 Spontaneity, improvisation and a make-it-work ethos characterised their trailblazing productions. The Lad from Old Ireland was so popular in America that, over the next few years, Olcott, Gauntier and their crew (also known as the ‘O’Kalems’) returned to Kerry and shot around twenty-nine films, an astonishing number. The surviving titles include: The Lad from Old Ireland, Rory O’More (1911), The Colleen Bawn (1911), His Mother (1912), You Remember Ellen (1912), Come Back to Erin (1914), For Ireland’s Sake (1914) and Bold Emmett, Ireland’s Martyr (1915).19 The predominant motifs of the Kalem films are a sympathetic portrayal of popular nationalism and a negative view of the British, though with some important caveats, such as an accommodationist tendency that perhaps spoke to ‘WASP America’, as Barton observes;20 a correspondingly aspirational view of America, seen as the land of restitution and opportunity; a conservative portrayal of gender combined

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with formulaic characterisation more generally, which cast rebels, priests and their associates in the role of protagonist–hero, and collaborators, informers, land agents and other ne’er-do-wells in the role of antagonist–oppressor; and finally, a cinematic historiography that pitches the rapid change of a utopian, but unfulfilled, revolution against the agonizingly slow time of failed insurrections and ongoing colonial status. In these respects the Kalem company set the tone for many films made during the revolutionary era that were, on the whole, stuck in a ‘vague aspect’, as Nicholas Allen writes, an ‘outline swathed in sentiment, the promise of tomorrow dressed in nostalgia for the past’.21 Though these films imagine a doctrinally popular nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, the on-location filming was viewed, on occasion, as an absolute sacrilege. The O’Kalems were hounded both by the British authorities and by the Catholic Church, who detected immorality in the proceedings, one priest in Killarney going so far as to sermonise against the filming of The Colleen Bawn: ‘He had himself seen two members of the film company with painted faces making love before the camera in a churchyard, thus desecrating the bones of his parishioners’ ancestors.’22 Despite these local improprieties, the alleged heresy of ‘making love before the camera’ in a rebel film more importantly demonstrates how, in the scenarios of Olcott and Gauntier, material from nineteenth-century literary, visual and musical works about rural dispossession and insurrection was interwoven with American film tropes from the silent era, particularly romantic westerns, that simultaneously plot territorial claims and erotic ambition. That both must be satisfied by film’s end – the hero returns home to (re)claim both land and bride – is a signature pleasure outwardly promised by these cinematic romances. For example, The Lad from Old Ireland is an emigrant romance and the ‘urtext of many Irish American narratives that followed’, as Tracy points out, beginning with an image of Terry (Olcott) digging in a woebegone field, surrounded by other impoverished farmers (most likely local farmers used as extras) and declaiming against his miserable fate.23 In the next scene he visits Aileen, who greets him outside her whitewashed thatched cottage and learns about his plans to strike it rich in America. Even though this was the first film Olcott and Gauntier shot in Ireland, images of thatched cottages, depressed farms, rock walls and courting farmers were already well worn for the contemporary audience, to whom it must have seemed as if a Thomas Moore poem or a Dion Boucicault play had come to life on screen, which both did in short order. Gauntier adapted Moore’s poem ‘You Remember Ellen’ for a film of the same name while the three-reel production The Colleen Bawn, based on Boucicault’s play, was released in 1911. Lacking opportunity at home, Terry emigrates to America, and the remainder of the short film is structured around a series of visual contrasts between metropolitan and rural locations. Terry’s ascension in America is rapid: he goes from hauling bricks to winning an election and surrounding himself with dapper urbanites, men who toast him and a woman who gifts him a none-too-subtle flower that, rather bizarrely, he puts in his top hat for safekeeping. Meanwhile, Aileen labours at home and laments the absence of Terry before she is seen kneeling next to her dying mother while a priest delivers the last rites; the landlord enters the cottage and demands the overdue rent moments after she dies. The kinetic rise of Terry in America (‘The Land of the Dollar’), set against the benumbed stasis of Aileen, who remains at home for ten years under

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the thumb of the priest and landlord, maps the gendered territories of pleasure and unpleasure in the film. The priest’s letter informing Terry that ‘It breaks her heart that you have forgotten her’ recalls him to Ireland, and he immediately sails home. The chief special effect of the film is also its most revealing thematic moment. Standing on the ship’s deck, Terry is gazing out to sea when, in a short dissolve, Aileen stands smiling beside him; he leans in for a kiss but she disappears before physical contact is made. Filmed on the S.S. Baltic before Olcott and Gauntier arrived in Ireland, the moment visualises Terry’s thoughts, which, in this instance, are geared towards a smiling, receptive Eileen. In his own mind, Terry’s self-making is measured by erotic enticements: a flower stored in a top hat and then placed on a desk, and a romantic fade-in on a transatlantic liner externalise Terry’s emigrant fantasies as sexual conquests. A now-cosmopolitan Terry arrives at Aileen’s house just as she is about to be evicted, and he pays her rent. In the extant copy, the final image of the film shows Terry shaking hands with several neighbours who have gathered in the house while Aileen looks away, her back straightened against everyone, a look of disquiet on her face. Most viewers might rightly assume that Terry’s return prevents her eviction and bodes a wedding. As Brian McIlroy notes, ‘a missing scene or inter-title likely suggested Terry and Aileen are married and return together to America’.24 But, formally, this is not what the final shot suggests: is Aileen’s pose one of shame, buyer’s remorse, desire to be alone, mourning, boredom? The film fragment entertains all possibilities while only hinting at a romantic conclusion, preserved by written records but lost in the visual archive, an ambivalence that persists through all surviving Kalem productions. And even if the marriage plot remained as records indicate, there lingers, still, the flower on Terry’s desk and the landlord’s unopposed reign. A landmark film that put to bed many stage Irish stereotypes, The Lad from Old Ireland further established the template for Olcott and Gauntier’s rebel romances, each featuring a misspelled historical figure (for example, ‘Rory O’More’ for Sir Rory O’Moore; ‘Emmett’ for Robert Emmet), as if the film is comically wary of an overt political identification. And each film similarly imagines a correlation between political and erotic ambition but goes further in showing how their urgencies are variously unsettled or neutralised by the formal properties of the film itself. Watching them today, one simultaneously views them as stage melodramas and modernist fragments, part Abbey production, part Lumière short film. Shot in Kerry during the 1911 Kalem filming season, Rory O’More begins with Rory (Jack Clarke) and Kathleen (Gene Gauntier) embracing in front of a rocky outcrop next to an isolated stream while Black William (Robert Vignola) spies on them from above. His gleeful leer registers the scopic thrill of both the peeping Tom and practised informer. When Kathleen later learns that a price has been placed on Rory, she rushes to his hideout in the hills and alerts him to the troops in the valley below, who are intent on capturing the ‘rebel leader’. Rory rushes off while Kathleen delays the military party by briefly flirting with their Commander: coquetry in service of the cause. Rory is discovered and tries to escape by swimming across a lake but turns back to save a pursuing soldier from drowning. For this act he is set free by the Commander, only to have Black William insist on his arrest. The court sides with Black William, despite the Commander’s positive testimony, and sentences Rory to death. During the trial scene, we see Rory standing in the dock on one side of the screen, and Kathleen sitting in the crowded gallery on the other, while Black William testifies between the two, a visual cue that juridical

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authority, combined with the informer’s singular malice, defers the consummation of the rebel romance. After a priest dramatically sacrifices himself on the scaffold, Rory escapes, the final intertitle of the film revealing his fate through a note written by the priest: ‘Kathleen and your mother will be there with a boat from the waiting ship. Godspeed you to America.’ Similar to The Lad from Old Ireland, the extant film ends with a brief image of Rory reading this note but provides no conclusive scene of an escape; viewers are left to speculate that he escapes to America, a cinematic wish-fulfilment withheld by the archival film but no less symptomatic of the tensions between the expectation of a romantic rebellion and the deferred cinematic time of its consummation. Without question, censorship controlled the ways in which sexuality was screened, pushing filmmakers to deflect it into other channels or, as in the case of The Lad from Old Ireland and Rory O’More, to conflate it with other ambitions.25 The overall effect of the rebel romance is that, ironically, the status quo remains mostly intact. You Remember Ellen, featuring Gauntier as the eponymous protagonist, also reaffirms the class system through a short aristocratic romance. Ellen meets a young traveller, William (Jack Clark), and in no short order they are married and work as poor, but still enamoured, farm labourers. Eventually, they leave Ellen’s home and their road trip through pastoral fulfilment sets the stage for a big reveal. William is not the impoverished labourer he seems but rather the Lord of Rosna Hall and, dressed elaborately, they are both welcomed into the aristocratic fold. You Remember Ellen is an aristocratic romance that fulfils what the rebel romance conceals: a sanctioned marriage, physical intimacy outside parental supervision, insider status, economic security and a native home. The aristocratic romance screens the conventions that are challenged but, nevertheless, remain within these productions. The Church, judiciary, land agents and informers maintain the foundations of the social order while both the emigrant and rebel romances are defused through emigration or accommodation. This is not to say that these films do not dream of rebellion: they do. But they do not fantasise about its consummation, only a chaste flirtation that evades the more radical elements of the source materials.26 Olcott was no doubt aware of the complicated relationship between Ireland and England when he first arrived but, as McIlroy notes, there is little evidence to suggest that he was sympathetic to the nationalist cause prior to this point. Olcott’s visit to John Redmond in the summer of 1910 to shoot footage of him (Redmond declined) indicates, though, that his sympathies for Home Rule certainly increased and his political vision over the ensuing four years became more daring.27 After they left Kalem at the end of 1912, Olcott and Gauntier produced titles under their own respective production companies, and, in these later works, they play more complex and nuanced characters that present the successful achievement of the romance plot as a solution to, rather than an evasion of, the political drama. Conventional desires on screen elicited orthodox resolutions, most of which stabilised the rebel romance as a form of popular, dramatic entertainment that made way for more seditious FCOI productions after 1916. In For Ireland’s Sake, one of the best films that Olcott and Gauntier made together, Olcott is Father Flannigan, a priest who facilitates the jailbreak of the rebel lovers Eileen (Gene Gauntier) and Marty (Jack Clark) by communicating to Eileen: ‘Tonight Marty will attempt an escape, be ready and do his bidding.’ Marty uses a file given to him by Flannigan to spring both himself and Eileen from their respective cells. They escape but not before

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knocking out two guards and stealing a rifle. They rendezvous with the priest, who quickly marries them and hastens towards a boat that will take them ‘To the west! To the west! To the land of the free!’ Flannigan tosses the rifle into the water as if to signify the priest’s official quelling of the insurgencies within both the romantic and the political plots, a point comically emphasised by the intertitle following their wedding night: ‘The morning after’. The bodies rousing from slumber are the unconscious soldiers at the prison, not the entwined lovers on the boat: Church and state reawaken to their domestic duties and the ‘armed rebels’ have been neutralised by the social conventions of their desire: that is, marriage. Though the film screens a community in revolt against the occupying British, the final moments are point-of-view shots from the boat gazing back at Flannigan waving from the shore: a technically stunning scene that lands any insurgents among the cinemagoers on the boat with Eileen and Marty, all heading west to buoy the romance of revolution while, on land, the status quo remains unruffled. In Bold Emmett, Ireland’s Martyr (1915), a film banned over fears that it would hinder British recruitment of Irish soldiers, Olcott plays Con Daly, a United Irishman who is arrested, along with his love interest Nora Doyle (Valentine Grant), for abetting the escape of Emmett earlier in the film. Con stands on the scaffold while Nora watches him from her cell window and Emmett, in disguise, climbs a nearby tree, ostensibly to aid an escape, a shot that captures the political–erotic triangulations of the Olcott productions, in so far as it imagines the rebel’s execution as a sacrifice to both politics and eros. Con evades execution by way of an official pardon for his aid to a wounded British soldier earlier in the story. ‘Re-united’, he returns home to his family, his priest and Nora. Bold Emmett utilises the conventions of every Olcott film, including a dramatic trial scene, rebel lovers, an escape from execution and a treacherous land agent, all of which lead to a formally reconciled vision: the historical rebel has been misidentified and sidelined in favour of Con, who returns home to fulfil the marriage plot and to praise the British authorities who pardoned him. Olcott and Gauntier stopped making films in Ireland at the outbreak of World War I and so their pre-Rising work feels, on the whole, less visceral and urgent about transformative change, but no less entertaining and ground-breaking. In terms of characterisation, form and theme, they intertwined erotic and political plots to screen allegories of social transformation that were revolutionary in sensibility but limited in vision: Con’s state-sanctioned reunion at the end of Bold Emmett underscores this point. After the Rising, though, indigenous filmmaking took over these cinematic projects and the insurgent romance shifted accordingly. One of the most important Irish films of the late 1910s, indigenous or otherwise, is Knocknagow (1918). Based on Charles Kickham’s best-selling novel, Knocknagow, or The Homes of Tipperary (1873), the film Knocknagow premiered in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in early 1918 and in Dublin on 22 April, the second anniversary of the Easter Rising. So popular was Kickham’s novel that a cinematic adaptation would certainly have been welcomed by Irish audiences, as Seán Ó’Faoláin hypothesises in a 1941 essay about the novel’s enduring popularity: This spirited and idealised novel . . . written by a fenian who had been in jail . . . came in the precise moment that demanded such a book, and it was exactly of the right spirit for a people emerging from bad times.28

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The film’s 1918 premiere was no less symbolically resonant, and it remains a monumental film in the history of Irish cinema for many reasons. Directed by Fred O’Donovan, an Abbey Theatre player well known for his portrayal of Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, Knocknagow was the first feature-length film released by the FCOI and confirmed the company’s status as a major player in the cultural wing of the revolution after the Rising. Knocknagow was produced by James Mark Sullivan, who founded the FCOI in March 1916 with Henry M. Fitzgibbon, with the express intention of making films in support of the nationalist cause. The FCOI saw itself as an alternative to the Abbey through its affiliation with the Irish Theatre Company.29 Shortly after the FCOI opened, their offices and all their early films were destroyed by fires during the Rising. In the years following its release, Knocknagow went on to popular acclaim in New York, Boston and throughout New England, owing in no small part to expert FCOI marketing, which advised US theatres on how to sell Irish amateur productions to cinema-savvy American audiences: ‘The way to handle the pictures is to Sinn Fein them. That is to say, appeal to the patriotic side of the Irish people.’30 Set in 1848 in Kilthubber and the nearby town Knocknagow, County Tipperary, Knocknagow has room for more character development and more time for unfurling plots and subplots, which deliver a more fully realised, if more convoluted and less technically astute production than the Olcott–Gauntier romances. At first glance, though, the film appears to be in sync with the affective range displayed in these earlier films. It opens by inviting the audience to embrace an unambiguous nostalgia: As this old tale unfolds there are waiting you neither soul stirring thrills nor sensational climaxes. We ask you to ramble with us through the summer days of long ago. Come back in spirit to the time when our great grandfathers faced a world that had little to offer. We turn back the pages of time to the Ireland of ‘48’ when Irish smiles broke through every cloud of oppression. This story, in a series of episodes, depicts the joys and sorrows of the simple kindly folk who lived in the homes of Tipperary seventy years ago. A series of illustrated title cards depicting the fourth stanza of the poem ‘Tipperary’ by Thomas Davis, emphasis falling on the ‘mood’ of ‘mirth and love’, follows these opening titles and poses yet another cinematic injunction for the contemporary audience, who were living in the wake of the Rising, the electoral victory for Sinn Fein and the end of World War I, to turn away from the kinetic, ‘sensational’ Kalem productions and into a taxidermic naïvety that was ‘at the root of Kickham’s romanticised vision’ and later perfected by Man of Aran.31 For many film historians, this nostalgic invocation is of a piece with melodrama because it connects the contemporary audience in spirit to historical instances of oppression through sentimental, intimate appeals. In very broad strokes, these intertitles are nostalgia itself, positing a fundamental deficiency of the present by screening an imagined idea of the past that doubles as a mythical origin for the present. Thus the backward glance of nostalgia works also as a utopian gaze forward, Janus-faced, distilling into a single image, as W. B. Yeats famously put it, ‘what is past, or passing, or to come’, and so remains crucial to populist-pap sloganeering well into the twenty-first century: ‘We Want Our Country Back’ (Brexit Leave Campaign) or ‘Make

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America Great Again’ (2016 US campaign). In nostalgic pathos, objects from the past are coveted in the present to sustain the connections between the now and the mythic space of tradition – whitewashed cottages, the homestead hearth in the O’Kalem films, for example – with film serving these sentimental needs by screening a cinematic world populated with venerated characters, landscapes and objects, and ultimately becoming an object itself of nostalgic veneration, bearing the imprint of a generation’s collective cultural memory. Nostalgia, and the nostalgia film in particular, aspire to ‘represent styles associated with times and settings of social unity and rootedness’, write Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw; ‘The fact that such cohesion was almost certainly illusory is of course totally irrelevant.’32 Marxist critics do well to remind themselves that nostalgia is, more often than not, extremely dangerous in its implicit assumptions that previous forms of political life and social organisation were somehow better, recalling to mind Fredric Jameson’s caveat emptor that ‘a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos’.33 Advocating stasis and return rather than any mechanism of ‘progress’ via radical revolution, schematic modernisation, or late modernist ‘working through’, nostalgia is perhaps best thought of as it was originally defined: a pathology. As Linda Hutcheon points out, the term was first coined to describe feelings of homesickness and may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power. . . . [Through nostalgia] the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past.34 The various pathologies of nostalgia are fully on display in Knocknagow, its signal pleasure. At first glance the film feels like a polemic aimed at allegorically exposing the cruelties of imperial practice in the 1910s through a story about landlords and tenants in the 1840s. Like most good allegories, the truth of what this story otherwise signifies is hidden in plain sight, as another intertitle near the film’s conclusion highlights: Fellow Irishmen . . . We must cultivate under every dire circumstance, patience and fortitude, to outlive every slander and to rise above adversity. We are a moral people above crime and a clean-hearted race must eventually come into its own no matter how long the journey, no matter how hard the road. The excitement of revolutionary change and the aura of dangerous romance have settled into a harder slog, one heralded by a slightly less rousing rallying cry in the intertitle, ‘Eventually!’ This is an implicit credo within Olcott and Gauntier’s films made explicit here, with an added Irish Catholic exceptionalism - an uncomfortable though not uncommon amalgam of racial purity, gender fixity, and moral authority. In such moments, the film ‘sketch[es] out a distinctly postcolonial vision of manhood, which is concerned with defining itself in opposition to Britishness as well as establishing a moral high ground over the former colonizer’.35 Taken together, the two intertitles cited above communicate a nostalgic–utopian pathos, a reassuring vision that seeks to curb anxieties about depleted revolutionary energies after the Rising. In political terms, this film’s nostalgia seems committed to a social conservativism that prefers the long game of mythical (and masculine) suffering to the internecine violence pledged by a revolution. The intertitles would have undoubtedly pleased bourgeois audiences,

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leading many film scholars to surmise that ‘Olcott and the emergent Irish filmmakers of the FCOI had in common a fear of inciting revolutionary action or seeming to condone violence.’36 Other moments in Knocknagow, however, diverge significantly from earlier films and, in many respects, frustrate the intertitle nostalgia upon which the fabled ‘Knocknagow nationalism’ is premised. An episodic, uneven film, then, that both cultivates and undermines the easy pleasures of cinematic nostalgia, Knocknagow opens with a period of short, non-sequential scenes held together by two main characters, Mat ‘the Thrasher’ Donovan (Brain Magowan), ‘with a heart as stout as his arm . . . the finest lad in the county’, and Mary Kearney (Nora Clancy), called simply ‘gentle Mary Kearney’. Mat is a freeholder who merrily ploughs the land and embraces the role of local hero and jock, his communal status confirmed in the film’s famous hurling and hammer-throwing sequence. So close is Mat to capturing the sex appeal of the 1930s matinée idol that Brian Magowan toured with the film and sang accompaniments to his scenes.37 Mary is the daughter of a large tenant farmer, ‘limp and affectless’ when compared to Gauntier, as Barton observes.38 As such, Mat and Mary convey seemingly untroubled gender roles on screen and, if this were an Olcott film, they would undoubtedly serve as the central, though more understated, paramours denied each other’s pleasure by the coitus interruptus of colonialism. But Knocknagow belies this expectation by setting their pleasures along parallel tracks that only occasionally intersect. Though both are tenants on the estate of the absentee landlord, Sir Garrett Butler (Charles Power), Mat and Mary signify very different classes and transform into very different objects of desire on screen: thus, the delays, misunderstandings and surrogate affections that complicate the romantic plots of Mat and Mary suggest that a formal pathos lurks at the heart of Knocknagow, a deep anxiety that the rebel-and-romance plot cannot be so easily resolved, as some Kalem productions attempted. Despite initial appearances, then, the film is a cautionary tale against nostalgia. Its anxieties are most apparent in the film’s love triangles, which are multiple and complicated. Mary is courted by both Henry Lowe (Georges T. Larchett), nephew of their landlord, and Arthur O’Connor (Fred O’Donovan, the film’s director), a young man initially in training to be a priest who labours under the misimpression that Mary does not return his affections. Mat’s love interest is Bessie Morris (Alyce Keating), whose affections lie with a Dragoon, forcing Mat to choose emigration to America over romantic rejection at home. Complicating matters further is Peg Brady (Moira Breffni), who is roguishly courted by a comic servant, Barney (Patrick O’Donnell), but who, herself, has designs on Mat. The antagonist to these romance plots is the land agent Pender (J. M. Carre), a classic silent-movie villain and a carry-over from Olcott and Gauntier’s films, who campily delights in stealing rent and brutally evicting tenants from their farm. At Pender’s instigation, a family is evicted from their cottage, and this brutal scene, along with a fox hunt and other moments of savagery, implies that the opening nostalgia for ‘the Ireland of “48”’ might be more perverse than first thought, for 1848 was one of the worst years of the Famine – the backward glance of nostalgia here transforms into a series of dramatic inversions, ‘seditious codes being delivered to a receptive audience’.39 A key sequence involving Mary’s appearance at a window on Christmas morning underscores how these inversions and romantic unpleasures – each premised on delay, confusion, sickness, eviction and jealousy – issue a formal caution against nostalgic pathos. Early in the film, Arthur and his mother visit Arthur’s mentor, Father

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O’Carroll (Valentine Roberts), and, while his mother and the priest visit, Arthur gazes out of a window at Mary. The intertitle explains: ‘Arthur watches Mary from the window, with the thought of a different future, as his mother talks.’ Aware, now, that the Church may not be the best career path for one so enamoured, Arthur fawns at Mary from what the audience quickly learns is an impossible vantage. The camera reveals a three-quarter shot of Mary, who wears a white dress, twirls her hair, and smiles straight into the camera before turning her head slightly. Encouraged, Arthur departs post-haste, not hearing his mother complain to the priest, ‘It’s that girl who has disturbed his mind.’ Once Arthur is outside, the camera reveals how Mary’s appearance through the window is not straightforward observation but amatory projection. In the scene immediately following, Arthur hurries down a long road, stopping to ask Barney directions to the Kearney house, and eventually discovers Mary in her garden, dressed as she was in Arthur’s vision. Cut to the next sequence that occurs at the Kearney house on Christmas morning, when Arthur gives Barney a letter to deliver to Mary, asking ‘that she come to her window, if she has any interest in him, as he leaves Knocknagow’ to pursue his medical studies. Arthur stations himself below the window, but Barney fails to deliver the letter on time and so Mary’s face does not appear in the window at the appointed hour because she is entertaining Henry Lowe. Arthur despairs and eventually leaves his station beneath the window just before Mary and her sister open it and look out to discover Barney, who remembers to deliver the letter upon seeing their faces in the window. Lowe, a few scenes later, will lay his heart at the ‘feet of Irish farmer’s daughter’ while Mary, ‘with her thoughts on the lad who waited in vain at the window, softly says him nay’. In this extended sequence, both Mary’s and Arthur’s desires come off as a series of unfulfilled scopic pleasures: the face at the window is a fantasy, is entirely absent or simply the wrong one. Consequently, Arthur’s stagy romanticism and Mary’s distraction and belatedness are, in effect, emotions that must be quelled in order for the romance to find purchase later in the film. The sentimental plot of a lover-in-waiting is here defined in the negative. As Arthur ‘looks for a different future’ and Mary ‘softly says nay’, without romantic assurances either way, we see the film invoke a self-cancelling version of nostalgia, what Rita Felski calls a ‘critical nostalgia’, the recognition that a backward look ‘may engender active attempts to construct an alternative future, so that nostalgia comes to serve a critical rather than a simply conservative purpose’.40 Though the plot of the film takes this critical vision into a socially conservative direction – Arthur must join the middle class through his profession in order to return to Mary – it nevertheless wagers against the nostalgia of the intertitles, which insist on a historical arc of tolerated suffering. The romance plot here demands equivocation and alternative futures outside the demands of fantasy, however socially conservative they ultimately appear to be when Mary and Arthur finally do marry at the end of the film. And through Arthur’s fascination with the framed and projected image (that is, Mary’s face at the window), Knocknagow also indicts the medium of film itself for its nostalgic seductions and contrived romances. This is further evident in Mat’s exasperating courtship of Bessie. After a series of misadventures and a brief imprisonment, Mat journeys to America and discovers that Bessie lives in a ‘pretentious home’ in the ‘west, the west’ of America, a discovery that delivers a clear cinematic rebuke to the ‘head west’ refrain of some Olcott productions. Instead, Mat returns with Bessie to Ireland and they are married, though the end of Knocknagow is no less fraught than that of The Lad from Old Ireland. In the

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final scene, Arthur and Mary visit Mat and Bessie’s cottage, the two couples signifying a foursquare class structure that persists. The final intertitle, ‘Knocknagow is no more – but there are still happy homes in Tipperary, thank God,’ appears just before the actors stare at the camera and then walk solemnly off screen. The contrast between the jaunty intertitle and the actors’ parting demeanour suggests that historical sentimentality has been evacuated, the future retains its uncertainties, and the insurgent romances at the centre of Knocknagow are choreographed by unpleasure. More than a century after Olcott and Gauntier landed in Ireland, there remain in Irish cinema many ‘afterlives’, as Paige Reynolds writes in a different context, cinematic gestures that aspire to be politically provocative, local and experimental but, nevertheless, compete with or, more often than not, borrow from generic forms inherent in popular films with broad international appeal.41 The central tension of Man of Aran is one that still defines today’s film culture – art-house indie film versus Hollywood blockbuster – and resonates throughout Irish cinema during the 2010s, both in the Republic and Northern Ireland. As McCloone explains, the legacy of Michael D. Higgins’s economic package that re-established the Irish Film Board in 1993 has been to create a flourishing film culture driven largely by multinational investment and popular mandate, evidenced by such behemoth productions as Game of Thrones (2011–19), based in the former Harland and Wolff shipyards, and The Force Awakens (2015), some of which was filmed on Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry.42 So dominant have these cultural formations become that tourism in Northern Ireland now inverts the intertitles of the Kalem films: instead of films reminding the viewer of the authenticity of the landscape seen on screen, the landscape itself now reminds viewers of the authenticity of the screen image. A sign at Ballintoy beach, for example, provides a visual guide to the Iron Islands in Game of Thrones, as if the production used on-location shooting in the style of Kalem.43 This is not to say that independent, indigenous films do not exist but that, as McLoone concludes, ‘the strategies on both sides of the border follow a similar pattern that emphasises the importance of the international screen industries as drivers for both economic growth and trickle-down cultural development’, a point that Barton similarly makes in her recent study of twenty-first-century films.44 And even when the two converge, it is usually part of the ‘trickle-down’ effects noted by Barton and McLoone. Similar to the Kalem films before them, The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) are examples of the kinds of hybrid films made possible by these confluences. Both were directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, have various connections to Ireland through funding or on-location shooting, star a range of international players, and combine a darkly comic style with a romantic plot. They also contain disturbing moments of violence and, in so doing, maintain the spirit of the insurgent romance by connecting the erotic to the political in ways that are challenging and disturbing. They are two films that, in sum, conjure up the legacies of modernist film production in Ireland by committing to its heretical legacy of technical experimentation and popular fascination. Despite their many differences, the films of Olcott and Gauntier and the FCOI reimagined what collaborative, politicised art looked like in 1910s Ireland, and they did so by giving us ‘art that can change one’, as Bowen wagers, and art that screened a history of oppression and revolution to an emerging mass audience desirous of the ‘something more’ offered by independent cinema in the years preceding the rise and eventual hegemony of the studio system.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, p. 202. Cinema Correspondent, ‘Man of Aran’, p. 6. Kennedy, ‘Shamrocks and Shillelaghs’, p. 8. Anonymous, ‘Man of Aran’, p. 14. Rony, The Third Eye, p. 101. Groo, Bad Film Histories, p. 193. Cinema Correspondent, ‘Man of Aran’, p. 6. Rockett, ‘Documentaries’, p. 72. Gibbons, ‘Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema’, p. 203. Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 33. For an overview of romanticism in Irish film, see Gibbons, ‘Romanticism’, pp. 221–34. Frost, Problem with Pleasure, p. 6. Condon, Early Irish Cinema, pp. 9–10. Ibid., pp. 125–76. Perry, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. Condon, Early Irish Cinema, p. 127. Gauntier, ‘Blazing the Trail’, p. 132. Tracy, ‘Outside the System’, p. 80. The extant copies of the films are held by, and available to view online from, the Irish Film Archive at (last accessed 4 June 2020). They are also available on the DVD The O’Kalem Collection: 1910–1915 (Dublin: Irish Film Institute, 2012). Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 22. Allen, ‘Cinema, Empire, and Transition’, p. 69. Qtd in Rockett, ‘The Silent Period’, p. 10; see also Flynn, Story of Irish Film, pp. 15–16. After Olcott met with the local bishop, the priest issued an apology. Tracy, ‘Outside the System’, p. 80. McIlroy, ‘Sidney Olcott and Irish Politics’, p. 108. Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, pp. 31–62. Rockett, ‘Representations of Irish History’, pp. 219–20. McIlroy, ‘Sidney Olcott and Irish Politics’, pp. 117–20. Ó’Faoláin, ‘Case History’, p. 5. McLoone, Irish Film, pp. 28–9. Qtd in Felter and Schultz, ‘James Mark Sullivan’, p. 38. Downing, ‘The Film Company’, p. 44. Chase and Shaw, ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’, p. 15. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 156. Hutcheon, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern’, p. 250, italics in original. Ging, Men and Masculinities, p. 39. Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 27. Condon, Early Irish Cinema, p. 253. Barton, Irish National Cinema, p. 31. Allen, ‘Cinema, Empire and Transition’, p. 67. Felski, Gender of Modernity, p. 59. See Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–8. McLoone, ‘Foreword’, p. xii. See Egner, ‘Game of Thrones is Ending’. McLoone, ‘Foreword’, p. xii.; see Barton, Irish Cinema, pp. 1–39.

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Filmography (films shot in Ireland) Bold Emmett, Ireland’s Martyr (United States: Sid Olcott International Feature Film Players, 1915; 3,000 ft; dir. Sidney Olcott). For Ireland’s Sake (United States: Gene Gauntier Feature Players, 1914; 3,000 ft; dir. Sidney Olcott). Knocknagow (Ireland: Film Company of Ireland, 1918; 7,910/8,700 ft; dir. Fred O’Donovan). The Lad from Old Ireland (United States: Kalem, 1910; 824/1,009 ft; dir. Sidney Olcott). Man of Aran (Britain: Gainsborough Pictures, 1934; dir. Robert Flaherty). Rory O’More (United States: Kalem, 1911; 761 ft; dir. Sidney Olcott). You Remember Ellen (United States: Kalem, 1912; dir. Sidney Olcott).

Bibliography Allen, Nicholas, ‘Cinema, Empire and Transition’, Modernist Cultures, 5:1 (2010), pp. 65–78. Anonymous, ‘Man of Aran’, Irish Press (28 May 1934), p. 14. Barton, Ruth, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Barton, Ruth, Irish National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004). Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, in Allen Hepburn (ed.), Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 192–202. Chase, Malcolm, and Christopher Shaw, ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’, in Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (eds), The Imagined Past, History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 1–17. Cinema Correspondent, ‘“Man of Aran.” Mr. Flaherty’s Fine Picture. First Showing in Dublin’, Irish Times (7 May 1934), p. 6. Condon, Denis, Early Irish Cinema: 1895–1921 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2008). Downing, Taylor, ‘The Film Company of Ireland’, Sight & Sound, 49:1 (1979), pp. 42–5. Egner, Jeremy, ‘“Game of Thrones” is Ending. But You Can Still Visit Westeros’, New York Times (5 April 2019), (last accessed 1 June 2020). Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Felter, Maryanne, and Daniel Schultz, ‘James Mark Sullivan and the Film Company of Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, 8:2 (2004), pp. 24–40. Flynn, Arthur, The Story of Irish Film (Blackrock: Currach Press, 2005). Frost, Laura, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Gauntier, Gene, ‘Blazing the Trail’, Woman’s Home Companion (December 1928), pp. 15–16, 132 and 134. Gibbons, Luke, ‘Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema in Ireland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 194–257. Ging, Debbie, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Groo, Katherine, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Hutcheon, Linda, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern’, in Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed.), The History on Film Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 248–59.

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Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). Kennedy, Harlan, ‘Shamrocks and Shillelaghs: Idyll and Ideology in Irish Cinema’, in J. MacKillop (ed.), Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 1–10. McIlroy, Brian, ‘Sidney Olcott and Irish Politics: The Lad from Old Ireland (1910)’, New Hibernia Review, 1:4 (2017), pp. 106–21. McLoone, Martin, ‘Foreword: Irish National Cinema – What Have We Wrought? Contemporary Thoughts on a Recent History’, in Barry Monahan (ed.), Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. vii–xvii. McLoone, Martin, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000). Ó’Faoláin, Seán, ‘Case History of an Irish Best-Seller’, Irish Times (10 May 1941), p. 5. Perry, Ted, ‘Introduction’, in Ted Perry (ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2006), pp. 1–12. Reynolds, Paige, ‘Introduction’, in Paige Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 1–8. Rockett, Kevin, ‘Documentaries’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema in Ireland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 71–94. Rockett, Kevin, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). Rockett, Kevin, ‘Representations of Irish History in Fiction Films Made Prior to the 1916 Rising’, in Laurence M. Geary (ed.), Rebellion and Remembrance in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 214–28. Rockett, Kevin, ‘The Silent Period’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema in Ireland (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 3–50. Rony, Fatimah Tobing, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Tracy, Tony, ‘Outside the System: Gene Gauntier and the Consolidation of Early American Cinema’, Film History: An International Journal, 28:1 (2016), pp. 71–106.

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15 ‘Put “Molotoff bread-basket” into Irish, please’: CRUISKEEN LAWN, Dada and the Blitz Catherine Flynn

I

n 1940, Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien, began the Cruiskeen Lawn column for The Irish Times. The column has often been dismissed by critics as an amusing distraction and a depletion of O’Nolan’s literary energies.1 Scholarship has tended to concentrate on the novels he published under the name of Flann O’Brien, such as At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. Yet the achievement of these novels granted, Cruiskeen Lawn may be O’Nolan’s most important work. To recognise its significance, and to understand the role of the ‘ironic stancelessness’ which critics detect in it, we must look to its moment of inception, and understand its response to that moment.2 Close attention to the relation of the linguistic effects of individual instalments to their immediate historical context, something which is disguised by the non-chronological and predominantly English-language anthologies in which selected instalments have been published to date, shows that Cruiskeen Lawn establishes new dimensions to Irish modernism, as it redirects modernist strategies to the relatively non-literary sphere of journalism. If O’Nolan has been unfavourably contrasted with Irish modernist exiles such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and seen as hampered in his writing by choosing to remain in Ireland, the particular constraints and challenges that came with this choice prompted the aesthetic innovations of Cruiskeen Lawn. Indeed, the self-contained genre of the novel might have been rendered unexciting for O’Nolan by comparison to the urgency and scope of the column, as it moved back and forth between languages and hijacked an entire newspaper to intervene in public discourse at a time of unprecedented violence. The first Cruiskeen Lawn appeared less than one month after the Germans began their Blitz on London. This shift in Germany’s tactics occurred on 7 September 1940: a substitute for invasion, the bombing was the start of a concentrated attack on British citizenry. Ireland, too, braced itself for bombs. The Irish Times notes preparations undertaken in Dublin for air raids, despite the country’s neutrality in the war: ‘Corporation employés are digging a shelter in Dublin to accommodate about 2000 people in the event of an air raid. . . . Trench shelters similar to those in London parks are also being prepared.’3 On 4 October, the day of the first Cruiskeen Lawn, The Irish Times reports the daytime bombing of a Sussex village by a German air-raider, a Royal Air Force attack on Hamburg, the Italian invasion of Egypt, and a German ‘express[ion] of regret to the Government of Éire for having erroneously dropped bombs on Irish territory’, which had caused the deaths of three women.4 In the previous week, Irish

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Times editor R. M. Smyllie writes in conflicted terms about the Blitz; making light of its effects, he writes that ‘the loss of life has been comparatively small’, that business in London has continued ‘more or less as usual’, and that ‘there is no sign of the slightest weakening in popular moral [sic]’.5 Yet a note of alarm sounds in his identification of the new, wholesale violence: When a bomb falls in the streets of London – or, for that matter, in the streets of Berlin – it makes no question of sex or age. It strikes indiscriminately at all who come within its devastating reach, sparing neither old nor young. In this respect, the present war is far more horrible than the last.6 There is a common view that Cruiskeen Lawn offered merely escapism and entertainment during World War II. In one of the earliest critical accounts, Anne Clissmann sets the tone, writing of the column’s ‘sense of mad and eccentric contradiction’, and ascribes to it a ‘transcending and consolatory role’ during the war.7 Yet, Irish Times articles from the previous months show culture and violence encountering one another in absurd ways in an increasingly tense Europe. One article notes the increase in traffic accidents in the darkened cities of London and Dublin, where lampposts and kerbs are painted white, and encourages pedestrians to dress in light colours and carry newspapers to ensure visibility during blackouts.8 In this increasingly strange environment, text and music take on new active roles. Another article quotes German Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s observation that: ‘if the British airplanes fly at tremendous height at night and drop their ridiculous propaganda on German territory I have nothing against it. But take care, if the leaflets are replaced by one bomb then reprisals will follow and will be carried out as in Poland.’9 Another Irish Times article notes the persistence of Polish radio broadcasters during the bombing of Warsaw: The sound of bombs and machine-gun fire and the crashing of masonry were heard clearly by listeners in Dublin who tuned in last night to a broadcast announced as being from Warsaw, during which such announcements as ‘we shall broadcast until our last breath’ were alternated with gramophone records of Chopin’s music, in which the Funeral March was often repeated. The sound of gunfire and bomb explosions almost drowned the hoarse voice of the announcer who, working in darkness, spoke at times in French, Polish and English, frequently reiterating ‘we must have peace’.10 If this opposition of culture and violence forms the backdrop to Cruiskeen Lawn, the column itself combines them to powerful effect. This was not the column’s brief: Smyllie commissioned O’Nolan to write an Irish-language column as part of his attempt to position The Irish Times as a liberal, pan-Irish publication. Anthony Cronin writes of his programme for the paper: It was Smyllie’s ambition to reduce the dependence of the Irish Times on the Protestant Unionist readership, which was diminishing every day; to make it the organ of the more liberal and more intellectual elements in the new state; and to modify its west British outlook accordingly.11

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Smyllie’s plan to feature the Irish language resonated with the desires of the Irish state; in his 1937 Constitution of Ireland, Éamon de Valera declared Irish the first official language, although less than a quarter of the people identified themselves as Irish speakers in the census of 1936, and even that number, scholars have argued, was inflated due to an absence of a definition for ‘Irish speaker’ in the census.12 The importance of Irish for the country was asserted in de Valera’s 1940 statement that ‘Ireland with its language and without freedom is preferable to Ireland with freedom and without its language.’13 The Irish language not only presented an alternative to Anglophone culture but also promised the possibility of a retreat from contemporary international events. O’Nolan was a likely choice for Smyllie’s plan, being fluent in the Irish language, an employee in the Civil Service, and the author of a series of witty and incisive letters to the newspaper in the preceding months. Despite his brief, in the first weeks of the column, O’Nolan questioned the nature and function of an Irish-language column. Writing, in Irish, under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, he observes: In the other newspapers there are columns that are called ‘news of the day’. These columns explain in Irish to readers that this and that happened throughout the world, despite that the whole newspaper is full of the same news in English. On that subject, for fear that readers of this paper would be blind to the large and terrible events of these times, we wish to communicate to you that there is a big war going on at present between England and Germany. We will have another piece of news tomorrow.14 Myles’s comments indicate the redundancy of news in Irish, as the majority of Irish speakers are bilingual. His brief summary of world events pokes fun at the notion of a population cut off from the outside world and content with the most telegraphic of news bulletins.15 These issues are further complicated by the fact that Cruiskeen Lawn appears at a time when even news commentary in English was constrained. Following Ireland’s declaration of neutrality in the war, the Emergency Powers Bill authorised the government to ban any statement of support for either set of combatants, which forced newspapers to focus on reportage of events, rather than analysis and debate. According to Terence Brown, this led to the ‘propagandistic reiteration of the familiar terms of Irish political and cultural debate until these categories became mere counters and slogans remote from any actualities’.16 Cruiskeen Lawn responds to these limits and ossifications of language not with reportage and reasoned discourse but with a new genre of writing. Irish, Myles comments, ‘is a dialectic rather than a dialect’.17 This dialectic, however, is not a linear, teleological progression, but an encounter of diverse voices. In its first months, Cruiskeen Lawn moves between the Irish and English languages, often juxtaposing them in a single instalment or transliterating one in the orthography of the other. These early instalments question the parameters and possibilities of a purely Irish voice, refusing to allow readers to ignore contemporary violence and compelling them to consider the relation between Irish nationalism and totalitarianism. The first Cruiskeen Lawn presents a domestic scene in which a mother violently refuses to translate the term ‘Molotoff bread-basket’ into Irish for her son.18 The instalment begins by reproducing a section from the Irish Times editorial of 28 September, which asserts the difficulty of ‘Irish in the Home’: ‘at a time such as the present when children all over the world are trying to keep pace with an influx of new words as a result of the war

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news bulletins, it becomes well-nigh impossible’. The editorial thus adopts a paternalistic, evasive stance, addressing children’s difficulties with the vocabulary of war rather than the war itself. It concludes: ‘Parents who confine the family meal-time to conversations in Irish must find it very difficult to explain such words as air-raid warden, incendiary bomb, non-aggression pact, decontamination, and Molotoff bread-basket.’ This Irish-language meal appears in the Cruiskeen Lawn in caricature form, where the patriotic and devoted parent is transformed into a monstrous embodiment of official norms. O’Nolan chooses the last of these terms as the focus of the instalment. ‘Molotoff bread-basket’ requires some explanation: in the Winter War of 1939–40, Russian aircraft dropped firebomb dispensers upon Finland in an attempt to force the Finnish government to surrender to the demands of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs. In response to public outcry, Molotov insisted that only airbases had been bombed, that the photographs of ruined buildings in Helsinki dated from 1918 and that the Soviet aircraft had only dropped bread for the starving Finnish people. The bomb dispensers subsequently earned the epithet of Molotov’s bread-baskets.19 In opposition to the confinement of Irish to harmless domestic concerns, in Cruiskeen Lawn Irish becomes an echo-chamber of contemporary events. In the second half of the same instalment, Myles presents the language as a site of lexical wealth and energetic variety, exhibiting a list of ways to say Molotoff bread-basket in Irish. He begins with the polite and literal ‘Cliabh aráin an duine-uasil Uí Mhuilitíbh’, which might be translated as ‘the bread basket of the respected Mr. Mulateev’, and ends with the transliteration ‘Brad-bhascaod Mhalatábh’. In between, he suggests ‘Manna Rúiseach’ (Russian manna), ‘Rúiskeen Lawn’ (full little volley of shots) and ‘Feirín ó Stailín’ (a gift from Stalin). The former two synonyms range from the humanitarian aid alluded to by the Russians to an accurate description of the Molotoff bread-basket as an explosive device. This is a bravura set of translations but the phrases effect an explosion of meaning, amplifying through translation absurdly contradictory accounts of an occasion of violence. In treating the Russian bombing of Helsinki, the instalment evokes, indirectly, the Blitz on London. As it does so, it disrupts the contained format and straightforward communicative mode of the journalistic article with frame-breaking, pun and polyglossia. Its polyglot contradiction becomes intensified as the instalment considers what the editorial holds to be an appropriate contemporary usage of Irish. ‘The task of reviving Irish’, we are told, would be hard ‘unless conversation could be limited to requests for food and drink’. And who wants conversation on any other subject? Why not admit that hardly anybody ever thinks of anything else? If on and after tomorrow the entire Irish Times should be printed in Irish, there would not be a word about anything but food and drink. Those who find that they cannot do without ‘incendiary bombs’, ‘decontamination’, and the like, would have to get some other paper to accompany their ghoul’s breakfast. The Irish would be full of cainnt na ndaoine [demotic language], excerpts from Séadna [a contemporary Irish-language novel which O’Nolan often scorned], corra-cainnte [unusual formulations], sean-fhocla [old proverbs], and dánta díreacha [Irish alliterative poetry], and would embody examples of béarla féinne [literally, the language of warriors, while ‘béarla féine’ refers to ancient legal language] and even én-béarla, or bird dialect.

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The list is complicated by the double meaning of ‘béarla’, both speech and the English language. This space of proper Irish speech, then, is one that is emphatically, even absurdly, native and, simultaneously, foreign. In adopting modernist techniques of translation, polyglossia and fragmentation, Cruiskeen Lawn anticipates the practice of Caribbean poets of the 1950s and 1960s who, Jahan Ramazani argues, used European modernist forms to counter imperial cultural norms; modernist tropes such as bricolage, syncretism and polyglossia formed ‘emancipatory alternatives to the closed, emotive monologic voice of the canonical English lyric purveyed in the schools’.20 Ramazani writes of the uses of modernist form to express a hybridity that opposed forms of cultural dominance [which were] often local instantiations of the imperium – Victorian sentiment and monologue, missionary prudishness and hypocrisy, colonial education and racism, a tourist industry complicit in the production of imprisoning stereotypes, and nationalisms and nativisms that mirrored European norms in reverse.21 Cruiskeen Lawn goes further: as it counters the nationalism and nativisms of the newly independent postcolonial Irish nation, it moves outside of literary genres, and outside of the available genres of the newspaper, excerpting the discourse of its day and amplifying, distorting and subverting it through linguistic play. Critics have observed the classificatory challenge the column thus presents to literary scholars. Steven Young writes: We critics have no category for the artist who transforms the banal into art, but insists on leaving it in the realm of the ephemeral and the topical. Cruiskeen Lawn has not received the attention it deserves, because it runs counter to our available ways of talking about literature.22 I propose here that we might understand Cruiskeen Lawn’s art of the ephemeral with reference to some of the characteristics of the avant-garde. Most notable among these is Peter Bürger’s account of the avant-garde’s dismantling of aesthetic autonomy. The avant-garde, according to Bürger, rejects the boundaries and conventions of established art – the work of art, the artist as genius, the museum as the repository of art – and intervenes directly in the ‘praxis’ of life to ‘trigger a general crisis in consciousness [and] an attack on society’s dominant reality principle’.23 Thus, if Joseph Brooker observes that Cruiskeen Lawn ‘was much preoccupied with the idea of “art” – an idea from which the column itself was generically excluded’, closer examination of Cruiskeen Lawn reveals that it matters less that it cannot be classified as art, traditionally conceived, and more that it re-establishes the aesthetic as engaged in the otherwise realist discursive space of journalistic prose, instantiating a hybrid practice that attacks central contemporary norms.24 The nature of Cruiskeen Lawn’s hybrid practice can be drawn out through reference to terms used by the other seminal theorist of the avant-garde, Renato Poggioli. Avant-garde poetic language, Poggioli writes, is a ‘game of multiple, diverse and opposing meanings’.25 In this childish play, language becomes a plaything that is set against rational discourse. Avant-garde production thus opposes the capriciousness, arbitrariness and evasiveness of

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a child’s world to the ‘unalterable correctness’ of the adult world of authority, convention and articulate discourse.26 If Cruiskeen Lawn, like Blather, has been understood as offering merely a space of play, this ludic quality is particularly important at the moment of Cruiskeen Lawn’s inception. Not only does it offer its readers an opportunity to partake in entertaining nonsense but it also prompts a reflection on contemporary Irish discourse, on national and international subjects, through the subversion of conventional language and thought. This engagement of childish play is signalled in the first instalment. Having quoted the editorial on wartime vocabulary, Myles comments: ‘One can imagine the stormy philological breakfasts that obtain in the households of the Gael,’ and the column shifts into dramatic mode, taking the form of a theatrical script with stage directions and dialogue. The breakfast scene opens with the boy’s limited, frustrated reading of The Irish Times. There are sufficient English phrases to allow readers with no knowledge of Irish to access the plot and to perceive the Irish language as a site of troubled communication and violence. Although Shawn expresses himself mainly in Irish, the stage directions are in English and Shawn lapses into English at the height of the conflict. It begins: ‘Shawn Beg (peering into the Irish Times)’; the phrase Molotoff bread-basket is repeated; it subsequently appears in an entirely English phrase, ‘But, Maw! What’s Molotoff bread-basket?’; and the final comment is preceded by the stage direction ‘Mother (leading with her right)’. A reader limited to English can understand the piece as staging a conflict between Mother Ireland, grown incomprehensible and violent, and a representative Irish son, ‘Shawn Beg’, whose transliterated name (Shawn Beg from Séan Beag, little Sean) emphasises his dependent status. The Irish dialogue in this scene locates the exchange within an environment of paternalistic repression and force-feeding. While the son asks for a translation, the mother repeatedly urges him to eat his porridge and to be quiet. Food here is a means not only of nourishing Shawn but also of silencing him. The mother refuses to tolerate his taste in food, just as she repudiates his desire to discuss contemporary political events. This force-feeding resembles the teaching of Irish. Ronan Fanning notes the imposition of the Irish language on schoolchildren: from 1926, all infant classes were taught through Irish regardless of the educational consequences for children who spoke not a word of Irish in their homes; and Irish was then progressively introduced into the higher primary classes. Similar measures, including special incentives and awards for both teachers and pupils, were introduced in secondary schools . . . Irish was made a compulsory subject in 1934. 27 The scene in Cruiskeen Lawn illustrates not the limitations of the Irish language, but rather its use to limit communication: one phrase is capitalised, ‘BI I DO THOST, ADEIRIM’ (BE SILENT, I SAY). The scene suggests the damage done by the enforcement of the language on the youth: Shawn Beg responds that he will neither eat porridge again nor have any respect for the Irish language. However, earlier in the dialogue, he refers to Irish as nothing but ‘seanchanamhain ghagach’. ‘Sean’ is the Irish word for ‘old’; Dinneen translates ‘canamhain’ as ‘witty sayings’ and ‘gágach’ as ‘leaky, full of chinks or cracks; apt to open into fissures’.28 In opposition to the mother’s repressive and restrictive use of Irish, then, the boy invokes a comic and

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porous linguistic performance. This alternative mode characterises the translations of Molotoff bread-basket featured in the instalment; its lexical play is thus linked with a childish pleasure. This scene goes beyond the subject of nativist repression by identifying the mother’s response with contemporary, totalitarian violence. In suppressing the child’s native English, the mother is doing the will of the state; the Irish Times lead article quoted at the beginning of the instalment alluded to a £2 bonus given by the government to ‘parents who persuade their children to conduct their everyday lives entirely without the aid of English’. But the final line of the scene identifies the mother with a Soviet Union bomber over Helsinki: ‘Mother (leading with her right): Bhéarfadsa Molotoff bread-basket duit, a thaisce, a aingilín bhig léigheanta’ (I’ll give you a Molotoff breadbasket, my treasure, my little learned angel). In her nurturing role, the mother is thus, comically, an agent of cultural and political violence. The instalment finishes with a complex phrase which replaces youth with official agencies of repression: ‘Mol an OGPU agus tiocfaidh siad’, a pun on the Irish proverb ‘Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí’ (Praise the youth and they will come on). ‘Óige’, the word for youth, is replaced with OGPU, an acronym for the Russian secret police of the time, and so the sentence reads ‘Praise the Russian Secret Police and they will come on.’ The mother, as the statesponsored agent of repression and control, replaces the child as the object of praise and as the desired subject of development. The distorted proverb thus links the Irish governmental encouragement of the linguistic control of children by their parents to a lethal agency of the Stalinist Soviet Union. If this alignment of Irish with Soviet policy were not striking enough, the instalment offers a further link to contemporary international events. Just before the proverb that ends the article, O’Nolan responds to the question posed in the editorial, ‘Has Gaelic ingenuity, for that matter, stretched so far as to provide a really expressive and indigenous equivalent for the well-known “Axis”?’ It answers, with a definitive tone, ‘Finally, let it be said that the Irish for “Axis” is “Mol”, which sounds like short for Molotoff.’ This is the closest direct reference to the Second World War in the instalment and it is embedded in wordplay. ‘Mol’ means, literally, ‘axis’, ‘hub’ or ‘shaft’; it is also the imperative of the Irish verb ‘praise’, and as O’Nolan himself points out, an abbreviation of the name of an expansionist foreign minister who misrepresents a bomb dispenser as a delivery of aid. O’Nolan thus names the Axis forces without presenting a clear stance; the lexical wealth of the Irish language is employed to allow the ambiguous and troubling reinsertion of contemporary international politics into a discussion of the domestic use of the Irish language. In the context of the mother’s suppression of political discussion at the breakfast table, the turn to the vocabulary of World War II through an insistence on the possibility of translation takes on a defiant quality. The Soviet Union and the Axis powers (at that point, Germany and Italy) are thus made present in the instalment without clear denotation, but associated with the violence of the Irish state. This identification of common violence opposes any nationalist desire to idealise an Irish stance of disengagement. Instead, the instalment’s contradictory, polyglot language critiques nationalist positions, in a manner that recalls the babble of Dada. An avant-garde collective of international artists based in neutral Switzerland, Dada opposed with deliberate irrationality the rationalistic nationalist discourse of World War I. Cruiskeen Lawn’s collapse of nationalist isolation recalls the Dadaist use of polyglot forms and aggressive nonsense to assert their cross-cultural links and their defiance of national propagandas. Poggioli characterises

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the Dada movement as the most extreme exemplar of the avant-garde’s infantile delight in senseless destruction: perhaps it was only in Dadaism that the nihilistic tendency functioned as the primary, even solitary, psychic condition; there it took the form of an instransigent puerility, an extreme infantilism . . . as practical psychology teaches us, the taste for destruction seems innate in the soul of the child.29 While Dadaist forms such as the simultaneous poems are strikingly discordant, Cruiskeen Lawn’s multilingual puns often instil a more insidious sense of unease.30 Yet the column’s identification with violence is announced by one of its translations of Molotoff bread-basket: the anglicised ‘Rúiskeen Lawn’ echoes the title of the column, the closeness of Ruiskeen and Cruiskeen suggesting that the column resembles a bomb that is falsely represented as assistance. As I attempt to show here, attention to the linguistic and formal nature of the early Cruiskeen Lawn prompts us to distinguish between literal topical discussion – the straightforward expression of content and opinions – and performative experimental intervention, or the blasting apart of closed linguistic spaces and fixed concepts. As Carol Taaffe observes, Cruiskeen Lawn became noticeably more topical after censorship was suspended in May 1945, as Myles commented on the atomic bomb, the Nuremberg trials, and the spat over the airwaves between Churchill and de Valera. Free to look beyond internal squabbles, the column swiftly responded to the consequences of war and this broader scope was sustained to the end of the decade.31 In contrast to these later, explicit, discussions, the early column’s aggression and playfulness respond to the contemporary reiteration of ready-made phrases, counters and slogans that allowed actualities to go unconsidered. In its first month, the column repeatedly sets its sights on the principles of cultural nationalism and isolationism. On 26 October, Cruiskeen Lawn sneaks references to the physical realities of the conflict into a seemingly straightforward lesson in the differences between the Irish and English languages. The piece is bilingual, divided almost evenly between English Roman and Irish uncial font. The English account of the Irish language adopts an authoritative pedagogical tone, informing us that the letter H is an ‘auxiliary, obtrusive and inelegant letter, while J, K, Q, W, X, Y, and Z are missing completely’.32 A sense of colonial exasperation is communicated in the observation that ‘All the vowels, like the Irishry they serve, can become fugitive when not accented.’ The Irish language section displays a similarly flawed sociolinguistic reasoning: ‘Tá seac`t litreac`a breise 'san aibg`ítír S˙asanac`—J. K. Q. W. X. Y agus Z. Na focla béarla is táb`ac`taige agus is mó úsáid, táid com`-d`éanta le na litreac`a úd, e.g. jockey, whiskey, axis, quid, sex, virtue, government, Jewish, navvy, love. Ba c`úm`ang`, dá b`ríg sin, an saog`al a b`éad` ag aoinne i Sasanna gan ac`t Gaed`ilg aige’. (There are seven extra letters in the English alphabet – J, K, Q, W, X, Y and Z. The most important and frequently used English words are constructed from these letters, e.g., jockey, whiskey, axis, quid, sex, virtue, government, Jewish, navvy, love. Because of this, life must be restricted for anyone in England who can speak only Irish.)

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As the list names various categories of ‘English’ life, it undermines the asserted difference of Irish and English cultures: all of these exclusively ‘British’ preoccupations were also important aspects of Irish culture of the time. The list thus fails as a description of cultural specificity and instead draws attention to how similar life is in Ireland and England, despite Irish attempts to foster a native, traditional culture. In a manner similar to that of the initial Cruiskeen Lawn, World War II enters almost casually into this ostensible discussion of language. The list of ‘the most important and frequently used English words’ contains the word ‘axis’. Its inclusion in the list parodies the attempt to create an Irish existence where German forces can be neither named nor experienced. The war is included indirectly once again at the end of the piece in a discussion of the absence of aspiration in the English language: ‘I n-ionad tinfead` do c`ur ar litreac`a áirit`e mar déantar i nGaed`ilg, baintear an tinfead` i Sasana as focla ina b`fuil sé ó dút`c`as, e.g. ’arm i n-ionad harm, ’ope i n-ionad hope, agus mar san de’ (Instead of aspirating certain letters, as is done in Irish, in English aspiration is taken from words in which it existed traditionally, e.g. ’arm instead of harm, ’ope instead of hope, and so on). These words are particularly timely in October of 1940. The vernacular distortion multiplies the connotations of the physical and emotional realities of the war: ‘arm’ evokes a weapon, while ‘ope’ suggests a hole blasted in a building. Another article, from 25 October, stages a confrontation between emblems of Irish identity and the realities of war, suggesting that the roofs of air-raid shelters in the centre of Dublin be used as platforms for Irish traditional dancing: Strong, low, one-storied houses they are, situated nicely here and there on the edge of the street. If the Gaelic League had any initiative, there would be Irish dances going on every night on the tops of these houses. The roof of each house is nice and wide and if you were looking for a stage for entertainment, you couldn’t get a more suitable place.33 The piece invokes colonial prejudices in lamenting that ‘the Gaels were ever without resilience, without get-up-and-go, and without knowledge of how to benefit themselves’.34 This counsel to Irish traditional culture is underlaid with the prospect of sadistic pleasure in watching the bombing of Gaelic entertainment (the section is called ‘Siamsa Gaedheal’). The collision of nativist culture, colonial prejudice – the shiftless Irish – and wartime violence collapses any stable notion of Irish identity, necessitating new reflection. On an expanded scale, other instalments link Ireland to radically different actors in the war: to vulnerable Bulgaria, forced by Germany to join the Axis powers in 1941, and, at the other end of the power spectrum, to Japan. In the latter instalment, Myles identifies the imperialist Japanese slogan Hakko-ichiu with the Irish motto and political party Sinn Féin, associating the Irish republican desire for the restoration of Northern Ireland with Japanese desires to put ‘the whole world under one roof’.35 As Cruiskeen Lawn’s fractured, polyglossic language and multipartite form disrupt conventional concepts and narratives, Irish neutrality becomes a central target. The historian Michael Cronin describes Irish attitudes to non-participation in the Second World War: ‘The decision of neutrality was driven, not by a moral choice between Nazism and Allied notions of democracy, but by a desire to demonstrate to

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the whole world that Éire was the master of its own destiny.’36 In attacking singular narratives – the particular form in which destiny is understood to unfold – Cruiskeen Lawn upsets notions of physical and national separation, and in doing so invites new thought regarding Irish policies. This invitation depends on a withholding of position, the detached inconsistency that Anthony Cronin criticises in the twenty-six-year-long column: if the first instalment is a ‘bilingual joke not unrelated to the events of the day [. . .] Even in this, the very first column of all, the ironic stancelessness, the refusal to adopt any real side in any argument, is evident’.37 The column’s refusal to adopt a stance was observed in letters to the editor. Many readers underline the necessity of putting humour to use for a political side, in accordance with Smyllie’s own discussion of humour in an editorial on 8 October, in which he describes Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons as playing a valuable role in keeping up morale in World War I. Alan Malone defines, with either machismo or wartime cheer, the ‘true writer of humour as a man who can “keep it up” and evoke from the reader the tribute: “Oh, this writer is always awfully funny.”’38 A ‘WestBriton-Nationalist’ criticises the stancelessness of the Cruiskeen Lawn’s humour: What are your inspiring motives in the little ‘skits’ you have started in the Irish Times? . . . Have you any positive idea behind your ‘corner’? If so, I would like to know it, and so would a number of my friends.39 This writer asserts ‘positive loyalties’, claiming a paradoxical middle ground between ‘faithfulness to Country and King and Empire’ and ‘complete isolation from Empire and from the British Crown’, an unclear position, as might be expected from a person with the contradictory name of ‘West-Briton-Nationalist’. Three days later, a letter from P. M. Bh. praises the West-Briton-Nationalist’s ‘honest and clear thinking exposition’ and ‘honesty, tolerance and true breadth of thought’.40 P. M. Bh. goes on to criticise Smyllie for attempting to ‘sabotage (as they say nowadays) the propagation of the Irish language and things Irish’ and asks the editor to ‘refrain from the petty maliciousness which you display towards [the Irish language] . . . because you fear the living tongue’.41 P. O hAodha writes: ‘I do not propose to take part in any controversy about your feature “Cruiskeen Lawn”, because I do not think that nonsense is a thing that can be argued about with advantage.’42 The purposeless humour of the early Cruiskeen Lawn none the less effects an intervention in Irish public discourse. In a letter that articulates the ethos of Cruiskeen Lawn so accurately it might have been written by Myles himself, Oscar Love writes: ‘The decay of humour in Eire is largely due to the spread of patriotism, for the patriot cannot appreciate his neighbours, but he worships himself.’43 As Cruiskeen Lawn occupies itself almost entirely with satires on aspects of Irish culture, according to Love’s definition it has the makings of a very funny column indeed. In response to Malone’s complaint that there are no humorous Irish writers because they are not ‘always awfully funny’, Love presents a more substantive explanation: Ireland cannot produce a Lear, a Lewis, or a W. S. Gilbert, because the Irish have not yet discovered that nonsense is a new sense. This sense is unknown to dictators. If present-day dictators possessed a sense of nonsense, the world would be rocked with laughter instead of shocked with bombs.44

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Love’s celebration of nonsense humour indicates the political dimension to the column’s stancelessness: mocking all sides and positing only irrationalities, the column’s style of humour responds not just to the dictates of Irish cultural nationalism, but to dictatorship in general. Nonsense here is the opposite of absolute power: if dictatorship is the violent imposition of autocratic will through unequivocal language, nonsense, in contrast, is pointless behaviour, communication that is purposefully unruly. Yet this humour is not innocuous: in the rhyming parallelism of Love’s phrase, laughter is rendered as uncomfortably similar to explosive devices, shaking bodies against their will.45 This violent humour mocks not just individual will but also individual authorship, in a manner that realises some of the most important aims of the historical avantgarde. Orvell and Powell trace the appearance over the preceding months of ‘the puckish voice of Myles’ in letters by Oscar Love, Lir O’Connor and Flann O’Brien, among others.46 Cronin observes that ‘it is difficult to be sure which letters are fake and which are genuine’.47 Some of the most virulent attacks upon the column are signed with names as eccentric as ‘Séainín na nAsal’ (Little Sean of the Donkeys). Oscar Love’s name somewhat implausibly joins an Irish mythic warrior to a strikingly positive affection; West-Briton-Nationalist’s name is an unlikely contradiction in terms, although his follow-up letter on 19 October smacks of sincere engagement. Not only Brian O’Nolan might have penned these missives; his friends, Niall Montgomery and Niall Sheridan, might have written them too. In a letter to his superiors, O’Nolan writes that ‘A considerable amount of material appearing in the Irish Times under Cruiskeen Lawn is not written by me at all. I have two substitutes or “stand-ins”.’48 Brooker therefore sees these letters as an example of collective authorship, which, like ‘the Blather project can be read as an ambiguous, belated echo of those European avantgarde groups – Futurism, Dada and Surrealism – in which the individual artist was also a member of the collaborative team’.49 But we can understand the unusual upsurge of letters that responded to the column as a more radical version of avant-garde collectivity: provoked by Cruiskeen Lawn, a heterogeneous public collective (that includes O’Nolan, Montgomery and Sheridan) responds with perception and wit to the implicit political assumptions and linguistic details of published discourse. This burgeoning of letters to The Irish Times thus fulfils one of the primary characteristics of the avantgarde as described by Bürger: ‘Given the avant-gardiste intention to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life, it is logical to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient.’50 The column’s mobilisation of the public is paralleled by its activation of the newspaper in which it appears. Cruiskeen Lawn’s destabilisation of the accepted tokens of reality goes further than the letters page. Once the frame of the column is broken, the whole newspaper invites a new kind of scrutiny. If the reader looks with suspicion upon the letters pages, he or she also experiences a heightened sense of the absurdity of the world portrayed by The Irish Times, as photographs of the destruction caused by the Blitz on London are juxtaposed with photographs of horses at fairs, notices for sales of fur coats and sausages, and society pages. This expansive effect lends new significance to the column’s title, a transliteration of a phrase from an Irish drinking song, ‘cruiscín lán’, ‘full little jug’. Spilling over into the whole newspaper, covering an ever-wider scope, this full little jug contrasts with the figure used by Tomás Ó Criomhthain at the opening of his iconic Blasket autobiography, An t-Oileánach (The Islander): ‘Is mé

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dríodar an chrúiscín, deire an áil. Sin é an fáth gur fágadh comh fada ar na cíní me’51 (You might call me the dregs of the little jug, the last of the brood. That’s why I was left so long feeding on my mother’s breast.)52 Ó Criomhthain elegises a dying island culture; Cruiskeen Lawn begins with a refusal of mother’s food and of the conventional limits of Irish life. This full little jug is celebrated by Myles himself: I have received letters from the people who are drunk from this jug. The beer does not appeal to some of them, others think that the drop-blast I make available here is too wonderful. But I couldn’t care less. In a week’s time, when I am tired and the well of wisdom is dried up, there will be the same Irish to read in this paper as there is in the other papers. We will have News of the Day as well as everyone. We will have the usual mad foolishness on Warsaw and on Egypt and on Romania and on Czechoslovakia and on Russia and whatever you want yourself, Seán. Conflict between Romania and Hungary! Air-raid on Liverpool, England! Fierce fighting in Egypt between Italy and Great Britain! Speech by Roosevelt on Romania and Egypt! War between Romania and Egypt! Egypt in the middle! Romania in the middle! Peace between Egypt and Romania! Another air-raid on Liverpool, England! Huge fires in Berlin! Air-raid on Dublin! War between Ireland and Romania! It’s a pity that Ireland is a small country and that its name is so small. It doesn’t fill much space’.53 Myles anticipates that the alcoholic ‘well of wisdom’ will dry up, yet the ‘normality’ subsequently featured in the column will none the less be ‘the usual mad foolishness’, as the world will continue its aggressive nonsense. Only a couple of the scenarios he lists are not actual. The passage telegraphs the internationalism of Cruiskeen Lawn, and its own situation in a world in violent transformation. Linking its own aggressive nonsense to a world at war, the column exemplifies the often-overlooked internationalism of Irish literature; if it is problematic to categorise Joyce and Beckett as completely Irish or not Irish at all, it is also problematic to define as purely Irish writings produced in Ireland. Poggioli argues that La Revue indépendante, founded in 1880, was the last organ to gather fraternally, under the same banner, the rebels of politics and the rebels of art, the representatives of advanced opinion in the two spheres of social and artistic thought. Abruptly afterward, what might be called the divorce of the two avant-gardes took place.54 Yet we might understand the newspaper column Cruiskeen Lawn in these terms: an alliance of formal innovation and social reform that appeared in public but in the Trojan Horse of a national newspaper. The column and its subsidiary effects on that newspaper establish a new kind of textuality in which Irish modernism moves beyond the confines of the literary in order to question the historical and social order. Cruiskeen Lawn reconfigures art as a model for a new mode of interaction, in which Irishness is neither essence nor state but a mode of active engagement.

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Notes 1. Hugh Kenner offers one of the most damning and commonly cited criticisms of Cruiskeen Lawn: ‘Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column? For ruin is the word. So much promise has seldom accomplished so little’ (Kenner, A Colder Eye, p. 321). Kenner sees the column as offering, at best, absurd escapism: ‘The column was at its most magisterial in wartime, six years of Irish solipsism during which Myles’ schemes for making jam out of used electricity or concocting emergency supplies of midnight oil – in general his knack for rigging up alternative universes – had a kind of derived plausibility’ (Ibid., p. 260). Miles Orvell and David Powell also see a comic dissociation in the wartime Cruiskeen Lawn: ‘Although these were of course the war years, Myles looked studiedly off-center at reality: after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was occupied with flying ballet shoes’ (Orvell and Powell, ‘Myles na Gopaleen’, p. 51). Recent in-depth studies of Brian O’Nolan and the Cruiskeen Lawn have echoed these older critical views. Joseph Brooker calls the early Cruiskeen Lawn ‘an eccentric antidote to the actual in a precariously neutral country’ (Brooker, Flann O’Brien, p. 140). Carol Taaffe writes that the initial column ‘betrayed an entirely introverted preoccupation with language and logic’ until May 1945, when it was ‘finally free to look beyond internal squabbles’ (Taaffe, Ireland Through the LookingGlass, pp. 7, 129). 2. A. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, p. 113. 3. ‘Air Raid Shelters for Dublin’, Irish Times (7 September 1940), p. 6. 4. ‘Five Villagers Killed’, ‘Development in War Situation’ and ‘Germany Regrets’, Irish Times (4 October 1940), pp. 5, 6, 5. 5. ‘Ordeal by Fire’, Irish Times (16 September 1940), p. 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Clissmann, Flann O’Brien, p. 183. 8. ‘Dangers of the Dark’, Irish Times (14 September 1939), p. 4. 9. ‘Strong Need of Speech’, Irish Times (10 September 1939), p. 4. 10. ‘Was it the Voice of Warsaw?: Drama Midst Sounds of Shot and Shell’, Irish Times (10 September 1939), p. 4. 11. A. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, p. 112. 12. See Carnie, ‘Modern Irish’. 13. Qtd in Townshend, Ireland: The Twentieth-Century, p. 156. 14. ‘Ins na páipéirí nuaidheachta eile bíonn colamhain aca ar a dtugtar ‘nuaidheacht an lae’. Mínighthear do léightheóirí i nGaedhilg sa cholamhain sin gur tharla so agus siúd ar fad an domhain, d’aimhdheoin go bhfuil an nuaidheachtán go h-uile lán de’n scéala céadna i mBéarla. ar an adhbhar san, ar eagla go mbeadh leightheóirí an phéaipéir seo dall ar chursaí móra uathbhásacha na h-aimsire seo, ba mhian linn a chur i n-iúl dóibh go bhguil cogaidh mór ar siubhal fá láthair eadar Shasana agus an Ghearmain. Beidh píosa nuaidheachta eile againn i mbárach’. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (16 October 1940), p. 4. 15. The first instalment was signed ‘An Broc’, or ‘The Badger’, an animal known in Ireland for its unruly, aggressive nature. Subsequent instalments were signed Myles na gCopaleen or, later, Myles na Gopaleen. Declan Kiberd explains: ‘Myles na Gopaleen’ was the stage Irishman of Boucicault’s play, The Colleen Bawn, amusing an English audience with malapropisms and buffoonery, with the more grammatically correct ‘Myles na gCopaleen’, O’Nolan ‘rescues the buffoon from the Victorian stage and makes him articulate . . . in his native language’ (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 497). I will refer throughout this chapter to ‘Myles’, as a considerable proportion of Cruiskeen Lawn instalments were written by O’Nolan’s friends, Niall Montgomery and Niall Sheridan; Taaffe consequently observes: ‘quite apart from the posturing and irony [. . .] it is unsafe to conflate Myles na gCopaleen with Brian O’Nolan’ (Taaffe, Ireland Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 127–8).

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, p. 205. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (19 April 1941), p. 7. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (4 October 1940), p. 4. See Langdon Davies, ‘The Lessons of Finland’. Ramazani, ‘Modernist Bricolage’, p. 448. Ibid. Young, ‘Fact / Fiction’, p. 118. Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde’, p. 703. Brooker, ‘Children of Destiny’, p. 14. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 38. Ibid., pp. 35–8. Fanning, Independent Ireland, p. 81. Dinneen, Foclóir Gaedhilge Agus Béarla. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 62. We might also compare O’Nolan’s juxtaposing of excerpts from the editorial with scenes of his own invention with the Dadaist practice of collage. Matthew Gale quotes George Grosz’s account that he and John Heartfield ‘invented the technique as a device to avoid political censorship . . . as early as 1915 or 1916 for postcards they had made and supposedly sent from the Front; this subsequently led to the idea that the technique had arisen spontaneously among the anonymous soldiers in the trenches’ (Gale, Dada & Surrealism, p. 128). Taaffe, Ireland Through the Looking-Glass, p. 129. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (26 October 1940), p. 6. ‘Tighthe láidre ísle aon-urláir iad agus táid suidhte go sásta thall is abhfus ar chiumhais na sráide. Dá mbéadh aon stuaim ag an Gallaic Léig, bhéadh rinnci Gaedhealacha ar siubhal gach oidhche ar mhullach na dtighte sin. Tá díon gach tighe aca réidh leathan agus dá mbeighfí ar lorg ardán siamsa, ní fhéadfaí ionad níos oiriúnaighe dfhagháil’. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (25 October 1940), p. 4. ‘Ach mo bhrón, bhí na Gaedhil riamh gan teacht-aniar, gan dul-chun-tosaigh, gan fios a leasa’. Ibid. See Flynn, ‘“Everybody here is under arrest”: Translation and Politics in Cruiskeen Lawn’, and Flynn, ‘“the half-said thing”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War’. M. Cronin, A History of Ireland, p. 217. A. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, p. 113. Malone, ‘A Reader’s View’, Irish Times (18 October 1940), p. 3. West-Briton-Nationalist, ‘To the Editor’, Irish Times (17 October 1940), p. 3. P. M. Bh, ‘To the Editor’, Irish Times (19 October 1940), p. 9. Ibid. O hAodha, ‘To the Editor’, Irish Times (22 October 1940), p. 6. Love, ‘To the Editor’, Irish Times (18 October 1940), p. 3. Ibid. Vicki Mahaffey, in States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment, observes a similar aspect in Oscar Wilde’s understanding of humour as a liberating if violent force, ‘dependent on the unexpected violation of categories [. . .] its function is to liberate the reader or listener from learned, oppressive habits of mind’ (p. 70). Orvell and Powell, ‘Myles na Gopaleen’, p. 50. A. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, p. 117. Flann O’Brien, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, p. 173. Brooker, ‘Children of Destiny’, p. 11. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 53. Ó Criomhthain, An t-Oileánach, p. 7.

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52. Ó Criomhthain, The Islander, p. 1. 53. ‘Tá litreacha faghálta agam ó lucht ólta an chrúiscín seo. Cuid aca nach dtaithnigheann an bheoir leo, cuid eile a síleann gur ró-iongantach an deór-sidhe atá curtha ar fagháil agam. Acht is ró-chuma liom. I gcionn seachtainne eile, nuair tá tuirse taghaithe orm agus tobair na h-eagna tráighte, beidh an Ghaedhilg chéadna le léigheamh ar an bpáipéar so is abhíonn ar na páipéirí eile. Beidh Nuaidheacht an Lae againn comh maith le cách. Beidh an gealt-ghamaidheacht gnáthach again idtaobh Bhársá agus an Éigipt agus an Rúmáin agus an Seacóslóbhaic agus an Rúis agus pé rud is rogha leat féin, a Sheáin. Achrann idir an Rúmáin, agus an Úngáir! Aer-ruathar ar Learpholl Shasana! Dianchogadh san Éigipt idir an Iodáil agus an Bhreatain Mhóir! Óráid ó Rúisbheilt I dtaobh na Rúmáine agus na hÉigipe! Cogadh idir an Rúmáin agus an Éigipt! An Éigipt ar lár! An Rúmáin ar lár! Síocháin idir an Éigipt, augs an Rúmáin! Aer-ruathar eile ar Learpholl Shasana! Teinte mhóra i mBeirlín! Aer-ruathar ar Bhaile Átha Cliath! Cogadh idir Éirinn agus an Rúmáin! Is mairg gur beag an tír í Éire agus gur ró-bheag a h-ainm. Ní líonann sí morán spáis’. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, Irish Times (4 November 1940), p. 4. 54. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 11–12.

Bibliography Brooker, Joseph, ‘Children of Destiny: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Ready-Made School’, (last accessed 15 October 2020). Brooker, Joseph, Flann O’Brien (Horndon: Northcote House, 2005). Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Bürger, Peter, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History, 41:4 (2010), pp. 695–715. Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Carnie, Andrew, ‘Modern Irish: A Case Study in Language Revival Failure’, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, (last accessed 15 October 2020). Clissman, Anne, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings: The Story-Teller’s Book-Web (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997). Cronin, Anthony, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton, 1989). Cronin, Michael, A History of Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Dinneen, Rev. Patrick S., Foclóir Gaedhilge Agus Béarla: An Irish–English Dictionary (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1904). Fanning, Ronan, Independent Ireland (Dublin: Helicon, 1983). Flynn, Catherine, ‘“Everybody here is under arrest”: Translation and Politics in Cruiskeen Lawn’, in Rubin Borg and Paul Fagan (eds), Gallows Humour: Death, Metamorphosis and Body Politics in Flann O’Brien (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), pp. 19–33. Flynn, Catherine, ‘“the half-said thing’: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War’, in Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and John McCourt (eds), Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), pp. 71–86. Gale, Matthew, Dada & Surrealism (London: Phaidon Press, 1997). Kenner, Hugh, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (New York: Knopf, 1983). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996).

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Langdon Davies, John, ‘The Lessons of Finland’, Picture Post, 7:9 (1940). Long, Maebh, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018). Mahaffey, Vicki, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). O’Brien, Flann, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018). Ó Criomhthain, Tomás, An t-Oileánach (Dublin: Clólucht an Talbóidigh, 1929). Ó Criomhthain, Tomás, The Islander, trans. Sean Coileain (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012). Orvell, Miles, and David Powell, ‘Myles na Gopaleen: Mystic, Horse-Doctor, Hackney Journalist and Ideological Catalyst’, Éire-Ireland, 10:2 (1975), pp. 44–72. Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968). Ramazani, Jahan, ‘Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity’, Modernism / modernity, 13:3 (2006), pp. 425–43. Taaffe, Carol, Ireland Through the Looking-Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). Townshend, Charles, Ireland: The Twentieth-Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Young, Steven, ‘Fact / Fiction: Cruiskeen Lawn’, in Anne Clune and Tess Hurson (eds), Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O’Brien (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997).

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16 Irish Christian Comedy: Heresy or Reform? Vicki Mahaffey

I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris. –James Joyce (letter Lady Gregory, November 1902)1

S

omething astonishing happened to literature in Ireland in the twentieth century: a new kind of religious comedy emerged, one that did not exist anywhere else in the world at that time.2 It is important to stress that this comedy does not make fun of religious values; it makes fun of the woodenness with which they are understood and (mis)applied to daily life. It exposes the gap between spiritual vitality and the potentially blind narrowness of orthodoxy. Certain Irish writers (including J. M. Synge, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett) used Christian stories as a backdrop against which to stage more ordinary human events, and the discrepancies are comical. Christy Mahon, in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, is recognisable through his name as a Christian man and possibly even a Christ figure, a son on the verge of being sacrificed by his father. Instead of saying ‘Thy will be done’, however, he turns the tables by trying to kill the father, who (here like the Son) defies death through an earthly resurrection. The comedy lies in the way the professedly Christian townspeople prefer the murderous version of a Christy Mahon to the holy one who goes like a lamb to the slaughter. In the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, the Virgin Mary’s power to inspire temperance in over-indulgent men is positioned as a parallel to the power of a virgin to give sexual succour to a stranger through an innocent display of her ‘understandings’ (underwear, knickers) as she looks up at the heavens. Joyce positions readers to be shocked, but a judgemental response precludes a sympathetic understanding of how this private and mutual facilitation of sexual release helps both characters return to difficult life circumstances. Shock and dismay at discreet exhibition and masturbation between adults may block readers from developing a more compassionate, even loving, appreciation of this unconventional respite from the feelings of abandonment and betrayal against which both characters are struggling. Religious stories are typically treated as elevated, transcending everyday life, but it is religious institutions – both Catholic and Protestant – and not theology that insists on dividing the sacred and the profane (the Incarnation is about their unification). Christian comedy reveals that elevating the sacred relieves worshippers from the responsibility of living in accordance with their professed values. Nor do they have to come to terms with the socially radical implications

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of a historical and political (as opposed to doctrinal and liturgical) Christianity. It is important to recall that Jesus’s ministry began as a protest against the way that Judaism, under the Roman occupation, was devolving into a list of rules (upheld by Temple law), instead of a serving as a spiritual alternative to social strictures. What Jesus had in common with these Irish writers is impatience with unconsciously hypocritical moralism. When divine patterns are repeated in the everyday world, they inspire very different responses among readers from those generated by similar stories when told in a religious context. In ‘Nausicaa’, when an act of mutually consensual (if not equally self-aware) masturbation is recast as an act of devotion before an icon of purity so as to provide momentary relief to both parties, it strikes some readers as blasphemous as well as obscene. In Playboy, when the townspeople lionise a man for what they believe to be murder and turn against him when his father turns out to be still alive, they perceive no contradiction between what they cheer on in life and what they profess to admire on Sundays. Sacrifice may be admirable in chapel, but in everyday life it is heroic to avoid being sacrificed. Flann O’Brien unexpectedly joins this comic conversation in The Third Policeman (written 1939–40, published posthumously 1967), which begins with an allusion to Synge’s Playboy: the narrator (like Christy Mahon) confesses that he has killed an old man (Old Mathers) with a loy. For both Synge and O’Brien, the loy (a word for a spade that means ‘law’) is a lethal instrument, here wielded against the authority of the past (a ‘father’ figure). The alternative to a mindless (and here violent) wielding of a law is greater self-awareness, and the willingness to examine one’s own actions and reactions within a larger historical and scriptural context. O’Brien, like Synge and Joyce before him, has not quarantined sacred space from the profane. O’Brien’s achievement is to highlight the comic absurdities that make it difficult to distinguish between ordinary life and hell. The problem that Christian comedy addresses is this: even if people agree to believe a religious story, shared belief in its truth and importance does not help them apply that truth to their own behaviour in other contexts. It is not easy to determine what a given story means, or how it means. The whole reason for creating a priesthood in a religion – or for teaching literary criticism, for that matter – is that the implications of a story are not self-evident. It is the process by which one interprets and applies stories that must be attended to with sensitivity and care; for that process to remain illuminating, it must change and adapt to different times and circumstances. Most institutionalised religions provide a stable, unchanging version of the Christian story and a static translation of its meaning, which amounts to little more than a universalised system of morality. But spirituality is much greater than morality: it is about the search for meaning, and not about how a single meaning should be invariably observed through repeated patterns of behaviour. One must learn how to apply exemplary stories to one’s own life and behaviour in a way that illuminates the complex meaning of that behaviour, not to judge whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. According to the Christian scriptures, the value of a given behaviour can be determined only in retrospect. Judgement takes place first at the end of life, but ultimately not until the end of Time. Part of what is so interesting about Christian comedy is that it draws attention to the paradoxical and thereby humorous ways in which fictional stories are true. Fiction is true, not to fact but to meaning. To subject a religious story to comic treatment

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unveils the kinship between religious scripture and other forms of fiction. One might define scripture as a story so ‘true’ as to be beyond question; what actually happened is retrospectively revised by the story, because the story is understood to be truer to the meaning of experience – its effect – than the actual facts. The institutionalised religions that grow out of stories bind their believers to a given version of a story and to the varieties of thought and behaviour that are affirmed by it (religare means ‘to bind’). Comedy, in contrast, challenges the sufficiency (or questions the effects) of the established meanings of a given governing story; it unbinds. The category of Irish Christian comedy aims not to challenge sacred stories, but to expand and adapt possible interpretations of them so as to ensure that their meaning is preserved rather than undermined. Comedy connects sacred truths with ‘brutal’ truths about the brevity and apparent randomness of mortal existence. Most importantly, because comedy is a form of affirmation, Christian comedies effectively affirm the essential interdependence of the sacred and the profane. They aim to form communities not of ‘chosen’ people, but of all people, including (and sometimes starring) its reprobates. They attempt to expose and defang the exclusiveness and self-righteousness of a morality that is simply thoughtless or obedient, and in so doing, to awaken readers and viewers to a more comprehensive acceptance of all people and their aberrant behaviour. That does not mean that all behaviours are licensed or approved; it only means that such behaviours are common, and in unconscious conflict with the spiritual values to which believers pay lip service. An important feature of Irish Christian comedy is that its humour also has the potential to enrage audiences and viewers who have based their self-worth on morality rather than growth. It shows that the standards and categories that constitute behavioural norms also serve as limitations. It is potentially a relief and a pleasure to see those inadequacies displayed, although the unexpectedness of the presentation can also spark protests (as we can see from the Playboy riots and the publication freeze of The Little Review magazine after the issue that contained the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses had been confiscated). The comprehensiveness of Jesus’s own unprecedented acceptance of others (of Samaritans, Gentiles and menstruating or adulterous or profligate women) was also perceived as threatening, which played a significant role in his arrest and crucifixion. Arguably, Irish Christian comedy exhibits both the radical acceptance and inclusiveness characteristic of Jesus and his followers and its subversive potential, its challenge to the status quo. In that sense, it is more ‘Christian’ in a spiritual sense than the religious institutions based on it.

The Story of Jesus The story of Jesus is only ‘comic’ in the way Dante used the word in the Divine Comedy: it is not humorous, but the resurrection with which it ends implies renewed wellbeing for an entire community (of believers). It reassures onlookers in the grip of horror that everything will turn out all right in the end. Christian comedy, in contrast, does not promise redemption in the end; it holds the outcome in abeyance, and humour is the compensation for that lack of certainty. It offers a deeper knowledge of good and evil, without the hope or fear of what they may produce in resurrection or damnation. One of the ways the Christian story can be recognised as literary, though, is through how it has changed over the centuries, both in response to historical circumstances and as what believers

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collectively see as meaningful evolves. What most people understand as the history of the life of Jesus (recorded in the Christian gospels) is, in fact, myth, a different form of collective truth that is closely allied to the truth of fiction. The collective fiction to which different sects of Christianity pay homage is arguably more about the Christian community in question than it is about the man who inspired them. Much has been written over the last twenty-five years about the ‘historical Jesus’, as opposed to the way Jesus has been constructed and reconstructed by the gospels and then by the Catholic Church. An understanding of the history that can be excavated about the life of Jesus, however, is potentially more powerful than the popular myth. Reza Aslan, when describing his research into the Bible in the preface to Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, recounts his surprise when he realised that the facts he was uncovering about Jesus’s life and times were more meaningful than the apolitical or mythical version of him that he had encountered in churches. He explains that knowledge of the context in which Jesus lived enhanced the meaning of his actions: Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, earthly being I had been introduced to in church.3 Aslan’s research into the historical context of Jesus’s life reveals more about the nature of the Christian gospels, making it more apparent that the gospel writers were not interested in recording the facts of his life and ministry, but the truths that were revealed by his words and actions.4 In other words, what we read in the gospels as facts are already interpretations of earlier events. The gospel stories that churches have made canonical are early readings of the meaning of something that must be interpreted differently in different times and places for that original meaning to be accurately understood or appreciated. Aslan argues that the first audiences of the gospels, like people throughout the ancient world, experienced truth and fact as necessarily interwoven: The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal – indeed, expected – for a writer in the ancient world to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as true.5 In contrast, modern readers typically see truth as residing in fact, not fiction, which means that the truth of meaning (fiction) is often misunderstood and undervalued. This has also made it more difficult to understand the meaning of events. Joyce represents the modern position of the four gospel writers as Mamalujo in Finnegans Wake. Short for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these once divinely inspired interpreters have devolved into four doddering old men (anal analysts) trying to make sense of what they see and hear, always followed by an ass. In life, as in Finnegans Wake, this is a

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comic position, not one to be emulated. The writers of Christian comedy interpret the meaning of Jesus’s story in a very different spirit, with verve and wit, in which the manifold misunderstandings of spiritual meaning are portals to deepened individual experience, as well as to a joyful tolerance for the omnipresence of error. The examples of Christian comedy that I have chosen to examine focus on two different kinds of relationships. The first, represented by J. M. Synge and James Joyce, concerns sexual relations between men and women. What is both comic and daring about their treatment is the refusal to denigrate sex as less important (and more sinful) than spirit. Both sexuality and spirituality are processes that ensure the continuation of life, and both are characterised by the rhythms of rise and fall. Does an appreciation of spirituality and sexuality as parallel enhance or desecrate the stories? If sexuality is portrayed as significant and meaningful (as it is in the sacrament of marriage), does that lessen the power of divinity in any way, or does it dignify a bodily act by recognising its congruence with other, larger, movements of rise and fall (the sun, mortal life)?

J. M. Synge and James Joyce The writer who essentially invented the genre of Irish Christian comedy was Synge. Yeats had set the stage for it with his early play, The Countess Cathleen (1892), in which the eponymous hero sells her soul to the Devil to save starving peasants during the Famine. The piece was designed to be a heroic tragedy, not a comedy, but viewers experienced it as heretical because Cathleen sacrificed herself to demons. Although her intention is to be a Jesus-style saviour, her methods are suspect. She emerges as a female Faust, someone willing to relinquish her eternal soul; unlike Faust (but like Jesus), she does so not for her own benefit, but for that of others. Yeats’s conflation of Jesus’s self-sacrifice with Faust’s willingness to sell his soul to the Devil helps to explain why his portrayal of Cathleen was decried by audiences as a libel against the Irish; it suggests that an Irish heroine was willing to bargain with demons. Joyce’s reaction to the play seems to have been different from that of most theatregoers. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus quotes to himself lines from Cathleen’s farewell speech, and when he does, ‘a soft liquid joy’ flows ‘over his memory . . . through the words’. Then he remembers hearing the audience’s protests against it, many from his fellow students, as he sits alone and jaded at the side of the balcony.6 If Yeats took the Christian theme of sacrifice and gave it overtones of damnation, J. M. Synge’s one-act play of 1903, In the Shadow of the Glen, takes up another central Christian idea, death and resurrection, to produce not a tragedy but a dark comedy that depends upon unorthodox parallels between the body and the spirit. Both plays take bodily deprivation seriously: food in The Countess Cathleen, sex in In the Shadow of the Glen.7 Synge, however, shows how male sexual potency can double as a violent threat – both are represented by a ‘big stick’ under a bedsheet. The play portrays the ways in which death and resurrection work on earth, in a rural area of County Wicklow. The fearful and comic night-time rising of a dead man with his stick at once suggests resurrection and the tumescence of the penis, except that this man has replaced his penis with a stick, and sex has been supplanted by a threatened beating. Dan Burke’s travesty of re-enacting Jesus’s resurrection in order to do harm exposes his desire to punish his younger, ‘starving’ wife for desires he cannot or will not fulfil: desires for companionship, sexual intimacy, and perhaps even children.

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A quick recap may be useful of this play, which Joseph Holloway called a ‘weird, humorous, and grimly unconventional little piece’, in which ‘an old man pretends he is dead in order to spy on his somewhat frivolous young wife’s suspected goings on with a young neighbour’.8 The action takes place on a single rainy night in the Burkes’ cottage in sheep country. Dan Burke, the husband, is lying under a sheet and his wife, Nora, thinks he is dead. She cannot confirm that, though, because he told her earlier that day that if he died suddenly and anyone touched the body other than his sister (who lives ten miles away), that person would be cursed. A tramp comes to the door, to whom Nora serves whiskey. She is waiting for a young man, Michael Dara; she asks the tramp to sit with the body and she goes outside to look for him. While she is gone, Dan terrifies the tramp by sitting up and asking for a big stick to put under the sheet. When Nora and Michael return, they concoct a plan to join forces after the mourning period, and Michael calculates their anticipated increase in wealth. It seems clear that Nora has had yearnings after other young men; her husband is much older than she is, and she is lonely. Patch Darcy, for example, was said to have kept company with her, but he recently went mad and died. When her husband overhears the discussion between Michael and Nora, in which Michael proposes marrying her and she declines because of her horrible experience of marriage, Dan rises up with his stick and forces Nora out of the door with the Tramp to wander the roads. Then he and Michael sit down and drink whiskey together. Two major ‘sources’ for Synge’s play have been suggested: Petronius’s account of the Widow of Ephesus in The Satyricon (Arthur Griffith’s suggestion), and a story Synge heard on the Aran Islands, later included in his volume The Aran Islands, published in 1907. Both of these are ‘bad wife’ stories in which a wife has sex with another man shortly after the death of her husband.9 But no one has fully analysed the important difference between Synge’s treatment and other stories of ‘dead’ husbands rising up to claim revenge. What is distinctive about Synge’s play is that it shows much more sympathy for the wife; he presents her expulsion from the home as a kind of liberation that is bound to be challenging, but that will be preferable to the living death she has endured with her husband in the cottage.10 Critics have noted the similarities between Nora Burke and Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House, but they tend to see Nora Burke’s expulsion from home as ‘a harsh fate’ rather than a liberation.11 Susan Cannon Harris points out that although Nora Burke does not make a revolutionary decision like Ibsen’s Nora (her freedom is forced upon her rather than chosen), her prospects are likely to involve hardship: living with companionship, but without shelter or food.12 I would propose, though, that the willingness of a woman to give up the protection of shelter (and the constraints that go with it) is, for both Ibsen and Synge, the first step toward the evolution of woman from a doll into a person, with all the attendant risks and pleasures of fuller development. One could argue that Synge is experimenting with different models of marriage: one version simply offers shelter and food, whereas a second version offers no protection but allows the woman to enter a much bigger world with an articulate and caring companion. Dan threatens Nora by insisting that, without his protection, she will die in a ditch: It’s lonesome roads she’ll be going and hiding herself away till the end will come, and they find her stretched like a dead sheep with the frost on her, or the big spiders, maybe, and they putting their webs on her, in the butt of a ditch.13

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The Tramp, in contrast, tells her, ‘you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in the place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by’.14 Nora finally decides to go with the Tramp because of his ‘fine bit of talk’15 after he tells her: Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it’s not my blather you’ll be hearing only, but you’ll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you’ll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm . . . it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.16 There is also good evidence to suggest that the Tramp with whom Nora leaves is a mask for Synge himself, who signed his letters to Molly Allgood, to whom Synge was engaged when he died in 1909, ‘Ever your Tramp’ or ‘Your old Tramp’.17 As Hugh Kenner once wrote about Synge, ‘those who set forth fare better than those who choose to stay’.18 Although In the Shadow of the Glen, unlike Playboy, sparked no riots (Joseph Holloway records that the first performance ‘met with a mixed reception’, but garnered nothing but applause the following night, 25, 27–819), Maud Gonne walked out of the opening performance and both she and Arthur Griffith attacked it in print. Griffith calls Nora a ‘strumpet’ and decries Synge’s play as ‘a foul echo from degenerate Greece’.20 Many critics denounced it as corrupted by foreign influence. Given that Synge was a Protestant turned avowed atheist, how are we to understand his sheepish comedy of violent male resurrection? And how do the sheep and shepherds work within a Christian context? Why, in a play that spurred prolonged controversy because of its portrayal of female sexuality,21 has there been so little discussion of male sexuality? This is a play in which a woman is married to an older man who was ‘always cold, . . . every day . . . and every night’, a coldness that Susan Cannon Harris astutely reads as impotence22; the couple are also childless. Dan dramatises that impotence as a feigned death, but he significantly hides a big stick beneath the sheet that shrouds him. The purpose of that stick, however, is not to create life but to destroy it. The ‘resurrection’ of Dan Burke ironically serves to ‘deliver’ his wife from marriage to him, but at the expense of her safety and ultimately her life. The man he has threatened to beat or even murder, however, Nora’s would-be lover / husband Michael Dara, instead takes her place at their table, safe from the driving rain into which the Tramp and Nora are sent. Male potency, in this play, is a weapon of violence and control rather than a source of pleasure. Dan Burke is a bad shepherd, unlike Patch Darcy, Michael Dara and Jesus (all good ones). The language of the play suggests that Dan is more like a sheep than a herder or protector. In a letter to Stephen McKenna, Synge discusses his treatment of sex in his plays: On the French stage the sex-element of life is given without the other ballancing [sic] elements; on the Irish stage . . . people . . . want the other elements without sex. I restored the sex-element to its natural place, and the people were so surprised they saw sex only.23 What this might suggest for a reading of In the Shadow of the Glen is that Synge intertwines sex with spirit, implicitly challenging those who would separate and rank them. Dan’s ‘resurrection’ would seem to be both spiritual and (comically) sexual, until it turns violent – his use of the stick to liberate and destroy perverts the values of both Christianity and marriage.

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The sexual comedy of Synge’s man arising from the dead / bed is plotted against Jesus’s death and resurrection, but a case could also be made for linking him to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Satan contends that eating the knowledge of good and evil will allow Adam and Eve to rise (‘you shall be as gods’), but instead it precipitates a fall, whereas Dan Burke pretends to fall (dead) and then arises to strike down his wife and her would-be lover. The expulsion into the rainy night could be seen (from Dan’s perspective, that of a god) as expulsion from paradise. But is life in the cottage paradise or is it hell? That is the question. Joyce does make a comic connection between his sexual sins and Satan a decade later, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Dedalus, after hearing the vivid hellfire sermon in Chapter 3, looks down in horror at his own treacherous penis, guilty of multiple encounters with prostitutes. He thinks, ‘He was in mortal sin’, marvelling at how quickly It happens, and then he questions: But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It feels and understands and desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body, able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O why?24 Stephen’s identification of the snake in the garden with a body part of his own is funny in part because it is an obvious connection (think of D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’, in which the snake is not Satan but ‘like a god’). Is the penis godlike (as it was in ancient priapic cultures) or is it Satanic in its treachery? This is like asking whether the Burkes’ cottage is paradise or hell. It may be the question that licenses writers to treat death and resurrection comically – can we reliably tell which is which? Stephen, a fictionalised version of the young Joyce, here turns away from his own ‘bestial’ sexuality through a horror of eternal torment, but the mature Joyce will comically play with the idea of the sexual as divine. Although Stephen sees his adolescent sexual parts as Satanic, Joyce portrays the male penis as both natural and a counterpart to the spirit in Finnegans Wake. Like Synge in In the Shadow of the Glen, Joyce puts a man whom everyone believes to be dead (Finnegan, or HCE) at the centre of the Wake. Falling and rising is the main movement around which different languages, times and places cluster and reconstellate. The pattern of rise and fall extends from the movement of the male penis to the fall and rise of Tim Finnegan, to the daily fall and rise of the sun, to the fall and rise of Jesus and the hope that a fallen Ireland will rise again, a hope kicked off by the aptly named Easter Rising. The fact that Easter contains the word ‘east’ reinforces all these connections: Jesus is the son / sun who falls and rises, and his rising happens in the East(er). HCE is called the ‘King of the Yeast’. HCE falls, too, and the book rests on the comic hope that he will rise again (in the morning, from sleep). Then there is the other big comic structure based on the Rising: the fact that it took place in the General Post Office (GPO). The idea that resurrection can be understood to be a matter of control over ‘letters’ is crucial. The fact that Shem is a Penman and Shaun a Postman

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implicitly stresses the centrality (in every sense) of the GPO. As a postman, Shaun is also a ‘deliverer’, which helps connect the GPO with the Christian overtones of the Rising.

Fathers and Sons Marriage designates an intimate connection between individuals who are not (or were not) equal in the eyes of the law. This inequality of power (like the one between parents and children) creates the possibility that the connection may slip from pleasurable and potentially productive to abusive or violent; the weaker party can be cared for or dominated (or both).25 A particularly fine example of how this works is Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Endgame, which features blind Hamm (literally the central character, occupying the middle of the stage in his wheelchair) and his servant / wife / son, Clov, who ministers to Hamm while moving back and forth from his adjacent kitchen. If Hamm cannot stand, Clov cannot sit; they are co-dependent in a way that describes many dysfunctional marital and parental relationships. In two dustbins at the front of the stage live Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell. The play takes place at ‘the end’ – of life, of a story, possibly of the world. So what makes this oddly haunting, seemingly post-apocalyptic play a comedy, much less a Christian comedy? It is the still, small hope for repetition with a difference, for a revision of the old Christian story that restores meaning. What creates the stultifying atmosphere of the play is the endless repetition of the same story, the same pattern, crystalised in the relation between God and Jesus. That pattern is portrayed as the template for the relation of father to son, master to slave, husband to wife, and (most controversially) hammer to nail. As critics have pointed out, in Endgame all but one of the characters’ names allude to nails in different languages (English Nell, French Clou or Clov, German Nagg and Mother Peg); the other character, Hamm, is a hammer. The play portrays the relation between fathers and sons as an ongoing generational agon: Nagg and Hamm, Hamm and Clov, Clov and the boy on the horizon. Fathers abuse sons and sons neglect and abandon fathers. The reduction of several complex kinds of relationship to the action of a hammer on nails is humorous, but that humour is darkened when we think of how, just off the page, Beckett traces these narratives to a master story of God the father’s treatment of his son, his Abraham-like willingness to sacrifice him. The occupation of Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph, a carpenter who raised Jesus to make yokes and ploughs, helps to underscore the brutal, personal meaning of this death as the son literally becomes a product of the father’s handiwork, one of the objects he makes with his tools. Jesus was nailed to a wooden cross by the will of the Father. His other father, Joseph, was the one who had taught him to use a hammer. Beckett’s treatment of the father in Endgame reduces him to a hammer designed to beat down subservient others (and to ham it up in the process). Beckett has done a critical reading of the gospel as a story, appreciating the formal symmetry of its (human) beginning and end, creator and created, through the motif of carpentry (the profession of the human father), which climaxes in the nailing of the son to two pieces of wood.26 The humour of such an ingenious reading is intertwined with its horror, which reduces the crucifixion to a story about a father’s reduction of a child he brought to life to something inanimate and instrumental. Fathers in Endgame exhibit greater fidelity to their perpetuation of brutal stories than to the love that those

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stories were designed to restore to the world. Beckett has isolated a subtle contradiction within the Christian story – a tension between love and dominance – that is typically overlooked, but which has potentially horrific familial and social implications. In Endgame, the behaviour of all the fathers (save one) is coldly brutal in its instrumentalising of those who are less powerful. Only one father – the one who appears in Hamm’s story – shows love and concern for someone other than himself, when, on the significant date of Christmas Eve, he begs Hamm to save his boy (p. 52). In sharp contrast, other fathers are callous and withdrawn: Hamm’s father Nagg recalls how he let his young son cry in the dark, uncomforted, although his father was his ‘only hope’: After all I’m your father . . . Whom did you call when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark? Your mother? No. Me. We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace. (p. 56) Hamm tells Clov that he acted as Clov’s father, but insists that he himself was fatherless (p. 38). What does it mean to be a father, if Hamm can describe himself as fatherless with his father in a dustbin on stage? And how do we reconcile Hamm’s description of himself as Clov’s father with his eventual confession that he was ‘never there’? (‘Absent, always. It all happened without me’, p. 74). Such absence is also characteristic of ‘Our Father’, to whom the characters repeatedly pray without answer, whereupon Hamm exclaims the ‘bastard doesn’t exist’ (‘not yet’, Clov rejoins, p. 55). The problem with fatherhood in a culture in which the father sacrifices his son for the greater good is that it is, in some sense, heartless. Hamm’s heart is ‘in his head’ (p. 18), and there is a sore in his breast where his heart should be. Fathers are rational, distant and unresponsive, and this has made the world a wasteland. We have exhausted that story. Interestingly, in Endgame Beckett reverses the relation of spiritual father and son as Joyce portrayed it in Ulysses; there, it is the surrogate father who is loving and the son who is ‘absent’ and unaware. In Synge’s Playboy, the father is abusive and the son compliant until one fateful day on which the roles are reversed. What makes Christy a man (and a real Mahon) is paradoxically his willingness to dominate and even kill. Such a maturation makes him seem heroic, even in the eyes of others. Throughout Endgame, Hamm is in the process of telling a story that he thinks is his own creation, but listeners readily hear as an old story. It is in fact the story of creation, or genesis, told from the perspective of Hamm’s own imminent end. Hamm replays Genesis not in a Garden of Eden but in a corpsed world, almost completely denuded of life and light. He encounters a man, a father, who crawls snakelike on his belly to beg Hamm for bread for his son. Hamm offers him a job as a gardener. Hamm is God, the man is Adam and Satan rolled into one insidious and desperate bellycrawling beggar. Either the man’s son is left to die, on Hamm’s advice, or else the man dies and the son grows up to become Clov. Death at the end of the world, the end of the story, the ‘endgame’ of chess, is slow and agonising, full of regret and longing. The characters chafe at the stranglehold of the story, its seemingly unending repetitions of the crafting of soon-to-be wooden sons who are condemned to obey if they want to mature into Hammers. The women in the play merely wither: Nell nostalgically feeds on happier days (refusing the dry biscuit of the present) and Mother Peg died of darkness, even though she once begged Hamm for light (he says he had no oil left, but Clov contradicts him).

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The relation between hammer and nail reinscribes what, in human terms, would be violent dominance as something that is simply practical, useful and for the greater good, which makes it humorous as well as disturbing. Most people would agree with Simon and Garfunkel in ‘El Condor Pasa’ when they sing, ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.’ In Endgame, Hamm is about to become a nail (like his aged parents, Nagg and Nell), and Hamm’s most significant nail, Clov, is about to take his place as Hamm (now that he has a boy of his own). That is the implication of Hamm’s decidedly unoriginal tale. The hope that trembles on the verge of a comic restructuring is the possibility that Clov may refuse to re-enact that patriarchal story of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and slaves, which is arguably overdue for an update that would realign it with the value placed on love, for which Christianity stands. The enemy in Endgame is also the entertainment or ‘game’ that helps pass the time: it is the predictability of the story itself, and its seemingly endless repetitions (which continue despite the heartlessness of fathers and the appalling attrition of actors). The creative process is intimately bound up with the forces of decay; many thousands of years after Genesis, almost 2,000 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the story has become a minimalist, threadbare one, but it still trickles on, much like the trail of dust between Clov’s feet. Is there a God? Everyone in the play agrees that ‘the bastard’ does not exist (not yet). But the story of creation followed by destruction continues to drive and bore its characters till the end. Why is this comic? Because human thought and action are so inadvertent, so mechanical, so oddly impersonal, so devoid of compassion. Perhaps the solution is to ‘discard’ the anthropomorphic idea of a human or personal God, who loves us all ‘with some exceptions’, as Lucky implies in Waiting for Godot. Perhaps it is time to reconceive God as neither a father nor a human being. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is more obviously a meditation about Scripture and its power to script human performance.27 One of the first exchanges between Didi and Gogo is about the Bible; Didi asks if Gogo has read it, and Gogo remembers the pretty coloured maps. But Didi’s main interest is in a disparity about damnation and salvation within the four gospels: a question about what happened to the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus. Two of the gospels do not mention the thieves, and the other two tell different stories: one says that one of the thieves was saved, whereas the other says that both were damned. Didi wants to know why people believe in salvation when, at best (in one out of four versions), the chance of being saved is only fifty-fifty. This, of course, is the question that drives the play: why do billions of people wait for the highly unlikely possibility of salvation? Is it because of the seasons? (That explanation is suggested by the one bare tree on stage, which has sprouted leaves in Act II – a natural resurrection.) Didi and Gogo are confined to this place at this time (like the audience) by a story: the story that Godot will come at the end of the day (or else night will fall). The tree by which they are told to wait is both the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and the tree on which Jesus was hung. They, of course, would like to hang themselves too, but instead of hoping for resurrection they hope for erections (this is a joke that Joyce also enjoys in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses). Didi and Gogo, like Hamm and Clov after them, are constrained by a story – the expectation that Godot (here a person and a neighbour) will keep his word. As he will do again in Endgame, Beckett shows that hierarchical roles are reversible. After they see Pozzo and Lucky, Didi calls Gogo pig (what Pozzo called Lucky), thereby playing Pozzo’s role of master. Later, when the two again ‘play’ at being Pozzo

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and Lucky, Didi (who is wearing Lucky’s hat) wants to play Lucky and to make Gogo Pozzo (p. 47); he has reversed their roles. The two boys who work for Godot are versions of Didi and Gogo: Gogo is beaten like the boy who keeps sheep (the saved), and Didi is decently treated like the boy who keeps the goats. Didi is the thinker (associated with hats) and Gogo is the dancer (associated with feet and boots); Lucky performs both their roles. Everyone is, in a sense, everyone else, including Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, God and Jesus, Atlas and Jupiter, Jupiter and Saturn. Whether one feels saved or damned is simply a matter of perspective and experience, as we can see when Didi and Gogo hear noises near the end of the play. Didi says ‘We’re saved!’ but Gogo wants to hide, fearful of being beaten. What Didi reads as salvation Gogo understands as a dangerous threat. ‘Higher’ people (the heads, like Didi and Pozzo) are more optimistic, ‘lower people’ (the feet, like Gogo and Lucky) are more pessimistic. Salvation and damnation are ways of polarising expectations based on past experience that, in reality, are closely intertwined. It is only when read through the lens of one’s position, age, sex or personal history that they become opposites. Depending on how people ‘read’ or misread the same story, it can be comic or tragic. The characters forget that if salvation and damnation are the same thing, whichever way they read it first, they will come to experience the other meaning later. What Beckett suggests about religion is wrapped up in its relation to story. When understood as a story meant to be believed (and imitated), religion papers over the mystery and paradox that are at the heart of spirituality. Stories suggest that it is relatively easy to separate good from evil, male from female, father from son, that one can know with relative certainty which is which and that the opposition is stable (not reversible). What is comic about the mystery is its insistence on the coincidence of mutually exclusive extremes, its reminder that humans do not (and cannot) know an ultimate or absolute truth. God is ineffable, not human, and as Didi and Gogo both agree, ‘nothing is certain’ (p. 35v).

The Mystery What is the basis of religion: is it the story or is it the mystery? For many people, it is the story that has rendered them actors or characters in a script, ‘to give [them] the impression [they] exist’ (Godot, p. 44v). Beckett, Synge and Joyce, in sharp contrast, are adherents of the mystery. To remember the mystery is to understand the story as heuristic, in need of periodic revision, in order to preserve the truth or meaning of the never-ending story. In Ireland, the main tension has always been internal to a Christianity inflected by nationality and therefore class (between English Protestants and Irish Catholics). This protracted tension has resulted in an emphatically un-Christian history of violence. Jesus himself was a radical pacifist, unlike so many of his followers. Jesus was also a reader – a radically new interpreter – of a series of stories: the Hebrew scriptures. He was a Jew rereading the meaning of his people’s scriptures. He did not desecrate those stories; he simply reinterpreted them for a very different situation, in which the Promised Land had become a colony of Rome. A lie is a story the teller does not believe to be true. So what does one call a story that people DO believe to be true? A memory. A history. A religion. Is it possible that, in modern times, truth has been reduced to fact? What does it mean for something to be true? I want to suggest that factual truth is often brutal, bristling with conflicting

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implications, and therefore not inherently meaningful. A story infuses some portion of the truth with meaning, with a pattern that creates a series of emotional effects and intellectual ideas. To harness its power, one really has to know how to read: literature, scripture, history, culture and, above all, oneself (in the context of all these other stories). The hero of Irish Christian comedy is not to be found within the play or story, but outside it: it is a humble, daring, innovative reader who is willing to admit, like the narrator in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, ‘There is much that I did not understand and possibly could never understand to my dying day.’28 What an embrace of the mystery grants is renewed access to life. The goal of comedy is to turn people from wooden beings (in The Third Policeman the narrator’s prosthesis starts to grow and take over his whole body29) into comprehensive and dynamic forces. Instead of re-enacting the story, one could choose to revise it in an effort to preserve and revitalise the story’s meaning. Such a choice is, by definition, heretical, because the Greek word (hairesis) from which the word comes means ‘a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice’. The purposive choice to renew old meanings, thereby restoring the mystery and Divine Comedy of existence, is, by definition, heretical, but the alternative is worse: Endgame.

Notes 1. Letter from Joyce to Lady Gregory written in November of 1902. Letters of James Joyce, p. 53. 2. It might be argued that Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (finished 1940, posthumously published 1966) is a possible exception. 3. Aslan, Zealot, p. xix. 4. Ibid., p. 31. 5. Ibid. 6. Joyce, A Portrait, p. 190. See also Joyce’s 1901 essay, ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, criticising the audiences of the Irish Literary Theatre: ‘even The Countess Cathleen is pronounced vicious and damnable’ (p. 50). 7. Synge, The Complete Plays, pp. 99–118. 8. Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, p. 25. 9. See Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 72. 10. Interestingly, the first person to come close to such a view of the play was Yeats’s father, J. B. Yeats, whose defence of it, ‘Ireland out of the Dock’, was published by Arthur Griffith the week of the play’s premiere. He understood the play as an attack on ‘our Irish institution, the loveless marriage’. See J. B. Yeats, ‘Ireland out of the Dock’, p. 2. Qtd and discussed by Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Synge and Irish Nationalism, pp. 6–7. 11. Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 77. 12. One exception is Ritschel, who refers to Shadow as Synge’s ‘Irishization of A Doll’s House’ (pp. 29 and 9) that aims to revolutionise (Irish Catholic) culture, and points out that Edward Martyn’s Players’ Club had staged a production of Ibsen’s play four months before the premiere of Shadow (Synge and Irish Nationalism, p. 8). See also Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, pp. 69–71. 13. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen, p. 116. 14. Ibid., p. 117. 15. Ibid., p. 118. 16. Ibid., p. 117. Ritschel contends that this speech echoes Antoine Raftery’s poem ‘Killeaden, or County Mayo’, evoking the Irish tradition of idealising the landscape (Synge and Irish Nationalism, pp. 10–11).

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17. Qtd in Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, p. 76, and Ritschel, Synge and Irish Nationalism, p. 11. Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O’Neill) also played Nora in Shadow in 1906. As Declan Kiberd points out, her performance stressed ‘a love-yearning’ shot through with sexual tension (Inventing Ireland, p. 302). 18. Kenner, A Colder Eye, p. 120. One of the first in a series of complex arguments about the relation of In the Shadow of the Glen to the colonial history of Ireland is that of Susan Cannon Harris. She argues that it set the stage for the riots over The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 because it called into question ‘the sexual purity of Irish women’ (Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 69), suggesting that the play challenges the ideal of ‘an impenetrable home, symbolized by a chaste domestic woman’ (Ibid., p. 72). She sympathises with Nora, who remains pure in that she never gets a chance to commit adultery with Michael Dara, but she does so by placing the blame for what confines her on ‘economic pressures’ partly shaped by imperialism rather than on the brutality of her ageing husband (Ibid., pp. 77–9). Joseph Valente pairs Shadow with Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan at its début. If Cathleen is the Sovereignty Hag of Gaelic myth, then Nora is simultaneously a figure who invokes the myth and a real woman who complicates and even inverts it. See The Myth of Manliness, pp. 120–9. 19. Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, pp. 25, 27–8. 20. 4 February 1904. Qtd in Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 73. 21. ‘Both Maire Ni Shiubhlaigh and Molly Allgood (under Synge’s direction) emphasised [Nora’s] sexuality,’ Benson, Jewish Dublin, p. 5, citing C. E. Montague, Dramatic Values (1911). 22. Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 78. 23. Synge, The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, p. 74. Qtd in Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 82. 24. Joyce, Portrait, pp. 117–18. 25. Fathers and daughters introduce a different set of problems, usually connected with sexual abuse. 26. If, as has been suggested several times, the set of Endgame resembles the interior of a skull, it is appropriate that what takes place there (in Hamm’s mind) is a meditation on the instrumental nature of repeated familial crucifixions, since, as Joseph Valente has reminded me, the crucifixion takes place at Golgotha, which means ‘place of the skull’. 27. Wonderful work has been done over the last twenty years on Beckett and God, much of it inspired by Mary Brydon. I am persuaded by and indebted to many of these arguments, but what I am interested in is primarily religion as story, especially in the religions of the book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. 28. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, p. 191. 29. Ibid., p. 199.

Bibliography Aslan, Reza, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013). Beckett, Samuel, Endgame: A Play in One Act, trans. Beckett (New York: Grove, 1958). Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 1954). Benson, Asher, Jewish Dublin: Portraits of Life by the Liffey (Dublin: A. and A. Farmar, 2007), p. 5, citing C. E. Montague, Dramatic Values (1911). Benson, Eugene, ‘Demythologising Cathleen ni Houlihan: Synge and his Sources’, in Masaru Sekine (ed.), Irish Writers and the Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986), pp. 1–16. Greene, David H., and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge (New York: Macmillan, 1959).

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Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed., Introduction and Notes Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Joyce, James, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 53. Joyce, James, ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 50–3. Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (Random-Vintage, 1986). Harris, Susan Cannon, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Holloway, Joseph, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). Kenner, Hugh, A Colder Eye: Modern Irish Writers (New York: Knopf, 1983). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). O’Brien, Flann, The Third Policeman (1967; London: Harper Perennial, 2007). Ritschel, Nelson O’Ceallaigh, Synge and Irish Nationalism: The Precursor to Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002). Synge, J. M., In the Shadow of the Glen, in The Complete Plays of John M. Synge (New York: Random-Vintage, 1935), pp. 99–118. Synge, J. M., The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. 1, 1871–1907, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 74. Valente, Joseph, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). Weygandt, Cornelius, Irish Plays and Playwrights (1913; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). Yeats, J. B., ‘Ireland out of the Dock’, United Irishman (10 October 1903). Yeats, W. B., The Countess Cathleen, in The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats, vol. II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clarke and Rosalind E. Clarke (New York: Scribner, 2001).

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Part IV Heresies of Gender and Sexuality

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17 The Irish Bachelor Ed Madden

That is what I am, a farmer, a bachelor farmer. It’s the bachelor bit that complicates the whole business. –John B. Keane, The Chastitute 1

I

I

n John B. Keane’s play Sive (1959), in which a young woman goes mad when forced to marry an elderly farmer, Keane repeatedly portrays the old bachelor in deprecating or diminishing ways. When he first appears, Keane describes Seán Dóta as ‘a small man’ who holds his hat ‘supplicatingly in front of him’. ‘He wears a respectable frieze overcoat,’ Keane adds, ‘which seems too large for him.’2 A coat that seems too big confirms both the man’s small stature and his overweening pride, but the fact that the coat he cannot quite fit is ‘respectable’ suggests that, despite his wealth and property, he himself is not quite respectable. A figure perhaps also ill fitted to our understanding of gender and Irish modernism, the Irish bachelor may offer a more complicated understanding of gender and resistance than previous analyses have allowed – and more complicated than that traditional coat thrown over his shoulders might suggest. When we think of the bachelor in Irish literature, he is almost always a bachelor farmer, an object of pity, derision or humour, sometimes all at once. Bachelors populate the foundational texts of Irish modernism – one thinks of the sterile and self-sufficient James Duffy of James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case, ‘an outcast from life’s feast’,3 or the bachelor quartet pontificating on paternity in Chapter 9 of Ulysses – yet ideas about Irish bachelorhood have mostly settled into the metonym of the bachelor farmer, notably depicted in Patrick Kavanagh’s antipastoral poem, ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942).4 The Irish bachelor of this tradition, inevitably older and rural, sexually frustrated and socially isolated, draws on a specifically Irish history, the post-Famine social system of stem-family inheritance and delayed marriages, as well as, it is sometimes suggested, Catholic attitudes toward the body and sexuality. But the literary figure, like the historical practice of delayed marriage itself, lasted well beyond the economic and historical exigencies that grounded it. This chapter examines a 1940 Westmeath play about the threatened eviction of single men from council cottages in 1939, A. J. Stanley’s Troubled Bachelors, which appeared only two years before Kavanagh’s Paddy Maguire would more clearly establish a way of thinking about the bachelor that persists in Irish cultural studies. The

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Irish bachelor emerges as a type in the 1930s, as Ireland transitioned from colony to nation-state and as national identity became explicitly linked to sexual order in the 1937 Constitution, as registered in the play’s attempt to establish types of bachelors and reasons for bachelorhood. First performed in 1940 and published in 1941, Stanley’s play has received no critical attention, and bachelor eviction notices, which mark the biopolitical force on actual single men of the nation’s increasing pro-natalist rhetoric, have mostly escaped commentary as well. Yet this play and that historical moment suggest a rich context for thinking about the meaning of bachelorhood in both literary and historical forms.5 The figure of the bachelor farmer circulates through the twentieth century, his pathologies on display in texts as varied as the novel December Bride (1951, and later film, 1991) and Joe Dolan’s comic anthem ‘The Westmeath Bachelor’ (1968), until finally renamed as sexually aberrant in Keane’s play The Chastitute (1981) – a comic apotheosis that appeared about the same time that a sociological study of the Burren would note that ‘bachelorhood is now too commonplace to be considered deviant’.6 This tradition persists into the present, in films like the 2006 documentary The Brothers, which one reviewer described as ‘a glimpse of a way of life, straight from a John B. Keane play’.7 Even old bachelors who do not fit in the tradition may still be framed within that tradition, as in Tana French’s The Witch Elm (2018), in which French deftly connects old Uncle Hugo to the tradition in quick physical sketch. More gentleman gardener than farmer, family anchor rather than outsider, Hugo, writes French, has the ‘rangy build of a hill farmer and a big, shaggy head with big, messy features, as if the sculptor had given the clay a rough general shape and left the detail for later’.8 The author can assume a stereotype so familiar that her readers will know its general shape, whatever the actual details. If the Irish bachelor is over-determined as literary trope, he is woefully underexamined as a category of gender analysis. In 1997, Adrian Frazier asked scholars in Irish studies to think about ‘alternative masculinities’ in Irish nationalism,9 and in 1999, in one of the few studies to place the bachelor alongside other forms of Irish masculinity, Joanna Bourke reminded us that bachelor masculinity is different from other forms of masculinity: ‘The never marrying man exemplified a very different masculinity from the marrying man.’10 Recent scholarship in Irish studies has begun to situate masculinity historically, but the bachelor farmer and the wider realm of bachelorhood that he represents and obscures remain, for the most part, unexamined.11 Bourke also reminds us that Irish bachelors tend to be rural, with a greater emphasis on celibacy, compared to British counterparts.12 Yet the growing body of bachelor theory in English and American cultural studies has failed to consider the Irish bachelor as a specific variant, except for brief attention to Irish–American bachelors in American culture, and remains focused on urban and middle-class men.13 That is, Irish gender studies has mostly ignored the bachelor, and bachelor studies, despite the occasional appearance of working-class Irish–Americans, has overlooked Ireland. Given the centrality of the bachelor farmer to the Irish cultural imagination, it may seem odd to suggest that the bachelor represents a form of gender resistance – a gender heresy. But restoring Troubled Bachelors to its time and place in 1940 Mullingar reveals the ideological richness and cultural complexity of Irish bachelordom, unstable and multivalent, so easily subsumed and reduced under the sign of the postFamine bachelor farmer. In the same way that migration scholar Mary Hickman

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has suggested that the male stereotypes of Irish migration (businessman in America, construction worker in Britain) are a way of ‘not knowing’ the complex histories of the Irish diaspora, one might ask if the figure of the bachelor farmer obscures the ideological complexity of the Irish bachelor.14 Stanley’s play enables us to see the bachelor differently, to ask questions about the relation of bachelor masculinity to time and space, citizenship and the state, celibacy and sociality, and shifting gender norms of modernity – in ways that complicate both the play’s ultimate affirmation of marriage and the traditional representation of the Irish bachelor farmer. The play is not modernist in form: driven by a marriage plot and relying on gender stereotypes, it is predictable and conventional. However, it provokes questions about what forms of masculinity were available in Irish culture in the early twentieth century and how those modes of thinking and being male were enabled, regulated or suppressed. Responding to the sweeping economic and social transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist cultural expression developed ‘a preoccupation with gender’ as a primary indicator of cultural change, examining ‘the erosion of gender norms’ and the ‘ensuing rearrangement of public and private life’, and representing an ‘affective crisis’ of cultural alienation that threatened both sociality and emotional intimacy.15 These concerns found focus in figures of gender or sexual dissidence, such as the New Woman, the invert or homosexual, the womanly man, the neurasthenic, the Jew – and the bachelor. Recent studies of modernist masculinities argue that ‘the culturally regenerative space of modernism . . . provided an opportunity for the critical reappraisal of prevailing and emergent models of masculinity’, and as the twentieth century began, as Natalya Lusty argues of Britain and Europe, masculinity ‘entered a protracted period of cultural reflexivity and malleability’.16 Daniel Worden similarly argues that, in American culture, representations of masculinity could at times offer ‘a site of protest against the dominant, a way of channeling power into unconventional publics and subjects’.17 Though not modernist in form, then, Stanley’s play gestures toward and arguably depends upon the very thing it would contain: the Irish bachelor as a modernist figure of gender resistance.

II On 14 April 1939, P. J. Bartley, the county health commissioner of Westmeath, sent notice to over 300 single men living in cottages owned and managed by the local authority that they had six months either to get married or to be evicted.18 There were 600 applicants for these council cottages, ‘many of whom are married and living in houses which are condemned’, and the pressure on housing focused greater attention on the 342 bachelors already living in the cottages.19 The minutes of the health commission state: ‘Serve notice on bachelor tenants of cottages that unless they are married within six months they will be dispossessed’20 (Plate 29). Unmarried men and women faced popular disapproval and ridicule in nineteenth-century Ireland,21 but at this moment in 1930s Westmeath, the nation-state enacted official disapproval in the allocation of housing. Subsequent newspaper coverage suggests that the men were not evicted,22 but that does not obviate the force of a government edict that demanded marriage in exchange for adequate housing. Nor was this an anomalous incident. Two years later, in 1941, the Westmeath Examiner reported the Meath Board of Health’s

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consideration of a letter from a young tenant who was told ‘to quit his cottage if he did not get married within a month’.23 Recent historical research by Holly Teresa Dunbar traces Irish coverage of bachelor housing from 1911 to the prewar years, including repeated ‘get married or get out’ notices and reports of actual evictions in County Meath in 1913.24 In rural counties of Leinster, she writes, ‘councils were unwilling to provide homes to bachelors, believing that they were unable to keep them in adequate condition without a woman to maintain the house.’25 In 1939 Westmeath, the official rationale was that married families with children should be prioritised for council housing, though the presumed failure of bachelors at home maintenance had also long been part of the discussion.26 Housing allotments would be the work of local government, but in 1943 Dáil Éireann finance debates over land allotments, officials admitted that, even though the Land Commission had ‘no rule against giving land to unmarried applicants’, they still insisted ‘that bachelor allottees will get married within a year’.27 These attempts to regulate the lives of single men were prompted by heightened political and popular concerns about the numbers of late marriages and the increased numbers of single men and women. Stanley’s play recreates the 1939 Westmeath eviction threat, but it falls in the context of a much broader concern about marriage, a moment in which a number of discourses – political, anthropological, historical and literary – would intersect around the image of the bachelor. High rates of late marriage and permanent celibacy were not unique to Ireland. Historian Timothy Guinnane and, more recently, sociologist Tony Fahey suggest that the large numbers of single men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected social patterns at work across Europe, though they note that, as the rest of the Western world moved toward a marriage boom, Ireland resisted.28 ‘By the 1930s,’ Fahey writes, ‘as the surge toward marriage was gathering speed elsewhere, marriage avoidance reached new extremes in Ireland,’ and this pattern would not change until the 1950s.29 In official discourse, the promotion of marriage and family found expression in the pro-natalism of the Free State’s 1929 Censorship of Publications, which prohibited printed matter related to birth control, and then in the 1937 Constitution, which installed the family as the primary unit of the new nation (Article 41), and ‘imagined a nation organised through patriarchal heterosexual marriage’.30 In popular discourse, the anxieties about celibacy and late marriage found expression in the spectre of ‘race suicide’, which culminated in John O’Brien’s 1953 The Vanishing Irish, a hyperbolic portrait of a ‘country with the fewest and the latest marriages in the civilised world’, in which spinsters and especially bachelors served as symbols of disease and death: ‘the blight of excessive bachelorhood . . . was dooming them to extinction’.31 In 1940, the year that Stanley’s Troubled Bachelors took to the stage, anthropological studies added to the discourse about bachelors, when American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball published their fieldwork among rural farmers in County Clare in Family and Community in Ireland (1940). As would be true of Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s fieldwork in Kerry, published in Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics (1977), post-Famine stem-family inheritance, delayed marriage and celibacy, and mass emigration – what Scheper-Hughes called ‘generative cultural themes’32 – were fundamental to the analysis, and though other studies of Irish bachelor culture would insist that the post-Famine stem-family system explanation was not generalisable throughout Ireland,33 the narrative that anthropologists traced in specific local contexts would, over the next four decades, become generalised into the familiar sociological figure of the

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bachelor farmer, an emblematic cultural narrative reiterated by historians, sociologists and literary critics.34 Contextualising Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 portrait of the bachelor farmer in ‘The Great Hunger’, Declan Kiberd summarises the narrative in Inventing Ireland: The habit of late marriage was widespread: the accompanying ethic of sexual continence was rooted less in the puritanism of the Catholic Church than in the need to avoid further subdivision of family farms to the point where they might be unviable. Accordingly, older inheriting sons remained ‘boys’ until their ageing parents agreed to make way for a young bride who might start a new family with them on the homestead. Many such ‘boys’ were still waiting in their late forties.35 According to this narrative, Irish bachelors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were geographically immobilised by issues of inheritance or displaced into immigration. They were awkward about sexual matters, a result of systemic social segregation of the sexes, and they were ambivalent toward, if not hostile to, marriage and children, even as they might be dependent upon or responsible for parents or siblings.36 Two additional issues are worth noting about this developing narrative. First, though Kiberd minimises the role of religion and sexual repression, others such as Tom Inglis and Scheper-Hughes place Catholic attitudes toward the body and sexuality at the heart of the bachelor’s predicament.37 Scheper-Hughes says an ‘excessive preoccupation with sexual purity and pollution, fostered by an ascetic Catholic tradition’ contributed not only to celibacy but also to ‘the high rates of mental illness among middle-aged bachelor farmers’.38 Second, and related to this preoccupation with religion, even though the narrative is economic and historical, psychological (and sometimes pathological) explanations can pre-empt the historical, especially in popular and literary representations. Michael G. Cronin pointedly remarks that while Arensberg and Kimball acknowledge ‘larger historical currents at work’, they concluded that ‘the kernel of the problem lies, of course, in the behaviour of the country people’.39 As he notes of John O’Brien’s popular study, ‘the crucial sites requiring transformation were the Irish family and the Irish mind’.40

III What, then, did it mean to be a bachelor in 1939 Westmeath? For one thing, the place was important. Dunbar locates much of the early twentiethcentury unrest about bachelor housing allocation in the rural counties of Meath, Westmeath and Athlone.41 A 1940 study cited Westmeath’s ‘bachelor problem’ as indicative of a national problem, with 76 per cent of men aged 20–44 unmarried in Westmeath, and 75 per cent in rural areas nationwide.42 And another thing: bachelors are funny. The first mention of the 1939 Westmeath eviction notice appeared not in the council minutes reported in the local newspaper but in an ‘Around About’ gossip column by ‘Stroller’, who quipped that the notice ‘created a flurry amongst the tribe’, who were planning a union, ‘not of a matrimonial nature, but one to preserve, what they term, their freedom’. He concluded, ‘the general public will watch further developments with interest and possibly with some amusement’.43 With some amusement. When news of the edict was reported abroad, letters and photographs from young women in England and elsewhere

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in Ireland began arriving at the offices of the Westmeath Board of Health, adding to the humorous reportage.44 Consistent in the coverage of the bachelor evictions is this emphasis on humour, as if, no matter how dire their fate, bachelors are always funny, an insistent humour that surely registers the marginal status of these men. Dunbar similarly notes that early debates about bachelor tenants were ‘often light-hearted’.45 ‘There was merriment at Meath Board of Health,’ begins a 1941 newspaper account of a young man’s objection to the compulsion to marry.46 The language of dispossession may seem to the modern reader a strange and grim reminder of the history of land evictions, yet Dunbar reports that when a councilman at a 1912 meeting in Ardee compared the council’s demand that bachelor tenants marry to British coercion, ‘the council laughed some more’.47 Intervening in the ongoing Westmeath controversy (and provoking more laughter), A. J. Stanley’s Troubled Bachelors appeared on the Mullingar stage barely a year after the eviction notice, on St Patrick’s Day, 1940.48 The play, published by James Duffy & Co. in 1941, repeats the eviction notice, though it reduces the window of matrimonial opportunity from six to three months.49 The play’s three troubled bachelors – Peter Carmody, Jack Whelan and Tom Kirby – resist the edict, despite the arguments of local officials and the persistent attentions of three local women, until in the last act they are won over by the women’s superior domestic skills, and they pair off in oddly equitable matches (the old bachelor Carmody pairs off with ‘elderly spinster’ Mary Swan) – the matches misrepresenting the facts. Not only was there disparity in the numbers of men to women in Ireland (more single men than women), but there was a consistent age gap at that moment in Irish marriages.50 – like the match of Séan Dóta and Sive in Keane’s play Sive. In addition to the official reason for eviction given in the order – the need for family housing – the play offers two further forms of persuasion. One is the state’s embrace of pro-natalist rhetoric, adapting the heteronormative discourse of family into what Lee Edelman might call an explicit discourse of reproductive futurism. Reproductive futurism deploys the figure of the Child as ‘the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’,51 and it is precisely the fantasised child to whom the local officials appeal. Joseph P. Scanlon, the play’s version of Commissioner Bartley, first has to convince the men that sexual order is integral to national identity. When Carmody insists, ‘I’m as good an Irishman as you are any day . . . I always stood up for the right and did my bit for the Cause,’ arguing that marriage has nothing to do with that. Scanlon replies, ‘It has a lot to do with what you call the Cause!’52 Though he does not quote the Constitution, he explains that the state is organised and sustained through the heteronormative family: ‘Not only do we want to provide for [men with families], but we want to encourage other men to marry so that they can take their proper place in building up a virile state,’ and he concludes, ‘The Council is determined to protect the assets of this nation and the biggest asset this nation has is its children.’53 A rent collector tells the bachelors, ‘we must look to the future, you know, we must look to the future,’54 that idiomatic ‘you know’ interpellating them into the discourse, even though that future is not theirs.55 The play opens and closes on the common yard in front of the men’s three cottages, which the script notes are ‘situated at the end of a boreen off the main road’. Symbolically, the bachelor narrative is not the main cultural narrative, and that dead-end lane off the main road where the men live, like O’Brien’s screeds about race suicide, surely represents the reproductive end of bachelorhood.56 In an inversion that amplifies the disconnect between bachelors and the future, Kirby, the shy bachelor, is so deeply embedded in the bachelor narrative that joining the normative narrative feels

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like a kind of social death – ‘I’d drop dead,’ ‘I wouldn’t get married if it was to save my life’ and ‘if one of them lasses from England comes near me you can order my coffin’.57 The other discourse of persuasion, not unconnected to pro-natalist discourse but operating in a different way – horizontally rather than vertically, through peers rather than official power – is that of the gendered distribution of labour. The play opens with three men unable to master basic domestic tasks (laundry, cooking, darning), a deficiency rectified in the last act by three women, who set their households to rights while the men are in town protesting against the edict. The play thus literally represents the separate spheres of public and private, and confirms Susan Cannon Harris’s argument that, in early twentieth century nationalist culture, the duty of women was to maintain the integrity of the domestic sphere and to regulate desires that would threaten it.58 A woman’s work, however, is never done; norms must be reinforced in the ongoing work of gender regulation. Popular in rural and amateur theatres through the 1940s, Stanley’s play was revived as a musical in Mullingar in 1965, part of Mullingar’s rich history of bachelor culture, which would develop through the middle of the century with bachelor balls and contests on the calendar into the 1990s.59 The sock darning that opens his play would become iconic. The cover of the 1956 Bachelors Digest, for example, a souvenir programme of the Bachelors Ball (Figure 17.1), features three men diligently attempting to darn the toes of socks.60 As the bachelor moves toward the end of the century, he remains in need of reform.

Figure 17.1 Cover of the 1956 Bachelor’s Digest, souvenir programme for the Bachelors Ball. Image courtesy of the Westmeath County Library, used with permission.

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IV The bachelors ultimately submit to the imperatives of both the state’s pro-natalist policies and the play’s marriage plot. But the play also grants them voice, and it is important for us to attend to the things they say – ‘I’m as good an Irishman as you are’ – as well as the things they do, the ways they resist the inexorable machinery of the marriage plot. Although the names of the men are, as the author notes, ‘purely fictitious’,61 Stanley’s Mullingar audience would have been fully aware of the controversy and might have even known some of the men. Stanley’s bachelors, like those infrequently named in the newspaper coverage that Dunbar surveys, are like Michel Foucault’s ‘Infamous Men’: ‘What snatched them from the darkness in which they could, perhaps should, have remained was the encounter with power.’ Without that encounter, no word would exist ‘to recall their fleeing trajectory’.62 Stanley’s play is about that encounter with power, and the bachelors’ resistance to state power puts into play energies and ways of thinking about single men that have been since obscured by our narrowed focus on the bachelor farmer. Given the prominence of those ‘generative cultural themes’ that Scheper-Hughes and others associate with the traditional narrative of the bachelor farmer, it is important to emphasise that what has become the traditional story of the bachelor farmer is not the story Stanley tells. Specifically, these men are not farmers: all three are labourers. They do not own land. There is no mention of parents or siblings. More importantly, Stanley’s play contrasts in several ways with what would become the traditional bachelor narrative: • Instead of one explanation for bachelorhood, the play proposes a diverse typology. • Rather than the bachelor farmer’s limited and dwindling options, we see an emphasis on autonomy and volition. • For the usual narrative of religious repression and family pathologies, the play reminds us that the story of the Irish bachelor is, in fact, a story of state regulation and suppression. • For the diminished space of inheritance and diminishing time of delayed marriage, the play suggests that there are multiple temporalities. • The play offers sociality in place of the standard story of celibacy and emotional isolation. Though inevitably constrained within the social world of the play, these elements can reform and reframe our understanding of the bachelor as he emerges in the modernist era as a site of protest against social and gender norms – ‘a way of channeling power’, to adapt Worden, ‘into unconventional publics and subjects’63 – even as the play harnesses him to a very conventional narrative. Anglo-American studies of the bachelor recognise that the figure may be either a stage of life or a kind of person, or, confusingly, both at once. To be a bachelor is to be part of an implied narrative, a temporary stage in a temporal narrative of life expectations – bachelorhood makes sense, says Michael Warner, only in the context of that compulsory societal narrative of marriage and reproduction.64 But to be a bachelor is to also be a kind of man. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the bachelor emerges in the late nineteenth century, alongside the homosexual, as a character type,65 and

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Katherine Snyder suggests that both type and life-stage definitions remained in play in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture66 – and this definitional confusion seems true of Stanley’s play. As type, the bachelor may function as a counter-figure, offering ‘an explicit counterfigure to the family’,67 while as a life-stage, the bachelor suggests the possibility of a counter-narrative to the compulsory heteronormative narrative of marriage and reproduction. In addition, bachelor studies tend to focus on three broad categories of cultural meaning: the bachelor’s embodiment of developing ideas of social, sexual and political autonomy, the structure and sociality of bachelor subcultures, or the relation of the bachelor to forms of social normativity, such as marriage and family, norms he may both reinforce and violate.68 The conclusion of the play reinforces the marital narrative, of course, but the protests of the bachelors indicate the potential for the violation of social norms. Are Irish bachelors born or made? Do they choose bachelorhood or is it imposed upon them? Are bachelors unmarriageable by habit or by constitution? At what point does resistance to marriage become an inability to marry, and when does a bachelor become a confirmed bachelor? That is, what drives their resistance to the marital norm? Snyder suggests that questions like these prompted various explanations and ‘confused taxonomies’ among popular writers of the nineteenth century ‘as a way of managing the trouble with bachelors’.69 Continuing that concern with typologies, Stanley’s cast list explicitly delineates three explanatory ‘types’ of bachelor: a confirmed bachelor, a ‘Gay type’ (meaning carefree) and the ‘nervous’ type. The play later reveals a fourth bachelor, the male secretary of the Urban Council, who tells a newspaper reporter, ‘I’m too busy’ to marry.70 Rather than a fourth type, however, he confirms Dunbar’s suggestion that there was a pervasive class component to the rhetoric of marriage: ‘often it was the middle classes who placed expectations and demands on working-class people to marry’.71 He attempts to enforce a norm that he is not necessarily subject to himself, escaping stigma through membership in the middle class. The play registers some confusion about when, exactly, a bachelor becomes a confirmed bachelor, as Carmody, the play’s confirmed bachelor, is listed as both ‘an elderly bachelor’ and ‘middle-aged’.72 That said, the representation of Carmody in the play slides from way of life to character type: when a female clerk wonders if a woman did something to warrant Carmody’s animosity toward women (he is described in the cast list as ‘something of a woman-hater’), the male council secretary assures her, ‘I suppose he’s just built that way.’73 Similarly, Whelan, who ‘likes the ladies but evinces no desire to get married’, sees bachelorhood as more character trait than way of life, arguing, ‘It’s not every man has a leaning towards matrimony.’74 Lest we read Whelan’s emphasis on ‘leaning’ as mere preference, Carmody immediately reframes the term as a ‘calling to matrimony’, a vocation, thus implicitly linking bachelor celibacy to priestly celibacy.75 Leaning, calling, vocation: these words blur the bachelor’s capacity for agency, yet, for Carmody, bachelorhood means agency, masculine autonomy. As a ‘road-ganger’, a working-class man in a supervisory role, he insists on his capacity for volition. ‘I’m a free man’, he protests, ‘with a will of my own and I dar’ any Council to come and tie me to any woman’s apron strings.’76 Carmody also portrays marriage as feminisation – ‘You’ll want us to start a sewing class next,’ he says,77 reminding us of those poorly darned socks. He describes marriage as a ‘spancel’ (a fetter or hobble).78 The emphasis so early in the play on ‘a will of my own’ marks the importance of will to the play’s understanding of bachelorhood, in contrast

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with the restricted compass and diminishing options of the bachelor farmer, defined by his failure or inability to act. Marriage functions for the Westmeath bachelors as non-marriage does for the bachelor farmer, who is tied (to the land) and hobbled (by family obligations). Although the men’s protests may perpetuate the popular image of the bachelor in the Irish press as selfish and ‘shirking the responsibility and financial burden of marriage and children’,79 their resistance to marriage also exemplifies Rónán McDonald’s claim that refusal and obduracy – the active refusal to act in ‘resistance to an ideology of productive, active masculinity’ – characterises the masculinity of late Irish modernism.80 As ‘active refusal to act’ may indicate, Carmody’s version of autonomous masculinity is marked by a double-bind not dissimilar to the double-bind of the nineteenthcentury metrocolonial Irishmen described by Joseph Valente, expected to uphold the British model of the manly ethos of self-control. Whether the Victorian Irishman upholds the model in order to prove his ability for self-rule, and thus passively justifies the effectiveness of British rule, or whether he resists the model by rebelling against empire, and thus demonstrates his inability to rule himself – either way he validates the need for British rule.81 The double-bind for the bachelor is that to insist on his autonomous masculinity and refuse marriage is to resist the demands of the nation and fail as an Irishman, but to submit to the demands of the nation in order to be seen as Irishman is to relinquish his autonomy, and thus fail as an Irishman. Either way, he fails as an Irish man. It is important to note that this framework of action and its regulation are political. Even though Scanlon reminds the men of their ‘duty to their religion and their country’,82 there are no priests in the play. This is a significant departure from what has become the traditional narrative of the bachelor farmer. In Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer (1974), Keane combined elements of sexual deprivation and religious oppression into a pathological comic portrait of the bachelor farmer as chastitute, a word he claims was coined by a local priest to name ‘those without orders who chose celibacy before marriage, love affairs or promiscuity’. They are ‘peculiar’ to countries ‘where the Catholic tradition of lifelong sexual abstemiousness was encouraged by the Catholic Church and where free-range sex and sexual discussion were absolutely taboo’.83 Other than a brief and telling retort about the Pope – ‘the Pope of Rome wouldn’t boss Peter Carmody!’84 – the Catholic Church does not appear in Stanley’s play. In his recent work on masculinity and Irish nationalism, Aidan Beatty says that historiographic explanations that emphasise the role of the Church in gender regulation allow the state to seem ‘blameless’, when, in fact, ‘the Irish state was strongly invested in projects of male power and social control’.85 The absence of the Church in Stanley’s play underscores the nature of the struggle: the regulation of men’s bodies and desires is a function of the State. Carmody measures the strength of his resistance to the edict by comparing it to his resistance to Partition, telling Whelan and Kirby that ‘the freedom of your own souls comes nearer to ye than any old border, no matter what the patriots say’.86 Literally, the question of marriage is nearer to their individual lives, as they live in a midland county far from the proposed border, but in dismissing ‘what the patriots say’, Carmody rejects in advance Scanlon’s attempts to link the language of nation to the regulation of gender, as when Scanlon later says that marriage and family are ‘work of national importance much greater than any Border’.87 Carmody may think that he is fully entitled to the rights of a citizen, but this play appears only three years

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after the nation has embraced the family, not the autonomous citizen, as the primary sociopolitical unit of the state. Carmody’s assertions of masculinity must be channelled into the heteronormative national narrative, and a bachelor who is both emphatically autonomous but inevitably married seems a useful political figure for this discursive operation, in that the rousing assertions of individual autonomy as a form of liberty must not be denied but reformed and refitted within the family. If the play recognises that competing narratives of gender identity are at work in 1930s Ireland, it also recognises that different standards of time, different chronologies and life narratives can be at work in the same physical and social space. Whelan admits to the local authorities that he knows they mean well, ‘but at the same time, it’s hard luck’ for ‘the boys here who are not the marrying sort’.88 At the same time. It is an idiomatic expression, but perhaps revelatory as well. Time is what bachelors do and do not have – the compressed three-month threat of eviction, the diminishing opportunities for marriage. ‘The clock ticked on,’ writes Patrick Kavanagh. ‘Time passes.’89 Although the opening scene description emphasises that dead-end boreen, it also recognises that the chronology imposed by the state may not fit the lives of the bachelors. ‘The time is a summer evening,’ writes Stanley, marking seasonal and diurnal time, ‘about seven o’clock new time.’90 The British imposed Greenwich Mean Time, or ‘New Time’, on Ireland in 1916. From 1880 to 1916, Ireland operated under Dublin Mean Time, which was 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich, the time zone of the rest of the United Kingdom. In 1941, when the play was published, Ireland and Northern Ireland operated under different times, as the UK adopted summer daylight savings time year round to save energy during the war. For most of the 1940s, then, Ireland was one hour behind Northern Ireland. While multiple time zones operating across one geographical space clearly suggest a distinction between state-imposed time zones and lived time (as well as emphasising the effect of Partition, which divided both time and space), it also corresponds to recent scholarship on queer time. Queerness, says Judith Halberstam, can ‘open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space’, specifically in resistance to the normative temporal and social logics of marriage, family, reproduction, generations, inheritance91: the very logics aligned with the life of the nation after the 1937 Constitution. Elizabeth Freeman proposes the term chrononormativity to describe the way we are ‘bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation’, or ‘the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’.92 To be out of sync with normative time is to be socially illegible. What looks like a dead end – that set of men’s cottages at road’s end – is, in fact, a space modulated by temporal heterogeneity, by lives not aligned with normative time. Carmody is economically productive and synchronised into capitalist time: he keeps his rent money in a mantel clock, and he always pays on time, ‘like the clock’.93 But he is not fully synchronised into heteronormative time because he is not producing what Scanlon calls the nation’s ‘biggest asset’.94 Under the edict, he is running out of time, but he is also out(side) of time. For Stanley’s bachelors, if time is multiple, space is shared, and this is a final difference from the tradition of the bachelor farmer. In contrast to studies that regularly show how bachelor culture is ‘organized around all-male groups’,95 isolation and repression dominate representations of Irish bachelors. In the film Pilgrim Hill (2012), for example, the bachelor farmer loses his girlfriend, his father and his sheep (thus his livelihood). In Bernard O’Donoghue’s poignant 1999 poem ‘Ter Conatus’, an emotionally repressed

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bachelor brother is unable to offer his dying sister physical affection, a hug, though he has lived with her for years – ‘being so little practised in such gestures’.96 As a demographic term, celibacy just means not married, not that the unmarried do not have sex, ‘although that seems close to the truth in rural Ireland’.97 Benjamin Kahan has argued that celibacy in the twentieth century is not the repression of sexuality but a form of sexuality, ‘an organization of pleasure’ that has its own socialities, forms of belonging and emotional expression.98 I am not suggesting that Stanley’s bachelors are homosexual, though bachelor culture is a homo-affectional space within which queer narratives and identities may develop. I am suggesting instead that, rather than always assuming that sexual abstinence requires emotional and social deprivation, we recognise, as the play does, that bachelorhood can be social. Scheper-Hughes, despite her attention to the pathological, admits that ‘there is a definite role in Irish society for such men’, and although she notes the negative impact of sexual segregation on male–female interactions, she also remarks on the extraordinary intimacy of single-sex environments, the ‘affectionate touching between unmarried males at the pub’.99 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also remark that the bachelor is social, dangerously so, with ‘multiple connections’ rather than family obligations – ‘equivalent’, they argue, ‘to a community whose conditions haven’t yet been established’.100 That utopian claim recalls Foucault’s claims about male friendship, that relations between men that exceed the sexual and the couple open up to new forms of belonging and community, ‘new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force’, which may ‘introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit’.101 But Stanley’s bachelors do not create a utopian community. They cannot imagine ‘new alliances’ that would exceed law and habit. Carmody is horrified by photographs sent to the bachelors by would-be brides in England, the ‘gentlemen-women’ with short haircuts and long trousers, pictures that impel him to protest the eviction notice, to ‘fight for your rights like a man!’ 102 The comic possibility of rural Irish bachelors marrying British New Women illustrates the limitations of the play.103 At first, Carmody does not even recognise them as women. His failure to see them marks the difference of 1930s Ireland, returning us to the importance of place and the dissimilarity of the Irish bachelor from bachelors elsewhere, in England or America. Troubled Bachelors makes space for forms of masculinity that are governed neither by the gender norms of repro-futurism nor by the traditional narrative of the bachelor farmer, but the Irish bachelor is still emphatically, if not imperially, male. Over a decade after he first wrote about Kavanagh and the bachelor farmer in Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd returned to ‘The Great Hunger’ in After Ireland. About the reception of the poem he notes, ‘Clichés have a habit of petrifying around unexamined assumptions.’104 Though he is talking about the mother–son relationship, he could as easily refer to the ‘generative cultural themes’ that Scheper-Hughes and others depend upon, which calcified into a portrait of the Irish bachelor, awkwardly draped in the respectable clothes of the past. Stanley’s Troubled Bachelors appeared in a rich and vexed cultural context in which single men were being defined, historicised, stigmatised, laughed at, regulated, dispossessed. He puts the state-driven discipline of bachelors on stage in a comedy that was enthusiastically performed over and over again in an insistent cultural re-enactment of the ridicule and discipline of the nonhegemonic man. The gender heresy that Stanley’s bachelors perform is not simply a resistance to marriage and reproduction, which is quashed by the play’s narrative. Nor is it the emphasis on masculine autonomy, which is bent to the imperatives of marital

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and constitutional responsibility. The modernist gender heresy that Stanley puts on stage is the possibility that masculinity is contingent and malleable, that it could be otherwise. That there could be other modes of being male than those made available through gender norms or nation-state, and that other forms of identity and sociality are made possible as different models of masculinity emerge. That the bachelor is neither failed nor faulty but, as Carmody argues with Scanlon, ‘as good an Irishman as you are any day’.105 Though one narrative, that of the bachelor farmer, would soon dominate the cultural imagination, the Westmeath bachelors took the stage at a moment when different models of masculinity were becoming legible, possible.

Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

I am deeply grateful to Rebecca Barr, Sean Brady, Seán Kennedy, Jane McGaughey and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin for their suggestions on earlier versions of this work. I would like to thank the students in my autumn 2016 queer temporalities seminar, especially Leslie Pearson, Maria-Josee Mendez and Travis Wagner, for their rich discussion of this play. Thank you, too, to the Irish American Cultural Institute and the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland in Galway for the residency that made possible much of the early research for this chapter. I remain very grateful to staff at the Westmeath County Library, especially Mary Farrell and Paula O’Dornan. Keane, The Chastitute, p. 5. Keane, Sive, p. 32. Joyce, Dubliners, p. 117. Kavanagh, Collected Poems, pp. 34–55. I have elsewhere examined the changing meanings of the ‘gay bachelor’, noting uneven lexical and cultural shifts across twentieth-century Irish culture and tracing those shifts through the cultural phenomenon of bachelor festivals. See Madden, ‘Bachelor Trouble’. Portions of that essay are adapted here. Curtin and Varley, ‘Marginal Men’, p. 303. Tallant, ‘Bachelor Brothers’. French, The Witch Elm, p. 98. Frazier, ‘Queering the Irish Renaissance’. Bourke, ‘The Ideal Man’, p. 94. See, for example, Beatty, Masculinity and Power; Ging, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema; Magennis, Sons of Ulster; Magennis and Mullen (eds), Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture; Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Theatre; and Valente, The Myth of Manliness. Most, though not all, focus on the last two centuries; see also Barr et al., Ireland and Masculinities in History, and McKibben, Endangered Masculinities. Bourke, ‘The Ideal Man’, p. 94. On Irish–American bachelors, see Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 77, and Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, p. 101. Other American bachelor studies include Greven, Men Beyond Desire; McCurdy, Citizen Bachelors; in British cultural studies, see especially Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort, and Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel. Hickman, ‘Thinking about Ireland’, p. 136. See DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, p. 174; Lusty, ‘Introduction: Modernism and Its Masculinities’, p. 7; and Moglen, Mourning Modernity, pp. 4–5. Moglen argues that American modernist writers represent a crisis in romantic and sexual intimacy, as ‘the most pervasive symptom’ of the early twentieth century’s processes of economic transformation.

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16. Lusty, ‘Introduction: Modernism and its Masculinities’, pp. 6–7. 17. Worden, Masculine Style, p. 3. 18. A series of Labourers’ Acts 1883–1936 had charged local authorities with a subsidised public housing programme, replacing inadequate housing in rural areas with cottages for rural labourers. British legislation remained in effect under the Irish Free State, though supervision of cottage housing shifted from rural district councils to county councils, and then, in 1936, to county boards of health. See Aalen, ‘Constructive Unionism’, pp. 137–64; also Dunbar, Representations of Gender, pp. 220–1. 19. ‘Bachelor Problem in Westmeath’, p. 5. 20. Although minutes of the health commission are not available for public use, Westmeath archivist Mary Farrell provided me with the text of the minutes, and I cite with permission. 21. Ó Danachair, ‘Marriage in Irish Folk Tradition’, pp. 101–2. 22. ‘War on Westmeath Bachelors’, p. 5. A year later, a newspaper columnist would insist that ‘the power of taking possession exists and there is no indication that the Commissioner is softening in his attitude to the bachelors. The sentence has been given. Its execution may take place at any time.’ See ‘Around About’ (6 April 1940), p. 5. 23. ‘Quit Cottages or Get Married Order’, p. 4. 24. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, pp. 219–29. 25. Ibid., p. 221. 26. ‘The Bachelor Problem’ was an ongoing topic in the Westmeath newspaper from as early as 1909. See ‘Tenancy of Cottages’, p. 6. 27. Though they relaxed the restriction and ‘had to give the bachelors a little more latitude’, Thomas Derrig said, ‘we do not intend by any means to allow them to escape’, in Derrig, Select Committee on Finance Debate. 28. Guinnane, ‘The Vanishing Irish: Ireland’s Population’, pp. 32–6; Tony Fahey, ‘The Irish Family’, pp. 65–75, esp. pp. 67–8. 29. Fahey, ‘The Irish Family’, p. 68; Ferriter, Occasions of Sin, p. 103. 30. Luibhéid, ‘Irish Migration and Sexuality Scholarship’, p. 63. 31. O’Brien, The Vanishing Irish, pp. 94, 228. 32. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, p. 23. 33. Curtin and Varley, ‘Marginal Men’, p. 289; Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, p. 30. 34. See, for example, Kennedy, The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility; Tom Inglis, Lessons in Irish Sexuality; and Kiberd, Inventing Ireland. 35. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 477. 36. On ageing parents and sibling relationships in bachelor households, see Guinnane, Vanishing Irish: Households, pp. 230–1; Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, p. 101; and Curtin and Varley, ‘Marginal Men’, p. 293. 37. Inglis, Lessons, pp. 35–7. For a critique of religious explanations, see Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, pp. 216–23. 38. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, p. 195. 39. Cronin, Impure Thoughts, p. 149. 40. Ibid. 41. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, p. 221. 42. ‘For Marrying – Dublin Is Not the Worst’ (1940), Irish Independent (21 February 1940), p. 6. 43. ‘Around About’, 22 April 1939, p. 4. 44. See, for example, ‘Two Bachelors May Find Wives, London Girl’s Letter to Westmeath’ and ‘Bachelors Take Note, Husbands Much in Demand’. 45. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, p. 221. 46. ‘Quit Cottages or Get Married Order’, p. 4. 47. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, p. 227.

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48. A doctor and amateur playwright, Stanley was a founding member of Mullingar’s Little Theatre, where Troubled Bachelors was performed. See Marian Keaney’s Westmeath Authors, pp.181–2, and Ruth Illingworth’s Images of Mullingar, p. 113. 49. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 22. 50. Coleman, ‘The Demographic Transition’, p. 57. See also Walsh, ‘Marriage in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’, p. 137. 51. Edelman, No Future, pp. 2–3. 52. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 36. 53. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 54. Ibid., p. 21. 55. Reproductive futurism works ‘in the service of a statist ideology’ by ‘installing proprocreative prejudice as the form through which desiring subjects assume a stake in a future that always pertains, in the end, to the state, not to them’. Edelman, No Future, p. 53, italics in original. 56. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, pp. 3, 5. 57. Ibid., pp, 10, 12, 20. 58. Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, p. 67. 59. ‘Musical a Big Success’, p. 5; Paula O’Dornan, email to author, 4 June 2013; ‘Will Mullingar Have Its Own Bachelor Dome?’ and F. Looney, ‘A Bachelor with Life for me,’ p. 13. 60. Mullingar Bachelor’s Digest, cover. 61. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 4. 62. Foucault, ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, p. 161. I am grateful to my student Leslie Pearson, who suggested this connection. 63. Worden, Masculine Style, p. 3. 64. Warner, ‘Irving’s Posterity’, p. 795, n. 6. 65. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 188–95. 66. Snyder, Bachelors, p. 4. 67. Vedder, ‘Between Genealogy, Degeneration and Reproduction’, p. 129. 68. Snyder, Bachelors, pp. 3–4. 69. Ibid., pp. 28–9. 70. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 32. 71. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, p. 218. 72. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 3. 73. Ibid., pp. 3, 32. 74. Ibid., pp. 3, 38. 75. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 76. Ibid., p. 14. 77. Ibid., p. 24. 78. Ibid., p. 8. 79. Dunbar, Representations of Gender, p. 218. 80. McDonald, ‘Nothing to Be Done’, p. 72. 81. Valente, The Myth of Manliness, pp. 21–5. 82. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 36. 83. Keane, Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer, p. 7. 84. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 16. 85. ‘Catholic-centric explanations’, he says, ‘serve not only to place a disproportionate amount of blame on the Church, they also serve to exculpate the state.’ In Beatty, Masculinity and Power, p. 210. 86. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 14. 87. Ibid., p. 36.

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88. Ibid., p. 38. 89. Kavanagh, Collected Poems, p. 41. 90. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 5. 91. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, pp. 1–6. 92. Freeman, Time Binds, p. 3. 93. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, pp. 12, 21–2. 94. Ibid., p. 39. 95. Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 77. 96. O’Donoghue, Here Nor There, p. 52. 97. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, p. 21. 98. Kahan, Celibacies, pp. 1–4. 99. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, pp. 175, 189. 100. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, pp. 70–1. 101. Foucault, ‘Friendship’, pp. 156–7. 102. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, pp. 28–9. 103. Given the long history in Ireland of allegorising colonial relations through gender, there is more to be said here about bodies, genders and nations. If there is an allegory here, it is a muddled one. 104. Kiberd, After Ireland, pp. 108–10. 105. Stanley, Troubled Bachelors, p. 36.

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Tallant, Nicola, ‘The Bachelor Brothers with a Deep, Dark Secret’, The Independent (6 August 2006), (last accessed 1 May 2019). ‘Tenancy of Cottages’, Westmeath Examiner (4 September 1909), p. 6. ‘Two Bachelors May Find Wives, London Girl’s Letter to Westmeath’, Irish Independent (21 April 1939), p. 8. Valente, Joseph, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). Vedder, Ulrike, ‘Between Genealogy, Degeneration and Reproduction: The Figure of the Bachelor in Science and Literature’, in Ana Barahona, Edna Suarez-Diaz and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds), The Hereditary Hourglass: Genetics and Epigenetics, 1868–2000 (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2010), pp. 129–35. Walsh, Brendan M., ‘Marriage in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’, in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin: College Press, 1985), pp. 132–50. ‘War on Westmeath Bachelors’, Westmeath Examiner (19 August 1939), p. 5. Warner, Michael, ‘Irving’s Posterity’, ELH, 67 (2000), pp. 773–99. ‘Will Mullingar Have Its Own Bachelor Dome?’, Westmeath Examiner (26 June 1993), p. 3. Worden, Daniel, Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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18 ‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female, Catholic Reader in Irish Modernism T. J. Boynton

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ne story of Irish modernism traces its emergence to the critique of British and other foreign literatures advanced by leading nationalists during the Revival. During this pivotal period, the nation’s enmeshment in an Anglo-centric literary marketplace suffused with detective stories, tabloid reporting, romance fiction and musical comedy came to be perceived as a threat to the national character, and nationalist agitations across factional lines thus targeted such consumption for reform. This critique was varied but took two predominant forms. The first, advanced by members of the mainly Protestant ‘Literary Revival’ like Edward Martyn, George Moore, George Russell (Æ), W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, defined the chief effect of these literatures as a debasement of the nation’s literary and intellectual taste. The second, advanced by members of the majority Catholic ranks of the nationalist movement such as D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith and Archbishop Thomas Croke, instead defined such consumption as morally degrading – as corrupting, in the famous words of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the traditional Irish virtues of ‘purity, piety, and simplicity’.1 This dual heritage deeply informed the subsequent development of Irish literature, and it would serve as a crucible for the formation of the ideals and aesthetic forms of Irish modernism. Both critiques necessarily aimed their reforms at the movement’s middle-class, Catholic constituency, with one faction promoting the rejection of British and other ‘cosmopolitan’ literary media as a route toward preserving Irish purity, piety and simplicity, and the other instead promoting such rejection as integral to intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. Both factions further targeted one Catholic group in particular: young, female readers. In keeping with the larger positioning of Irish femininity as a key marker of national identity and autonomy, the consumption of popular literary fare was identified as a special threat to this demographic. Images of the young, female Catholic reader perilously engaged in the consumption of tabloid reporting, romance fiction, musical comedy and even pornography thus moved to the foreground of literary depiction as the Revival progressed. Such depictions would become a staging ground both for the contest between Literary and Catholic nationalists’ divergent ideals and for their shared, common project of deanglicising Irish culture.2 This chapter argues that Irish modernism developed in part through ‘heretical’ efforts to challenge the representation of this consumer demographic as pure, pious and simple. Such efforts prove nearly ubiquitous among the key writers and texts

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of the modernist period, from early, to ‘high’ and ‘late’, with two strategies acquiring a particular salience. First, athwart the Catholic emphasis on purity and piety, modernists depicted Irish female readers as frequent, even avid, consumers of literatures defined by the Church and its allies as immoral. Such representations provided a more honest, documentary portrait of Irish female reading practices than the idealised image propounded by the Catholic intelligentsia. Second, more aspirationally, modernists repudiated the ideal of ‘simplicity’ by attempting to promote and stimulate such readers’ intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. Such efforts proceeded both through the portrayal of female characters who embodied such cultivation and through the dissemination of newly complex and challenging literary works. Attention to these related, ‘heretical’ strategies sheds new light on Irish modernisms’ relationships with the religious and gender pieties of the nationalist movement, and further illuminates their engagement with a number of broader topics in modernist studies such as pulp literature, popular culture and media spectacle. The Revivalist campaign against the literary wares of the metropole is well known, but a few brief examples will help scaffold the genealogy to follow. One of the earliest examples of its Catholic variant appears in an 1884 letter of support from Archbishop Croke to Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, subsequently published in The Freeman’s Journal and The Nation, in which he warned that not only England’s sports but her accents, her vicious literature, her music, her dances, and her manifold mannerisms . . . [are] not racy of the soil, but rather alien . . . as are for the most part, the men and women who first imported and still continue to patronize them’.3 This diagnosis by a leading ‘patriot priest’ of the consumption of British literature as ‘vicious’ – as generating vice – would be echoed throughout the Revival by nationalists like D. P. Moran, who, in the 1899 New Ireland Review essay ‘The Gaelic Revival’, depicts the Irish populace as a ‘motley gathering’, ‘yelling at low jokes and indecent songs’ in the ‘music halls’ and filing ‘in petticoats in its thousands . . . into the circulating libraries and the penny novelette shops for reams of twaddle’.4 The first issue of Moran’s own The Leader, launched in 1900 as a platform for his ‘Irish Ireland’ brand of Catholic nationalism, would further specify ‘British gutter literature’ as the source of the indecent tendencies amid which the petticoated, female reader figures so prominently.5 While sharing the Catholic preoccupation with the anglicising effects of Irish literary consumption, Literary Revivalists would base their opposition not on these effects’ impurity or impiety, but on their vulgarity – their impoverishment of the Irish intellect. Literary screeds against the same media and sites of anglicisation – the music hall, the circulating library, the bookshop – routinely deploy such rhetoric. Perhaps the most canonical piece of Revivalist agitprop, Douglas Hyde’s ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, premises its rejection of ‘English books . . . penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and . . . the garbage of vulgar English weeklies’ on the claim that only by uprooting such texts ‘can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore – one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe’.6 Though Hyde’s position as the cofounder of the leading organisation of the language revival, the Gaelic League, lent his

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urgings cross-factional appeal, their emphasis on vulgarity accords better with Literary critiques of British literary ‘garbage’ like those of the Irish poet–mystic George Russell (Æ), who, in the 1899 essay ‘Nationality and Imperialism’, states that ‘Police gazettes’, ‘penny novels’ and ‘hideous comic journals’, along with ‘the songs of the London music halls’, spread ‘vulgarity of mind’ among Irish consumers.7 Similar language distinguishes Literary critiques of perhaps the main hub of the nation’s literary distribution at the fin de siècle, the rural bookshop. Russell lambasted these for their ‘dust heaps of cheap prints, without high purpose . . . glimmering . . . with the phosphorescence of mental decay’, while the Literary Revival’s leading public intellectual, W. B. Yeats, excoriated Galway’s bookshops specifically for their London music-hall songs . . . halfpenny comic papers . . . sixpenny reprints of popular novels, and, with the exception of a dusty Dumas or Scott . . . and one or two little books of Irish ballads, nothing that one calls literature, nothing that would interest a few thousands who alone out of many millions have what we call culture.8 Irish Catholic women themselves soon joined in these conflicting campaigns. Accounts of the curriculum of the institution from which most derived their education, the convent boarding school, help to contextualise their activities, as well as what we might call the infrastructure of Catholic femininity during the Revival period. In her ‘Twenty-Five Years’ Reminiscences’, the novelist Katharine Tynan recalls a course of study circa 1870 consisting mainly of ‘books of a spiritual kind’, leavened only on ‘holidays and feasts’ with more ‘worldly’ matter such as ‘the guileless novels of Lady Georgina Fullerton, The Heir of Radcliffe . . . [and] Adelaide Proctor’s poems’.9 On such occasions, A nun read aloud . . . When [she] came to a passage of love-making . . . she would turn very red, and laugh or . . . say with contempt that what followed was great nonsense . . . the love-making passages were huddled away out of sight to our extreme disgust and disappointment.10 For the convent hierarchy, as with later agitators against the ‘novelette’ like Moran, even such comparatively tame, romance-based fare seemed a threat to ‘petticoated’ purity, piety and simplicity. Nationalists such as the suffragette Mary Hayden would praise the cloister’s sheltering of Irish girls from such texts, but would further insist that its instruction prepared them insufficiently for the decolonisation effort. Hayden’s ‘Women Citizens – Their Duties and Training’ (1912) stresses the vulnerability of the female, Catholic reader before the array of textual media with which she will be confronted upon graduation: she has practically never had an opportunity of reading a newspaper, and so has never been accustomed to follow the passing course of events. Therefore . . . she generally contents herself with skimming over the notices of social functions and reading the lists of births, deaths, and marriages; unless indeed, as too often happens, she turns her attention to those more sensational items on account of which she was debarred from newspaper reading during her school days.11

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Beneficially shielded from ‘sensational’ influences as students, fledgling female citizens yet fail to receive the political training needed to spurn the literary marketplace’s pandemonium of frivolous discourses. The rhetoric of female activists like Hayden illustrates that Irish women could invoke both brands of nationalist literary agitprop in support of their respective causes. While the moral tenor of Catholic nationalism is audible in Hayden’s approving description of the convent’s ‘debarring’ of sensational material, the larger, ‘suffragist’ aim of fomenting an electorate of young, discerning female readers dovetails with Literary efforts to bolster the Irish intellect. A similar rhetorical combination distinguishes the work of other organisations allied to Hayden’s Irish Women’s Franchise League, such as Maud Gonne’s Inghinidhe na hÉireann, or Daughters of Ireland. The Daughters’ founding charter of 1900, alongside such other ‘objects’ as ‘complete independence’ and ‘the study of Gaelic, of Irish Literature, History, Music and Art’, highlights the imperative To discourage the reading and circulation of low English literature, the singing of English songs, the attending of vulgar English entertainments at the theaters and music halls, and to combat in every way English influence, which is doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people.12 As with Hayden, this ‘object’ exhibits a dual Catholic / Literary appeal through its emphasis on the ‘low’ character of English literature and media and on their ‘vulgar’ threat to an inherently ‘refined’ Irish aesthetic taste. The foregoing illustrations divulge only a fraction of the historical picture from which Irish modernist depictions of female reading emerged. We have none the less begun to gain a sense of the fault lines dividing the campaigns of Catholic and Literary nationalists; of the foremost sites and venues of concern in the Irish literary marketplace; of the main print and performance genres identified as anglicising threats to cultural revival and independence; and of Irish women’s own engagement with these concerns. One additional fact that should be evident from the foregoing survey is crucial for any chronicle of Irish modernist ‘heresies’: that although Catholic nationalist ideology was better positioned than its Literary competitor to secure the allegiance of the nation’s middle classes, it was less likely to encourage literary innovation. The commitment to preserving the Irish Catholic female’s purity, piety and simplicity in many ways ran counter to the cultivation and complication of intellect and taste sought by the burgeoning, international movement of modernism. It was thus instead Literary nationalism’s ideals of avoiding vulgarity and stimulating an Irish intellectual reawakening that gave rise to the nation’s early modernist works. The first Literary work of note to engage concerns over female, Catholic reading is one that provoked some controversy: namely, W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen. The play’s crude bid for nationalist hegemony, depicting a member of the Protestant Ascendancy sacrificing her soul to save a Famine-struck, Catholic populace, invokes such concerns explicitly. The play’s fourth scene, in which a queue of Irish peasants sell their souls to demon ‘merchants’ for food money, spotlights a nameless ‘woman’ who, according to the merchants’ black ‘book’ of transgressions, is ‘soft, handsome, and still young’.13 In the 1892 version of the play, the First Merchant describes the sin that has lowered the value of the Woman’s soul: ‘It’s certain that the man she’s married

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to / Knows nothing of what’s hidden in the jar / Between the hour-glass and the pepper pot.’14 The Woman’s alarmed reply sheds light on this allusion: ‘The scandalous book!’15 The play thus positions ‘scandalous’ female reading as one of the ‘sinful’ practices Cathleen’s sacrifice will expurgate. Is the book in question blasphemous, merely ‘sensational’ or even a work of pornography? The Merchant’s further description creates as much confusion as clarity: ‘when he’s away / . . . the hand that wrote what’s hid / Will tap three times upon the window-pane’.16 The item, then, appears to be the handwritten accessory of an adulterous affair between the Woman and its author, though this would seem to contradict its being a ‘book’ – a bound, print artefact. Further confusion is created by the Woman’s rejoinder: ‘And if there is a letter / There is no reason why I should have less money than the others.’17 Is the ‘scandalous’ text a ‘book’ or a ‘letter’? The reader is forced to deduce some strange combination of the two, such that, for example, the cuckolding writer gave the Woman a ‘letter’ that she then hid in a ‘book’ and placed in the ‘jar’. Such confusions aside, the ‘scandalous book’ signals the play’s intervention into ongoing debates over young, female reading and develops its message of Protestant leadership in relation to this perceived threat. Yeats in fact panders to the Catholic view of such reading matter as impure and impious rather than merely vulgar to render the play more ideologically palatable to its audiences. Famously, however, upon its first performance in 1899, his hegemonic bid foundered, in part as a result of a scathing campaign of negative propaganda mounted by the Catholic critic F. Hugh O’Donnell, whose pamphlet, ‘Souls for Gold!: Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin’, succeeded in persuading no less a figure than Cardinal Michael Logue that any ‘Irish Catholic audience’ who could stomach the play ‘must have sadly degenerated, both in religion and patriotism’.18 Interestingly, the version on which O’Donnell based his broadside, from Yeats’s 1895 Poems, alters the scene in question such that the Woman has instead hidden a ‘scandalous parchment’ of ‘love-letters’.19 Why Yeats changed this key description – whether for purposes of verisimilitude, simple cohesion or otherwise – is difficult to determine. O’Donnell, however, would single out this moment in a follow-up attack published in The Freeman’s Journal, as an ‘up-to-date appreciation of Irish Womanhood’, offensive for its ‘suggestiveness of foulness’: Going, going, gone! . . . an unchaste Irish wife – secured for hell for a hundred crowns! The Celtic Muse of W. B. Yeats is tireless in its flattering appreciations of the Irish nation. Its men, apostate cowards; its women – such as this.20 Even in the absence, then, of the original ‘scandalous book’, the play’s evocation of the charged topic of Catholic, female reading played a prominent role in its reception. Though some critics have questioned the modernist credentials of Revivalist works like Cathleen, O’Donnell himself had no doubts regarding the play’s ‘up-to-date’ aesthetic or its violation of purity, piety and simplicity. In his judgement, the play offered ‘a sort of witch’s cauldron of aboriginal superstition and Ibsenite neo-paganism’, passed off as ‘the permanent spring of Celtic genius and Celtic religion’, ‘a sort of Maeterlinckish–Ibseniteish–Baudelairian drama’ whose affinities with French Symbolism, the primitive, and the immodesties of Ibsen fatefully deviated from the ideals required for decolonisation.21 O’Donnell would also single out other early dramas by Yeats such as The Land of Heart’s Desire, in which the protagonist, Mary Bruin, is converted to ‘neo-pagan’ belief in the Celtic fairies by an ‘old book’ inherited from her

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great grandfather, as further ‘revolting burlesque[s] on Irish Catholic religion’.22 Not only Yeats’s efforts to model bad female reading, then, but his parallel efforts to model alternative, ‘Celtic’ habits of literary consumption coded to some Catholic critics as modernising violations of an Irishness better preserved in amber. Another Revivalist work more commonly viewed as modernist proves even more thoroughly engaged with debates over deleterious female reading: namely, J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Where Yeats’s early efforts focus on genres of ‘scandalous’ and / or adulterous orientation, Synge’s instead target the medium that so bedevilled Mary Hayden: the newspaper. As I have argued elsewhere, Playboy is extensively preoccupied by one newspaper genre in particular, one singled out in nationalist texts such as Hyde’s ‘Necessity’, Moran’s ‘The Battle of Two Civilizations’ and Æ’s ‘Nationality and Imperialism’: ‘The Police Intelligence’.23 This genre encompassed reports of crimes committed locally, nationally and internationally, as well as of legal proceedings stemming therefrom up to and including executions, and was, in effect, an early brand of true-crime, tabloid sensationalism. Synge’s ‘Preface’ to the play signals its intervention in this sphere when he states, In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers.24 Indeed, the play’s central theme turns out to be the process by which indigenous language and thought – ‘a popular imagination that is fiery, magnificent, and tender’ – are anglicised and reified by legal newspaper coverage.25 Criticism of the play has long stressed the strangeness of the fact that its Catholic dramatis personae, in particular its heroine, ‘Pegeen Mike’ Flaherty, respond favourably to the protagonist’s tale of murdering his father. Numerous references, however, indicate that their reception of Christy Mahon’s ‘gallous story’ derives not from some vestigial Irish wildness that Catholicism has failed to stamp out, but from the Mayo villager’s taste for tabloid sensation. Upon Christy’s first hints of criminal transgression, his auditors speculate that he might have assaulted a police officer, a bailiff or even a ‘landlord’. Christy responds by invoking ‘The Police Intelligence’: ‘Ah, not at all . . . You’d see the like of them stories on any little paper of a Munster town. But I’m not calling to mind any person, gentle, simple, judge or jury, did the like of me.’26 The ensuing stage directions, whereby his listeners ‘all draw near with delighted curiosity’, suggest that the Mayoites’ familiarity with the legal coverage of the Irish ‘little paper’ drives their fascination.27 The play confirms this suggestion when a group of the Flahertys’ young, female neighbours arrive in hopes of glimpsing the upstart beau. Finding Christy absent, Honor Blake laments, ‘it’ll be a hard case if he’s gone off now, the way we’ll never set our eyes on a man killed his father’, while her companions, Nelly and Sara Tansey, engage in some amateur detective work while examining Christy’s possessions.28 Sara’s reply to Nelly’s query, ‘Are you thinking them’s his boots?’, is especially revealing: ‘If they are, there should be his father’s track on them. Did you never read in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip?’29 Lest such references be thought marginal to the play’s portrait of young, Catholic femininity, Pegeen herself displays intimacy with ‘The Police Intelligence’ as she soothes Christy’s fears of police pursuit: ‘I’m after going down and reading the fearful crimes of Ireland for two

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weeks or three, and there wasn’t a word of your murder. They’ve likely not found the body. You’re safe so with ourselves.’30 Pegeen’s citation of ‘the fearful crimes of Ireland’ as assurance for Christy’s safety and, thus, his continuing eligibility to marry her, along with the play’s other references to ‘the papers’, tie its dynamics to nationalist concerns over sensational reading in the rural Irish town. Such towns in provinces like Munster and Connaught indeed served as ‘Police Intelligence’ hubs through the dissemination of British papers such as Illustrated Police News, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Reynold’s Newspaper, and through homegrown organs such as The Freeman’s Journal and The Connaught Telegraph. As Susan Cannon Harris has shown, the play’s audiences identified Christy’s story as based on that of one of the foremost celebrity criminals of the day whose exploits filled the pages of such publications, the Mayoite outlaw James Lynchehaun, found guilty of assaulting his English landlady, Agnes McDonnell, and burning down her ‘Big House’ in 1894.31 Christy’s would-be heroism (later deflated upon the discovery of his father’s survival) thus bears upon both general agitations against anglicising reading practices and specific worries over such practices’ corruption of the young, rural, Catholic female. Like Yeats, Synge implies that such females’ Catholicism is imperilled by ‘vicious’ reading, which, in the case of Pegeen, leads her to idolise murder as a paragon of masculine ‘daring’. Also like Yeats, however, Synge proves less concerned with violations of purity and piety than with the eclipse of the ‘tender’, ‘fiery’ Irish ‘imagination’ by the reified vulgarity of the British culture industry. Synge’s masterpiece signals the moment at which, during the later phases of the Revival, Literary modernists began not simply to oppose a cultivated, Celtic primitivity to British vulgarity, but to infuse their own aesthetic forms with immanent, avant-garde critiques of ‘low’ literary genres. Later Irish texts that chronicle the decolonisation process continue to invoke concerns over Catholic female reading and to express their visions for the new nation through this figure. This moment also witnesses the emergence of Catholic modernist voices whose portrayal of the nation’s literary landscape built upon and complicated the predominantly Protestant modernisms that emerged before independence. Some, like the playwright Sean O’Casey, adapted the Literary critique of aesthetic vulgarity as a lens for examining the privations of the Catholic working classes. The second text of O’Casey’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’, Juno and the Paycock, which chronicles the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War, draws upon this critique to contextualise the plight of its Catholic heroine, Mary Boyle, who is impregnated and jilted by British schoolteacher Charles Bentham. The play’s opening stage directions identify potential for Mary to transcend her circumstances in her cultivated reading habits, but they refer her ultimate, tragic fall to the predominance of ‘vulgar’ taste among her social class: Two forces are working in her mind – one, through the circumstances of her life, pulling her back; the other, through the influence of books she has read, pushing her forward. The opposing forces are apparent in her speech and her manners, both of which are degraded by her environment, and improved by her acquaintance – slight though it be – with literature.32 Central to these countervailing influences is Mary’s father, ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle, an avid reader of the sensation- and crime-mongering British paper News of the World, who

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disapproves of Mary’s literary choices – ‘she’s always readin’ lately – nothin’ but thrash, too. There’s one I was lookin’ at dh’other day; three stories, The Doll’s House, Ghosts, an’ The Wild Duck – buks fit for chiselurs!’ – and who later blames them for her romantic misfortunes: ‘Her and her readin’! . . . What did th’ likes of her, born in a tenement house, want with readin’? Her readin’s after bringin’ her to a nice pass – oh, it’s madnin’, madnin’, madnin’!’33 O’Casey thus invokes longstanding, Catholic fears over reading’s potential to violate purity and piety, but such fears form part of a broader milieu of intellectual vulgarity to which Mary’s and the Boyle family’s miseries are instead attributed. Conversely, it is Ibsen who once more offers a cultivated, progressive alternative, both for Mary as a representative reader and – through O’Casey’s innovative fusion of ‘Ibsenite’, feminist tragedy with an urban Hiberno-English indebted to Synge – for the play’s female audience members. The moment of decolonisation also witnessed the emergence of Ireland’s greatest Catholic modernist voice, that of James Joyce, whose work of the 1910s and 1920s represents a reaction against both Catholic nationalist ideology and the Literary ideals that informed preceding Irish modernisms. While sharing the experimental sensibility of Literary nationalists like Yeats and Synge, and showing a similar impatience with Catholicism’s trinity of ideals, Joyce was committed to chronicling Irish realities to an extent that also bucked preceding Literary representations. As early as Dubliners, whose initial publication history of 1904–7 coincides with the peak of the Revival, Joyce shows an impish eagerness to puncture the fantasies of both Literary and Catholic nationalists by depicting all Irish readers, including Catholic female ones, as engaged in taboo literary practices. The story ‘An Encounter’, for example, begins by depicting its young, Catholic protagonists as enthusiasts of publications such as ‘The Union Jack, Pluck, and the Halfpenny Marvel’,34 all of which bore the imprint of British publishing magnate Albert Harmsworth, whose products Æ, in the 1906 Irish Homestead essay ‘Village Libraries’, describes nationalist crowds as burning in effigy.35 Like his real-life contemporaries, the boys’ instructor, Father Butler, upon discovering one boy, Leo Dillon, reading a story titled ‘The Apache Chief’ instead of his ‘Roman History’, rails against such fare as ‘rubbish’ and ‘wretched stuff’, written only ‘for a drink’.36 Other stories such as ‘Eveline’ – the tale of a young Catholic woman attempting to resist the seductions of emigration whose title may allude to ‘a Victorian pornographic novel . . . in which the heroine has sexual intercourse with her father’37 – and ‘The Boarding House’ – centring on a promiscuous young woman named Polly Mooney who sings the lyrics ‘I’m a naughty girl. You needn’t sham. You know I am’, from the fin-de-siècle British musical comedy A Greek Slave – round out the collection’s portrait of Irish youth as immersed in practices of literary consumption defined by Catholic agitators as vicious and by Literary ones as vulgar.38 Such contexts in Joyce’s first mature work presage the more extensive deployment of taboo intertexts in the novel whose sexual frankness would test the boundary between ‘low’ and ‘high’ literature throughout Europe and America, Ulysses. The international shock precipitated by the novel’s portrayal of everyday Irishness in 1904 demonstrates the interconnectedness of Irish nationalist agitations with broader standards of Catholic and Protestant decorum throughout the Western world, thus implicating the broader history of modernism, censorship and obscenity addressed by critics such as Celia Marshik, Rachel Potter and Katherine Mullin.39 That Joyce’s epic holds such a central place in such discussions is partly the product of his relentless tipping of Irish

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nationalist sacred cows. The episode of the novel that inspired the famous US obscenity trials, ‘Nausicaa’, offers a radical portrayal of the young, Catholic female as thoroughly immersed in print-cultural material of sensational, romantic and advertising varieties, while its stream-of-consciousness narrative plunges the reader into a modernism whose forms are directly imitative of these genres. Its parodies imitate not only the sentimental, Romantic textures of novels like Maria Cummins’s bestselling The Lamplighter, but related popular genres such as the gossip-mongering ‘society column’ and the beauty magazine. The chapter’s mock-Homeric goddess, Gerty McDowell, owes her ‘eyes of witchery’ to ‘Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Women Beautiful page of the Princess Novelette’, a ‘weekly magazine published in London’ whose contents consisted of ‘thinly disguised plugs for the magazine advertisers and their products’,40 while her ‘neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes’ derives from the Lady’s Pictorial, another British ‘weekly illustrated journal of fashion, society, art, literature, music . . . and drama’.41 The narrative imbricates such references and their accompanying stylistic devices with overheard bits of Catholic ritual emanating from the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Mary, where a temperance retreat is in progress that is of particular interest to Gerty, who reflects she might now be married if only her father ‘had . . . avoided the clutches of the demon drink, by taking . . . those powders the drink habit cured in Pearson’s Weekly’.42 As the novel’s primary representative of female, Catholic youth, Gerty’s mental colonisation by British popular-cultural media, extending even to her religious and familial imagination, signals Joyce’s agenda of puncturing both Catholic and Literary fantasies regarding this key demographic, at the same time as it furnishes a modernism whose transnational, Anglo-Irish cultural basis offers a more comprehensive and honest portrait of Irishness at the turn of the twentieth century. That Gerty’s male-gaze-directed, ‘West British’ self-fashioning at Sandymount Strand succeeds even beyond her wildest dreams by inspiring the novel’s protagonist Leopold Bloom to masturbate, highlights Joyce’s further implication that such media reside only a hair’s breadth from that most taboo of genres, pornography. Though Judge John M. Woolsey would rule that the novel’s salacious elements contribute to a high-cultural ‘exploration of the human mind’, Ulysses none the less bears deep allegiances to pornography’s ‘vulgar’ and ‘vicious’ features.43 Through its other, central representative of Irish Catholic femininity, Molly Bloom, Ulysses in fact suggests that young women like Gerty may grow even more intimate with pornography as they mature. The Blooms’ marital relations revolve around pornographic texts, which Leopold acquires for Molly as a sort of surrogate for the sexual relations in which they no longer engage. In ‘Wandering Rocks’, we see Bloom shop for such material at a book vendor’s stall, where his attentions focus on works such as ‘The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk’ and ‘Sweets of Sin’, whose appeal depends directly on the violation of Catholic morality.44 Earlier, in ‘Calypso’, the reader is privy to Molly’s complaint that one of his selections, Ruby: Pride of the Ring, has ‘nothing smutty in it’, as well as to her request for ‘another of Paul de Kock’s’, preferred for his ‘nice name’.45 Bloom, for his part, has mounted a fold-out image titled The Bath of the Nymph, from the British ‘soft pornography’ magazine Photo Bits, above their marital bed,46 while according to Molly’s internal monologue in ‘Penelope’, he also possesses a ‘smutty photo’ of a woman who is ‘as much a nun as [she is] not’.47 We might, indeed, characterise the revolutionary stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of

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the last chapter as a fully realised version of ‘Nausicaa’ – as the embodiment of the mental landscape of a mature female reader whose frank and avid taste for pornography, divorce-trial and Police Intelligence sensationalism, musical comedy and taboo fantasy (including one of sexual interaction with a priest in the confessional) foretells the future that awaits, should Gerty discard the prophylactic of sentimental respectability. Even setting aside Molly’s adulterous affair with Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, this trajectory’s implications for nationalist readers of all stripes – including those worried about the novel’s own female consumers – are ‘scandalous’ indeed. Around the time of the novel’s publication in 1922, such readers in fact witnessed the (partial) realisation of their dreams of independence through the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Despite the severance of the colonial link, however, the state’s official enshrinement of Catholic nationalist ideology, combined with the relentless bombardment of an increasingly global and Americo-centric popular culture, continued to exacerbate anxieties over Irish purity, piety and simplicity. The Free State would attempt to combat such forces of depravity through such measures as the Censorship of Films Act (1923) and the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), as would the Irish Catholic hierarchy, which issued a ‘joint pastoral’ in 1927 declaring, the evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress – all of which tend to destroy the characteristics of our race.48 The historical record suggests, however, that the Ireland of the early independence period remained an enthusiastic market for such fare.49 In this sense, Joyce’s exposé of Irish popular taste may be read to lampoon that period in addition to the Revivalist moment of 1904. Ulysses, in fact, heralds a turning point in Irish modernist depictions of the female, Catholic reader after which – the efforts of O’Casey notwithstanding – the aesthetic emphasis falls not on the preventative, Literary critique of popular genres, but on the ‘realist’ admission of the nation’s engulfment by them. This, then, is a late Irish modernism, one that stages the eclipse of nationalist hopes of autonomy by the reifying influences of the culture industry. Depictions of this eclipse fill the pages and stages of the 1920s and 1930s. One such work is Denis Johnston’s expressionist play The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ (1929), so named in honour of its rejection by Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre. The play’s plot is ingeniously conceived to underscore the reification of nationalist values. Its protagonist is a stage actor who, cast in the role of the nationalist martyr Robert Emmet, is knocked unconscious during a performance and awakens under the delusion that he is the real Emmet. In this altered state, he wanders the streets of 1920s Dublin, amazed and frightened by its deviation from his ostensible, republican ideals. The many Irish females he encounters offer some of the play’s most striking illustrations of this deviancy through their undifferentiated engagement with nationalist and pop-cultural signifiers. One, a ‘Flapper’, conversing with a ‘Trinity Medical’ regarding the relative merits of dance-hall venues such as the ‘Metropole’, skewers the early Yeats via her ‘Max Factor’ cosmetics: ‘Do you like my nails this shade? Heart’s Despair it’s called.’50 Elsewhere, ‘Two Young Things’ named Carmel and Bernadette

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have had a ‘gas’ listening to a popular band, the ‘Wet Dreams’, ‘Down at the Girls’ Club’ located in ‘Parnell Square’.51 Near the play’s climax, the daughter of the Free State’s ‘Minister for Arts and Crafts’, Maeve, blunders through a lisping recital of British writer A. A. Milne’s nonsense poem ‘The King’s Breakfast’ while wearing a ‘religious medal’, and then plays the piano ‘accompaniment’ to the Emmet ballad ‘The Thtruggle Ith Over’ to honour ‘Joe’, a young man the faux-Emmet accidentally ‘plugs’ in a burlesque of hard-boiled detective fiction.52 The Minister’s respectable guest, Lady Trimmer, after inquiring whether ‘Emmet’ is ‘interested in art’ as well as ‘Celebrity Concerts’, expresses a sensationalist appreciation both for his martyrdom – which she ‘didn’t approve of at the time’ but finds ‘so interesting now’ – and that of Joe, whose ‘poetic’, deathbed lamentations she hopes to ‘purchase’ in print from ‘Hodges and Figgis’.53 In the background of these ribald proceedings, Cathleen ni Houlihan, disguised as a ‘Flower Girl’, spews profanity, while the play’s chorus chants ‘clean and pure Art for clean and pure people’.54 Surrounded by such Irish women, the resurrected Emmet can only protest, ‘I . . . can’t . . . remember . . . my lines!’55 The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ would contribute a modest entry to the annals of modern Irish plays that outraged audiences, along with others such as The Countess Cathleen, Synge’s Playboy and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926), whose juxtaposition of a bawdy music-hall anthem-singing prostitute with the words of 1916 Easter Rising martyr Patrick Pearse provoked riots. In ‘A Note on What Happened’, Johnston would highlight two details from his own pillorying: first, that The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ was viewed as ‘anti-National’ not by ‘Republican’ militants reverent of Emmet, but by those who saw as ‘blasphemous’ its use of ‘the language of the Holy Writ . . . in obscene circumstances’; and second, the words of a ‘young lady’, who, ‘having seen the play said of it that it made her blush. Not because of its vulgarity – ordinary vulgarity was a commonplace on the stage . . . She had blushed for me – that such thoughts should have ever entered my head.’56 On the one hand, then, as with O’Casey’s work, audiences objected to Johnston’s violation of purity and piety; on the other, they objected to his play’s immodest, blush-inducing modernity – to the way in which its Expressionist pyrotechnics bucked expectations of simplicity. Johnston summed up the play’s central aim by thumbing his nose at all of the above: This play . . . is about what Dublin has made a good many of us feel. And if it is a very wrong and vulgar feeling that could only have been experienced by people with nasty minds, we aren’t worth bothering about anyway.57 The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ would thus become the latest Irish modernist work to invoke vulgarity, but that label would now be worn as a badge of aesthetic honour defying Catholic-nationalist prudery both moral and intellectual. The interpenetration of nationalist iconography and vulgar popular taste also serves as the modus operandi of another major work of 1930s modernism, Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds. Deeply indebted to Joycean genre parody, O’Brien adopts a kindred bathetic strategy in which Revivalist icons such as Finn MacCool, Mad Sweeney and the Pooka are transported to a contemporary Ireland suffused with ‘low’ genres such as detective fiction, Police Intelligence and Society Column reportage, music-hall entertainment, and the literary and cinematic western. Perhaps the novel’s central parody targets the moralistic authorship prevalent in the climate of Free State

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and early Éire patriotism through the figure of Dermot Trellis, a hack novelist whose characters put him on metafictional trial for his ‘despotic’ authorship. The trial features the testimony of one of Trellis’s fellow authors, the western writer William Tracy, who charges that Trellis, unable to create his own female characters, retained the ‘services’ of one featured in Tracy’s story, ‘Jake’s Last Throw’, whom he later returned ‘in a certain condition’, implicitly pregnancy.58 Noting that, upon her departure, ‘she was a good girl and attentive to her religious duties’, Tracy complains that in order to ‘re-instate the girl’, he was forced to create ‘an otherwise unnecessary person to whom [he] married her’, as well as to find ‘employment for her son’ with another writer, all of which ‘adversely affect[ed]’ and ‘impaired the artistic integrity of [his] story’.59 Though it is left unclear how the girl in question was seduced by her new employer – who elsewhere creates and then sexually assaults his own female characters – this episode highlights the representative status of the Catholic female in O’Brien’s nationalist parody. Trellis, an author of otherwise devout, Catholic intentions, convinced that only by ‘putting plenty of smut’ into his story can his moralistic message reach a large readership, corrupts his female personae, whose reputation their original authors must then repair at the cost of their work’s cohesiveness.60 The ‘vicious’ taste of the Irish public now precludes the representation of pure and pious females, who do not sell, while the tensions between the need to appease both salacious demand and official morality detract from aesthetic quality. O’Brien’s metafiction delivers this satirical barb by collapsing the distance between Catholic, female characters and their real-life counterparts, the (putative) perils of whose reading habits their fictional avatars, drawn into corrupt literary orbits, comically exemplify. It is clear, then, that fin-de-siècle concerns over Irish reading habits, and those of Catholic females in particular, remained alive and well after independence, and that Irish modernisms throughout this period continued to be shaped by the intersection of such concerns with perceptions of national identity. As the period traditionally designated ‘modernist’ drew to a close following World War II, such legacies could still, in fact, be glimpsed in the work of later Irish writers like Samuel Beckett, who carried the experimental modernist sensibility into the contemporary era. The early Beckett weighed in directly on these matters by castigating Free State censorship in ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ (1934) and the reified version of national identity predominant after independence in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934). The plot of his first novel, Murphy (1939), implies further defiance of this regime by centring on the title character’s romance with an Irish prostitute, as do more topical allusions such as Murphy’s praise of his former, ‘amateur’ lover for a quality now rare ‘in Twenty-six counties’: ‘not confus[ing] her self with her body’.61 Such references become scarcer in Beckett’s later work, but at least one major text of the contemporary period, the play Happy Days (1961), shows traces of the controversies central to earlier Irish modernisms. Before he began to undertake what S. E. Gontarski calls the ‘vaguening’ of the play, Beckett had designs on making its absurdist proceedings specifically Irish ones. Among such expurgated details are: the Ur-version of the protagonist, Winnie, ‘picked up [her] English in Rathgar’; her Ur-husband, Willie, reading news of nuclear bombs hitting the British Isles, reports, ‘aberrant rocket strikes Erin, eighty three priests survive’; and the Ur-Winnie’s concluding song is not ‘The Merry Widow’, from the English version of the eponymous Austrian operetta, but ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, from the Irish–American Chauncey Olcott’s musical comedy, The Isle o’ Dreams.62

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Such references provide a context in which other aspects of the play, both original and final, take on Irish resonance. Along with her habitual morning prayers, Winnie’s upbringing – which, for a ‘woman of about fifty’, would span the late Revival and early independence periods – suggests her potential Irish Catholicism, just as Beckett’s original designation of the play as ‘A Low Comedy’ may position it as a Joyce-like flouting of nationalist views regarding frivolous stage productions.63 The play’s ‘vaguening’ suggests that Beckett’s distaste for recent Irish trends may have inspired such references’ eventual effacement. Vestigial components of Catholic and Literary Revivalist hobby horses remain, however, in Willie and Winnie’s shared, Bloom-like perusal of a pornographic postcard, which she scorns as ‘genuine pure filth’ that would ‘make any nice person want to vomit’ but which he, ‘expos[ing] himself’ and applying ‘Vaseline’, implicitly masturbates to,64 and in Winnie’s response to the suddenly well-dressed Willie at play’s end: Well this is an unexpected pleasure! . . . Reminds me of the day you came whining for my hand . . . I worship you, Winnie, be mine . . . and then nothing from that day forth only titbits from Reynold’s News.65 This invocation of two prime targets of Revival-era screeds against anglicisation, Titbits and Reynold’s News, ties the general deterioration of memory, mental acuity and aesthetic discrimination displayed by Winnie throughout the play to such longstanding campaigns. The play’s resuscitation of these Irish touchstones is mangled almost beyond recognition by Beckett’s absurd, post-apocalyptic and incipiently posthuman aesthetic. The explanatory framework these touchstones provide, however, for details such as her inability to recall the ‘exquisite lines’ of her ‘classics’ – snatches of which she confuses with advertising lingo, patent medicine directions and commodity contents lists in addition to British newspapers, music-hall songs and a stock of cliché sayings she dubs ‘the old style’ – draws the play into a postmodernist alignment with the high-cultural critiques of Literary modernism. That references to such works as At the Hawk’s Well and ‘The Second Coming’, both written by the Revival’s foremost Literary nationalist, directly populate Winnie’s bric-à-brac of monologue intertexts, neatly indexes the failure of such attempts at aesthetic intervention. To what extent the jumbled matrix of ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘classic’, ‘vicious’ and ‘vulgar’ texts amid which Winnie lives accurately reflects the more general, contemporary fate of the Irish Catholic, female reader is difficult to say. What is more certain is that Beckett’s portrayal conducts an autopsy on the specific reform strategies of the nationalist movement, strategies that inspired a half-century-long effort to fashion an Ireland not merely politically independent of the British Empire, but independent of those deleterious influences with which the empire was identified, central among them those of the emergent, capitalist culture industry. In so far as Ireland’s wholesale, mid- to late twentieth-century merger with an increasingly global capitalist modernity and postmodernity also entailed an embrace of those same reifying, value-confusing influences, we may be justified in sounding a note of lament for the eclipse of the alternative vision on which the independent nation was so inspiringly founded. Without endorsing the specific prescriptions of now-antiquated, fin-de-siècle Catholic and Literary ideologies, the critical posture and insights to which they helped give rise may bear some enduring value in a world where the forces once identified with empire have, in so many ways, become general. Through its close parallels with the trajectory of Irish modernity writ large, the story of the Catholic,

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female reader may thus hold more than a merely historical or archaeological interest. The telling of that story may, in turn, prove not just one of the most distinctive, but also one of the most durable achievements of a uniquely Irish modernism.

Notes 1. Duffy, ‘What Irishmen May Do for Irish Literature’, pp. 12–13. 2. For the duration of this chapter, the capitalised term ‘Literary’ will be used to designate matters associated with the Literary Revival, while the lower-case use of ‘literary’ will designate more general concerns. 3. Qtd in Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, p. 153. 4. Moran, ‘The Gaelic Revival’, p. 80. 5. Ibid., p. 116. 6. Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, pp. 169–70. 7. Russell, ‘Nationality and Imperialism’, p. 19. 8. Russell, Co-Operation & Nationality, p. 43, and Yeats, ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, p. 204. 9. Tynan, ‘Twenty-Five Years’ Reminiscences’, p. 661. 10. Ibid. 11. Hayden, ‘Women Citizens – Their Duties and Their Training’, pp. 343–4. 12. ‘Objects of Inghinidhe na hÉireann’, p. 92. 13. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, in The Collected Plays, p. 24. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 17. Ibid., p. 25. 18. Qtd in Cairns and Richards, Writing Ireland, p. 72. 19. O’Donnell, ‘Blasphemy and Degradation’, p. 269. See also ‘Souls for Gold: A PseudoCeltic Drama in Dublin’, pp. 261–5. 20. O’Donnell, ‘Blasphemy’, p. 269. 21. O’Donnell, The Stage Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic Drama, pp. 9–10, 12–13. 22. Ibid., p. 16, and Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, in Yeats, Collected Plays, p. 35. 23. Boynton, ‘The Fearful Crimes of Ireland’. 24. Synge, ‘Preface’, p. 3. 25. Ibid., p. 4. 26. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 16. 27. Ibid., p. 16. 28. Ibid., p. 32. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 42. 31. See Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, pp. 120–1. 32. O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, pp. 67–8. 33. Ibid., pp. 85, 134–5. 34. Joyce, ‘An Encounter’, in Dubliners, pp. 11–12. 35. Russell (Æ), ‘Village Libraries’, pp. 74–5. 36. Joyce, ‘An Encounter’, p. 12. 37. Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, p. 253. 38. Joyce, ‘The Boarding House’, in Dubliners, p. 57. 39. See Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship; Potter, Obscene Modernism; and Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity.

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334 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

t. j. boynton Joyce, Ulysses, 13.109–13, and Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 386. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.148–50, and Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 386. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.289–92. Qtd in Marshik, British Modernism, p. 99. Joyce, Ulysses, 10.601–41. Ibid., 4.345–8. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 78, and Ulysses, 4.369–73. Joyce, Ulysses, 18.17–22. Qtd in Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, p. 33. See Fallon, Age of Innocence. Johnston, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, in Selected Plays of Denis Johnston, p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., pp. 53, 73, 50. Ibid., pp. 59–60, 74. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 39. Johnston, ‘A Note on What Happened’, in Selected Plays, pp. 80–1. Ibid., p. 80. O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 217. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 31. Beckett, Murphy, pp. 215–17. Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days, pp. 13, 40. See also Johnson, ‘An Ante-Text’, pp. 302–9. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 137, and Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days, p. 13. Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 143–4, 147. Ibid., p. 167.

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel, Happy Days, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 135–68. Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957). Boynton, T. J., ‘The Fearful Crimes of Ireland’, in Éire-Ireland, 47:3/4 (Fall/Winter 2012), pp. 230–50. Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Duffy, Sir Charles Gavin, ‘What Irishmen May Do for Irish Literature’, in Sir Charles Gavin Duffy, Sir George Sigerson and Douglas Hyde (eds), The Revival of Irish Literature (London: T. Fisher & Unwin, 1894), pp. 9–34. Fallon, Brian, Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960 (Dublin: Gill & McMillan, 1998). Gifford, Don, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Gontarski, S. E., Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). Harris, Susan Cannon, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Hayden, Mary, ‘Women Citizens – Their Duties and Their Training’, in Declan Kiberd and P. J. Matthews (eds), Handbook of the Irish Revival (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp. 342–5.

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Hyde, Douglas, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, in Breandan O’Conaire (ed), Language, Lore and Lyrics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986). Johnson, Toni O’Brien, ‘An Ante-Text for Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”’, Irish University Review, 19:2 (autumn 1989), pp. 302–9. Johnston, Denis, Selected Plays of Denis Johnston (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1983). Joyce, James, Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1992). Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). Marshik, Celia, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Moran, D. P., ‘The Gaelic Revival’, in Patrick Maume (ed.), The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), pp. 73–93. Mullin, Katherine, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). O’Brien, Flann, At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1951). O’Casey, Sean, Juno and the Paycock, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 63–148. O’Donnell, F. Hugh, ‘Blasphemy and Degradation’, in Lady Gregory (ed.), Our Irish Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), pp. 266–70. O’Donnell, F. Hugh, ‘Souls for Gold: A Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin’, in Lady Gregory (ed.), Our Irish Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), pp. 261–5. O’Donnell, F. Hugh, The Stage Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic Drama (London: John Long, 1904). ‘Objects of Inghinidhe na hÉireann’, in Declan Kiberd and P. J. Matthews (eds), Handbook of the Irish Revival (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p. 92–3. Potter, Rachel, Obscene Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Ranelagh, John O’Beirne, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Russell, George (Æ), Co-Operation & Nationality: A Guide for Rural Reformers from This to the Next Generation (Dublin: Maunsel, 1912). Russell, George (Æ), ‘Nationality and Imperialism’, in Lady Gregory (ed.), Ideals in Ireland (London: Unicorn, 1901), pp. 14–22. Russell, George (Æ), ‘Village Libraries’, in Declan Kiberd and P. J. Matthews (eds), Handbook of the Irish Revival (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp. 74–5. Synge, J. M, ‘Preface’, in The Complete Plays of John M. Synge (New York: Vintage Books, 1935), pp. 3–4. Synge, J. M., The Playboy of the Western World, in The Complete Plays of John M. Synge (New York: Vintage Books, 1935), pp. 5–80. Tynan, Katharine, ‘Twenty-Five Years’ Reminiscences’, in Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), pp. 661–2. Yeats, W. B., ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, in Samhain 1906: Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 202–21. Yeats, W. B., The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

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19 ‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption in the Late Novels of Molly Keane Lauren Rich

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or decades, readers have wrestled with Molly Keane’s heretical novels – novels that violate every possible standard of good behaviour. In her early novels, published under the androgynous pseudonym M. J. Farrell during the 1930s, Keane deals with abortion and a lesbian relationship, among other provocative topics. Such subjects were taboo in Ireland at that time for any author, but especially so for an Anglo-Irish lady, for whom the act of writing was scandal enough: ‘for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow’, Keane once confessed.1 Although such stigmas had faded somewhat by the time Keane published three novels under her real name in the 1980s, her late novels continue to defy convention through both their complicated relationship to Irish modernist literary tradition and what Ellen O’Brien calls their ‘very nasty’ content.2 Critics have tended to focus on the unsavoury aspects of consumption and its natural corollary, excretion, in Keane’s later work: Aroon’s matricidal rabbit quenelles in Good Behaviour (1981); cousin Leda’s excremental desecration of Mummie’s wardrobe in Time After Time (1983); and Nicandra’s nauseating spinach in Loving and Giving (1988; alternatively titled Queen Lear). This is understandable: Keane is a master of stomach-churning imagery that violates the norms of polite society. As O’Brien points out, Keane revels in ‘sending the abject to confront the Ascendency’.3 What such readings overlook, though, is that Keane’s fiction also contains some of the most pleasurable descriptions of food and eating in modern Irish literature, second only, perhaps, to Maura Laverty’s. It may surprise readers who associate Keane primarily with death-by-rabbit and regurgitated greens to learn that she authored a cookbook, Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking: Well-Loved Recipes from Childhood. Keane’s cookbook was published contemporaneously with her three late novels, in 1985, and contains recipes for, among other things, ‘Rabbit-Not-in-the-Nursery-Style’ and creamed spinach soup. Both recipes are mischievous nods to Keane’s fiction. Although the word ‘quenelle’ does not appear in Nursery Cooking, ‘Rabbit-Not-in-the-NurseryStyle’ calls for finely minced rabbit, shaped into dumplings and poached. Similarly, the spinach for Keane’s ‘Spinach Soup’ is puréed and diluted with milk and cream, presumably to avoid the ‘heavy bitterness’ of a ‘brown–green mountain’ like the one that traumatises Nicandra in Loving and Giving.4 My own discovery of Keane’s lovingly

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composed recipes for comforting dishes such as ‘Fluffy Eggs’ and ‘Bread-and-Butter Pudding’ prompted me to re-examine the role of food in her fiction, and to notice just how often she portrays food as a source of sustaining and even redemptive comfort in a brutal world. In focusing on the connection between food and violence (as Mara Reisman does) and on the abject (as O’Brien does), we have overlooked Keane’s simultaneous insistence on the pleasures of consumption. Perhaps the greatest heresy of Keane’s fiction is not its shocking inclusion of the abject and the violent, but its foregrounding of the uncomfortably close relationship between the grotesque and the delicious; Keane constantly reminds readers that cooking can turn the abject, to borrow a phrase from her cookbook, into something ‘really eatable’.5 For Keane, the pleasures of food do not facilely negate the wretchedness of the raw ingredients of modernity, but these pleasures are genuine none the less. High modernism is traditionally associated with the turn to aestheticism and formal experimentation in response to alienation during the early twentieth century, though recent modernist scholarship has considered a wider range of cultural developments over a longer span of time. As our view of modernism expands, so does our need for more nuanced understandings of the particular experiences of alienation to which writers like Keane are responding. This chapter focuses on the influence of class and gender on characters’ relationships with food in Keane’s late novels Good Behaviour, Loving and Giving and Time After Time to show how they broaden our understanding of modernism: they challenge its traditional temporal bounds and posit the compensatory privacy achieved through pleasurable consumption of forbidden food as consolation for the alienation from self and society created by rigid Anglo-Irish sociocultural norms. The consumption of food in Keane’s work functions not merely as a sublimated form of repressed sexual desire, as critics like Sarah Sceats have argued, but as a potent and pleasurable act in and of itself. Sex in Keane’s fiction is nearly always frustrating, frustrated or abortive; quite literally, nothing comes of it. There are no happy marriages in Keane’s late novels, and the romantic and sexual relationships are nearly all one-sided.6 Even the mating of the nursery mice in Good Behaviour is described by Mrs Brock as ‘horrible’ (at least for females), producing only ‘disgusting’ babies likely to be gobbled up by their father.7 Clearly, Mrs Brock’s brutal explanation of the facts of life is coloured by her recent affair with Aroon’s father. Intimacy is especially difficult for many of Keane’s characters as their inability to perform gender in narrowly defined, socially acceptable ways limits their opportunities for sexual fulfilment. Food, on the other hand, Keane depicts as an effective avenue for self-gratification, for exercising bodily autonomy, and for gleefully subverting the orthodoxies of class and gender that define the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Through food, Keane’s characters can satisfy their appetites and assert identities that resist social norms, allowing them to escape the fate of the decaying class in which they were born. Although food in Keane is always symbolically overdetermined, it nevertheless remains firmly rooted in embodied, sensual, human experience – an experience Keane presents as sustaining and pleasurable, however subversive such pleasures may be in a social class whose patriarchal structure is inextricably linked with the suppression of female bodies. Keane’s three late novels portray the Protestant Ascendancy as slowly starving to death, both literally and metaphorically, as its financial resources dwindle, its Big

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Houses are abandoned and its grand families die out. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, where gunrunners from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) lurk ominously in the shadows, the most serious threats to Ascendancy power in Keane’s novels are located within the ‘starved spaces’ of the Big Houses themselves.8 Three Ascendancy estates are razed by Irish nationalists in the final paragraph of The Last September. Their destruction is swift, purposeful and political: ‘the death – the execution, rather – of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night’.9 Although the burning of the Big Houses is foreshadowed throughout the novel, their sudden and systematic conflagration (and the description of the IRA agents as their ‘executioners’) serves, for Bowen, as an appropriate ending for a class whose willful blindness to external political realities makes it vulnerable to such attacks. In contrast to Bowen’s novels, none of Keane’s fictional Big Houses goes up in flames. This is noteworthy since her own family home was burned by the IRA, a story she enjoyed recounting to friends.10 Nevertheless, as Kreilkamp observes, Keane’s fiction generally ‘ignores any overt confrontation with political forces’.11 As a result, it emphasises the importance of more domestic existential threats to the Ascendancy: ‘neither world nor national war affects women’s lives as much as traditional social and financial constraints’.12 Most of the Big Houses in Keane’s late fiction are still standing at the ends of the novels; therefore, characters must find ways to survive in these ‘starved spaces’ or, like Nicandra in Loving and Giving, be consumed by them. The abandoned house hired for the Hunt Ball in Loving and Giving provides a striking example of how Keane uses architecture to embody her perception of the Ascendancy’s repression and consequent decline. She describes the house as empty, barren and exposed – an emaciated skeleton: ‘in the bedless bedroom, a fitted canopy stretched out squarely over nothing’, and all that remains of the Regency conservatory are a few ‘ribs’ enclosing ‘the corpses of camellias, their desperation for water manifest’.13 That Keane’s Anglo-Irish Big Houses are destroyed through poverty rather than political arson implies that the Ascendancy bears responsibility for its own demise. It also highlights the ways in which, for Keane, the Ascendancy’s repressive norms governing food, bodies, gender and sexuality are implicated in its destruction. At the same time, the economic and architectural collapse of the Ascendancy creates opportunities for individual characters to defy these norms and thereby escape the fate of their class. In this way, Keane underscores the dangers of suppressing appetites and the liberating possibilities of indulging them. Food plays a prominent role in Keane’s portrayal of Anglo-Irish social life, from the ‘formal, nearly sacred’ private dinners shared by Mr and Mrs St. Charles to the lavish hunt balls and feasts where social alliances are forged, yet all gustatory and sexual activities are tightly controlled by unspoken standards of good behaviour. As Aroon observes, ‘there was a right and wrong ritual in doing anything’, with good behaviour strictly codified along class and gender lines.14 In both Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving, as critic Mara Reisman notes, ‘one’s relationship to food becomes an important way to define class-based behavioral expectations’.15 For many of Keane’s characters, the rigidly enforced social codes governing both eating and sexuality lead to deep ambivalence toward physical pleasure and discomfort with one’s own embodiment. In Nursery Cooking, Keane confesses to sharing this discomfort: ‘for years, I had a sensation of shame as well as guilt about second helpings; a deep-rooted sense that the enjoyment of food was unattractive, something to conceal’. She associates her

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abiding shame with ‘another axiom of my later youth: “An eager girl [greed again] never gets her man.”’16 Denial of pleasure and suppression of appetite are important markers of class and gender for Ascendancy women throughout Keane’s writing. Mrs St. Charles appears indifferent to all matters relating to embodiment, from household meals to her husband’s affairs. She ‘had no enjoyment of food, for she ate almost nothing’ and is clearly relieved when her husband takes over the meal planning.17 An elegant, slender woman, Mrs St. Charles is ‘appalled by the size of anything’, especially her ungainly daughter, Aroon.18 Like Mrs St. Charles, Nicandra’s mother (whom she calls Maman) encapsulates the upper-class ideal of female beauty paradoxically abstracted from the physical body. On watching Maman at the breakfast table, Nicandra finds it ‘impossible to connect such beauty as hers with the enjoyment of food’.19 Significantly, Maman does not consume any of her breakfast; rather, she is revolted by Nicandra’s innocent gift of a ‘double butterfly’ (which turns out to be two butterflies copulating) and sets down her coffee cup ‘with distaste’ at this open display of sensuality.20 Later, Maman punishes Nicandra by forcing her to eat a double portion of spinach, while she herself ‘ate nothing’ and turned away her wine.21 For Ascendancy women, an aversion to physical pleasure is a key element of good behaviour, though, like most aspects of good behaviour, it can conceal deep hypocrisies. Maman’s squeamishness about the butterflies does not prevent her from running off with the land steward. The expectation that women are indifferent toward the body and immune to physical appetites does not extend to the lower classes in Keane’s fiction; in fact, such women’s hunger often signals both their inferior status and their sexual availability. Unlike the ladies of the Big House, the St. Charles family’s Irish servants manifestly need to eat; the maids are often heard crunching laundry starch, ‘partly as a thinning diet, and partly because they were hungry’.22 An affair between Mr St. Charles and the servant Rose is both gustatory and sexual in nature, and their menu-planning tête-à-têtes (studiously ignored by Mrs St. Charles) are ‘ambiguous’, with ‘talk of food inspiring them both with thoughts of the necessary pleasures’.23 Aroon unintentionally alludes to the nature of their relationship: only Rose, she says, ‘knows just how long he likes his woodcock cooked’.24 Similarly, Aroon’s plump governess, Mrs Brock, craves rich food, but her appetite leaves her vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Mr St. Charles seduces her with an expensive box of Charbonnel and Walker chocolates, an ostentatious gift that Mrs Brock views as luxurious, but which underscores the class differences between herself and the ethereal Mrs St. Charles.25 Even among the Anglo-Irish characters, subtle social distinctions are maintained through the expression or control of appetite. Although the Crowhurst sisters are Anglo-Irish, they occupy a lower rung on the social ladder than the St. Charles family; as a result, they are not subject to the same rigid standards of good behaviour. Ever the snob, Aroon pities their poverty and diminished status, but she also envies the Crowhursts’ freedom to eat what they want (and to sleep with whomever they want): ‘the more we eat, the thinner we grow’, they gloat over pâté sandwiches.26 Nicandra’s friend, Lalage, in Loving and Giving is similarly exempt from restrictive class-based gender norms. Lalage is rich and beautiful, but she does not belong ‘to the Anglo-Irish “Family”’ and is therefore permitted – even expected – to exhibit ‘bad taste’.27 Nicandra openly envies Lalage’s physical confidence and flirtatious ease with men. Next to her friend’s ‘ripe plum’ figure, Nicandra is ‘a cold skeleton, inside an expensive shroud’.28

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After dancing awkwardly with Nicandra at the Hunt Ball, Andrew summarises the contrast between the two young women: the sensual Lalage ‘had all the qualities necessary for a love affair, but none of those he calculated as obligatory in the girl that he might marry some distant day’.29 Thus, bodily dis-ease in Anglo-Irish women functions as a sign of class superiority and a prerequisite for the role of lady of a Big House. Many of Keane’s Ascendancy characters experience trauma as their developing appetites collide with rigid class and gender norms. For both Aroon and Nicandra, childhood is an extended period of hunger and neglect, throughout which their diets are controlled by adults who view any sign of physical enjoyment as profoundly unladylike – a serious betrayal of their social status. As a result, both characters endure ‘quite poisonously disgusting’ nursery food: lumpy porridge, crusted milk and cheap, inedible meats, patterned after Keane’s own childhood memory of nursery breakfasts.30 Unable to stifle their daughters’ appetites, Mrs St. Charles and Maman try to make their daughters’ growing bodies conform to Ascendancy ideals. In addition to underfeeding Nicandra, Maman, who holds ‘a rather Chinese theory on the suppression of growth’, forces her into too-small boots to ‘encourage the proper shape’.31 (No wonder that Andrew finds Nicandra to be an inept dance partner years later, as she stumbles on stunted, ‘corpse-like’ feet!) Mrs St. Charles’s methods are more direct. She shames Aroon for her ‘stupendous’ physique and, under a thin guise of economising, imposes austerity measures aimed at literally and emotionally cutting Aroon down to size. When Aroon protests, her mother responds pointedly: ‘My poor girl – don’t let’s talk about your size. There are some subjects I do avoid. . . . They say whales can live for months on their own fat – do they call it blubber?’32 In this repressive atmosphere, it is unsurprising that so many of Keane’s characters emerge from adolescence with disordered appetites and fraught relationships to both food and sex. There is some basis for Kreilkamp’s assertions that ‘the children of the Big House, the victims of an institutionalised system of child abuse, become meanminded spinsters, closet homosexuals, kleptomaniacs or intellectually stunted adults’, and that ‘chastity, that most unnatural of all sexual predilections, is the fate of a disproportionate number of Big House children’.33 However, this is too reductive a reading. In reducing food to a poor substitute for intimacy, Kreilkamp, Sceats and other critics overlook the way that Keane’s writing emphasises the importance of food as a source of meaningful pleasure and personal agency. Sex may be crucial for the survival of the species, but food is necessary for the survival of the individual. Keane is neither optimistic about nor invested in the survival of the Ascendancy as a species; she seems more than willing to see it die out in her fiction and in real life. But she repeatedly connects pleasure in food with the survival of individuals. Again and again, the women still standing at the ends of Keane’s novels are those who reject the Ascendancy’s near-anorexic feminine ideal and indulge their appetites for forbidden foods. Although many of Keane’s characters do end up celibate, they do not starve, and those who have experienced physical intimacy come to prefer food as a more private and efficacious consolation for the pain of their lives. This is underscored by Keane’s portrayal of sex as a source of disappointment and food as a source of pleasure. Aroon St. Charles would seem, in many ways, to validate Kreilkamp’s picture of the deprived Big House daughter who becomes an ‘unnaturally’ chaste pathological spinster. As a child, Aroon is starved of both food and affection, and she frequently conflates the two. Desperate for attention, Aroon discovers that consumption can be as effective a means of performing identity as the abstention practised by her mother:

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I can eat. I can be the fat woman in the fairground; the man who chews up iron; the pigheaded woman; anything to escape from hopeless me. So, at that first dinner before the first ball, I wolfed down sensational quantities of food. Almost a side of smoked salmon, and I ate a whole lemon and its peel as well; most of a duck; four meringues and four peches melbas; mushrooms and marrow on toast; even cheese. . . . They cheered me quietly. I was a joke again. I was a person. I was something for them to talk about.34 Most critics have interpreted Aroon’s eating as an attempt to ‘bury the pain of emotional exclusion’.35 This is undoubtedly true, but intimacy (sexual and otherwise) in Good Behaviour is not all it is cracked up to be. Aroon’s powerful craving for affection and her jealousy of the ‘love circles’ she perceives around her are not necessarily evidence that love is better than food. Aroon is a notoriously unreliable narrator, and by her own admission, her narration is distorted by her experience of deprivation: ‘I fattened out my least memories, slyly building up a future.’36 As the novel unfolds, attentive readers perceive that the ‘love circles’ that appear so enviable to Aroon are built on manipulation, exploitation and lies. From her parents’ cold marriage to the short-lived engagement of Richard and Alice, many of these relationships are manifestly unfulfilling to both parties. Aroon’s jealousy of Mrs Brock’s affair with her father is especially misplaced, as the affair leads directly to Mrs Brock’s suicide. While Aroon may eat to satisfy a displaced craving for intimacy, Keane’s fiction portrays physical intimacy as profoundly unsatisfying. By contrast, Keane’s sensual descriptions of food in Good Behaviour are deliciously satisfying. Aroon revels in Rose’s poached eggs and rashers: ‘The eggs were perfect, swelling primly on large slices of buttered toast, the lightest dust of cayenne blown over their well-matched pearls.’37 Although Aroon dislikes the Crowhurst girls, she relishes their ‘irresistible’ fish pâté sandwiches and takes ‘two delicious helpings’ of their duck, enjoying it ‘more than anything [she] had eaten since Papa’s illness’.38 She also consumes hearty teas of ‘sandwiches and tiny scones, and medlar jelly, iced orange cakes, and ginger cake’, prepared by Rose for her bed-ridden father.39 Significantly, many of these foods are associated with people Aroon dislikes and distrusts. However, the provenance of the food does not diminish her pleasure in it.40 Even her vision of a future tyrannised by her mother and Rose quickly turns into a detailed fantasy of indulgence, her imagined enjoyment heightened by secrecy: I could see myself hungry. I would keep my dress allowance to buy food; it was a cozy secret idea. Water biscuits (high-bake) and gentleman’s relish and anchovy fillets, perhaps a bag of sugar for an occasional grapefruit, all to be stored in my bedroom with a bottle of sherry now and then.41 Here, the fact that Aroon would consume such foods alone and in violation of the dictates of good behaviour enhances her anticipated pleasure in them. Aroon also gives a mouthwatering description of the fatal dish she serves her foodaverse mother, complete with Michelin-level mise en place: The tray did look charming: bright, with a crisp clean cloth and a shine on everything. I lifted the silver lid off the hot plate to smell those quenelles in a cream sauce. There was just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation. Anyhow, what could be more delicious and delicate than a baby rabbit?42

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This appetising description supports Aroon’s self-defence: ‘It was perfect. I made it so I ought to know. It was RIGHT.’43 Reading proleptically, readers see that Aroon is also ‘RIGHT’ (or so she claims), in the sense of being justified in committing the matricide that liberates her from the last vestiges of her oppressive class and family, allowing her to outlive them all. Despite her mother’s insistence that she cannot eat rabbit, Aroon assures her that it is merely a ‘delicious chicken mousse’.44 As it turns out, Mrs St. Charles succumbs to her revulsion before the rabbit even passes her lips: she vomits while reluctantly lifting the fork to her mouth and then dies. By reminding readers that this seemingly innocuous dish is actually made of ‘baby rabbit’ that has been ‘forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender’, Keane emphasises both the abject provenance of the food and the violence inherent in cooking.45 Most critics focus on the scene’s abjection, but both the initial appetising description of the dish and Aroon’s command that Rose ‘keep the mousse hot for my luncheon’ challenge readers to reckon with the fact that many of the foods humans enjoy, from meat to mushrooms, are never far from their abject origins.46 Moreover, reacting to the ‘baby rabbit’ with revulsion and refusal is a problematic response for readers, as to do so would align us with the cruel and controlling Mrs St. Charles and the repressive Ascendancy values she embodies. Keane develops this tension further in Loving and Giving by contrasting the miserably married Nicandra with her happily widowed Aunt Tossie. Part Two of the novel concludes with young Nicandra ‘[breaking] the code of propriety’ and startling Andrew with the ‘wild quality’ of her physical response to his ‘nibbling’ kisses in the car after the Hunt Ball.47 Starved of pleasure, Nicandra believes that all her longings will be satisfied if she marries Andrew, a hope reflected in her hungry prayer that God will ‘help me to get him’.48 Part Three takes place three years later, with Nicandra and Andrew’s marriage and consummation faits accomplis, despite Andrew’s insistence on twin beds. Within the rigid structures of Ascendancy marriage, however, Nicandra is denied the pleasures that Andrew and Lalage are permitted to enjoy. Suffering the digestive ailments of early pregnancy, she discovers her husband and friend sharing sandwiches ‘like two naughty children raiding a larder in a nice book for girls. Nicandra had no part in the adventure, no share in the fun. She remembered the horrid phrase “in her condition”’, words that refer to both her pregnancy and her class.49 Nicandra has so internalised the social pressure to deny her appetites that she suppresses her response to her husband’s affair, telling herself ‘she must behave’.50 In the scene that follows, Keane strikingly parallels Nicandra’s obedience to food rituals with the seemingly inevitable sacrifice of her will to her husband’s: ‘However deep the trouble, dinner, like brushing your teeth, had to happen. I’ve lost Andrew, she thought, and I’m peeling potatoes. It can’t be true. But Pommes Anna always went with Chicken Stew, it was a custom.’51 As Nicandra strains to uncork a bottle of wine, the narrative adopts an ambiguous, passive quality that emphasises her distance from her own body and desires, including her desire for motherhood: ‘She knew exactly what was going to happen now – she would lose her baby and [Andrew] would commend her.’52 From this moment on, Nicandra is described as being in a permanent state of bodily discomfort and hunger. At the sight of a pregnant woman, ‘a small, dreadful loneliness crept round her heart, like a warning of indigestion’, and ‘pleasant acts, such as . . . having a drink, eating dinner, were barren now. The hunger in her heart was not transferable.’53

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Unlike Aroon, Nicandra has so internalised Ascendancy values that she is unable to partake in the consolatory and sustaining qualities of food. After such long denial, Nicandra’s appetite diminishes, along with her sense of self. Dropping by for lunch, Robert is alarmed to discover that she is visibly malnourished and eats ‘without the smallest interest’.54 Gradually, Nicandra, who by this point has given up breakfast, loses even the sensation of hunger: ‘The best thing in the world would be to feel hunger for anything.’55 Loss of appetite in Keane’s fiction seems to equate to a loss of the will to live. Having fully internalised the near-anorexic good behaviour of her class and gender, it is appropriate that Nicandra dies shortly thereafter in the dining room of Deer Forest, her diminished body a fitting last meal for its starved space. Following the sounds of ‘slaughter . . . going on in the dining room’, where her unfed hunting dogs have turned on one another, Nicandra plunges through the rotten floorboards and her thin body is swallowed up by the empty space below.56 Unlike Nicandra, Aunt Tossie is unashamed of sensual enjoyment; like Aroon, she is undeterred by foods with unsavoury or violent associations. As a widow, Aunt Tossie relishes the freedom to indulge her appetites without regard for others’ disapproval or interference. She luxuriates in the autonomy of preparing an ‘early breakfast’ of tea and biscuits each morning without the assistance of servants. She savours this solitary meal, ‘nibbling away in a leisured manner’ before joining the family in the dining room for a second breakfast.57 Her private stash of whiskey in the toilet cupboard is an open secret within the household and another example of her indulgence in forbidden pleasures. Unlike the indifferent Maman and Mrs St. Charles, Aunt Tossie delights in meal planning, her control over the menu heightening her pleasure in the meal to come. Anticipating the Hunt Ball dinner, Aunt Tossie ‘felt hungry’: ‘Alone of all of them, she knew how good dinner was going to be.’58 Keane devotes the better part of five pages to the dinner scene, describing in detail the fish in their ‘discreet miasma of herb-scented butter’, the snipe pudding with ‘Mrs. Geary’s finest and most secret sauce’, and the sea-kale, ‘small as a baby’s fingers’.59 As in Aroon’s description of baby rabbit whizzed in a blender, Keane highlights the way that Tossie’s enjoyment of the food is enhanced by her acknowledgement of its grotesque origins. The thirdperson narration slips into Tossie’s consciousness, tracing her recollection that ‘snipe don’t sing’ as ‘she cut through the thread-like neck, and holding the bird’s head by its absurdly long beak, crunched through the white skull and sucked out the strange delicious brains within it’.60 Keane refuses to conceal the inherent violence of eating, and she condemns the Ascendancy characters whose ritualistic manners and repressive gender norms attempt to do so. So great is Tossie’s pleasure in the meal that nothing can diminish it – not even a wardrobe malfunction in which the ‘great, creamy heap’ of her left breast bulges out of her dress just as the trifle is served, mounded with whipped cream and topped with a single, suggestive cherry. The other guests are aghast at her faux pas and squeamish Nicandra feels ‘sick as if she was eating Aunt Tossie’; only Tossie is ‘unperturbed’, ‘help[ing] herself to trifle with splendid insouciance’ before discreetly rearranging her boa.61 If anything, Tossie’s enjoyment of her food is enhanced rather than diminished by her awareness that, in doing so, she violates taboos. Whereas Nicandra’s cooking for Andrew is an extension of her self-denial and conformity to social pressures, Aunt Tossie welcomes cooking as an opportunity to satisfy her personal tastes and subvert confining class roles. After the family’s ageing

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cook grows too senile to be trusted, Aunt Tossie discovers a passion for cooking and becomes ‘an enthusiastic, if variable, cook’, intrepidly mining the European Cook Book for inspiration. She finds ‘happiness and importance’ in her kitchen adventures, and she is unconcerned that her presence below stairs is a ‘debasement of proper status’, except in so far as it might embarrass the few remaining servants.62 Aunt Tossie does not fully escape the family’s tragic trajectory; throughout the second half of the novel she suffers emotional and financial losses, not to mention alcoholism, constipation and indigestion. But, unlike Nicandra, she retains a clear sense of individual taste and appreciation for good food, which are connected to her indomitability. As the food-averse Nicandra tries to force Aunt Tossie to moderate her diet, Aunt Tossie continues to demand (and sometimes sneak) ‘well buttered’ watercress sandwiches, pork chops and ‘two boiled eggs – four minutes’.63 Moreover, Aunt Tossie’s digestive ailments are caused, not by her indulgent diet, but by the oppressiveness of Ascendancy norms as internalised by Nicandra and symbolised by Deer Forest. Aunt Tossie’s worst fit of indigestion is triggered when Nicandra forces her out of the squalid caravan, where she has been living alone quite happily, and back into the Big House. As Aunt Tossie realises that life in the Big House under Nicandra’s supervision entails sacrificing her privacy and autonomy (especially over her meals and ‘meagre little drinks at odd hours’), she senses ‘that tiny familiar stitch of pain [that] crept, alive again, under her arm and grew, a preposterous indigestion’.64 Ultimately, Aunt Tossie escapes the starved space of the Big House in Loving and Giving while, as we have seen, Nicandra does not. In her introduction to Time After Time, Emma Donoghue describes Keane’s penultimate book as ‘a dazzling drama of human cruelty and frailty’, in which she ‘has loaded her characters with almost too much to bear’.65 In addition to the problems that plague Big House children in Keane’s other late novels, the four adult Swift siblings suffer from disabilities that further complicate their status as the Ascendancy’s symbolic and literal heirs: Jasper has one eye, April is deaf, May has a deformed hand and Baby June is dyslexic. Into the already strained dynamics of Durraghglass, the decrepit Big House that the siblings are forced to share, Keane introduces cousin Leda, a blind, elderly, half-Jewish woman who attempts a nasty takeover of the estate in retaliation for the Swift family’s past sins. Leda functions as a collective guilt symptom of Anglo-Irish repression, highlighting its sexual double standards and linking these to other moral failures. During her first visit to Ireland as a girl, Leda was charmed by Durraghglass and her uncle, Valentine Swift, with whom she had an incestuous affair. The Swifts’ mother promptly sent Leda home to Austria, where, the family assumed, she eventually died in a concentration camp. Decades later, Leda’s daughter reveals that she survived by being ‘useful’ to the Nazis.66 In making a main character of her Big House novel both a Holocaust survivor and a collaborator, Keane injects a startling reminder of modern genocide enacted on a huge scale and raises uncomfortable questions about Anglo-Irish complicity in the horrors of modernity. To what extent is the Swift family or, more generally, the Ascendancy to blame for Leda’s suffering? She, not her older and more powerful male seducer, is evicted from the safety of Ireland and cast into the turmoil of pre-World War II Europe, even if Mrs Swift intended the punishment as a banishment rather than execution. This question is further complicated by Ireland’s controversial official position of neutrality during World War II. Although the Swift siblings are not personally

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to blame for the atrocities of World War II, through the character of Leda, Keane suggests that the alienation and repression within Anglo-Irish society is indicative of the way that this society also responds to the moral claims of perceived outsiders. Just as the Ascendancy abjectifies female bodies and sexuality, it also attempts to repress its complicity in the suffering of Irish Catholics during the Great Famine and of European Jews during World War II. The Swift siblings suffer under the repressive atmosphere of the Ascendancy, but they also live with the guilt that they are beneficiaries of the Ascendancy’s indifference to the suffering of others. Despite the wretchedness of its characters, as Kevin Donovan argues in his analysis of the interplay of food and architecture in Time After Time, ‘there is hope’ at Durraghglass as well – often in the form of food.67 Donovan argues that ‘the passage of food, through the bodies of the family, but also through the complex body of the house’, facilitates a transformation of the architecture of the Big House that challenges the ‘dialectic of inside and out’ and creates opportunities for ‘sustainable life‘ as the decaying house’s once-rigid boundaries become more porous.68 My reading complements Donovan’s argument by examining Keane’s framing of food as consolation for the suffering and guilt of AngloIrish modernity. As we have seen, cooking has the power to transform the abject into the edible without erasing its provenance. Characters like Aroon and Aunt Tossie, who understand the abject as an inherent aspect of human experience, find their pleasure in eating intensified by this private knowledge. In Time After Time, the problem of Leda as a persistent reminder of the outside world ensures that neither the Swifts nor readers can entirely repress Anglo-Irish modernity’s abject. However, Keane’s portrayal of subversive consumption offers a hopeful model for incorporating (that is, acknowledging rather than denying) the abject. As in her previous two novels, Keane presents physical intimacy in Time After Time as disappointing and disempowering; as an escape from suffering, loneliness or cruelty, it is a dead end. The only Swift sibling to marry, April had ‘rather looked forward to [sex]’, until experience validates her mother’s dispiriting advice: ‘It’s a thing men do. You won’t like it.’69 April’s brief marriage to Colonel Grange-Gorman, during which he supplies her with pornographic books and pictures to re-enact in bed, leaves her with a lasting appreciation for ‘the value of her own bodily privacy’.70 Like Aunt Tossie, April embraces the financial and bodily autonomy of widowhood. She takes great satisfaction in feeding, shaping and dressing her body as an end in itself rather than to suit someone else’s tastes. She is a chronic dieter, but her diets enhance her sense of autonomy and her enjoyment of food: ‘slipping off Weight Watchers now and then’, especially for a favourite food, gives her an illicit thrill and power over her body.71 Also like Aunt Tossie, April keeps a secret stash of alcohol for private consumption; ‘Learning about drink had been one of the few treats in her marriage with Colonel Grange-Gorman.’72 Both women turn to food not as a sublimated form of sexual frustration, but as a superior form of physical pleasure through which they assert their privacy and autonomy against stifling patriarchal class norms. Jasper, the only male sibling in the Swift family, is perhaps the character most attuned to the pleasures of subversive consumption. Kreilkamp reads him as a ‘closeted homosexual’, whose adulthood is stunted by sexual frustration.73 Yet in failing to take seriously Jasper’s interest in food, Kreilkamp minimises Jasper’s enjoyment of it and overlooks Keane’s lengthy, sensual descriptions. Against class and gender norms (Big House cooks are nearly always Irish women), Jasper savours his role as the family cook, though he

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views cooking as a way to cater to his own tastes rather than as a service to his sisters. The filthy kitchen is his private domain, presenting opportunities for privacy, autonomy and self-fulfilment: in preparing a pigeon pie, ‘a righteous feeling of peace and busyness in creation came over him. Everything to do with the pie was forming a quiet importance for him.’74 Like Aroon and Aunt Tossie, Jasper also knows that secrecy is the best sauce. He treats himself to an occasional mixed grill ‘for his own lonely pleasure – his midnight feast secret from those inquisitive sisters’.75 He also indulges in a nightly bedtime drink, which he prepares to exacting standards after his sisters have retired: Now it was Complan; Complan in the one large cup remaining from the Good’s breakfast set, decorated with wandering violets. In any other cup Complan would have seemed undrinkable. He added a strip of orange peel (cut thin as lemon zest for a Martini) to the white paste mixed in his cup; then the careful stream of boiling water; after that a capful of whiskey, a coffeespoonful of brown sugar and a very light grating of nutmeg.76 Even when feeding his siblings, Jasper’s pleasure in food is personal rather than communal. He presides over the table – ‘No one but he was permitted to interfere with his dishes or their arrangement’ – and licks his chops – ‘he had obviously been enjoying some private pleasure in the kitchen’ – before serving up his ‘masterpiece’ of quiche, lamb’s lettuce and blackcurrant fool.77 Jasper’s pigeon pie is the focus of the first two chapters of the novel, ‘In the Kitchen’ and ‘In the Dining-Room’. Like Aroon’s rabbit quenelles and Aunt Tossie’s snipe pudding, Jasper’s pie is often cited by critics as an example of Keane’s use of the abject to underscore the decaying state of the Ascendancy.78 It is certainly true that the pie has abject origins: tough pigeons half-eaten by Jasper’s cat, ‘a few mushrooms somewhere in paper bag’, too-salty bacon ‘stiffening in age’, and worst of all, leftover beef from the dogs’ dinners with the blue mould scraped off are all warmed alongside Baby June’s newborn pig in the aged Aga. Nevertheless, Jasper is a skilled and imaginative (if unhygienic) cook, who skilfully blends herbs and frowns on stock cubes. Despite its disgusting ingredients, his pie is excellent beyond words. The pigeon breasts married beautifully to the beef from the dogs’ dinners, the old rashers of bacon, and the eggs. A pile of purple sprouting kale sat on the hot-plate to one side of the pie and pommes-de-terre Anna on the other.79 The meal, which also includes a salad and ‘baby rhubarb and rice cream with a vaporous suggestion of nutmeg’, could have come straight out of Elizabeth David (except for the dogs’ dinners bit).80 While Keane’s tone and attitude towards her characters can be difficult to ascertain and her first-person narrators are notoriously unreliable, the extended third-person description of the meal as delicious is sincere. The bickering siblings fall silent when the pie arrives; their conversation does not resume ‘until smaller second helpings and a salad were being eaten’.81 Significantly, a recipe for ‘Jasper’s Pigeon Pie’ is the only direct reference to any of Keane’s fictional characters in Nursery Cooking. While Keane’s recipe omits the mouldy meat, elsewhere in the cookbook she writes candidly

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about a serendipitous experiment of her own that began with unpromising ingredients. In her recipe for ‘Shepherd’s Pie’, Keane recounts harried days as a single mother, pressed for time and desperate to put a meal on the table. She confesses, a good long fumble through the fridge produced: knuckle-end of a leg of roast lamb; a very small piece of veal; a slice of tongue from the delicatessen. Is twicecooked meat bad for children?, I asked myself, answering myself to try it on them anyhow. From that experience, she concludes, ‘to make a good shepherd’s pie you need to be deprived of all the classical essentials’ and unfussy enough to incorporate scraps and orts.82 Keane’s recipe is an endorsement of Jasper’s pronouncement, ‘It takes imagination and a reasonable digestion to appreciate good cooking.’83 The secret of good cooking and eating, for Keane, is to delight in the transformation of the abject into the ‘really eatable’. To deny food’s abject origins or to deny one’s own embodiment, as so many of her Ascendancy characters do, is fruitless and fatal. Similarly, Keane insists on confronting Anglo-Irish modernity’s abject. For the Swifts to ignore Leda and the horrors she both embodies and represents would be to repeat the sins of the Ascendancy and so suffer its fate. Survival depends upon the ability to acknowledge and accept imperfect consolations: ‘We have to eat and drink to live,’ May Swift tells her siblings.84 In a tribute to Keane in The Guardian, Keane’s friend and the editor of her late novels, Diana Athill, praises ‘Molly’s astonishing gift for giving and taking pleasure’ in any circumstance, a gift that made her ‘a perfect hostess’.85 Many friends and interviewers confirm Keane’s attentiveness to food in real life as in her writing. In a profile for The New Yorker (delightfully punctuated by Keane’s offers of homemade cake, tea and ‘a little booze up’), Mary Kierstead marvels that, ‘from 11 a.m. on, food and drink appear at closely spaced intervals’ in Keane’s Ardmore home.86 In her Preface to Nursery Cooking, Keane writes that the meagre, disgusting nursery meals of her childhood drove her to seek nourishing pleasures elsewhere: ‘given, found or stolen, we looked for food we could enjoy’.87 As she recounts, secret meals of fire-cooked potatoes and ditch-grown watercress were enhanced by being ‘adventures of disobedience’: ‘no potatoes have ever been so good’.88 Like Aroon, Aunt Tossie and the Swifts, Keane turned to forbidden food in her childhood and her writing to escape the ‘starved spaces’ of the Big House, discovering the private pleasures of consumption and charting a path for survival. The illicit meals Keane recounts in her cookbook, like her novels, demonstrate that ‘stolen fruit is best of all’.89 Keane’s treatment of food differs markedly from that of many canonical Irish modernist writers. Solitary dining in James Joyce’s fiction, for instance, is rarely pleasurable and, more often than not, underscores rather than ameliorates his characters’ alienation.90 Unlike Keane’s Anglo-Irish characters, Joyce’s urban-dwelling Irish frequently dine alone in public eateries, which serve as unhomely reminders of their social, economic and political marginalisation. Keane’s characters occupy a very different space, literally and symbolically, and have a very different relationship to food. Keane’s insistence on the consolatory powers of food may seem heretical indeed, in light of Anglo-Irish landowners’ culpability for mass starvation in Ireland during the Great Famine. Nevertheless, as her characters frequently have cause to observe,

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the life-sustaining pleasure of solitary consumption is an unearned mercy – one that does not depend on good behaviour. After the shocking revelations about Leda’s collaboration with the Nazis, Jasper finds refuge ‘alone in the kitchen at last, [where] he set himself to the construction of the perfect sandwich of his imagination. Leda didn’t deserve it, of course, but who did?’91 In Keane’s modernity, it seems that no one deserves to enjoy food, yet it offers real consolation to those willing to consume these forbidden fruits.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Qtd in Weekes, Irish Women Writers, p. 155. O’Brien, ‘Anglo-Irish Abjection’, p. 35. Ibid., p. 40. Keane also includes a trifle recipe, though it contains far less brandy than Aunt Tossie’s and, by eliminating the single ‘tip-top’ cherry, avoids an unfortunate resemblance to Aunt Tossie herself. Keane uses this phrase twice in her cookbook to describe various puddings: ‘Mrs. Finn’s Really Eatable Rice Souffle Pudding’ (p. 109) and ‘Mary-Brigid’s Really Eatable Cornflour Pudding’ (p. 122). Hubert and Richard’s budding relationship might have been an exception, though it ends prematurely due to their disapproving families and Hubert’s early death. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 61. Ibid., p. 183. Bowen, The Last September, p. 303. Weekes, Irish Women Writers, p. 158. Kreilkamp, ‘The Persistent Pattern’, pp. 456–7. Weekes, Irish Women Writers, pp. 158–9. Keane, Loving and Giving, pp. 80–5. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 29. Reisman, ‘Food and Violence’, p. 157. Keane, Nursery Cooking, p. 11. Keane, Good Behaviour, pp. 13, 59. Ibid., p. 180. Keane, Loving and Giving, p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 34–6. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 45. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 124. Keane, Loving and Giving, p. 88. Ibid., pp. 68–9. Ibid., p. 88. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 12; Keane, Loving and Giving, p. 16; Nursery Cooking, p. 7. Keane, Loving and Giving, p. 48. Ibid., pp. 180, 194. Kreilkamp, ‘The Persistent Pattern’, p. 456. Keane, Good Behaviour, pp. 85–6. Sceats, Food, Consumption and the Body, p. 92.

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the pleasures of consumption in molly keane 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

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Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 110. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., pp. 124, 150. Ibid., p. 190. Similarly, Aroon is undeterred by funeral sandwiches, leftovers and, of course, the rabbit quenelles that cause her mother to vomit and die. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 237. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid. See O’Brien, ‘Anglo-Irish Abjection’, and Reisman, ‘Food and Violence’. Keane, Good Behaviour, p. 7. Keane, Loving and Giving, p. 89. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., pp. 75–6. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., pp. 198, 207–8. Ibid., p. 203. Donoghue, ‘Introduction’ to Time After Time, pp. vii–viii. Leda’s Jewish husband committed suicide to avoid the gas chambers, but Leda herself ‘had a very comfortable war. In Paris, mostly. She had friends, very good friends, in the Occupation’ (Keane, Time After Time, p. 181). Donovan, ‘The All-Consuming House’, p. 135. Ibid., pp. 136–7. Keane, Time After Time, p. 48. Mrs Swift’s advice to April repeats Mrs Brock’s explanation to Aroon in Good Behaviour almost verbatim: ‘It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it’ (p. 62). It also evokes Keane’s recollection of her Aunt Bijou’s warning on the eve of Keane’s own wedding: ‘I shall never forget my honeymoon. It was the most horrible time of my whole life’ (Kierstead, ‘A Great Old Breakerawayer’, p. 100). Ibid., pp. 47–8. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Kreilkamp, ‘The Persistent Pattern’, p. 456. Keane, Time After Time, p. 11. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., pp. 57–8. For example, O’Brien, ‘Anglo-Irish Abjection’, p. 47. Keane, Time After Time, p. 28.

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350 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

lauren rich Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 28. Keane, Nursery Cooking, p. 52. Keane, Time After Time, p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Athill, ‘Diana Athill on Molly Keane’, n.p. Kierstead, ‘A Great Old Breakerawayer’, pp. 97–8. Keane, Nursery Cooking, p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid. See Rich, ‘A Table for One’. Keane, Time After Time, p. 183.

Bibliography Athill, Diana, ‘Diana Athill on Molly Keane: “I admired many authors, but Molly I loved”’, The Guardian (21 January 2017), (last accessed 19 October 2020). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Last September (New York: Random House, 2000). Donoghue, Emma, ‘Introduction’ to Molly Keane, Time After Time (London and N. Pomfret, VT: Virago, 2006), pp. vii–xi. Donovan, Kevin, ‘The All-Consuming House: Food and Architecture in Molly Keane’s Time after Time’, in Samantha Martin McAuliffe (ed.), Food and Architecture: At the Table, (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 129–40. Keane, Molly, Good Behaviour (London: Virago, 2001). Keane, Molly, Loving and Giving (London: Virago, 2001). Keane, Molly, Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking: Well-Loved Recipes from Childhood (London: Macdonald, 1985). Keane, Molly, Time After Time (London: Virago, 2001). Kierstead, Mary D., ‘A Great Old Breakerawayer’, The New Yorker (13 October 1986), pp. 97–112. Kreilkamp, Vera, ‘The Persistent Pattern: Molly Keane’s Recent Big House Fiction’, The Massachusetts Review, 28:3 (2017), pp. 53–460. O’Brien, Ellen L., ‘Anglo-Irish Abjection in the “Very Nasty” Big-House Novels of Molly Keane’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 10:1 (1999), pp. 35–62. Reisman, Mara, ‘“Slaughter was going on in the dining room”: Food and Violence in Molly Keane’s Fiction’, Women’s Studies, 44 (2015), pp. 156–82. Rich, Lauren, ‘A Table for One: Hunger and Unhomeliness in Joyce’s Public Eateries’, Joyce Studies Annual (2010), pp. 71–98. Sceats, Sarah, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Weekes, Ann Owen, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).

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20 ‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction Siân White

I

n Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), a character–narrator known as ‘middle sister’ describes her experience, decades before, of being stalked and harassed by an older, prominent republican paramilitary known as ‘milkman’. His unwanted and sinister attention had radically altered her public reputation and relationships. From the narrative present, that adult self names the offences against her, accounts for her eighteenyear-old self’s withdrawn response, and identifies the cultural forces that enabled both the harassment and the silencing as she never could have then: [P]eople here were unused to words like ‘pursuit’ and ‘stalking’, that is, in terms of sexual pursuit and sexual stalking . . . If such a thing was entertained to go on, hardly even then would our society take it seriously. It would have been on a par with jay-walking, maybe less than jay-walking, given it was a woman’s thing . . . the Hollywood phenomenon of sexual prowling would have been overshadowed, as everything here was overshadowed, by the main topic of conversation in this place.1

Though Burns sets Milkman in an unnamed place at a time dominated by ‘political problems’ – sectarian violence in what is clearly Northern Ireland during the Troubles – she compares its gender politics to ‘the Hollywood phenomenon of sexual prowling’, placing middle sister’s story among other stories of harassment, assault, abuse and rape that have ultimately surfaced with the #MeToo movement.2 Amid institutional failures to hold perpetrators accountable and competing ‘he said, she said’ accounts is an increasing tendency by authorities or the public to dismiss accusers’ and survivors’ testimonies as unreliable. Such dismissals are founded in judgements about both the teller (as too damaged or suspect, or over-reacting to a ‘misunderstanding’) and the telling (as too non-linear or reliant on fallible memory). The result is the discrediting of female victims, whose very victimisation renders them and their stories unbelievable. Middle sister joins this public conversation by explicitly naming the nuanced, covert and pervasive forms of predation she experienced, and revealing how her young, experiencing self was acculturated to doubt her own perceptions: ‘I did not know intuition and repugnance counted.’3 Though powerless to control what happened to her then, she can claim authority to tell her story now.

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Figure 20.1 In the narrow terraced streets built for working people every house except the last needs only three walls. Northern Ireland, 1965. Photo credit Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum Photos, printed with permission.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, Burns does not opt for the realist mode to assert middle sister’s credibility, but instead chooses a style that self-consciously calls attention to the act of narration. Middle sister presents her critique of real-world sexual politics in an often absurdly humorous manner, taunting those who might mistrust her telling, as if to say, ‘I’ll give you something to disbelieve . . . .’ Burns’s choice brings to mind other Irish women writers who use unconventional forms to portray victimised women’s and children’s experiences. Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) each uses a version of first-person present-tense narration to show how victimisation shapes the narrators’ perceptions and responses to their circumstances, and to grant them telling authority.4 Together, these three novels demonstrate that self-conscious or experimental forms are especially suited for truthtelling and for challenging the gendering of unreliability. Their narrative forms are not without precedent, however, and each of these novels references and modifies literary antecedents in specific ways to address the contemporary moment. In Donoghue’s Room, the first-person narrator is five-year-old Jack, who understands little about his circumstances, living captive with his mother in her kidnapper and rapist’s backyard shed (called ‘Room’), somewhere in North America. The dramatic irony created by Jack’s innocence recalls Henry James’s experiment in What Maisie Knew (1897) with using a child’s perspective to deliver a scathing indictment of adults’ moral corruption. Whereas James depicts Maisie’s perception

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of divorce and adultery using a past-tense, third-person limited narration, Donoghue raises the stakes by portraying criminal sexual depravity in a first-person, present-tense form that narratologists call ‘simultaneous narration’, where Jack does the impossible of experiencing and narrating simultaneously.5 The novel begins, ‘Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra.’6 The juxtaposition of his innocence with the grave circumstances is more poignant because his moment-to-moment experience co-occurs with his narration. McBride’s novel similarly offers the Girl’s interior experience and narrative authority, though the style and sexual circumstances are different. The novel traces the Girl’s life – from foetus to her suicide in young adulthood – during which she witnesses her brother’s terminal illness and suffers verbal, physical and sexual abuse by family members and strangers. The syntactically irregular style, by turns streaming and fragmented, recalls James Joyce’s Ulysses, harnessing the unmediated and spontaneous authenticity of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue and the associative fragments of Leopold Bloom’s free indirect discourse. Whereas Ulysses frankly portrays characters’ sexual lives in Molly’s and Bloom’s recognisably consistent styles, however, McBride’s A Girl renders extreme, sustained sexual violence and emotional distress in an evolving style that incorporates both the inaudible mental transcript associated with internal monologue and the speaking quality of narration, which the Girl directs to her brother: ‘Two me. Four you five or so. I falling. Reel table leg to stool. Grub face into her cushions. Squeal. Baby full of snot and tears. You squeeze on my sides just a bit. I retch up awful tickle giggs.’7 Despite its different prose, McBride’s novel resembles Donoghue’s since the Girl, like Jack, experiences and narrates simultaneously. The novel shows her trauma but also lets her speak. Middle sister’s narrative self-consciousness in Milkman has eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedents. Her digressions recall Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as critics have noted, where the ‘homodiegetic’ Shandy – a witness and teller of others’ stories – openly admits to how little he knows, undermining the conventional omniscience of the narrator. Middle sister’s digressive and meandering style likewise undercuts her authority, but with greater irony because her narration is ‘autodiegetic’: she tells her own story,8 like the narrator of a fictional autobiography such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Both Jane Eyre and middle sister explicitly reference the narrating process, but middle sister’s metanarrativity goes beyond direct reader address. Her self-consciousness and intertextual references playfully question the relationship between representational form and reality. In different ways, then, these contemporary women novelists adapt their literary precursors’ techniques and preoccupations to expose realities of gendered power – where victims are feminised and therefore deemed unreliable – which contemporary society has failed to address. By using narrators who speak in unexpected ways with unexpected agency, these novels challenge the association of femininity with an unreliability based in incapacity or incompetence, an association as dominant in the Anglophone literary tradition as in current discourses surrounding sexual predation. Novels like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita focus on protagonists that, by today’s standards, are predatory; taken on their own narrative terms, though, the novels privilege and even invite sympathy for those protagonists.9 Meanwhile feminine narrators – whose

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authority is qualified or even discounted – are deemed unreliable (because, for example, of incapacity, as with Benji in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), and unreliable narrators, especially those who broadcast their narrative incompetence, read as feminised (like the cuckolded John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier). By contrast, these women writers undermine that consensus by embracing the paradox of the narrator’s political marginalisation and narrative empowerment, and challenging a binary of ‘victim or agent’ by allowing the narrating protagonists to tell their stories as both. In the process, the writers expose extreme but seemingly pervasive sexual depravity and demonstrate that non-mimetic or experimental fiction is particularly ideal for conveying and legitimising victims’ stories.

‘Stories are a different kind of true’: Narrating the Real In Donoghue’s Room, narratives and narration are central to Jack’s subjecthood and agency. His worldview is shaped by both his youth and his confinement to the windowless shed that ‘Old Nick’ has constructed and where Jack was conceived and born. The narration remains limited to his understanding, even as he and his mother adjust to life outside Room after Jack enables their escape midway through the novel. The language hews to Jack’s idiosyncratic syntax – what Fintan O’Toole calls ‘elaborate baby talk’10 – which moves between conventionally marked direct speech and indirect thought. While some critics liken its form to the modernist interior monologue because of its fidelity to Jack’s perspective, the novel is clearly a narration.11 Unlike James’s Maisie, whose perspective is privileged but merely shown, Jack as narrator has the editorial authority to compress time, respond to immediate events and reflect upon his experiences, showcasing his intellectual development. His innocent portrayal of horrific circumstances stands in tension with that narrative authority. Though Jack cannot present directly what he cannot understand, neither can he be dismissed as unreliable. After all, he effectively reports details and events of his world, providing enough information, for example, for the reader to infer the almost-nightly rapes of his mother from his metonymic rendering through counting the bedspring creaks.12 Though his reports are descriptively accurate, his narrow frame of reference limits his ability to interpret and evaluate what he perceives13: I’m not actually sure if [Old Nick] is real for real. Maybe half? He brings groceries and Sundaytreat and disappears the trash, but he’s not human like us. He only happens in the night, like bats. Maybe Door makes him up with a beep beep and the air changes. I think Ma doesn’t like to talk about him in case he gets realer.14 He perceives Ma’s attitude correctly without comprehending the context or its significance for her. Yet his reasoning, based on what he knows, is sound and he regularly revises his understanding as he learns more. That competence and tenacity bolster his authority as a narrator. At the same time, such authority stems primarily from his facility with narrative, which many representational modes have modelled for him. Having been immersed in visual and narrative texts throughout his life – television shows, drawings, paintings, books, the mirror and Ma’s oral tales – he is comfortable with their fictional elements without perceiving fictionality as unreal. His ‘real’ includes the cartoon character Dora,

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the book character Alice (in Wonderland), the Baby Jesus, living things like Spider, Mouse and Plant, and anthropomorphised objects like Jeep and Remote. All are equally his friends: Dora is a drawing in TV but she’s my real friend, that’s confusing. Jeep is actually real, I can feel him with my fingers. Superman is just TV. Trees are TV but Plant is real . . . Skateboards are TV and so are girls and boys except Ma says they’re actual, how can that be when they’re so flat?15 He perceives their visual and tactile differences but does not initially understand the relative realness of visually flat or round figures, or of two-dimensional screens or drawings compared with three-dimensional objects, despite Ma’s explanations: ‘Lots of TV is made-up pictures – like, Dora’s just a drawing – but the other people, the ones with faces that look like you and me, they’re real.’16 His conception of ‘real’ lies not only in what he sees, but in how he relates to them. He builds his community from a social instinct that is foundational to his role as narrator. His observation of their flatness, though, signals his burgeoning awareness that form dictates content: an object’s representation determines what seems real and what does not, and what makes an artist’s – or narrator’s – rendered reality credible. E. M. Forster’s classification in Aspects of the Novel (1927) of caricatured, unidimensional characters as ‘flat’ and the more credibly complex, fleshed-out characters as ‘round’ resembles the contrast in visual art between the flat, undifferentiated figures in early Christian art and the mimetic depictions of physical roundness by Renaissance artists.17 By contrast, Jack’s ideas of flatness and roundness echo an abstract, modernist understanding, where two- and three-dimensionality have no necessary relation to mimetic ‘realness’. The visual art in their makeshift gallery – including work by Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso from the cereal box ‘Great Masterpieces of Western Art’ series – showcases how artists’ formal innovations emphasise different perspectives, and together they illustrate how form produces meaning. Jack recognises the ‘truth’ conveyed in Pablo Picasso’s abstract and political Cubist painting Guernica (1937), to which his narration gives the most attention. Its critique of political circumstances – in which Nazi Germany, in collusion with Francisco Franco, bombed a Basque town – by portraying the event’s horrific impact on powerless people and animals essentially tells Jack’s story back to him. The painting’s presentation of multiple perspectives simultaneously produces flat, iconic figures of mother and child, whose uncanniness Ma recognises: Ma thinks Guernica is the best masterpiece because it’s realest, but actually it’s all mixed up, the horse is screaming with lots of teeth because there’s a spear stabbed in him, plus a bull and a woman holding a floppy kid with his head upside down and a lamp like an eye, and the worst is the big bulgy foot in the corner, I always think it’s going to stamp on me.18 Though his ‘but’ suggests he disagrees with his mother’s ‘realest’ assessment, he considers the depicted subjects identifiable, though ‘mixed up’, and his concern that the bulgy foot can literally breach its two-dimensional frame indicates that he understands these flat figures as equally real to round figures. He perceives the visual difference, but

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his judgements about realness do not assume that mimetic form is realer than abstract form. His intuition that the painting resembles his and Ma’s aberrant life implies that the painting’s content has impacted him, its estranging portrayal expressing a truth. By demonstrating that representation can convey something true, even if it does not look ‘real’, the visual art primes him to understand the implications of fictional stories for his real life, and to use narration to think, act and make meaning. Jack’s understanding of himself relative to his perceptions and what is ‘real’ – an understanding that ultimately enables him to act and to narrate – crystallises through Ma’s own representational efforts. Her drawing of him while sleeping, a mimetic rendering created while he was not consciously present and from a perspective he cannot see, is one of several representations indicating that things exist beyond his perception. Ma uses stories to entertain and educate him, habituating him to accept fictionality. Stories, she says, are neither literally true nor fake: ‘Stories are a different kind of true.’19 Her storytelling expands his frame of reference about their circumstances: a stolen mermaid story illustrates the concept of kidnapping and the The Count of Monte Cristo introduces the possibility of escape.20 Her narratives reveal storytelling to be an effective instrument for communicating what exists beyond his perceptions, enabling him to conceptualise a larger reality and narrate it into existence. His authority as a perceiver thus develops into his authorship as a narrator, which simultaneous narration showcases. Narrativising reflects Jack’s current, subjective understanding of reality and also leads him to new questions and realisations, which in turn revise his understanding and produce a new narrative. This process recurs throughout the novel, marked by deictics (italics added) that signal the order of events and realisations: Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they’re real, they’re actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired . . . Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything . . . When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all . . . When I was four I didn’t know about the world, or I thought it was only stories. Then Ma told me about it for real and I thought I knowed everything. But now I’m in the world all the time, I actually don’t know much, I’m always confused.21 Jack uses narrative chronology to reconcile his previous understanding with new information. Though his certainty wanes, his repeated returns to global summaries – ‘now I’m five I know everything’ or ‘now I’m in the world all the time, I actually don’t know much’ – suggest he understands narrativising as a tool for meaning-making, not just reflecting but actually bringing a reality into existence. He implicitly understands, however, that producing reality requires an opportunity to tell and an audience to listen. Throughout his life he has occupied the audience position, brought into the wider culture through stories and with his social world populated largely by fictional characters. When Ma explains their captivity in terms of a story – ‘We’re like people in

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a book, and he won’t let anybody else read it’22 – she activates Jack’s intuition that narrative’s capacity to produce reality depends on a crucial, fundamentally social contract between teller and audience. A story’s truth is actualised only when expressed and received. In preventing their story from being read, Old Nick denies them their chance at existence. Jack’s agency as a story-world actor and narrator stems from the implied conclusion that he must escape and then narrate so they can exist. Donoghue’s novel thus demonstrates that fictionality is essential to conveying truth: fictional narratives tell Jack the truth about his victimhood and subsequent power, while the novel’s nonmimetic narrative situation tells Jack’s different kind of true.

‘Forgive me brother for I have sinned’: Narrating for Redemption Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing exposes a degeneracy hiding in contemporary Ireland through the Girl’s particular experience with an escalating cycle of incest, abuse, promiscuity, rape and violence that spans her lifetime. The other characters are referenced only by their roles relative to her (brother, mother, grandfather, uncle), which makes the family an archetype while also limiting the frame to her perspective. The novel claims its place in an Irish tradition by incorporating the Irish language and religious, folkloric and literary discourses – four section titles, for example, reference the religious symbol ‘Lambs’, folklore’s ‘Land Under the Wave’, the Catholic rite ‘Extreme Unction’ and W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’ – while its evocations of Joyce’s experimental form lend it particular cultural weight. McBride juxtaposes these references to a romanticised Irish culture – where even Joyce’s transgressive novel has been canonised – with real, ongoing and unaddressed sexual violence and depravity. The novel’s narrating features, meanwhile, complicate the Girl’s status as a mere victim and the novel’s status as a typical interior monologue. The hybrid form lends her authority and credibility by showing her experience of violence and also letting her tell her story, for her reasons. To acknowledge the novel as a telling is to legitimise her claims to acting and narrating with purpose. She answers her powerlessness over significant people and events – her abusive and strictly religious mother, her rape at thirteen by her uncle, and the removal and return of her brother’s tumour that disables and then kills him – with actions to reclaim power: in her ongoing relationship with her uncle, in seeking out sex with strangers, and even in her suicide. While still a teenager, she converts her victimisation into fantasies of reciprocity and omnipotence, implicitly taking responsibility for actions that she understands as assertions of agency. During her uncle’s visit when she is thirteen, before the rape, she interprets his predatory grooming as welcome mutual attraction: How much secret pleasure to stare at uncle in my mind’s eye. Think of him come across the room. I have him . . . What’s in me? There’s something twist. Must move or shake him. Uncle. Think I must give him some surprise . . . What. Is lust it? That’s it. The first splinter. I. Give in scared. If I would. Stop. Him. Oh God. Is a mortal mortal sin . . . I am. Going to the bad. To the somewhere new.23 She does not perceive her uncle as dangerous but instead connects their mutual attraction to her own emerging sexual awareness and sinful desire. Even during the rape itself, the grammar presents her action – scratching his face – as a comparable assault

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on his body: ‘Done and done to. Doing. I’ll do all of this . . . He is digging into me and me to him . . . And his cheek. My nail my nail. That’s it. I’ve done to him. What’s done in me.’24 Despite the evident disparity between what each is doing to the other – she has marked him for a week, while he has marked her for life – her language imagines them as an equivalency. The discrepancy between her interpretation and what is clearly child rape produces a dramatic irony akin to Jack’s, though the older Girl understands enough to value imagining herself as an active participant rather than a victim. When, as a young adult, she confronts her uncle about the rape and he apologises,25 they initiate an ongoing relationship, and her participation expresses both her response to trauma and her claim to selfhood. Even as the relationship becomes more violent, she believes she chooses and benefits from it. Though the causes and consequences of her behaviour are important and suggest that her capacity to make good choices is compromised, what she reports and how she interprets her experiences are equally legitimate. Her declared purpose for her sexual and narrative agency is her close identification with her brother, whose disability and death position him as a Jesus figure, a sacrificial son with the ability to redeem. She also believes, however, that he requires her protection, and she uses promiscuity to defend and avenge him: ‘He was the first off. Worst off. I begin. Now I know full well what I can do. For me and for you.’26 She discovers ‘Saying yes is the best of powers,’27 and her aggressive call to sexual activity echoes an invitation to battle: ‘There is no Jesus here these days just Come all you fucking lads. I’ll have you every one any day. Breakfast dinner lunch and tea.’28 Though such encounters grow increasingly violent, she reaffirms her determination, once proclaiming, ‘My will be done.’29 In replacing God’s possessive pronoun with her own, she implies her omnipotence by co-opting and revising internalised religious discourses for her narrative. That act of revision is one of several ways in which she claims her authority as a narrator and the novel as a telling. Another is that she directs her second-person ‘You’ to her brother throughout the novel, from the womb until even after he dies. That death registers in her narration as a lone paragraph: ‘Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to now?’30 As her designated audience, he provides both the impetus for her narration and the purpose for her actions. She positions him as a priest, audience to her explanatory and defensive apologia, and witness to her confessional atonement: I can do myself. Damage. That’s it if I would. Do you hear me? Is it ever time for you to understand. . . . Forgive. Forgive me that that I didn’t see. Look out my eyes. That I didn’t know what I was doing though I did though I did. Oh do you love me. Can you love me. Do you love me still. My sins. My grievous. Woe my wrong. I went out to him and said do what you will if you want. If you’re able will you save me from that . . . If I knew what I do. I don’t so by the way I’m telling you. I’m warning now what a monster I have become . . . Wash oh yes that’s it wash away. My. Sin. . . . Can you love me even after that? Even now. I won’t ask and I won’t say that inside myself or ever out again. Forgive me brother. I know not what I do. Forgive me brother for I have sinned.31 By substituting ‘brother’ for ‘Father’ in the final prayer, and begging him to understand, love, save and forgive her, she signals her perceived responsibility for what she

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has done and endured. The ongoing use of second person and her references to his hearing and her telling affirm her status as a first-person narrator. Significantly, the dominant present tense signals that, like Jack, the Girl narrates as she experiences. Her emotional, mental and bodily responses register at the sentence level, as when, for example, excessive punctuation disrupts conventional syntax: I thought was nothing left. Now you’ve. How he knows it. He knows it is there for the beating the stealing the. I. Some place around that. No. I am there. Now you’ve. I. What’s it like in the silence when. You. I. Where. I. Hello. Hello. Is he are you there? Ssssss. There? I’m only here in my bones and flesh. Now you’ve gone away.32 The repeated grammatical subject ‘I’, and its isolation from a predicate by full stops, simultaneously convey the Girl’s first-person narrative status and her hesitation about how to articulate herself as a subject. While the fragmentation might seem to scramble the pronouns ‘I’, ‘he’ and ‘you’, evacuating them of context or meaning, throughout the novel the narrative stays engaged with the Girl’s direct experiences with events and people, and her pronoun referents correspond with the immediate context at almost every stage. The unconventional prose presents the violence and trauma of any given event without devolving into nonsensical jibberish. Other typographical irregularities – the abnormal use of capitalised or lower-case lettering, the transposition of letters and the omission of spaces – depict her emotional experience of a chaotic moment by speeding up or slowing down the prose: ‘There he does it. Says come on now it’s what’s good you and us. Stick it ionthedon’tinside wwherhtewaterisswimming htroughmynoseandmouth throughmmysense myorgands sthroughmythrough. That. A. My brain. He. Like. Now.’33 Unlike dynamic but consistent stream-of-consciousness forms such as Molly Bloom’s, the grammatical irregularities in A Girl increase and change as the violence and emotional distress increase: Garble lotof. Don’t I come all mouth of blood of choking of he there bitch there bithc there there stranlge me strangle how you like it how you think it is fun grouged breth sacld my lungs til I. Puk blodd over me frum. In the next but. Let me air. Soon I’n dead I’m sre. Loose. Ver the aIrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP.34 These visual distortions of language render violence and rape on the page, conveying the immediate impact of violence on the body and mind. The chosen formal effects recall modernist typographical experiments, like those of Ezra Pound and Guillaume Apollinaire. Like its modernist precursors, the novel demonstrates that the written or visual text can portray what a mediating external narrator and grammatically conventional prose do not. McBride’s novel combines the effects of internal monologue (where a breathless stream can express emotional urgency and authenticity in the moment) and visually experimental form (where effects can be shown on the page) with the empowerment implicit in first-person narration. The experimental firstperson, present-tense form enables a direct and unsanitised depiction of sexual violence without undermining the Girl’s credibility as a purposeful teller of her story. How we interpret the novel’s form is entirely linked to how we interpret the Girl’s agency as a subject. Critical responses largely treat the novel as an internal monologue

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or a stream of consciousness, what Dorrit Cohn calls a ‘simulation of an unwritten, inaudible language’ being overheard or instantly transcribed rather than spoken.35 Those critics who do refer to a ‘narrator’ do not attend carefully to the differences between internal monologue and narration. Many insist that syntactic and typographical irregularities indicate that the Girl lacks coherent subjecthood or consciousness, and that the form mimetically represents her psychic disintegration into madness. Some call the form ‘pre-conscious’,36 as if the Girl’s narrative comes from a foetal or semiotic state. These approaches reduce her to a victim whose subsequent actions stem entirely from unconscious compulsions, as if she lacks capacity to make choices. They discount the power she explicitly claims and undermine her narrative credibility. The textual signals that the novel is a narration – that is, the Girl’s insistence that she narrates to a specific audience for a specific purpose – suggest instead that formal irregularities serve to convey her immediate experience. After all, modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce normalised the idea of ordinary consciousness as flowing or fragmented. Their innovations disrupted an assumed link between healthy or coherent consciousness and syntactic wholeness or grammatical conventionality. McBride herself resists that association, describing the novel’s form as ‘trying to make language cope and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into straightforward grammatical language’.37 For McBride and her modernist precursors, formal experimentation signals not mental illness or damage but consciousness itself. While the form directly conveys the experience of victimisation, the Girl’s assertions of power cannot be dismissed. She is a victim who nevertheless is able and has the right to make choices, even though it means she bears some responsibility for the harm she suffers. Denying the agency she claims as an actor and narrator compounds the disempowering and violent acts committed against her. McBride’s novel thus brings a politics of gender and sexuality together with a politics of narration to challenge assumptions about who has the capacity and right to act and speak.

‘I’m not making this up’: Narrating in Retrospect In Burns’s Milkman, middle sister’s sometimes absurd narration spans several weeks, from milkman’s first contact to his execution by state authorities, and depicts the terror of living under paramilitary rule in a mainly Catholic, nationalist district in late 1970s Belfast. She never explicitly names the place and refers to most characters by their relationships to her, as with ‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘third brother-in-law’ and ‘longest friend’.38 Such indirection communicates her subjective view but, more importantly, depicts recognisable and tacitly understood circumstances in which naming can raise suspicions of informing, an offence often punished by merciless torture and execution. Her narrative illuminates the entrenched social behaviour and prejudices that undergird the political conflict, where tribal unity depends on strict conformity to traditional gender performances and to dominance by hypermasculine men. Such conformity is enforced as much by social surveillance, gossip and shaming as by violence or threats of violence; it discourages honest emotional expression, and marginalises non-normative individuals, called ‘beyond the pales’, who are mentally ill or defy gender or sexual norms. In a community that mistrusts police, hospitals and modern telephones, any efforts to address women’s ‘issues’ are meagre and oversimplified. The kangaroo court, for example, categorises crimes against women as degrees of rape; it

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does not penalise Somebody McSomebody for punching middle sister, but convicts him of ‘1/4 rape’ for entering the women’s bathroom to find her. Middle sister’s narrative implicitly blames this pervasive misogyny and repression for her harassment and her inability to act or speak in her defence. Her present-day narrative agency contrasts that lack of agency in the story-world. Reviewers of Milkman consistently mischaracterise the voice as a teenager’s, overlooking its significance as a retrospective narration.39 Though composed of layers of subjective experience and mediated by memory over time, such retrospection is shaped, in content and form, by the narrator’s authority. Her digressive style certainly demonstrates her terror and obsession then, but she never loses her place in the story entirely, indicating her narrative self-possession now. She can claim informed credibility because of both her decades of hindsight and her comic and self-referential style. For example, sometimes her special names for others, like ‘maybe-boyfriend’ or ‘Somebody McSomebody’, appear in other characters’ speech. In another instance, a working-class neighbour uses a rhetoric and vocabulary too formal for the informality of the moment to express thinly veiled threats to maybe-boyfriend for acquiring part of a British-made car.40 She often depicts characters in comically ironic terms – like her preternaturally intelligent and curious ‘wee sisters’, whose delight in having Thomas Hardy, Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad read to them is unexpected because of their age and presumed level of education – without undermining the overarching circumstances’ plausibility. Her rendering of repressive, often terrifying circumstances lends her authority, not despite such self-consciousness but because of it. The self-consciousness includes direct references to the act of telling. After summarising her community’s attempts to address ‘women’s issues’ as ‘Rape and all that jazz was practically what it was called’, she asserts, ‘I’m not making this up,’41 acknowledging an audience that might either share her incredulity or disbelieve her story. She also emphasises the story as a written account, where visual textual elements can convey meaning. When longest friend references milkman and middle sister says ‘she gave him a capital letter’,42 the capitalisation indirectly and concisely communicates milkman’s elevated community status. But middle sister does not just alter typography – she narrates about altering it. Similarly, she later presents her sister’s swearing not by directly quoting her, by declaring that she swears, or even by deploying the visual symbols (*%#&^$, called ‘grawlixes’) often used to censor swearing, but by writing those symbols out: the sister ‘exploded into advanced asterisks, into percentage marks, crossword symbol signs, ampersands, circumflexes, hash keys, dollar signs, all that “If You See Kay” blue french language’.43 The narrative enacts multiple conversions – with words on the page substituted for symbols that themselves stand in visually for swear words (as in the F-U-C-K example, too) – that evoke without explicitly naming the expletives. In these examples, the multiple layers of mediation do signifying work for her, signalling her narrative as a version that is both plausible and cleverly constructed. Her references to cultural texts do similar work. An early encounter with a pornographic magazine prefigures her later use of high and low cultural forms to represent story-world events and her resulting realisations. At the end of the first chapter, moments after an unwanted encounter with milkman, she slips on a discarded centrefold, ‘a double-page spread of a woman with long dark, unruly hair, wearing stockings, suspenders, something too, black and lacy’,44 and glimpses the misogynist sexualisation that will dominate her subsequent experiences. Again, though, she

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describes without naming the object, leaving its significance inexplicit. The pictured woman and the implied sex act are doubly depersonalised: she is dressed to perform desire and consent for an implied sexual encounter that is delinked from the emotional, relational component of intimacy. Moreover, she performs for a camera, distanced from other people, so her image can be reproduced and distributed publicly for countless anonymous spectators. Middle sister stumbles unwittingly into spectatorship, becoming equally implicated in the exploitation: ‘She was smiling out at me, leaning back and opening up for me, which was when I skidded and lost balance, catching full view of her monosyllable as I fell down on the path.’ The narrator uses ‘monosyllable’ (which is ironically polysyllabic) to euphemise ‘cunt’, evoking its multiple colloquial connotations and the image of its genital referent without using the actual word. She also describes the woman’s actions as aimed specifically at her: the woman opens up ‘for me’ and directs ‘at me’ that phony performance of a come-on, the centrefold’s smile. The pictured woman seems to invite, not force, middle sister to identify with her and to participate, too – as looker or, perhaps, co-performer. That middle sister skids just after recognising the invitation, however, instead implicates the pictured woman in her own exploitation, and suggests that she is soliciting middle sister to participate in a misogynist and sexually dangerous culture. The implicit pressure of a visual offer that middle sister cannot refuse foreshadows both the communal pressure to be milkman’s girl and her powerlessness over others’ perceptions about her involvement with him. Her slip on the magazine, then, is a slip into a social reality that sexualises her against her will and where women are complicit in their own objectification. She only catches the full, real view as she goes down. That view reveals the misogynist community to be rigid and repressed, a condition that middle sister’s extra-textual references confront and illustrate. Rare moments of authentic desire and love draw her attention. Twice she witnesses genuinely passionate kisses – between her brother and his former girlfriend, and between maybe-boyfriend and his best friend, ‘chef’ – but uses a perfume advert to describe them. She calls them ‘Jean Paul Gaultier kiss[es]’, ‘one of those “you’ll never be kissed like this until you smell like this” Christmas French perfume advertisements’.45 The 2012 perfume ad campaign she references offers video lessons on The Art of the French Kiss, where consumers choose their fragrance and create a personalised video to be shared on social media. In claiming mastery of the French kiss genre, the ad peddles not just perfume (by French haute couture designer, Gaultier) but also specialised kissing skills and, implicitly, the underlying passion. The ad campaign commodifies human connection and appeals to a consumer culture that values public broadcast over private, genuine experience. Middle sister produces irony by evoking this cultural cliché to describe kisses that she clearly recognises as profound and genuinely loving, contrasting the rare, real-world referents – the kisses – with the cultural repression and commodification of authentic love. Her capacity for irony has roots in certain realisations she had at the time. Milkman’s harassment coincides with her burgeoning ability to see outside the behaviour and prejudices to which she had been acculturated. Accordingly, she connects her community’s norms about gender and sex with their entrenched epistemological beliefs about what they know and how they recognise it. The entrenchment is rooted in fear, which leads them to mistrust anything new or non-normative, whether sexual agency or an alternate perspective. When her French teacher at the adult learning college suggests her students

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observe a sunset’s colours, they collectively refuse to acknowledge the sky could be other than the ‘official’ blue or the ‘unofficial’ blue, black and white: If what [the teacher] was saying was true, that the sky – out there – not out there – whatever – could be any colour, that meant anything could be any colour, that anything could be anything . . . So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.46 That the received wisdom could be wrong introduces a potentially destabilising relativity where ‘anything could be anything’. When middle sister herself actually looks at the sunset, she sees a multicoloured and constantly changing impressionist canvas of all colours except blue, but her community cannot perceive beyond already accepted terms. They do not merely forbid deviation, but cannot even imagine it. Her incipient critical distance, however, sets her apart from them and informs her future narration. In one episode, middle sister explicitly links their intransigent views to a particular form of representation. Near to her brother’s genuine kiss, a gathering audience watches a ‘strange spectacle’ of two men fighting silently in the street: They were still at it, those men, in silence, doing so too, with those cigarettes dangling. Perhaps it had been a fight too quiet, too prolonged, too puzzling, a disconcerting fight, difficult to gauge, one which worked largely perhaps by association of ideas, some modern, stylistic art nouveau encounter. Being a conventional audience, however, used to chronological and traditional realism, the majority began to doubt that those men, indeed, were fighting at all.47 What middle sister calls a ‘fight’ is unsettlingly performative, even ‘art nouveau’. That early twentieth-century applied arts movement, which used expressive, dynamic lines and organic asymmetry to aestheticise the ordinary or useful (like household objects or structural features of architecture) bridged the gap between utilitarian and fine arts, between aesthetic value and use value. What she calls an art nouveau fight is both aestheticised and useful. The audience, however, does not recognise it as such because of preconceived ideas about what a fight is in both form (such as sound or duration) and utility (to resolve conflicts, avenge wrongs or express anger). The spectacle they witness is too performative or stylised; they doubt the fight is real because of its form. In framing their doubt in aesthetic terms – ‘chronological and traditional realism’ – middle sister critiques their rigid inability to distinguish between the rendering and the rendered. But she also challenges the false promise of so-called realism, that a form can correspond directly to its content, or that a representation must be mimetic for the content to be believable. Her own narrative, by contrast, uses non-mimetic selfreferentiality to convey real-world experiences. Her story-world fight example therefore signals what her own narrative is doing, cautioning her audience not to dismiss her own story as unreal because of its non-mimetic form. In these examples, Burns’s novel enacts Oscar Wilde’s reversal of artistic mimesis in which life, as middle sister tells it, imitates art.48 In her stories – about the Impressionist sunset, the stylised fighting, even the commercial facsimiles of passion and desire – art

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not only illuminates but essentially invents life. She asserts her authority to craft her story and to elect its representational form, and her metanarrative style proclaims her credibility rather than undermining it. With the benefit of hindsight, she knows why stories are disbelieved, and has the language and erudition to contextualise her story in broader cultural and aesthetic traditions. Like Donoghue and McBride, Burns complicates the relationship among victimhood, personal agency and reliability by showing how a politics of gender intersects with a politics of form. These women writers thus mount heretical challenges to orthodoxies of gendered power and of experimental, especially modernist, narrative forms. Paige Reynolds has argued that some contemporary Irish women writers use modernist form as a tool to critique patriarchy,49 implicitly including in that critique modernists, like Joyce, who retain significant cultural power though they might have disregarded, failed to address or exacerbated gender problems. Donoghue, McBride and Burns engage their literary heritage to illuminate the darkest parts of patriarchy: the pervasive misogyny and predation, and the broader cultural forces that enable them – the ineffectual or toxic masculinity, the complicity of women and bystanders, the shaming or shunning of non-normative people and the denial of survivors’ reliability. Predation, it seems, is part of our culture – normalised, often hiding in plain sight – while its victims struggle to act and speak for themselves. The most experimental modernist narrative forms, of course, deliberately circumvented the speaking narrator in order to offer unmediated access to characters’ mental interiority, to show rather than tell. The contemporary novels discussed in this chapter recuperate narrative mediation as an expression of gendered power while still preserving the intimacy of interiority. Their experimental techniques – their non-mimetic narrative situations, syntactic and typographical irregularities, and self-conscious intertextual references – challenge any association of an objectively knowable reality with omniscience and reliability, while making persuasive claims for their narrators’ authority. These novels feature the seemingly least credible narrators – the innocent child, the victim of sustained violence, the ironic and self-referential teller – using narrative styles so often deemed unreliable: subjective, non-linear, fragmented, digressive or reliant on memory. As a result, paradoxically, the novels compellingly assert the legitimacy of the protagonists’ experiences and abilities to convey trustworthy, though fictionalised, versions of ‘real’ events. Their overtly constructed representations participate in an artistic tradition with aesthetic stakes, rendering fictional worlds that starkly expose contemporary, real-world sexual politics.

Notes 1. Burns, Milkman, pp. 182–3. Italics in the original. 2. Burns finished the novel in 2014 but, in a 2018 interview, notes ‘the publication was very timely, in terms of the sexual scandal and abuse issues, and whether you’re believed or not’ in an interview by Tom Gatti. See also Smith, ‘Open Secret’, who reviews it as a #MeToo novel, and reviews by Wills, ‘The Unnameable’; Kilroy, ‘Creepy Invention’; Leith, ‘Pretentious’; Miller, ‘Coming of Age’. 3. Burns, Milkman, p. 6. 4. Donoghue, Room; McBride, Girl. See critical responses to the novels by Fogarty, ‘Like a baby’; Bracken and Harney-Mahajan, ‘Recessionary Imaginings’; Cahill, ‘Girlhood’;

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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O’Toole, ‘Rape of the Narrator’; Enright, ‘A Girl – Review’; and Abdel-Rahman Téllez, ‘Embodied Subjectivity’. On simultaneous narration, see Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, pp. 96–108, and Huber Present-Tense Narration, pp. 69–86. Donoghue, Room, p. 3. McBride, Girl, p. 7. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 245. Though Mann’s novel conveys Aschenbach as tormented by his obsession about the much younger boy, the third-person limited narration nevertheless offers little critical distance from that obsessive desire. In Lolita, first-person narrator Humbert’s unreliability is a question of ethics rather than competence: his self-justifications signal his place on the margins of a normative ethical frame while also proclaiming his narrative power. O’Toole, ‘The Rape of the Narrator’. Huber, Present-Tense Narration, p. 56. Donoghue, Room, p. 37 and others. See James Phelan’s six types of unreliability in Living to Tell about It, pp. 49–53. Donoghue, Room, p. 18. Italics in the original. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 60. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. Donoghue, Room, p. 21. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., pp. 67–8, 123. Ibid., pp. 70–1, 102, 277, 313. Ibid., p. 90. McBride, Girl, pp. 50–1. Ibid., p. 58. This quotation – ‘Done and done to. Doing. I’ll do all of this’ – echoes Joyce’s Ulysses, specifically Stephen Dedalus’s words in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (Ulysses, 9.651, 653) and, later, Leopold Bloom’s thoughts in ‘Sirens’ (11.907–9). McBride, Girl, pp. 106–7. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., pp. 151–2. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 194. See Cohn, Distinction, pp. 37, 103–6. On ‘preconsciousness’, see Cahill, ‘Girlhood’, pp. 158–60. McBride qtd in Alice O’Keeffe, ‘Interview – Eimear McBride’, p. 3. See Hutton’s fascinating analysis of middle sister’s ‘unique lexicon’ (‘The Moment’, p. 366). See, for example, Miller, ‘Coming of Age’. A notable exception is Wills, ‘The Unnameable’. Burns, Milkman, pp. 27–9. Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 272–3, 294, 275.

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366 46. 47. 48. 49.

siân white Ibid., pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 273, italics added. Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, pp. 1–37. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.

Bibliography Abdel-Rahman Téllez, Shadia, ‘The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator: Sexual Abuse, Language (Un)Formation and Melancholic Girlhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Estudios Irlandeses, 13 (March 2018 to February 2019), pp.1–13. Attridge, Derek, ‘Foreword’, in Martha Carpentier (ed.), Joycean Legacies (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. vii–xx. Bracken, Claire, and Tara Harney-Mahajan (eds), ‘Recessionary Imaginings: Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28:1–2, (2017), Special Issue, pp. 1–193. Burns, Anna, ‘“I’ve been homeless myself”: you start thinking, “I’m not entitled”: Novelist Anna Burns on Winning the Booker Prize’, interview of Anna Burns by Tom Gatti, The New Statesman (24 October 2018). Burns, Anna, Milkman (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018). Cahill, Susan, ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing? Girlhood, Trauma, and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28:2 (2017), pp. 153–71. Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Donoghue, Emma, Room (New York: Bay Back, 2010). Enright, Anne, ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride - Review’, The Guardian (20 September 2013). Fogarty, Anne, ‘“It was like a baby crying”: Representations of the Child in Contemporary Irish Fiction’, Journal of Irish Studies, 30 (2015), pp. 13–26. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927). Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 245. Huber, Irmtraud, Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Hutton, Clare, ‘The Moment and Technique of Milkman’, Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, 69:3 (2019), pp. 349–71. Jordan, Jan, ‘Beyond Belief?: Police, Rape and Women’s Credibility’, Criminal Justice, 4:1 (2004), pp. 29–59. Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). Kilroy, Claire, ‘Milkman by Anna Burns Review – Creepy Invention at Heart of an Original, Funny Novel’, The Guardian (31 May 2018). Leith, Sam, ‘Pretentious, Impenetrable, Hard Work . . . Better? Why We Need Difficult Books’, The Guardian (10 November 2018). McBride, Eimear, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Norwich: Galley Beggar, 2013). Miller, Laura, ‘A Novel About Coming of Age Amid the Troubles’, The New Yorker (3 December 2018). O’Keeffe, Alice, ‘Interview – Eimear McBride’, The Bookseller (7 August 2016), pp. 22–3. O’Toole, Fintan, ‘The Rape of the Narrator: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride’, The New York Review of Books (20 November 2014).

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Pennington, Heidi, Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018). Phelan, James, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Poovey, Mary, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism – Another View’, Boundary 2, 19:2 (1992), pp. 34–52, p. 42. Reynolds, Paige, ‘Introduction’, in Paige Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 1–8. Reynolds, Paige, ‘Trauma, Intimacy, and Modernist Form’, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies (11 September 2014), (last accessed 19 October 2020). Smith, Rosa Inocencio, ‘How to Tell an Open Secret’, The Atlantic (16 January 2019). Ullman, Sarah, and Liana Peer-Hagene, ‘Social Reactions to Sexual Assault Disclosure, Coping, Perceived Control, and PTSD Symptoms in Sexual Assault Victims’, Journal of Community Psychology, 42:4 (2014), pp. 495–508. Wilde, Oscar, ‘The Decay of Lying’, The Decay of Lying and Other Essays (1891; New York: Penguin, 2010), pp. 1–37. Wills, Clair, ‘The Unnameable’, The New York Review of Books (21 March 2019). Wood, James, ‘Useless Prayers’, The New Yorker, 90:29 (29 September 2014), p. 80.

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21 Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Ailbhe Darcy

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ysteriously, the speaker of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘The Crossroads’ must remain at a crossroads for a sizeable segment of the liturgical calendar, from the beginning of Lent until the Feast of the Assumption. Her wait will be rewarded with a celebration reminiscent of the Irish custom of showing off First Communicants to all the neighbouring families: I have been at the crossroads now All the time without leaving Since the afternoon of Shrove Tuesday. [. . .] Now it is a long time to the Feast of the Assumption, When my mother will come To collect me in her pony and trap And we will go calling on all our cousins And take tea and sherry in their parlours.1 The air of ceremony suggests that we are privy to a coming-of-age ritual and, given the feminine ‘tea and sherry in their parlours’, our speaker is probably a young woman. Beginning with its title, ‘The Crossroads’ slyly recalls a radio address which Éamon de Valera, then Taoiseach, gave to the nation in 1943, and which became known as the ‘comely maidens’ speech. Although de Valera made no reference to crossroads or comeliness on radio, an earlier draft of his speech was mistakenly published in the following morning’s newspaper, conjuring an ideal Ireland that would be populated by ‘comely maidens dancing at crossroads’.2 In the preceding years, de Valera’s constitution had underwritten the special position of the Catholic Church in the new Irish state and was informed by Catholic social teaching in its attitude towards women. De Valera’s vision of ‘comely maidens dancing at crossroads’ became jokey shorthand for the Irish Catholic construction of Irish femininity. Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem, decades later, restores dignity to those ‘comely maidens’. In the course of discharging her strange duty, this maiden is treated as having special access to the sacred. Parishioners bring her

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the blessed ashes on Ash Wednesday and the blessed palm branches on Palm Sunday. Little girls come to her, shyly, to seek her approval of their ‘embroidered dancing costumes’. The young woman’s ritual may be oppressive but it is also attractive, affording her glamour and importance within her community. A young woman in possession of some strange power which renders her important while paralysing her: the analogy with the wider experience of women in Ireland is clear. It is precisely by bestowing power upon womanhood, by idealising child-bearing womanhood, that Irish Catholicism has disempowered women. But even putting it in this way, as though there were a simple ambivalence at the heart of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem, is to belie the mystery of the poem’s matter-of-factness. Its speaker greets her stint at the crossroads unquestioningly, as though it were part of the natural order of things. Aingeal Clare writes that Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems should put us in mind of Beckett’s love of weird spaces and of using language itself as an in-between space.3 The speaker of ‘The Crossroads’ has something in common with the Beckettian characters who suddenly address us from positions of stuckness that are at once bizarre, baffling and uncannily familiar. In ‘The Crossroads’ we encounter the paradox of a young woman’s position in Irish society in a fictional form that resists binary thinking or easy righteousness. ‘The Crossroads’ offers a figure for women’s continued oppression in an Ireland only gradually disentangling itself from hegemonic Catholicism. Published in 2001, the poem acts as a reminder of the origins of the debates still raging around women’s reproductive rights. But if the poem diagnoses the continued power of Catholic ideology, the strange story the girl tells in the poem also stands in for vernacular religious ritual, which has a complicated and unstable relationship to orthodox religion. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when another ideology is ascending to dominance in Ireland – a secular, globalised capitalism – such vernacular devotional practices can themselves be seen as a form of resistance, since they go nowhere, have no rational explanation and – in the terms of a modernity which values only measurable economic productivity – produce nothing. Such practices are often imagined to belong to the past; but traditional devotional practices still exist, pockets of resistance, in the present. By giving such practices mythic dimensions, by drawing attention to their strangeness and mystery, Ní Chuilleanáin takes on the task David Lloyd considers urgent at a moment when ‘the forces of “progress and development” seem to have attained an uncontestable dominance’.4 This is the task of attending to the hopes and desires of past formations – or, more precisely, of formations popularly considered ‘past’ – and taking them seriously as alternatives without, however, romanticising the past. My interest in this chapter is in two poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who have contributed to dismantling this ideology bequeathed by the past, even while resisting an ideology coming to dominance in the present – that of globalised secular capitalism. While refusing a singular construction of female Irish poetic identity, these poets also preserve formations from the past which offer alternatives to dominant ideologies in the present. They challenge the construction of poetic authority as rooted in a singular, authoritative subjectivity by building, from old materials, new forms of lyric voice that explore alternative, communal subjectivities. One simplistic narrative about Catholic Ireland is the assumption that religion declines with modernity until it is gone; dissent from religious institutions, beliefs and rituals has therefore been considered necessary for Ireland to modernise. Scholars

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have increasingly questioned this assumption, pointing to glaring exceptions from the vibrant religious market in the United States of America to the international rise in religious fundamentalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By now, it seems clear that Western Europe’s secularisation in modernity is the exception rather than the rule.5 Scholars have also questioned what secularisation might mean in the first place and how we might measure it. Does secularisation refer to levels of belief in God or to devotional practices? Does it tell us only about the authority of religious institutions over other institutions? Is it measured in attitude or behaviour? Depending on the approach, attempts to measure secularisation can yield very different results. In Ireland, very broadly speaking, it is possible to see two phases of modernisation. In the first, dubbed by Tom Inglis ‘the long nineteenth century of Irish Catholicism’, the Catholic Church, far from impeding modernisation, was the primary mechanism by which modernisation happened.6 Inglis adapts Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to convey the extraordinary power the Church had in the long nineteenth century to influence education, economics, psychology and behaviour.7 A certain construction of womanhood was key to this power, as the Irish mother provided the link between institutional needs and individual behaviours. Ní Chuilleanáin’s early poetry diagnosed ‘the disablement of creativity and energy in Irish life, particularly that of women’, as being one result of the hegemonic control of the Church.8 In the second phase of Irish modernity, currently unfolding, we see a decline in religious authority, but not necessarily a decline in faith or practice, beyond a drop in Mass attendance. The apparent secularisation of Ireland over the last half-century is more accurately characterised as a turn to what Gladys Ganiel calls extra-religious activities: belief systems that exist at a remove from orthodoxy, devotional practices that take place on the margins of official religion.9 We also see, as scholars of Irish literature have amply shown, only a gradual and partial dismantling of the powerful ideology and iconography of the Catholic Church. Central to the ideology of Catholic Ireland was a particular construction of womanhood, which portrayed motherhood as all-important and female sexuality as allthreatening. Lia Mills provides the term ‘iconic feminine’ to refer to three apparently disparate figures – the poetic muse, the virgin mother of Catholic orthodoxy, and Mother Ireland – who together have delineated the Irish culture’s notion of ideal womanhood, an asexual, maternal ideal enshrined in the state’s laws and policies.10 The fault line along which the most fiery battles over Church–State relations would be fought was the family and, at its heart, the reproductive woman, since women were crucial to the Church as the link between the public sphere and the private home. The body of the woman comes to embody, in Irish modernity, the problematic permeability of the private and public spheres. As the struggle for Irish independence progressed, the need for Irish Catholicism to idealise motherhood and demonise female sexuality combined with the need for Irish nationalism to construct gender in ways that supported the development of a nation-state and the use of force to protect that nation-state. Eavan Boland, the most influential shaper of critical readings of Irish women’s poetry after the mid-twentieth century, has written: Once the idea of a nation influences the perception of a woman then that woman is suddenly and inevitably simplified. She can no longer have complex feelings and aspirations. She becomes the passive projection of a national idea.11

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During the Irish Revival, women were the authors of much poetry written in service of the iconic feminine.12 Women poets have also been at the forefront of efforts to diagnose and resist this singular construction of Irish womanhood. Irish women produced notable modernist works in the early half of the twentieth century, among them Blanaid Salkeld, Rhoda Coghill and Freda Laughton, but as Anne Fogarty has pointed out, ‘Irish female modernism belongs to a literary past which is even more irrecuperable than that of the supposed lost generation of male poets of that period.’13 The inheritance of Irish women poets – including their inheritance of an Irish feminist modernism – has been fragmented and suppressed by publishers, critics and anthologists, a process that is well documented.14 Because of the modern history of Irish women’s poetry, some of its foremost innovators exist at a remove from the modernist tradition; the two poets under discussion in this chapter do not overtly position themselves as inheritors of modernism. In their extra-poetic works, Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill have written about their search for ‘foremothers’ as young poets; they do not write about Salkeld, Coghill or Laughton in this context.15 What was available to them, instead, was the example of more immediate precursors such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eithne Strong and Leland Bardwell, poets who innovated within the conventional poetic forms of their respective Irish-language or Anglo-Irish traditions. It would be a mistake, however, not to recognise the modernist impulses and strategies at work in the practices of Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill. Writing about British poetry after the Movement, Linda A. Kinnahan notes that a modernist poetics sometimes persists in forms overlooked by critics. She points to feminist poetic experimentation: While feminist poetry is most customarily associated with the preferred model of the Women’s Movement – a lyric-based reporting of women’s experience assuming a unified self, voiced through accessible language – a feminist poetics of radical language experimentation runs through the twentieth century to the present, tenaciously exploring how authority (and power) resides in the forms and operations of language, the contexts of linguistic systems and the production of meaning through these systems and operations.16 If Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin have not subscribed to what Kinnahan dubs the modernist poetics of ‘I-aversion’, their poetry is none the less deeply attentive to the constructed nature of self, the ways a voice is constructed out of language, and to the poem’s own voice as a carrier of ideology.17 Alongside younger peers such as Medbh McGuckian and Mairéad Byrne, these two poets work ‘at the language-face’ in the way Kinnahan describes, exploring how voice and language produce and replicate systems of domination, and working to interrupt those systems. As Guinn Batten has shown, their poetry also forms part of a dialogic feminism, of which Eavan Boland’s work is another part of the conversation.18 Both Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill are fascinated by anachronism, using it to trouble our sense of what is proper to modernity and to preserve alternatives. David Lloyd, in contemplating the ruins that litter the Irish landscape, provides an image for a particular kind of anachronism: those parts of the past which have been sidelined by modernity, but to which we might yet attend. A ruined building, he notes, is not only

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part of the past but part of the present. It does not show us a piece of the past which has now transformed into our present; a ruin is precisely that part of the past which has not transformed to fit our sense of the present. A ruin signifies alternative futures which did not come to fruition, alternative hopes which were set aside by modernity: ‘If the work of modernity is in effect to obliterate both the memory and the present consciousness of its violence,’ the ruin challenges ‘the obstinate refusal in the present to accept that there are no alternatives.’19 Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill seek such ‘ruins’ in folklore, relics and vernacular practices. Like architectural ruins, these stories, songs, objects and rituals are remnants of the past. They existed in the past. But they cannot be relegated to history, since they also exist in the present. And, as expressions of a culture, they both constitute us and are constituted by us. Like language, they fashion the individual into a part of a larger whole; equally, they can be used to reimagine or interrupt the larger culture. These forms of cultural expression are especially associated with women; as Ní Chuilleanáin writes, women in Ireland have been ‘the guardians of vernacular culture’, even when ‘their chance of contributing to the emergence of new literary forms as their English-speaking contemporaries did was slender’.20 Written in Irish, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems spring from an assumption, expressed frequently in interviews, that the worldview comprehended by the Irish language is a more capacious one than the worldview of the monoglot speaker of the dominant English language. As Donna Potts observes, her poetry implicitly operates on this assumption that the worldview expressed and experienced by Irish speakers comprehends more than a purely English-language one, ‘with its emphasis on the rational and on a rigid distinction between the objective and the subjective’.21 This implicit assumption of the poetry is confirmed by the untranslatability of some of the concepts and characters in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems, such as the supernatural Bean an Leasa – about whom, more in a moment – and by the proliferation of English translations of the poems, as though no translation is ever final because no perfect translation is possible. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems have been published alongside English translations by various contemporaries since the mid-1980s, with many of them existing alongside more than one English-language version. As Kenneth Keating writes, this bilingual publishing history frustrates ‘patriarchal criticism’s pursuit of stable, singular texts, upon which understandings of poetic careers and traditions may be founded’.22 Ní Dhomhnaill’s publishing history also confounds criticism’s desire to portray a body of work’s development over time as a coming-of-age narrative about an individual poet, since her bilingual publications often reprint poems from earlier collections with new translations. Just as Ní Dhomhnaill’s work unsettles our sense of a linear publishing history, so it unsettles our sense of what belongs to the past by excavating Irish folklore and religious tradition for images and narratives that persist and remain productive in the present. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem ‘Deora Duibhshléibhe’ suggests the continued presence of the ‘bean caointe’ or keener. Its speaker, driving over the Conor Pass, imagines encountering ‘the banshee Dora Dooley / on her way to keen / the Fitzgeralds of Murragane’, with the power to lift a spell from the entire landscape.23 As Angela Bourke has explained, the ‘caoineadh’, or keen, an elaborate oral lament composed and performed by women, was an important form of public protest, accessible to

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women right into the twentieth century: ‘Some women poets gave vent to anger at powerful people, publicly criticized their own relatives and in-laws, and gave graphic accounts of personal violence and miserliness, all in the course of lamenting.’24 The keen provides a vibrant form to modern Irish literature generally – to the written as well as the oral traditions – for reasons which range from the Irish Revivalist alignment of the keening woman with Mother Ireland to the recuperation of the form as a mode of communal catharsis and expiation.25 In Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem, the keener is part of everyday life: Nó ab ann ab amhlaidh a bheannóinn di go simplí is í ag dul thar bráid faoi mar a dheineas anois ó chianaibhín le bean ón áit.26 Paul Muldoon translates these lines as: I’d merely give her a wave as she went by just as I did only a short time ago to a little, old, local lady.27 Maryna Romanets describes Ní Dhomhnaill’s work as ‘bridging the temporal abyss between Irish mythology and the present’, but more accurately the poems refuse the idea that there is a ‘temporal abyss’ at all.28 Pointedly macaronic as well as contemporary – the keener carries a Mexican ‘chihuahua’ under her arm – Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems insist that the alternative worldviews expressed in folklore are still present, dissociating them from an essentialist notion of authentic, premodern Irishness. The keen has a particular power in the literature of Irish women, where it ‘retains an inherent capability to disrupt dominant political, religious and cultural discourse’.29In Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem ‘Lá Chéad Chomaoineach’ or ‘First Communion’, the mother of a girl receiving First Communion responds in a way more appropriate to a funeral, ‘moaning’ (‘ag gol’) about her ‘daughter’s indoctrination into the first of many power structures that will constrain her individuality and sexuality’.30 The mother’s keen expresses anxiety for a girl joining a hegemonic religion and thereby becoming a ‘little white girl-host’ destined to ‘wander alone’ in a ‘vast / void’, the word ‘host’ in Muldoon’s translation suggesting both the communion host and the notion that the girl will become a carrier of religious ideology. True to the political impulses of the keen, the original poem worries not only about the mother’s daughter, but about all of the First Communicants being inculcated: ‘an ealta bhán de chailíní beaga’ (literally, ‘the white flock of little girls’; Muldoon translates this as ‘the little white girl-host’). The keen includes criticism of society’s ‘latter-day foxes / and wolves – greed, drugs, cancer, skullduggery, the car-crash’ and ends on the word ‘neamhthoil’ (‘involuntariness’), which emphasises the speaker’s helplessness: each girl will move alone through this dark world against the speaker’s will.

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Ní Dhomhnaill uses folk material and oral forms to explore ways of complicating the lyric ‘I’, drawing attention to its participation in a linguistic community. She explores the ambivalent role of folklore in Irish women’s lives as itself a form of language in which power and control reside. In her 1988 collection, Féar Suaithinseach, she introduces the character of the Bean an Leasa, literally ‘the woman of the fairy fort’. At times, the Bean an Leasa signals the entrance of the social world into the poem, at others she is a figure for the speaker’s subconscious, and at still other times she plays the part of some other force – spiritual, supernatural, chaotic or sexual – excluded by modern society. As Laura Kirkley notes, the Bean an Leasa poses difficulties for English-language translators.31 In Muldoon’s translation of ‘An Crann’, the Bean an Leasa is ‘this bright young thing’ and ‘her ladyship’, conjuring up an image of the careless privilege that might accompany freedom from a society’s rules but unfortunately playing down the supernatural dimension.32 Michael Hartnett translates her as ‘the fairy woman’ and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin as ‘The Queen of the Fairies’, but this translation also neuters her dangerous power since English ‘fairies’ are much less threatening than the Irish ‘sidhe’.33 ‘Fuadach’, one of the Bean an Leasa poems, reimagines the case of Bridget Cleary. Cleary was burned to death in Tipperary in 1895 by her own family, who claimed that she had been replaced with a changeling.34 Stories of fairies stealing women or babies and leaving changelings in their place are part of a body of work known as the ‘síscéalta’ (literally ‘fairy tales’; the plural of ‘síscéal’). Bourke, who has given us the most influential account of Cleary’s death in her book The Burning of Bridget Cleary, describes how such stories might have been used particularly by women, to eke out some living space, as well as to talk about issues like mental illness and disability. But Bourke notes that Cleary’s story also suggests a more frightening use for lore, since, in cases like Cleary’s, folklore seems to have been a means to keep a woman violently in her place. Bourke quotes William R. Bascom, who writes that the basic paradox of folklore [is] that while it plays a vital role in transmitting and maintaining the institutions of a culture and in forcing the individual to conform to them, at the same time it provides socially approved outlets for the repressions which these same institutions impose on him.35 In ‘Fuadach’, the Bean an Leasa comes into the speaker’s home and does indeed steal her and replace her with a changeling. The speaker describes herself as made vulnerable to this intrusion by her thrall to society and its norms: ‘Ní ligfeadh fios mo bhéasa dhom / í a chur amach arís’ is translated by Hartnett as ‘Knowing my place / I did not tell her go,’ but a more precise translation might be ‘My good manners wouldn’t allow me / to put her out again.’36 When one says of a person, ‘tá fios a bhéasa aici’ (‘she knows how to behave’), the phrase contains the knowledge of a set of normative standards existing outside individuals. These social norms put the speaker in the dangerous position of having to let in the malicious Bean an Leasa. In another of the Bean an Leasa poems, ‘Thar mo chionn’ (‘On my behalf’), Ní Dhomhnaill reimagines the story of Ann Lovett.37 Lovett was a fifteen-year-old girl who, on 31 January 1984, went to a Marian grotto where she gave birth to a child. Both child–mother and infant died. There followed an outpouring of personal histories on national radio, summed up in a journalist’s account:

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Middle-aged and elderly women wrote of how they had been pregnant, and given birth, in . . . similar circumstances. They wrote of how they had hidden their pregnancies; had their babies behind a locked bedroom or bathroom door on a break from working in the fields or in the kitchens. Some had smothered their own children; stuffed their bodies in drawers and suitcases, terrified of disclosure.38 As Andrew Auge has written, the Lovett case is crucial for Irish women poets, and for the discourse around Church and State generally, because it ‘made the link between Marianism’ – or, more broadly, the iconic feminine – ‘and the public policy debates over contraception and abortion palpably evident’.39 The case made it impossible to ignore Irish society’s total and dangerous condemnation of any departure from the ideal of Irish womanhood. In ‘Thar mo chionn’, a woman is waylaid by the Bean an Leasa, who asks her to come into the lios, or fairy fort, and breastfeed a crying child. Because the woman is careful not to eat the fairies’ food, they cannot keep her as a wet nurse. They make a dire promise as to what will come of this: Is gearr go mbeidh a dhóthain bídh Ag an leanbh san. Tá cailín beag istigh faoin dtír ag iompar linbh i ngan fhios don saol is nuair a thiocfaidh a ham tiocfaidh an chlann is le barr sceimhle is doichill roimpi titfidh an t-anam aisti is beidh sí againn.40 (It won’t be long now until that child has his fill of milk. There’s a young girl down the country carrying a child without telling a soul and when the time comes the baby will come and with fear and horror the soul will collapse from her and she’ll be ours.) Later, we discover that the fairies have stolen a fifteen-year-old girl in the speaker’s place, and we cannot help but think of Lovett: Is mo ghraidhin í an créatúirín, an cailín beag cúig mbliana déag a chuaigh ag cur cúraim linbh di i gcoill in aice le “grotto”.41 (God love the little creature, the girl-child of only fifteen who went to give birth in a wood by a “grotto”.)

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‘Thar mo chionn’ translates as ‘On my behalf’ and the poem is written in the first person. For Bourke, this restoration of a first-person voice is subversive because it undoes the process by which repeated telling in the third person would round and smooth [a] narrative, assimilating it to a body of previously existing legend. The result is that although women characters are found prominently in fairy legends, and many legends are told by women, women’s voices as subjects in them are relatively scarce.42 Moreover, as Bourke describes it, this kind of story was one usually told by women; and it was more like a conversation than a liturgy.43 All present would take part in the story’s telling. Ní Dhomhnaill uses the traditional form of the síscéal to invite Irish readers to join in telling Ann Lovett’s story; by recounting it in the first person, with an everywoman as speaker, she uses the síscéal to emphasise how the individual lyric voice is constructed socially, out of language. By requiring Irish readers, in ‘Thar mo Chionn’, to speak about their own complicity in Ann Lovett’s death, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem challenges ‘the obstinate refusal in the present to accept that there are no alternatives’, to quote Lloyd again.44 The forms of the síscéal and the keen are, for Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘ruins’ in Lloyd’s sense: forms which may be sidelined in modernity, but which none the less exist in the present and are available for putting to use in resisting orthodox narratives. Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, too, scouts out relics of the past – literal relics, sometimes – and uses them to unsettle the agreed-upon narratives of the present. In her first collection, a poem called ‘Celibates’ uses the rather obvious metaphor of a bee, and the less obvious metaphor of a colony of hermits, to introduce a theme to which the poet will repeatedly return, that of the individual as one part of a larger whole. As in many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, the actions in this poem are taken by groups, not individuals: When the farmers burned the furze away Where they had heedlessly lived till then The hermits all made for the sea-shore, Chose each a far safe hole beneath rocks, Now more alone than ever before.45 ‘Celibates’ presents itself as a parable, a riddling story that illustrates a moral. The bee in this story has been made vulnerable by being alone, its vulnerability hinted at by the phrase ‘strayed overboard’: In August a bee, strayed overboard Down the high cliff, hummed along the strand. Three hermits saw him on that long coast.46 The hermits, ‘more alone than ever before’, have also been made vulnerable by atomisation. In the last line, hermits and bee alike are suddenly drowned: ‘One spring the high tides stifled them all.’47 From the hermits’ point of view, the moral might be one about the resilience of communities; from the farmers’ point of view, the poem might warn against meddling with the order of things.

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Almost two decades later, Ní Chuilleanáin suddenly resurrects the hermits.48 They emerge from their holes into sun and light and warmth. This later poem, ‘Studying the Language’, disputes many of the assumptions we may have made about the hermits: I listen to their accents, they are not all From this island, not all old, Not even, I think, all masculine.49 The hermits, as it turns out, are neither ‘old’ nor past, but crowding together and making conversation in the present tense. Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems are sometimes seen as ignoring contemporary Ireland and ‘rooting around in history’.50 Aingeal Clare describes them as ‘exercises in historical memory’, Lucy Collins as ‘objects that carry the past without giving direct expression to it’, and Catriona Clutterbuck as ‘invested in understanding the complexities involved in communicating historical reality’.51 Ní Chuilleanáin herself makes a joke of her archaic sensibility in her most recent collection, when she writes, ‘I appear to have been born in 1870 / and schooled in 1689.’52 This joke, however, draws our attention to an important point: although its speaker might ‘appear’ to belong to another time, she is speaking now. The subjects of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems are people or practices which may be imagined to belong to history, but in the poems, they speak or happen in the present day. As I write, after all, there are still hermits in the world. There are even, for the moment, bees. In Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, the things of the past are not necessarily past. With hindsight, it also makes sense that the hermits in ‘Celibates’ were not ‘all masculine’, since Ní Chuilleanáin is famous by now for her interest in women in cloistered religious communities. She seeks out religious communities in part to explore communal subjectivities that might challenge our valuing of individual subjecthood, as in the wonderfully titled ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’ (‘I have pain in our teeth’).53 Ní Chuilleanáin sees women in religious communities as embodying a challenge to the iconic feminine. As Auge puts it, the marginal experience of nuns in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry ‘ostensibly upholds’ but also ‘interrogates the cultural codes in Ireland that have regulated the emplacement of women in society and in their own bodies’.54 Given the history of institutional Catholicism in Ireland, and particularly the involvement of nuns in some of the worst abuses of power in this context, there is an obvious risk here of romanticising religious women’s role in Irish history. Ní Chuilleanáin steers a course away from this risk by focusing not so much on the teaching or even the lives of nuns, but on fragments of their bodily presence: material relics and ritual practices that act as ‘ruins’ that persist in the present and productively unsettle it. In an essay, Ní Chuilleanáin describes wondering, as a child, about the nudes of classical art. ‘Why were these incredibly confident people in the nude meant to be the real thing?’: Then I walked through a gallery in Berlin at the age of twenty and turned a corner out of three rooms of brownish Rembrandts. There before me was Correggio’s Leda and the Swan, full of blue and white, narrative space, and perversity. Here was the body at the centre of a story, female and pleased in all its dimensions. I was suddenly back in a world before the upheaval of the Reformation, before the Protestant war on icons of the body, rituals, and material ceremonies.55

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The ‘real thing’ in this story is the body ‘at the centre of a story’, one that moves through ‘narrative space’. This particular body, strikingly, is a raped body – and yet, it manifests in the work of art as ‘pleased in all its dimensions’. Correggio’s Leda, by her sheer material presence, belies the narrative she is supposed to represent. Likewise, throughout Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, the poet repeatedly focuses our attention on the ways in which a material presence has the power to disrupt agreed-upon narratives. She seeks out what persists in material form or in bodily rituals and gestures, and invites us to notice and revalue these ‘icons of the body, rituals, and material ceremonies’ that signify in unexpected ways. A pair of poems about women saints illustrates the point. ‘St Margaret of Cortona’ was a penitent and in ‘St Mary Magdalene Preaching at Marseilles’ we encounter one of the first religious women of Christianity.56 Each poem gets as close as possible to the viewpoint of the saint without ever quite taking it up, an effect achieved by an extraordinarily close attention to the body: the hair on Mary Magdalene’s wrists, the teeth in St Margaret’s smile. In each poem, the woman speaks but we do not hear what she says. Both of these women have been denigrated by history at times as sinful, loose women; in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, their persistent bodily presence is what resists official narrative. ‘St Margaret of Cortona’ opens with a preacher describing St Margaret as a whore; the word whore prowls through the poem. As if to emphasise St Margaret’s own silence in history, the poem focuses on the mouth, the source of speech, but far from speaking, St Margaret’s mouth is a weighty material relic: In the mine of the altar her teeth listen and smile. She is still here, she refuses To be consumed. The weight of her bones Burns down through the mountain.57 St Margaret’s refusal to be ‘consumed’ is expressed by her sheer bodily presence. And, if her story is to be salvaged or altered, the poem suggests it will be by dint of this unsettling bodily persistence. The poem ends by offering a strange and ambiguous image which sets linguistic narrative against linguistic materiality: The names flew and multiplied; she turned Her back but the names clustered and hung Out of her shoulderbones Like children swinging from a father’s arm, Their tucked-up feet skimming over the ground.58 Collins sees ‘redemption’ for language in this image, arguing that ‘the names clustering at her shoulder bones resemble angel’s wings’, a beautiful reading but one which may require a leap of the imagination.59 Staying with the comparison that Ní Chuilleanáin herself offers, when she writes that the clustering names are like children swinging from a father’s arm, the poem seems to suggest that because language itself has a material presence, even words said in condemnation have potentiality. Like children, and indeed like the bones of St Margaret, words will persist and can come to mean something other than what they mean now.

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Written at a time of grief, after the deaths of her mother and sister, Ní Chuilleanáin’s 1994 collection, The Brazen Serpent, offers a particularly intense investigation of the persistent potential to be found in religious relics and practices. The volume mulls over rituals of marriage, grieving and care. ‘The Water Journey’ pays precise attention to ritual actions without taking any interest in their supposed meaning.60 The opening poem, ‘Fireman’s Lift’, uses Correggio’s sixteenth-century fresco in Parma to dramatise the communal, ritualised quality of end-of-life care; The Brazen Serpent has a circular structure which sends the reader back to this opening poem at the end to see the work entire, and how the light Melted and faded bodies so that Loose feet and elbows and staring eyes Floated in the wide stone petticoat Clear and free as weeds.61 The poem mines religious art to retrieve an image of communality which unsettles singular viewpoints as well as any narrative of progress or productivity. The volume’s title poem, ‘The Real Thing’, returns to the question of the possibility of preserving choice and freedom in the margins of official religion.62 The scene-setting lines – ‘[t]he bishop has ordered the windows bricked up on this side / Facing the fields beyond the city’ – recall Ní Chuilleanáin’s comments about the barring of nuns from education and about the ‘need felt by societies to keep women enclosed and occupied in inarticulate work’.63 But the act that takes place within this enclosed space breaks the official rules. Sister Custos ‘[e]xposes her major relic, the longest / Known fragment of the Brazen Serpent’, and the transgressiveness of this act is implied by the genderbending innuendo of the language.64 She then veils the relic again and locks it away. Breaking the rules but also pointedly producing nothing by her transgressive act, Sister Custos embodies the potential for resistance to both Catholic orthodoxy and the secular capitalism that is offered as its only replacement. The biblical story of the brazen serpent, quoted in the epigraph to The Brazen Serpent, identifies a tension at the very origins of the Catholic Church between material presence and written orthodoxy. When Sister Custos declares of the Brazen Serpent, ‘this is the real thing’, she commits heresy. But the serpent turns up again in the Gospel of John (3: 14), when Jesus himself appears to mistake the serpent for the ‘real thing’: ‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of God be lifted up’, he tells us, ‘That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ In a very troublesome way, the gospel story itself equates the body of God with the Brazen Serpent. Writing about John Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’, Ní Chuilleanáin has said that Donne’s poem is ‘about a body literally turning its back on ritual and thus on the significance of material presence in that central day in the Christian calendar’:65 ‘Yet dare I almost be glad I do not see / That spectacle of too much weight for me’ (lines 15–16), writes Donne, about his disinclination to look upon Christ’s body on the cross.66 By declaring Christ’s body ‘the real thing’ and ritually unveiling it, Sister Custos brings bodily presence back to the centre of religious mystery. The ‘one free foot kicking / Under the white sheet of history’, on which the poem ends, is Christ’s foot, kicking free of his burial shroud as he comes back to life – a brazenly physical presence.67

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Throughout her work, Ní Chuilleanáin repeatedly focuses our attention on the ways in which physical presence and ritualised gesture can persist and have the power to unsettle received narratives. She seeks out the vernacular practices that are passed down in a community in material forms, such as relics, or as ritual physical gesture, such as devotions, and which have traditionally been associated with ‘women, the ignorant people and the wilfully superstitious’, because it is in these ‘ruins’ that she sees the potential for resisting both the ideology bequeathed to us by the past and the ideology most powerfully at work in the present.68 As in ‘The Real Thing’, resistance never seems quite achieved in the poems, however. We are left with a potentiality not yet realised – a ‘free foot’ still ‘kicking / Under the white sheet of history’ – a ‘ruin’ that might be reimagined in a multitude of ways. The poem remains parabolic in order that it may not be co-opted into any conventional narrative. This chapter celebrates the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin as feminist poetries which – despite not being located in an overtly and easily recognisable modernist tradition –manifest a recognisably modernist poetics, illuminating how identity is constructed through language and seeking out sites for disturbing or interrupting dominant narratives. Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin take on this important work using strategies specific to an Ireland gradually and sometimes painfully disentangling itself from Catholic hegemony. They scout out poetic approaches that resist not only the ideology bequeathed by Irish Catholicism but also the proffered alternative of a wholly secular capitalism. Ní Dhomhnaill draws on oral forms such as the keen and the síscéal as alternatives to more conventional forms of lyric selfhood; Ní Chuilleanáin retrieves the physical materials of religious practice, and the physical bodies of religious practitioners, using them in her parabolic poems to interrupt and unsettle handed-down narratives and apparently fixed meanings. The work of these two poets troubles our sense of what is proper to modernity and preserves intriguing alternatives, ripe with potential.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ní Chuilleanáin, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p. 11, lines 1–3, 14–18. Wulff, Dancing at the Crossroads, p. 12. Clare, ‘The Boys of Bluehill Review’. Lloyd, Irish Times, p. 8. Pérez-Agote, ‘The Notion of Secularisation’, pp. 886–904, p. 890. Inglis, Moral Monopoly, p. 93. Ibid., p. 11. Clutterbuck, ‘Good Faith in Religion and Art’, pp. 131–56, p. 132. Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, p. 2. Mills, ‘I Won’t Go Back to It’, pp. 69–88, p. 69. Boland, A Kind of Scar, pp. 12–13. Mills, ‘I Won’t Go Back to It’, p. 73. Fogarty, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’, pp. 209–31, p. 209. See, for instance: Fogarty, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’; Keating, ‘The Reductive Logic of Domination’, pp. 104–22; Kelleher, ‘The Cabinet of Irish Literature’, pp. 68–89; Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘What Foremothers?’, pp. 18–31. 15. Ní Dhomhnall, ‘What Foremothers?’; Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Speranza’, pp. 17–34. 16. Kinnahan, ‘Feminism’s Experimental “Work at the Language-Face”’, pp. 154–78, p. 155. 17. Ibid., p. 158.

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challenging the iconic feminine 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Batten, ‘Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin’, pp. 169–88, p. 183. Lloyd, Irish Times, p. 4. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Women as Writers’, p. 155. Potts, ‘When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell’, pp. 52–70, p. 53. Keating, ‘Bilingual Poetry’, qtd with permission. Ní Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, p. 46, lines 12–14. Bourke, ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow’, pp. 160–82, p. 160. Conrad, ‘Keening the Nation’, pp. 39–57, p. 49, p. 53. Ní Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, p. 46, lines 26–31. Ní Dhomhanill, The Astrakhan Cloak, p. 47, lines 26–31. Romanets, ‘Degenerating the Myth of Transhistorical Masculinity’, pp. 57–74, p. 59. O’Brien, ‘Contemporary Caoineadh: Talking Straight through the Dead’, pp. 56–63, p. 56; O’Neill, ‘The Caoineadh’, pp. 191–203, p. 192. Ní Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, p. 32; Ferguson, ‘The Subversion of Supernatural Lament’, pp. 643–66, p. 648. Kirkley, ‘The Question of Language’, pp. 277–92. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, p. 60; Bourke, ‘Reading a Woman’s Death’, pp. 553–86, p. 553; Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Cf. Bourke, ‘Bean an Leasa’, pp. 74–91, p. 80. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, p. 60, lines 5–6; Hartnett’s translation, p. 61, lines 5–6. Ní Dhomhnaill, An Dealg sa bhFéar (Galway: An Chéad Chló, 2011), p. 190. O’Reilly, ‘Emily O’Reilly’s Account of her Report that Broke the Story’. Auge, A Chastened Communion, p. 51. Ní Dhomhnaill, An Dealg sa bhFéar, p. 190, lines 48–55. My translation. Ní Dhomhnaill, An Dealg sa bhFéar, p. 190, lines 69–72. My translation. Bourke, ‘Reading a Woman’s Death’, p. 572. Bourke, ‘Bean an Leasa’, p. 77. Lloyd, Irish Times, p. 4. Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems, p. 17, lines 1–5. Ibid., p. 17, lines 11–14. Ibid., p. 17, line 15. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 89, lines 6–8. Clare, ‘The Boys of Bluehill Review’, n.p. Ibid.; Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, p. 115; Clutterbuck, ‘The Irish History Wars’, pp. 97–118, p. 102. Ní Chuilleanáin, The Boys of Bluehill, p. 17, lines 14–15. Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems, p. 60. Auge, A Chastened Communion, p. 147. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Acts and Monuments’, pp. 570–80, p. 6. Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems, p. 72, p. 61. Ibid., p. 72, lines 12–15. Ibid., p. 72, lines 21–25. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, p. 120. Ní Chuilleanáin, The Brazen Serpent, p. 22. Ibid., p. 10, lines 11–15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 16, lines 5–6; Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Nuns’, pp. 16–32, p. 28. Ní Chuilleanáin, The Brazen Serpent, p. 16, lines 9–10.

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382 65. 66. 67. 68.

ailbhe darcy Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Acts and Monuments’, p. 570. Donne, Collected Poems, pp. 259–60. Ní Chuilleanáin, The Brazen Serpent, p. 16, lines 24–5. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Strange Ceremonies’, pp. 133–54, p. 134.

Bibliography Auge, Andrew, A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). Batten, Guinn, ‘Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the Nation’, in M. Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 169–88. Boland, Eavan, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989). Bourke, Angela, ‘Bean an Leasa: Ón bPiseogaíocht go dtí Filíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’, in Eoghan Ó hAnluain (ed.), Leath na Spéire (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1992), pp. 74–91. Bourke, Angela, ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry’, in Joan Newlon Radner (ed.), Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 160–82. Bourke, Angela, ‘Reading a Woman’s Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in NineteenthCentury Ireland’, Feminist Studies, 21:3 (1995), pp. 553–86. Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London: Penguin Books, 2001). Clare, Aingeal, ‘The Boys of Bluehill Review: Distinctive and Rewarding’, The Guardian (29 May 2015), (last accessed 20 October 2020). Clutterbuck, Catriona, ‘Good Faith in Religion and Art: The Later Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review, 37:1 (2007), pp. 131–56. Clutterbuck, Catriona, ‘The Irish History Wars and Irish Women’s Poetry: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland’, in Jane Dowson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 97–118. Collins, Lucy, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Conrad, Kathryn, ‘Keening the Nation: The Bean Chaointe, the Sean Bhean Bhocht, and Women’s Lament in Irish Nationalist Narrative’, in Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (eds), Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008), pp. 39–57. Donne, John, Collected Poems of John Donne (Ware: Wordsworth, 1999), pp. 259–60. Ferguson, Molly A., ‘The Subversion of Supernatural Lament in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 42:6 (2013), pp. 643–66. Fogarty, Anne, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’, in Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (eds), Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930’s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 209–31. Ganiel, Gladys, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Inglis, Tom, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998). Keating, Kenneth, ‘Bilingual Poetry’, in A. Darcy and D. Wheatley (eds), A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, forthcoming), quoted with permission. Keating, Kenneth, ‘“The Reductive Logic of Domination”: Narratives and Counter-Narratives in Irish Poetry Anthologies’, New Hibernia Review, 21:1 (2017), pp. 104–22.

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Kelleher, Margaret, ‘The Cabinet of Irish Literature: A Historical Perspective on Irish Anthologies’, Éire-Ireland, 38:3/4 (2003), pp. 68–89. Kinnahan, Linda A., ‘Feminism’s Experimental “Work at the Language-Face”’, in J. Dowson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 154–78. Kirkley, Laura, ‘The Question of Language: Postcolonial Translation in the Bilingual Collections of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon’, Translation Studies, 6:3 (2013), pp. 277–92. Lloyd, David, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008). Mills, Lia, ‘“I Won’t Go Back to It”: Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine’, Feminist Review, 50:1 (1995), pp. 69–88. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, ‘Acts and Monuments of an Unelected Nation: The Cailleach Writes about the Renaissance’, The Southern Review, 31:3 (1995), pp. 570–80. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, ‘Nuns: A Subject for a Woman Writer’, in P. Boyle Haberstroh (ed.), My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 16–32. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, Selected Poems (London / Oldcastle, County Meath: Faber and Faber / The Gallery Press, 2008). Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, ‘Speranza, an Ancestor for a Woman Poet in 2000’, in E. Ní Chuilleanáin (ed.), The Wilde Legacy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 17–34. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, ‘“Strange Ceremonies”: Sacred Space and Bodily Presence in the English Reformation’, in A. J. Piesse (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 133–54. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, The Boys of Bluehill (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 2015). Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, The Brazen Serpent (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1994). Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2001). Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, ‘Women as Writers: Dánta Grá to Maria Edgeworth’, in E. Ní Chuilleanáin (ed.), Irish Women: Image and Achievement (Dublin: Arlen House, 1985). Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, An Dealg sa bhFéar (Galway: An Chéad Chló, 2011). Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, Féar Suaithinseach (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1984). Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, trans. Michael Hartnett (1986; Dublin: New Island Books, 2000). Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, ‘What Foremothers?’, The Poetry Ireland Review, 36 (1992), pp. 18–31. O’Brien, Kathleen, ‘Contemporary Caoineadh: Talking Straight through the Dead’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 32:1 (2006), pp. 56–63. O’Neill, Margaret, ‘The Caoineadh, Psychoanalytic Theory, and Contemporary Irish Writing: Anne Enright’s The Gathering’, in A. Markey and A. O’Connor (eds), Folklore and Modern Irish Writing (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2014), pp. 191–203. O’Reilly, Emily, ‘Emily O’Reilly’s Account of her Report that Broke the Story’, Irish Times (31 January 2004), (last accessed 20 October 2020). Pérez-Agote, Alfonso, ‘The Notion of Secularisation: Drawing the Boundaries of its Contemporary Scientific Validity’, Current Sociology Review, 62:6 (2014), pp. 886–904. Potts, Donna L., ‘“When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell”: The Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’, New Hibernia Review, 7:3 (2003), pp. 52–70. Romanets, Maryna, ‘Degenerating the Myth of Transhistorical Masculinity: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Cú Chulainn Cycle’, Nordic Irish Studies, 2 (2003), pp. 57–74. Wulff, Helena, Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).

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Part V Critical Heresies

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22 ‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and / as Disability in Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente

‘All I am is feeling’: Beckett and Affect

A

s a dystopian manifesto of social devolution, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895) followed rather faithfully along the Darwinian, proto-eugenical track laid down by criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the psychiatrist B. A. Morel. What distinguished Nordau’s tome, other than its obsessive length, was its focus on modern art and literature as the primary locus, the epicentre, of the condition of degeneracy. Whether or not his theories ‘can be understood as inherently literary’,1 Nordau’s take on degeneration certainly unfolds in the mirror of literary production. At its best, Nordau reasoned, art reflects the vigour of the society whence it sprang: art is ‘a manifestation of vital force and health, a revelation of the capacity for evolution of the race’.2 The degenerate artist, on the other hand, is the antitype of such aspirational performance. He suffers from ‘emotionalism’, and so he cannot attain to discipline, the very condition of style. His ‘defective attention’ means he is unable to master art’s formal demands, while ‘fugitive ideation’ renders him incapable of a cogent plot. Degeneration is ‘morbid deviation from an original type’ and, in a literal mimesis of that perversion, degenerate artworks are morbid deviations from normal form. Nordau located this errancy in the modernist abandonment of classical lines, which, he contended, ‘were given by the nature of human thought itself [and] could only be changed if the forms of our thought became changed’.3 Or, we might say, ‘if the norms of our thought became changed’, since ‘the nature of human thought’ has so clearly admitted formal variants outside the pale of Nordau’s validation. In Degeneration, aesthetics is where forms of norm and norms of form intersect to produce morally true (hence beautiful) works of art. So far, so familiar. But this account, which draws heavily on Nordau’s self-account, proves misleading in the final analysis. Nordau was, indeed, concerned to establish the biological grounds of literary expression, if only to damn certain species of literature in corroboration of his devolutionary thesis. But once he installed the literary arts as the prime specimen of modernity’s decline and fall, there still remained the question of the literature itself, in its own right. And Nordau’s treatment of its internal properties – the determination of its defining criteria, purposes and values – departs from his biopolitical

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premises to arrive, surprisingly, at a crude, forensic version of affect theory. Notwithstanding his censure of degenerate art as teeming with hysterical emotionalism, he flatly asserts that ‘the real source of art is emotion’.4 To take up M. H. Abrams’s schema of aesthetic orientation, we would say that Nordau defines art not in terms of its imitative function (the properly classical dispensation), nor its edifying function (the neoclassical dispensation), but its expressive / emotive function.5 For Nordau, moreover, this expressive / emotive function is rooted in the biomedical constitution of the individual and the race.6 A literary work either elaborates an emotional response to reality that is hale, improving and uplifting, or one that is exorbitant, entropic and disordered, if not diseased. Belying his avowed classicism, that is to say, Nordau’s aesthetic would more properly be designated its opposite number: a crypto-Romanticism.7 That said, Nordau’s invocation of good ‘form’ as the touchstone of literary achievement cannot mask his lack of familiarity with, or interest in, specific formal principles, or the absence of anything in Degeneration approaching the most rudimentary theory of aesthetic form. Implicit, rather, in Nordau’s unsystematic excurses is a kind of nervous reflex model of artistic representation: that is, art is a reflection of the bio-/ neuromedical condition of author and audience, registered in the affective currents transmitted, more or less directly, from the former to the latter and shared in by both. Rhetorically speaking, intact form serves Nordau as the sign of cultural health and broken form the sign of cultural deterioration; but as a practical matter, he doubts whether form has the ‘dividing, predetermining, and delimitating importance which dreamers and simpletons attribute to it’.8 Aesthetic form is, at most, a vanishing mediator for Nordau, without material purchase upon the affect circulating through it. This problem of form and its elision still haunts affect theory today. In her trenchant study, The Forms of the Affects, Eugenie Brinkema observes that the recent affective turn in film studies has not only emphasised intensities aroused at the expense of meaning conveyed, but has bracketed out the issue of form altogether, as anything other than a mere ‘means to affective ends’, a channel through which the emotional charge passes. Brinkema identifies and critiques a ‘new and intentional fallacy’, which ‘suggests that each cinematic affect is of or related to the spectator’, is ‘taken as always being for us’, a ‘reification of the passions’ on a personal basis.9 She argues instead for a ‘de-privileging of the models of expressivity and interiority’ in favour of treating affects as ‘structures that work through formal means (as line, light, color, rhythm, and so on)’.10 Herself an affect theorist, Brinkema does not promote formal questions to the detriment of the aesthetic generation of feeling, but insists rather on the indispensability of form to the generation of properly aesthetic feeling, the inseparability of a work’s form and its specifically emotional, as well as semantic, content. Brinkema’s immanent critique of the affective turn in contemporary film theory makes for a close and useful analogue to Samuel Beckett’s ongoing response to Nordau’s Degeneration. Beckett read the book in the 1930s, and was sufficiently engaged to take notes toward his work in progress, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett’s Dream Notebook). If Byron Heffer is right, most of what Beckett came to know about degeneration he gleaned from ‘careful scrutiny’ of this one text.11 Note-snatching was Beckett’s chief means of courting inspiration during this period, a measure, in this case, of his interest in, as well as exasperation with, Nordau’s screed. He found delight in occasional phrases – ‘Kakoethes’, for example – and used them for years afterwards.12 More importantly for our purposes, his decisive breakthrough as a writer occurred precisely when

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he embraced, à la Nordau, the profoundly emotional basis of his artistic potential: ‘All I am is feeling’.13 Russell Smith points up the lack of attention paid to this remark in Beckett studies, in a compelling, Adlerian reading of the second part of Molloy.14 What Smith himself underplays, however, is the specifically aesthetic dimension of the project: the issue of form. For Beckett, unpasteurised emotion is not simply vehiculated by, but inheres in, the literary or dramatic form to be elaborated. Where Nordau pathologises as degenerate the abandonment of a classical form whose specific relationship to affective content he neither conceived of nor cared about, Beckett seeks to de-pathologise the so-called indices of degeneracy by formalising, and thereby universalising, the affect they elicit. The goal, he tells Tom Driver in 1960, is ‘to find a form that accommodates the mess’.15 And Beckett does so by fashioning literary and dramatic structures responsive in their antinormativity to the anomalous, dissident or disabled states being portrayed, and the peculiar emotional intensities these degeneracies occasion. If, in Tobin Siebers’s terms, Nordau puts forward an ‘art of disqualification’ in which ideal forms of embodiment are the benchmarks of human worth (degeneration theory as ‘ableism’), Beckett counters with a radical disability aesthetic which projects divergence from such ideals of embodiment not only as inevitable and omnipresent but as opening, for artist and audience alike, on to the very condition of human worth: the Real of the affect that animates all symbolic form – the feelings we all have, whatever we might ‘know’ or think about them.16 Recent disability studies scholarship has offered some penetrating analyses of Beckett’s affirmative representation, his accommodation of contra-normative conditions of embodiment and mindedness as a riposte, tacit or overt, to Nordau’s cultural eugenicism.17 Michael Davidson remarks, for example, that ‘[w]hen disability is the norm – as it is in Beckett’s work – the human condition must be revised in terms of non-traditional bodies and sensoria’.18 Under the heading ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’, Ato Quayson examines the affective implications for both the characters and the reader of the encounter with disability that Beckett presents in his novels. In addressing Beckett’s response to Degeneration directly, Siobhán Purcell argues that where ‘Nordau lamented the perceived decline of physical aesthetic form, Beckett privileges these impaired states, even manifesting them at the level of form’.19 An analysis of Beckett’s formal method, however, and of his structuration of the affects in particular, is precisely what has been missing from these otherwise tonic interventions. Each remains stubbornly focused on content. Even Purcell’s invocations of Beckett’s use of form actually refer to the narrative content of his work,20 where his opposition to Nordau on ideological grounds is perhaps most obvious. Similarly, Byron Heffer provides a fascinating account of ‘degenerate form’ in The Unnamable, but focuses primarily on ‘abject materiality’: that is, the body of the characters.21 Read with a specific eye to form – the body of the text – Beckett’s critique of Nordau proves all the more compelling for the inside-out approach that he adopts. He incorporates the underestimated affective turn within Degeneration and amalgamates it with the formal commitment to which Nordau gives mere lip service. With this strategy, the effects of the ubiquitous non-traditional bodies and minds on offer in Beckett are instantiated and reinforced from the start in the structure of the texts or the lineaments of the stage performance. Here we have a specifically political impetus for Beckett’s pursuit of what we are calling ‘the degeneration of

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form’: a serious structural engagement with sentiments which, being antinormative in origin and effect, necessarily contravene those standards of beauty, the classical, that enthrone traditional, normative forms of embodiment, as well as orthodox standards of artistic form. Or, as Beckett puts it: Nothing very new or very beautiful, when I come to think of it. They came together one on top of the other, a double-yoked orgasm in months of aspermatic nights and days . . . I am afraid the ‘give us a wipe’ class of guttersnipe continues to please me, or at least to recommend itself to me inasmuch as ‘true’. One has to buckle the wheel of one’s poem, nicht wahr, or run the risk of Nordau’s tolerance.22 For a young artist in the modernist tradition, buckling the wheel – deliberately flouting the rules of form – was de rigueur – as de rigueur, in fact, as rebuffing Nordau’s derogation of contemporary literature.23 In classical art, Beckett told Tom Driver, ‘all is settled’.24 Classical form thus works as a check on the spirit of innovation, a curb that Nordau greatly approved on behalf of ‘the nature of human thought’ and that Beckett joined those proto-modernist writers whom Nordau excoriates – Mallarmé, Verlaine, Nietzsche, Ibsen – in programmatically overstepping. But the precise means and rationale of Beckett’s subversion of the classical model does distinguish him among his modernist peers and forebears. The logic of Beckett’s approach most closely approximates, and partly derives from, the signifying revolution that he discovered in Joyce’s post-postmodern masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. Reflecting on that tour de force in his first major publication, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’ (1929), Beckett turns Nordau’s vernacular against the classically minded readers who found their habits of interpretation balked by Joyce’s crush of vehicle and tenor: Here is the direct expression – pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. The rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.25 Instead of being a symptom of degeneracy, as in Nordau, formal experimentation, of which the Wake is the ne plus ultra, serves to unmask the ‘decadence’ of those who insist instead on the straightforward delivery of a message. Beckett is specifically concerned to promote Joyce’s conflation of form and content, of the medium of representation and its object, as he makes clear further along in the same essay: Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself . . . When the senses sleep, the words go to sleep. When the sense is dancing, the words dance.26

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Because he served as Joyce’s amanuensis during the writing of Finnegans Wake, Beckett had both a personal and a professional stake in this compositional method, which he adapted to an inverse creative temperament. On Beckett’s own assessment, Joyce was ‘leaning towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I work with impotence, ignorance’.27 Where Joyce aimed to be the consummate master of his materials, Beckett believed in ceding control. There is a rich literature on Beckett’s preoccupation with ‘habitual, automatic and involuntary behaviour’ in his writings.28 He likened them to ‘involuntary exonerations’, which became a dominant metaphor for his artistic process. He thereby espouses a kind of will-to-impotence. Joyce’s virtuosity impelled him to an ‘apotheosis of the word’, a transcendence of verbal representation in which word and object, vehicle and tenor, fuse perfectly, and ‘writing is not about something’ but ‘is that something itself’.29 In keeping with the view that his own artistic integrity resided in impulsiveness, in reflex action rather than calculation, Beckett sought, instead, to consolidate his medium with what it could not master: feeling.

Things Fall Apart: Degenerating Modernism One of the books that Beckett read for Joyce in preparing the Wake, and which ‘greatly impressed’ him, was Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2). ‘I have often wanted to re-read it’, he told Hans Naumann in 1954, ‘[b]ut it seems impossible to find.’30 Somewhere Beckett did find it, however, and his copy contains over 700 marked passages.31 Dismissed by some as the work of a crank, the Beiträge was a book that Beckett was destined to be impressed by.32 In a rejection of the Kantian a priori, Mauthner pushes to its ‘logical’ conclusion the idea, acknowledged in the West since Protagoras, that our senses are incapable of providing objective knowledge of reality.33 What Kant decrees a priori, Mauthner deems relative a priori, since what appears to Kant as ‘given’ inheres, for Mauthner, in inherited linguistic conventions.34 The subject does not simply use language to think or know, since thinking and knowing are structured by the conventions of language. ‘All I know is what the words know’.35 As with Lacan’s account of the preponderance of the signifier in the Symbolic Order, Mauthner’s language comes with meaning already stuck to it. Lacan calls this ‘semantic ballast’, and it outweighs subjective intention.36 At the same time, for Mauthner, language remains ‘our only means of ordering our experience’.37 He has a special term for the ‘knowledge’ that results: ‘word-superstition’. Certainly, we can achieve a workable consensus about the nature of reality, given that we have the same inherited sense organs,38 but this offers no immediate ‘break through to the real’.39 In the circumstances, Mauthner valorised silence, reserving especial praise for the mystics excoriated by Nordau. Beckett was intrigued, having styled himself a ‘dud mystic’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women.40 His problem, he knew, was that he could not keep silent.41 In his rocking chair, Murphy had been both bound and gagged, but ‘it had not been enough’.42 In a world that can be neither escaped nor known, Mauthner would claim, insight consists in surrendering any claim to insight: ‘The lowest form of knowledge is in language, the higher in laughter; the last one in the critique of language, in the heavenly stillness and gaiety of resignation and renunciation’.43 Here, the critique of language and the mystic’s silence

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are offered as exact equivalents: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’44 The problem is that, in language, silence, properly speaking, is unattainable. This is why so many of Beckett’s characters are tyrannised by the prospect of a silence they can neither hold nor attain. In the prison house of language, ‘silence is still a word’.45 For Mauthner, the problem was intractable, which is the conclusion, too, of Beckett’s Unnamable: ‘I shall never be silent. Never.’46 In anticipation of aspects of Lacan’s formulation, Mauthner sees language as both founding and confounding the human subject in its attempts to ‘know’ reality. Gershon Weiler neatly summarises the main contention: ‘To get to know things as they really are, we should be able to transcend the limitations of our language, and this is impossible’,47 like sitting in a chair and then lifting it up with one’s own hands.48 Simply put, language is an ‘unfit tool for knowledge’.49 Beckett agreed and, in his German letter, compared writing, ‘Grammar and Style’, to a ‘Victorian bathing suit’.50 The problem, then, was how to get out of it. If Mauthner was right, there was no way out. And if Beckett was liberated by writing the Trilogy, by its end the consequences of the aporia he had been courting had begun to insist: ‘No “I”, no “have”, no “being”. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on’.51 Writing L’Innommable ‘finished’ him, Beckett said, landed him in a situation from which he could not ‘extricate’ himself.52 The Texts for Nothing were an attempt to get out of this ‘attitude of disintegration’ that failed, and failed inevitably. It appeared Mauthner was right: narrative could not itself provide for supersession of the aporia generated by narrative. A rare double-line in Beckett’s Beiträge marks the observation that true Unity, or self-annihilation, could be reached only by way of ‘the Non-word’.53 As early as 1937, Beckett had fantasised about this ‘literature of the unword’.54 Repeating a trope from Mauthner, which is also in Schopenhauer, he saw language as a ‘veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the nothingness) behind it’. He proposed ‘to bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through’.55 This something that lurks behind and honeycombs the Symbolic Order can only be, as Jean-François Lyotard has theorised, a disruptive, because unrecognised, ‘feeling’, which he calls the differend. In a literary text, moreover, the only place this feeling can ‘seep through’ is back into the language itself. So, in effect, Beckett aspired to the very union of tenor and vehicle that he admired in Joyce’s writing, but substituted a tenor incommensurable with its vehicle and thereby turned that vehicle against itself. The result is an aesthetic of ignorance in which language is at one with its intractable counterpart – undistilled affect. In that fusion, language becomes a kind of antilanguage: words contra the finality of representation. In Lacanian terms, Beckett finds in various types of non-normative subjectivity the model for a formal corrosion of the Symbolic Order that could release feeling in / of the Real. This, after all, is what ‘a literature of the unword’ proposes: a desublimation, rather than an exaltation, of symbolic form. Beckett’s method in this regard sets him apart from other, more representative modernists, for whom literary form seems to have been a levee against the romanticist ‘overflow of powerful feeling’. The father of Imagism, T. E. Hulme, advocates a classical mode of poetry wherein finding the ‘exact curve’ of the ‘contemplated object’ winnows out the emotional ‘ore’, leaving behind a properly ‘hard, dry’ thing of purely ‘descriptive’ verse.56 His signature essay, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, prophesies a species of poetic impersonality made famous by another of the ‘men of 1914’, T. S.

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Eliot. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot describes how the form of a poem works to ‘transmute the passions which are its material’, such that the ‘intensity’ of the verse in question resides not in the emotions expressed but in the ‘processes’ refining those emotions.57 For Eliot, form is precisely what makes ‘poetry . . . not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion’.58 Beckett’s perfect foil on this, as on so many issues, was W. B. Yeats. Certain of Yeats’s greatest poems – ‘The Tower’, ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Under Ben Bulben’ – unfold in stark dichotomy between the poet’s impassioned response to what he witnesses and the well-wrought poetic urn in which he houses that response. One poem in particular, ‘The Fisherman’, thematises the discrepancy. Driven to distraction by the circumambient emblems of civilisation’s decline – ‘The craven man in his seat / The insolent unreproved’59 – Yeats imagines an audience answerable to a verse that could temper vexation in the very expression thereof. This figure, who ‘does not exist’, images forth ‘one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn’.60 If poetry here is not an escape from emotion, as Eliot proposed, it is a vehicle of emotional control: a submission of the passions to the heat-reducing authority of formalisation. And lest we think this a merely masculinist business, Elizabeth Bowen affected a ‘classic impersonality’ as well.61 She expressed great admiration for the ‘self-control’ and ‘coldness’ exhibited by Flaubert: his fashioning of a ‘beauty, immune to feeling’.62 Beckett himself identifies this Apollonian strategy in the work of Franz Kafka, arguably his semblable, his frère, in the arts of impotence and destitution. When the publication of Molloy drew comparisons with the creator of Joseph K, Beckett demurred: The Kafka hero has coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not spiritually precarious. Another difference. You notice how Kafka’s form is classic. It goes on like a steamroller – almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time – but the consternation is in the form. In my work, there is consternation behind the form, not in the form.63 This account is puzzling, not to say confusing, in that Kafka’s form seems both serene and consternated at the same time. But things clear up once proper weight is accorded to the simple word ‘almost’. Kafka’s form does not actually attain to serenity from Beckett’s point of view, in so far as it remains a defence mechanism, a buffer against the agonising extremity of feeling portrayed in, and evoked by, the ordeals Kafka retells. By contrast, Beckett’s form is not consternated in an attempt to dissimulate the ‘mess’, as he calls it, behind a show of equipoise classically rendered. To the contrary, ‘to find a form to accommodate that mess’, so that ‘we might open our eyes and see [it]’: that, Beckett asserted in 1960, ‘is the task of the artist now’.64 Beckettian consternation exists in the lurking mess itself, and not in the form that has made itself available to the awareness, intellectual and emotional, of that modern plight. The ‘material of experience is not the material of expression’.65 This, at least, is what Beckett implies in a second response to queries about his affinities with Kafka, from Hans Naumann in 1954: I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then . . . I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of account.66

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Beckett’s scepticism goes to Kafka’s formal method, which strains to hold the horrors it contemplates, and hence the horror of contemplating them, at an ‘imperturbable’ aesthetic distance. The content may be unsettling, but the form remains ‘settled’.67 This is why Russell Smith’s ground-breaking account of Molloy as a ‘rage fable’ needs to be supplemented with specific attention to form. Beckett is not, any more, looking to control his feelings. And, unlike Kafka, he is not interested in having form act as a bulwark against those feelings. In the Trilogy, rather, he portrays the disintegration of subjects in narratives themselves subject to disintegration. And these disintegrating literary forms ‘let themselves’ be an affective record or index of ‘disasters’, not the last resource of their sublimation and transcendence. Ultimately, Kafkaesque grotesquerie is mitigated, to Beckett’s mind, by the familiar conventions, the classical form, of narration in which it is presented. For his part, Beckett will insist on the dialectical intrication of content and form on an affective basis: an art shaped by how it feels, rather than what it might say. This incorporates Joyce’s legacy while putting at stake the possibility of coherent expression in the name of a still more vital aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, value: truth of feeling. Mauthner had offered no good reason to doubt our feelings, only our knowledge of them. And he saw ‘good reasons for assuming that there is something outside us, something beyond language, for our sense-impressions bring us into contact with [it]’.68 Unlike language, physical sensation opens onto the Real. Prior to Kant, moreover, physical sensation had been a chief object of aesthetics. In Under Representation, David Lloyd retrieves from Kantian reflections on taste a prior definition of aesthetics as a ‘discourse on the sensible body’.69 For Lloyd, Kant’s determination to ground the universal subject in a capacity for disinterested judgement necessitated a move away ‘from the body as an organ of feeling’.70 In doing so, Kant wanted to liberate aesthetics from a ‘dangerous subordination’ to affect, preferring ‘formal modes of judgment’.71 In effect, Beckett seeks to reverse this move: where, for Kant, the feeling body presents an obstacle to the integrity of aesthetic judgement,72 for Beckett, aesthetic judgement presents an obstacle to truth of feeling. And where Kant’s aestheticism has its corollary in the imperturbability of Kafka’s form, Beckett’s degeneration of form aims to grasp feeling in its immediate emergence: to enact a literature of the unword from the place of the sensible body. In light of the aporia Beckett was to encounter in prose, theatre became indispensable. On the page, Joyce had wanted to say everything. Beckett had tried to say nothing. But by linking form and content dialectically, and asserting his will-to-impotence, Beckett had written himself into a corner: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’73 On the stage, at least, the stubborn materiality of the body offered the prospect of an escape from the prison house of language. In 1947, Beckett wrote Eleuthéria, a mindbogglingly odd play that we still do not quite know what to do with. After being carted around Paris by his lover (and later his wife) Suzanne, it was retired, and gathered dust until 1996. Between the completion of Malone Meurt and the commencement of L’Innommable, however, Beckett wrote En attendant Godot, which changed everything. Beckett later remembered this as an opportunity to ‘get away from the awful prose’ he was writing at the time,74 but it was also a move towards something: towards theatre as unbound by certain of language’s limitations. In Mauthner’s terms, theatre provides a space of ‘discovery’ rather than ‘invention’. In the Critique, discovery inheres in ‘sensual observation’ that has not yet reached symbolisation: ‘a moment . . . not yet tyrannized by the means available to express it’.75

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Inventions, by contrast, are what discoveries become once they enter language. ‘Saying is inventing,’ as Beckett knew all too well.76 By the time it reaches the intellect, sensation has already lost something of the affective charge Beckett is interested in. Discoveries constitute incursions of the Real, and achieving these discoveries – inflicting them on his audience – was to become a chief ambition of Beckett in the theatre. This is what he meant when he told Jessica Tandy he wanted ‘to work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect’.77 A new dispensation – an affective amalgam not just of form and content, but of form and body – was, in every sense, taking the stage.

All I Am Is Failing: Happy Days One main problem that Mauthner had encountered in drafting his Critique – and it would become Winnie’s main problem in Happy Days – was entropy. Mauthner had tried to suggest that ‘time’ was just another word, but if the second law of thermodynamics held – if ‘the entropy of the world tends to a maximum’ – it suggested that time was real.78 Entropy gives existence a direction, albeit a negative one: ‘an isolated system . . . increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state’.79 Described as the ‘fundamental law’ of physics,80 this baffled Mauthner’s attempts to insulate language from reality. Time, he was discovering, was no mere invention.81 In Happy Days, Beckett foregrounds the theme of entropy, and we are accustomed to thinking of it as the thing Winnie is fighting against: toothpaste, lipstick, time, all ‘running out’. In Act 1, Winnie sounds a bit like Mauthner: ‘I speak of temperate times and torrid times, they are empty words.’ But she also experiences ‘doubt’ on this score. From moment to moment, each fraction of a second, things change so little one might almost ignore the passage of time – ‘I used to say, Winnie, you are changeless’ – but a strange feeling insists: ‘Most strange [Pause.] Never any change [Pause.] And more and more strange’.82 This is entropy and, all her life, Winnie has sought to deny it. The objective correlative of this predicament, as it pertains both to Winnie in her mound and to the cosmos more generally, is the music-box. In a triumph of theatrical condensation, we see a dying woman, in a dying universe, consoling herself with a dying song. The futility of this gesture has not stopped directors from portraying it as heroic, but this is another example of the ‘redemptive perversion’ that Beckett lamented in productions of his work (particularly productions in England).83 Beckett avoided this problem when he directed Happy Days himself for London’s Royal Court in 1979. James Knowlson was there, and gives a somewhat startled account of the ‘real innovation’ in Beckett’s production: ‘his conception of Winnie’.84 She ‘hovered much closer to madness than in earlier productions’, he felt. Beckett wanted a ‘child-woman with a short span of concentration – sure one minute, unsure the next’.85 The link, here, is Nordau. ‘Defective attention’ was at the heart of his symptomatology,86 and had its affective corollary in Winnie, who ‘flitted from topic to topic, fitfully inspired by objects to hand’.87 Under Beckett’s direction, and in Nordau’s terms, Winnie is a degenerate, more or less frantically attuned to the business of scatterbrained denial: ‘No better, no worse, no change.’88 The point, however, is not to redeem her predicament in an appeal to British pluck. Happy Days is conceived in opposition to such sentiments. ‘She’s not stoic’, Beckett

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insisted, ‘she’s unaware.’89 Indeed, it is Winnie’s will-to-ignorance, not her penchant for heroism, that provides the degenerating impetus behind the play. At its core, what Freud would call its ‘navel’,90 Happy Days is a play about sexual trauma. ‘This’ trauma has its origins in the encounter with Dr Carolus Hunter, recently found dead in the tub: ‘this . . . Charlie . . . kisses . . . this . . . all that . . . deep trouble for the mind’.91 The insistence of unspeakable affect relating to that incident is what drives Winnie’s ongoing pursuit of distraction: ‘No. [She turns back front. Smile.] No, no [Smile off.].’92 In developing the theme, Beckett masterfully weaves together the problems of entropy and repressed memory: Oh well what does it matter, that is what I always say, it will come back, that is what I find so wonderful, all comes back. [Pause.] All? [Pause.] No, not all. [Smile.] No, no. [Smile off.] Not quite. [Pause.] A part. [Pause.] Floats up, one fine day, out of the blue. [Pause.] That is what I find so wonderful.93 That is how it is with repressed material: it ‘floats up . . . out of the blue’. That is what Winnie finds so wonderful. For much of the play, she is denial with a smile, but the music-box scene is one of eight fateful moments when her fretful defences falter.94 In his production notebook, Beckett called these ‘défaillances’ – that is, deflations – and they are carefully choreographed to puncture Winnie’s efforts: ah yes – [wiping] – many mercies – [wiping] – great mercies – [stops wiping, fixed lost gaze, brokenly] – prayers perhaps not for naught – [pause, do.] – first thing – [pause, do.] – last thing.95 As degenerations of form, these scripted leaks signal the incursion of the entropic principle. They express the insistence with which energy is lost in a universe in which matter can be neither created nor destroyed. They belie anyone who, like Winnie, would deny entropy. In psychoanalytic terms, they express the inevitable futility of Winnie’s resistance, as well as its futile inevitability: ‘Forgive me, Willie. Sorrow keeps breaking in’.96 ‘Interruption’, Beckett admitted, is one of the ‘clues’ of the play.97 Expressed at the level of form, this principle has its most conspicuous instantiation in the play’s dominant stage motifs: the mound of dirt that encases Winnie’s frame and the sounding bell that punctuates her reveries. These not only supplement but, respectively, contour the spatial (mound) and temporal (bell) dimensions of the dramatic action. Winnie’s immersive heap defines her life-habitus in terms of profound limitation, an impairment of mobility, cast by the play’s internal audience (the Showers / Cookers) as an insupportable disability, and apprehensible as the outward sign of degeneracy. The deepening of the dirt from Act I to Act II underscores this diagnosis; it augments the entropic dynamic that animates the play, exacerbating Winnie’s immobility to the point of full body paralysis: a functional loss of control that represents a somatisation of Beckett’s aesthetic of impotence. What Winnie’s art of distraction cannot do is resist entropy. For its part, the bell tolls for Winnie in particular, marking the coordinates of her diurnal experience. Its ringing wakes her in the morning – reveille with a snooze option – and in the evening promises rest from the strain of remaining buoyant under the (literalised) weight of adversity. But the timing, and with it the role, of the alarm

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alters dramatically in Act II. The bell continues to ring periodically throughout the scene, seemingly at random: a cosmic spinning out of control to match Winnie’s own increasingly dissipated self-possession. Signals of a general devolution meet indices of individual degeneracy. On a second or third hearing, however, it turns out that there is indeed a method to the maddening irruptions of the bell in Act II. Winnie repeatedly closes her eyes to escape her earthly bonds mentally in sleep, and each time she does so, the bell’s piercing sound brings her abruptly to wakefulness, summoning her again and again to confront her ‘estate’ (landed / bodily). This coercive aspect of the bell bears its ultimate significance in coordination with the constraining function of the earth mound. To wit, as Winnie’s physical being grows more encumbered in disability, more inert, and consequently more suggestive of death (‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return’), her mental being, quickened by that bell, continues to be intent and lively, if for all that non-normative, disabled, spasmodic in its proceedings, likewise bearing the stigmata associated with degeneration. That is to say, even as the latter-day bell may be seen to sustain and extend, if not heighten, Winnie’s consciousness, it also serves as a mechanism of interruption, thus an externalisation of the cardinal species of errancy imbuing Winnie’s mind, in synchrony with the dirt mound’s objectifying the limitations of Winnie’s body. At the same time, it is this cognitive errancy that, in occluding the communication and interpretation of positive meaning, renders Winnie’s consciousness the source, the repository and, for the audience, the object-cause of a powerful but indefinably textured affect. A spur to Winnie’s mindfulness, the formal motif bell acts as a taunt to that ‘dribbling comprehension’ of an audience that demands digestible signification ‘divorced’ from the form of its delivery. Like an inverse type of Pavlov’s bell, it whets in order to balk the viewers’ appetite for symbolic association that might, first, explain or even redeem Winnie’s ‘degenerate’ condition, and in the process, second, unburden these onlookers (modelled once again, by the Showers / Cookers) of the discomfitingly unclassifiable overflow of feeling she evokes.98 Initially, Beckett had envisaged Winnie alone, an ‘imbedded female solo machine’, but quickly determined that she needed a foil: ‘he should be as close to a mere ear as possible and as dubious as the divine’.99 He needed someone who was both there and not there. ‘The solution’, he decided, was: to have a real interlocutor at the outset (just enough to establish his reality, in the event the back of his head) and then get rid of him for the rest of the play. In this way she is alone on stage talking neither to herself nor to her audience nor to an imaginary character.100 It is an aural equivalent of the Panopticon: ‘Days perhaps when you hear nothing. [Pause.] But days too when you answer [Pause.] So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard’.101 In Happy Days, contra Bishop Berkeley, to be is to be overheard. But the question of who, at any given moment – if anyone, is listening is rendered ambiguous for large parts of the play. For Winnie herself, the ambiguity surrounding her audience(s) seems all but inevitable, inherent in the very structure of her testimony. She repeatedly proclaims herself

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unable to discourse in the absence of an interlocutor, however notional that interlocutor might be, only to turn about and recall extended bouts of self-apostrophe: Ah yes, if only I could bear to be alone, I mean to prattle away without a soul to hear. Not that I flatter myself that you hear much, no Willie, God forbid [Pause.] Days perhaps when you hear nothing. [Pause.] But days too when you answer. [Pause.] So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never do – for any length of time.102 I say I used to think that I would learn to talk alone. [Pause.] By that I mean to myself, the wilderness. [Smile.] But no. [Smile broader.] No no. [Smile off.] Ergo you are there.103 This confounding of monologue and dialogue constitutes a key strategy for rendering affect a residue of the dramatic form, rather than simply an interior reserve of the characters, or the scripted response of the audience. Immanent in Winnie’s discourse is an irresolution as to its proposed recipient. Is it addressed to Willie, whom Winnie regards as the necessary condition of her speech? Is it addressed only to herself, whom she positions as its sufficient ground? Or is it addressed to the playgoers, towards whom she is ultimately, if tacitly, oriented? This uncertainty surrounding her interlocutor thwarts, in turn, any thoroughgoing interpretation of her speech act. For the intention underlying or animating any dramatic utterance is contingent in part upon its ‘intended’, whose relation to the speaker bears upon and, in significant measure, inflects the tonality of the words spoken and thus the purpose in speaking them. What Winnie says can be apprehended easily, given the relative simplicity of her idiom, but in the absence of an assured addressee, why she is saying what she is saying and precisely what she means in saying it cannot be readily decoded. Lacking a clear destination, a definitive for-whom, her ejaculations of sentiment remain dizzyingly desultory, digressions without a main axis, unmoored to the very categories of sense on which they rely (‘happy’, ‘wonderful’, ‘better’, ‘worse’, ‘comforting’, ‘no pain’, ‘Ah well’, ‘marvelous’, ‘can’t be helped’, ‘most strange’). In so far as Winnie’s rambling speech-act(s) function(s) indeterminably as conversation, soliloquy and / or self-communion, the feelings carried by her words, like their prospective meaning, resist being mapped in terms of their origin or end, their intent or their impact. As a result, the tenor of those feelings proves likewise indeterminable: are they social in nature, do they emerge and exist to be shared, are they for another, whether Willie or the audience? Or are they asocial in nature, do they emerge as Winnie’s defence against, or as compensation for, the lack of a viable other, or even as a kind of enjoyment in that lack? If all of these possibilities and more are in place simultaneously – the most likely solution to the riddle Beckett poses here – then it would seem that Winnie’s discourse is irrevocably social at its most self-reflexive and stubbornly self-reflexive at its most other-directed. Under these circumstances, the affective energies that Winnie’s words release are not to be located in the speaking or listening subjects, in one or more positions of address, but rather circulate in the undecidable transactions among them, which is to say that they exist finally in the form of the drama that stages them.

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Given that such an affective dynamic defies the normative bounds of self-possession, continence or impersonal mastery that high modernist literary forms typically serve to buttress, the means whereby Beckett triggers this dynamic, the destabilisation of the dialogue, signals his calculated pursuit of a degenerate form. By thus integrating ‘the forms of the affect’ pertaining to degeneracy (qua disability) with the overall design of the play, Beckett translates degeneracies from pathologised objects in a normative world to a mode of worlding unto themselves. And not just any mode of worlding. From a normative standpoint, physical, mental, neurodevelopmental and psychosocial disabilities come freighted with stigmata – hesitancies, vagaries, temporal swerves, interruptions, eccentricities of thought, movement and address, fitful shifts of attention and posture – all of which serve to frustrate, or defy, conventional expectations and habits of receptivity. The internal properties of Winnie’s discourse plainly and quite deliberately instance what Nordau and other tribunes of degeneracy would apprehend (in every sense) as the stigmata of mental and spiritual enervation and disturbance, the symptoms of biologically rooted defects of character. Winnie’s repertoire of verbal stigmata includes: 1. Self-interruption: ‘It’s understandable [Pause.] Most [Pause.] The earthball [Pause.] I sometimes wonder [Pause.] Perhaps not quite all [Pause.] There always remains something. [Pause.] 2. Hesitancy and Confusion: ‘When I hear sounds [Pause.] I used to think . . . [Pause.] . . . I say I used to think they were in my head [Smile].’ 3. Indefiniteness of Reference: ‘the old style’, ‘mercies, great mercies’. 4. Miscellaneous and Contradictory Reference: ‘that is what I always say’, ‘That is what I find so wonderful.’ 5. Memory Lapses and Attentional Slippages: ‘The bag is there, Willie, as good as ever, the one you gave me that day . . . to go to market. [Pause. Eyes front.] That day [Pause.] What day?’ 6. Reversals of reversals: ‘can’t complain . . . mustn’t complain . . . no pain . . . hardly any . . . slight headache sometimes . . . occasional mild migraines . . . it comes . . . then goes.’ Beckett disposes these tics and stereotypies of utterance to highlight their simultaneously entropic and expressive tenor. Translated into the form of a narrative or dramatic mise-en-scène, they not only signal a running down or dissolution of coherent signification, but serve to interdict the trodden paths of interpretation: to obstruct the customary ways of accessing meaning. In this jarring hiatus of signification emerges an especially complex, yet unfiltered, species of affect: raw, visceral, unamenable to, and unsublimated by, the rational constraints of sense; but necessarily, for that very reason, also unsimplified by those constraints, irreducible to classification or even identification, replete with inchoate, unsynthesisable nuance. That is to say, Winnie’s stigmata catalyse an affective surge that exceeds and confounds, even as it invites and compounds descriptive categories like desperation, hopefulness, resignation, alienation, attachment, disconsolateness, empathy, determination, stoicism, insouciance and so on. As the residue of degenerate form and disabled meaning, Beckett demonstrates, affect can be at once overwhelming in its brutality and elusive in its subtlety: literally, both too brutal and too subtle for words.

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Winnie’s verbal stigmata, moreover, represent something more than elements of dramatic content. Beckett organises them in and as formulaic motifs – ‘the old style’, ‘that is what I always say’, ‘That is what I find so wonderful,’ ‘That is what I find so comforting,’ ‘some remains’, ‘not all’, ‘no no’ – whose insistently patterned repetition over the course of the performance constitutes the very fabric of the theatrical universe on offer. The cacophonous, untethered affects mobilised by these iterative patterns of verbal errancy paradoxically define, give shape to, the dramatic experience for all concerned. Inasmuch as they unfold as the indices of a non-traditional or disabled cognitive or neuropsychological condition, their combined ubiquity in, and coextensivity with, the world of Happy Days can be seen to culminate in what we have called Beckett’s pursuit of degenerate form. The disabling of form, disability as aesthetic principle, produces a formalisation of affect: dramatic form as both vehicle and terminus of the ‘feeling’ that Beckett takes as his own entelechy, ‘all I am’.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Purcell, ‘Buckled Discourses’, p. 30. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 335. Ibid., pp. 38; 55; 137; 16; 545. Ibid., p. 324. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 6–26. Nordau, Degeneration, pp. 324–5. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 21–6. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 544. Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects, p. 31. Ibid., p. 37. Heffer, ‘Unformed Life, n.p. For example, Beckett, Disjecta, p. 171. D’Aubarède, ‘Interview’, p. 217. Smith, ‘Uproar’, p. 138. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 218. The object-relations psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, has comprehensively theorised the phenomenological state in question as ‘the unthought known’, arising out of the pre-verbal experience of the infant. On the normate body, see Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies. Qtd in Purcell, ‘Buckled Discourses’, p. 39. Purcell, ‘Buckled discourses’, p. 31. We refer specifically to her reading of the kinds of physical movements Molloy displays (Purcell, ‘Buckled Discourses’, p. 39). Heffer, ‘Unformed Life’, n.p. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 87. Purcell, ‘Buckled Discourses’. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 220. Beckett, Disjecta, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Shenker, ‘An Interview’, p. 148. Barry et al., ‘Beckett, Medicine’, p. 133; Salisbury, ‘Throw up for Good’. Beckett, Disjecta, p. 172. Beckett, Letters II, p. 465.

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31. Van Hulle and Nixon, Beckett’s Library, p. 158. 32. There is already a considerable literature on Beckett, Joyce and Mauthner. See Van Hulle, ‘Beckett-Mauthner’, for an excellent introduction. 33. Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 91. 34. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, pp. 172–4. 35. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 31. 36. Lacan, Seminar, pp. 307; 122. 37. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 172. 38. Ibid., p. 178. 39. Ibid., p. 170. 40. Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, p. 186. 41. Not least due to the ‘obligation to express’ described to Georges Duthuit in 1949 (Beckett, Proust, p. 103). 42. Beckett, Murphy, p. 102. 43. Qtd in Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 177. 44. Wittgenstein, qtd in Van Hulle and Nixon, Beckett’s Library, p. 166. 45. Mauthner, Beiträge, I, p. 83. 46. Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 267. 47. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 175. 48. Mauthner, Beiträge, I, p. 544. 49. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 175. 50. Beckett, Disjecta, p. 171. 51. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 148. 52. Ibid. 53. Van Hulle and Nixon, Beckett’s Library, p. 158. In German, ‘Zum höchsten Einssein der Vernichtung gelangt man durch das Nichtwort’ (Mauthner, Beiträge, I, p. 83). 54. Beckett, Disjecta, p. 173. 55. Ibid., p. 172. 56. Hulme, ‘Romanticism’, p. 75. 57. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, pp. 30–1. 58. Ibid., p. 33. 59. Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 148, lines 15–16. 60. Ibid., p. 149, lines 35, 38–40. 61. Bowen, Mulberry Tree, p. 5. 62. Ibid., p. 157. 63. Beckett, Letters II, p. 465. 64. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 218. 65. Beckett, Letters III, p. 377. 66. Beckett, Letters II, p. 465. 67. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 220. 68. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 180. 69. Lloyd, Under Representation, p. 45. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., p. 51. 72. Ibid., p. 45. 73. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 382. 74. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. x. 75. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, p. 187. 76. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 31. 77. Qtd in Brater, ‘The I in Beckett’s Not I’, p. 200. 78. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, pp. 204, 203–7.

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402 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

seán kennedy and joseph valente Schrödinger, What is Life?, pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 73. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique, pp. 203–7. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 6; p. 22; p. 16; p. 35; p. 26. Beckett coined the phrase with reference to Peter Hall’s London production of Waiting for Godot of 1955 (see Simpson, ‘Suffering Beyond Redemption’, forthcoming). For a critique of the redemptive perversion in Beckett studies, see Heffer, ‘Beckett’s Queer Atavism’. Knowlson, Happy Days, p. 15. Ibid. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 55. Knowlson, Happy Days, p. 15. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 8. Qtd in Knowlson, Happy Days, p. 16. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 525. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 30. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 12. Knowlson, Happy Days, p. 45. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 7. Ibid., p. 20. Knowlson, Happy Days, p. 12. In a further twist, the gawping of the Shower / Cookers resembles any ‘normal’ audience confronting Winnie, rendering them complicit in the ableism portrayed. Beckett, Letters III, pp. 366, 369. Ibid., p. 366. Beckett, Happy Days, p. 12. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 29.

Bibliography Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Anderton, Joseph, Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Barry, Elizabeth, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury (eds), ‘Beckett, Medicine and the Brain’, Journal of the Medical Humanities, 37 (2016), pp. 127–35. Beckett, Samuel, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (1932; Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder, 1983). Beckett, Samuel, Happy Days (1961; London: Faber and Faber, 2010). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (London: Calder, 1993). Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit (London: Calder, 1987). Beckett, Samuel, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979). Beckett, Samuel, The Letters of Samuel Beckett II, 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Down Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Beckett, Samuel, The Letters of Samuel Beckett III, 1957–65, ed. George Craig, Martha Down Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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Bollas, Christopher, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Mulberry Tree, ed. Hermione Lee (San Diego: Harcourt-Brace, 1986). Brater, Enoch, ‘The I in Beckett’s Not I’, Twentieth Century Literature, 20:3 (July 1974), pp. 189–200. Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Chamberlin, Edward, and Sanders Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia, 1985). D’Aubarède, Gabriel, ‘Interview’, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1961; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 215–17. Driver, Tom, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1961; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 217–23. Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood (London: Metheun, 1920). Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey (1900; London: Hogarth, 1953). Gibson, Andrew, ‘Beckett, Vichy, Maurras and the Body: Premier Amour and Nouvelles’, Irish University Review, 45:2 (2015), pp. 281–301. Heffer, Byron, ‘Beckett’s Queer Atavism’, Estudios Irlandeses, 14:2 (2019), Special Issue, ed. Seán Kennedy, pp. 78–91. Heffer, Byron, ‘Unformed Life in Beckett’s The Unnamable’, in Seán Kennedy (ed.), Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), n.p. Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (1958; Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1989). Hulme, T. E., ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in Patrick McGuinness (ed.), Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme (1912; New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 68–83. Jones, David Houston, Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Knowlson, James (ed.), Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988). Lloyd, David, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989). McNaughton, James, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Mauthner, Fritz, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols (1901–2; Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923). Morin, Emilie, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Nordau, Max, Degeneration (London: William Heineman, 1895). Purcell, Siobhán, ‘“Buckled discourses”: Disability and Degeneration in More Pricks than Kicks’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 27 (2013), pp. 26–41. Quayson, Ato, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Salisbury, Laura, ‘Throw up for Good: Gagging, Compulsion and a Comedy of Ethics in the Trilogy’, in Russell Smith (ed.), Beckett and Ethics (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 163–80. Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (1944; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

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Shenker, Israel, ‘An Interview with Samuel Beckett’, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1956; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 146–9. Siebers, Tobin, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). Simpson, Hannah, ‘“He wants to know if it hurts!”: Suffering Beyond Redemption in Waiting for Godot’, in Seán Kennedy (ed.), Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 79–89. Smith, Russell, ‘“Uproar, bulk, rage, suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain”: Beckett’s Transports of Rage’, in ‘Beckett, Medicine and the Brain’, Journal of the Medical Humanities, 37 (2016), Special Issue, ed. Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude, and Laura Salisbury, pp. 137–47. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Valente, Joseph, ‘Aging Yeats: From Fascism to Disability’, in Marjorie Howes (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Van Hulle, Dirk, ‘Beckett-Mauthner-Zimmer Joyce’, Joyce Studies Annual, 10 (1999), pp. 143–83. Van Hulle, Dirk, and Mark Nixon, Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Weiler, Gershon, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Windelband, Wilhelm, A History of Philosophy I: Greek, Roman, Medieval (1892; New York: Harper, 1958). Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (1933; New York: Scribner, 1996).

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23 Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction Maureen O’Connor

The increasing seriousness of things, then that’s the great opportunity of jokes. –Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady

W

hen Ralph Touchett, in Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, observes the humorous potential in serious things, he does not mean ‘things’ in quite the way Laurence, a kind of comic counterpart to Touchett, does in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel, The Last September, when he envisions an ante-judgement day: ‘Imagine, sir, a small resurrection day, an intimate thingy one, when the woods should give up their tennis balls and the bundles of hay their needles: the beaches all their engagement rings and the rivers their cigarette cases and some watches. The sea’s too general, an affair of furniture and large boilers, it could wait with the graves for the big day. . . . Last term I dropped a cigarette case in the Cher, from the bridge at Parson’s Pleasure. It was a gold one left over from an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks and mashed, and killed ladies. It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James; I loved it. I want to see it rush up out of the Cher, very pale, with eyeballs, like in the Tate Gallery. It wants a woman to be interested in a day like that, to organise; perhaps the Virgin Mary?’1

This mock-apocalyptic scenario provides several entry points into a reading of the non-human in Bowen’s work as queerly comic: a camp performance of heterosexuality that is none the less virginal; the alienated body, in its surreally anthropomorphised cigarette case, endowed with human eyeballs, rising among the objects granted their eternal reward in advance of the redemption that awaits ungainly, heavy objects of the earth, an ungainly grouping that includes humans; mixed temporalities, in Laurence’s imagining the future restoration of an object lost in his personal past, redolent of a time before he was born; and alternative epistemologies, suggesting a belief not only in ensouled objects capable of intimacy, worthy of love and redemption, but also in those objects’ interest for the Virgin Mary, whose intercession the Protestant Laurence might not be expected to call upon.

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Bowen’s ‘animist sensibilities’, her ‘intuitions about the non-human realm’2 have been noted by numerous critics.3 This chapter aims to develop that work by drawing on the insights of new materialism, especially the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, in an examination of the ways in which Bowen’s sensitivity to the non-human, a hallmark of modernist literature, according to Carrie Rohman and Bill Brown,4 is inherently disruptive of all coercive and limiting standards of ‘propriety’, including those dictating high literary sobriety. The non-human, whether ‘animate’ or ‘inanimate’, contributes to the distinct humour and ‘queerness’ of Bowen’s writing, affecting both form and content. Bowen’s fiction, like the work of new materialists, proposes radical challenges to received ideas about human centrality by undermining foundational divisions, including the assumed separation between the human and the non-human. Bowen has always disrespected this separation. Impossibilities preoccupy her work, particularly those that obtain through the suspension of ‘logic’ and allow for contradictory realities to co-exist. The ‘queerness’ that refuses divisions between the human and the non-human, while insisting on difference, demonstrates just how possible numerous impossibilities actually are. Laurence entertains his (not-quite-)end-times fantasy while spending his summer holiday from Oxford with relations who live in an Irish ‘Big House’, Danielstown, based on Bowen’s Court, the novelist’s family home in rural County Cork. In Bowen’s biography of the beloved house that had been in her family’s possession for centuries, she notes that her ‘family got their position and drew their power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong’.5 The uneasy ambiguity of Anglo-Irish identity, as most commentators on Bowen’s fiction have noted, was an important influence on her unique style, distinguished by occasionally surreal imagery and what Anna Teekell identifies as sometimes ‘wilfully tortuous syntax’,6 featuring double and even triple negatives, proliferating grammatical twists and reversals that resist positivist authority and logic. ‘Heart-cloven and split-minded’, as Seán Ó’Faoláin described her,7 Bowen nevertheless was, in her own words, always ‘extremely conscious of being Irish – even when I was writing about very un-Irish things such as suburban life in Paris or the English seaside’.8 Like the ancestors she writes about in Bowen’s Court, with their intense ‘emotional ties to nature’,9 she was preoccupied with the landscape of rural Ireland, not only its flora and fauna, but its man-made elements as well, treated elegiacally in her Irish fiction. Laurence’s ‘sense of detention, of a prologue being played out too lengthily’,10 instantiates the kind of haunted chronology that characterises Bowen’s work, which is concerned ‘with an otherness which precedes, haunts, solicits the very possibility of self-identity and individuality, memory and the present, the social and the human’.11 In addition to political and historical contingencies, Bowen’s own embodied marginalisation, as a woman, especially as one who had love affairs with men and women, allows for an evasive relationship to the material that marks women’s writing under patriarchy, where, according to Luce Irigaray, ‘the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject’. Under this discursive regime, ‘a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side’,12 ‘disruptive excess’ providing an apt description of Bowen’s literary style. According to Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Bowen’s novels ‘derange the very ground of “character”, what it means to “be” a person, to “have” an identity’.13 Identity and even personhood are unstable phenomena in the fiction, which negates ‘the presumed inviolable integrity of the human and the presumed inviolable integrity

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of the inhuman or inanimate’.14 The ‘queerness’ of identity itself resides in the disavowed non-coincidence of human subjectivity, according to new materialist readings of the relationship between the human and the non-human. Karen Barad, for instance, in an essay on nature’s ‘queer performativity’, argues that ‘identity is not an individual affair. Identity is multiple within itself.’15 Similarly, in Bowen’s 1929 story ‘The Jungle’,16 immersion in the natural world undermines notions of identity as singular for the adolescent Rachel. On entering the wood, or ‘jungle’, her special hidden retreat, ‘an absolutely neglected and wild place’ removed from human concerns and activities, she feels ‘a funny lurch in her imagination . . . everything in it tumbled together, then shook apart again, a little altered in their relations to each other, a little changed’. The referent for the pronoun ‘it’ is ambiguous – the jungle? Rachel’s imagination? Are they the same thing? This ambiguity is not resolved when the jungle provides the setting for Rachel’s disturbing, erotically coded dream about her schoolmate Elise, described as ‘just like a compact thick boy’. Rachel struggles with her feelings for Elise and debates whether to invite her to the jungle. When she does, Rachel refers to it as ‘a rather queer place’.17 Its ‘queerness’ is not restricted to the girls’ relationship to each other, but originates in the jungle’s jarring effect on Rachel’s relationship to her ‘self’, tumbled together with ‘everything’. ‘Queer’ functions here, and elsewhere in Bowen, in the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.18 At the story’s end, after a period of estrangement, the girls accidentally meet again in the jungle. Elise’s ‘round cropped head like a boy’s’ rests on Rachel’s knee: ‘She felt all constrained and queer; comfort was out of the question’.19 From this ‘rather queer place’ there is no return to comforting, received ideas about difference, desire, identity or singularity. Bowen’s readers have long been aware of the novelist’s queerness, her ‘interest in homosexuality’.20 When suggesting that Bowen unsettles our ‘thinking about the homoerotic’, however, Patricia Coughlan notes that, in her work, ‘desire has a strikingly labile quality, seeming to be imagined as not always safely (or dangerously) invested in persons but to be conceived as a force or form of energy in itself’,21 not necessarily implicating a human object. Dana Luciano and Mel Chen have insisted that queer theory denaturalises sex, releases it from ideas about the ‘natural laws’ dictating sexuality, so that ‘lifting that prohibition . . . multiplies not only possibilities for intrahuman connection but also our ability to imagine other kinds of trans/material attachments’.22 This echoes Barad’s contention that ‘eros, desire, life force runs through everything, not only specific body parts or specific kinds of engagement between body parts. . . . Materiality itself is always already a desiring mechanism.’23 Imagining new possibilities for attachment is often relayed comically in Bowen. Humour, however black, enlivens most human–non-human exchanges, figurative or literal, in the fiction, and in most instances, some kind of desire is being communicated, whether repressed or expressed. In the first chapter of To the North (1932), Cecilia, a young widow, endures a tedious train journey, the miseries of which are enumerated by the narrator: ‘the heart hangs dull in the shaken body, nerves ache, senses quicken, the brain like a horrified cat leaps clawing from object to object’24; the closing simile introduces a touch of the ludicrous into the catalogue of discomforts. Cecilia is travelling home to her sister-in-law, Emmeline, the one person with whom Cecilia enjoys a relationship

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in which ‘she was quite happy’. She declares to Emmeline, ‘I’m not interested in men anymore’, and their relationship is compared to a ‘quiet marriage’, emblematised by their kitten, Benito, in the eyes of at least one character, Lady Waters, whose moral objections to the women’s domestic arrangement are unconsciously revealed in her misidentification of the cat as ‘Beelzebub’.25 To the North is one of the many Bowen texts in which animal metaphors are used to comic effect. Markie, an ‘appropriate’ object of female affection (who fatally disrupts Emmeline and Cecilia’s relationship), is an ‘agreeable reptile’ and ‘the Frog Footman’; schoolgirl Dorothea is ‘punctual as a conjurer’s rabbit’; Cecilia smoulders ‘like a Siamese cat at a show’; and Gerda behaves ‘with all the coy propriety of a favoured squirrel’.26 Other vivid examples from Bowen’s work include: ‘Mrs Bowles’s words’, which, in Friends and Relations (1931), ‘rather like old dulled fish gently tipped from a barrow went on slipping and slipping’27; young Victor Ammering in The Hotel (1927), looking ‘hunched and indecisive-looking, ruffled about the head like a young thrush’28; and the unlovable child Margery Mannering in the 1929 story ‘The Dancing Mistress’, who peers ‘up through misted spectacles like a plump small animal in the bite of a trap – like a rat, perhaps, that no one decently pities’.29 In The Heat of the Day (1948), set in London during the Blitz, an unnamed dog acts, according to Victoria Coulson, as ‘canine avatar’30 for Louie, the young wife of Tom, a serving soldier. Androgynously named Louie, who ‘had never had a censor inside herself and . . . had no way of knowing whether she were queer or not’, is lonely in a city she does not know well. She casually picks up men and comes to share a bed with Connie, a mannish Air Raid Precautions (ARP) warden who walks with a ‘scissor-like stride’ in her ‘dark blue official slacks’. Alarmed about (or perhaps jealous of) Louie’s behaviour, Connie begins to write a letter to Tom in which she complains of Louie ‘always straying about like a dog’.31 Commentators often refer to Louie as ‘promiscuous’ and / or desirous of being put on a lead like a dog and controlled, taking Connie’s point of view as somehow reliable. However, it is other male characters in the novel who explicitly figure as animals in bondage, like Stella’s son Roderick, who ‘unyoke[s] himself’ from his soldier’s pack ‘with an animal patience’, and Robert’s late father, who ‘let himself be buckled into his marriage like Ernie’s Labrador used to let himself be buckled into his collar’.32 By the same token, the queerly comic scene between Louie, Stella and Harrison, in which Louie spuriously claims to be the owner of a stray dog, works against such a derogatory reading of Louie’s character. The scene takes place in an underground ‘bar or grill which had no air of having existed before tonight’, as makeshift as a bit of cinema scenery, filled with beings who very carefully ‘do not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the fact of being human’, an example of Bowen’s mystifying use of the negative. Are these humans or not? One woman with the ‘zip fastener all the way down’ appears ‘to have a tin spine’; all of the ‘extras’ self-consciously perform their human roles. Stella and Harrison are being importuned by a stray dog who takes to Stella, an opportunity grasped by ‘ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent’ Louie to ingratiate herself with Harrison, whom she had tried and failed to pick up earlier in the narrative. Louie lays claim to the spotless dog she calls Spot, though Stella noticed the dog in the bar before Louie arrived. The dog is described as ‘pleading to be allowed to be under obligation to someone’ and as masochistically enduring Harrison’s kicks. The action becomes slapstick as Louie alternately struggles to control the dog and ignores

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him, and his trailing lead gets tangled. Significantly, the dog’s liking for Stella turns Louie’s erotic interest away from Harrison, and she leaves the bar feeling ‘entered’ by Stella, of whom she is clearly enamoured. Louie, like ‘Spot’, experiences spontaneous yet sincere affections, but does not submit to control or definition, not even to figurative limitations. Her fellowship with the non-human is not a degradation, but an expression of greater humanity, as when she objects to Harrison’s verbal abuse of her and her (temporary) canine companion: ‘people to be friendly, that’s what the war’s for, isn’t it? I never had any more motive than that poor dog!’33 Animals not only serve figurative purposes in Bowen, but also make their own incisive observations, like the sheep in the story ‘The Easter Egg Party’ (1941), who give Isabelle ‘a long reproving look’,34 even though it is Isabelle’s companion Hermione who has been presented as an unpleasant, cat-hating child. The sheep see through the performances of both little girls, alerting the reader to the fear and loneliness beneath Hermione’s mask of truculence. In ‘The Parrot’ (1925), Mrs Willesden’s servant Eleanor goes in search of her mistress’s escaped bird, which leads her to the forbidden home of the arty, not-quite-respectable Lennicotts. The parrot makes his own discriminations amongst humans, however, without regard to social standing, indicating a distinct preference for Mrs Lennicott: ‘convey[ing] by a multiplicity of innuendos that Mrs Willesden and Eleanor were a pair of old frumps, and . . . he knew a woman of distinction when he met one’.35 There is a fine blade of cruelty in many of these images. While Bennett and Royle consider Bowen’s ‘the greatest comic novels to be written in English this century’, Corcoran observes of Bowen’s comedy ‘that it may cut very deep indeed, with a laughter this side of hysteria’.36 Of her own sense of humour, Bowen suggests that ‘everything in Ireland resolves itself into laughter, though seldom laughter of the happiest kind’.37 Pain and even violence are never far from the comic in Bowen’s work. Lisa Colletta numbers Bowen among the ‘British’ novelists whose ‘comedic work . . . between the wars is shot through with the trauma of violence and the threat of further brutality’.38 The closest thing to light-hearted comedy that engages with the non-human in Bowen’s œuvre occurs in her single children’s book, The Good Tiger (1965), about a cake-eating beast who lives in a zoo but is invited to a child’s party. The appearance of animals in a text always introduces formal and thematic instability, however, and poses a potential threat to the illusion of human superiority and identity, often through humiliation or comic deflation. As Bennett and Royle observe of Bowen’s fiction, As a figure of resemblance, . . . [animal] metaphors generate a sense of laughter which doubles and dislocates, dissolving the very logic of likening and likeness. Bowen’s characters are not themselves – they are neither simply human nor simply animal – in the strangeness of these configurations.39 The simplest child’s tale potentially wields the power to disturb in its revelations of the disavowed and terrifying closeness of the human and the non-human animal. Rude, nosy neighbour Mrs Jones can express her terror at encountering a tiger at a human party only by quacking, an unconscious acknowledgement of her inferior position in the food chain as prey. She appears traumatised by this realisation, as, even after escaping the house, ‘She kept on quacking’.40 This hierarchical reversal, which animalises the human, is typical of the kind of ‘intersubjective experience’ that Coulson considers in her discussion of animals in

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Bowen’s fiction, in which such relationships are ‘alert to the vicissitudes of power that shape even the most recondite intimacies’.41 In Bowen’s 1934 story, ‘The Cat Jumps’, a thoroughly modern couple attempts to transcend the oppressive power dynamics implicit in heterosexual intimacies (they discuss Havelock Ellis, the sexologist who famously wrote about ‘sexual inversion’), even as they play traditional matchmaker with houseguests, but something ‘animal’ irrupts, ‘queering’ both efforts. The story features ‘pellucid, sane’ sophisticates meeting for a country weekend at the newly acquired house of Harold and Jocelyn Wright, known for their ‘light, bright, shadowless, thoroughly disinfected minds’.42 Their new home, Rose Hill, was the site of a grisly murder by another Harold, Harold Bentley, who chopped his wife into pieces as she dragged herself through the house in an attempt to escape the attack. The hosts and guests, with the exception of Muriel, dismiss the superstitious idea of the house being haunted by this misogynist horror. Muriel, who has resisted her hosts’ attempts to pair her off with another guest, Edward Cartaret, insists on tirelessly rehearsing all of the details of the mutilation and murder, and suggests that Carteret, as well as possibly all of the men in the house, are ‘utterly pathological’, after noting the way they hung on Carteret’s story ‘of cutting up that cat’. As the night advances, everyone but Muriel reverts to their atavistic, animal selves, either entertaining bloodthirsty fantasies or cowering in terror. The merging of past and present Harolds is suggested toward the end of the story, when Wright thinks resentfully of his wife that ‘She lay like a great cat, always, over the mouth of his life’.43 While thinking this, his ‘dreadful’ look causes Jocelyn to faint away. The punch line of this Gothic comic tale, which Hermione Lee calls a ‘baroque joke about the war between the sexes’44, is that Muriel has locked all of the bedroom doors from the outside as she makes her way to another woman’s bedroom to spend the rest of the night. Not only Harold is possessed by some kind of spirit in the story, but inanimate objects are also possessed. Once overcome with terror, Jocelyn begins to notice the strange behaviour of things in her bedroom: ‘Jocelyn dropped her wrap to the floor, then watched how its feathered edges crept a little. . . . As though snatched by a movement, the towel slipped from the mirror beyond her bed-end. . . . On the floor, her feather wrap shivered again all over.’ This unexpected animation forces Jocelyn to see herself as ‘an animal in extremity, . . . mindless’.45 Objects are as vulnerable to haunting and possession as people in Bowen’s fiction, exchanging qualities across the human and animal divide, as well as that between the animate and the inanimate. Houses and objects in The Last September, for example, manifest more liveliness than any of the novel’s human characters, liveliness conveyed through unsettling, boundary-dissolving figurative language, such as a doorway that ‘yearn[s] up the path like an eye-socket’, or a piece of paper that creeps ‘on the floor like a living handkerchief’.46 Rohman maintains that modernism is the first literature to register the psychic eruption of animality through the fragmentation and discontinuity of ‘circuitous and unstable narrative devices’,47 like the untenable syntax of a doorway ‘yearning up the path’. Keri Walsh situates this kind of oneiric imagery in the context of Bowen’s connections to surrealist art practice and practitioners,48 the early twentieth-century avant-garde who, ‘most famously and at times comically’, according to Bill Brown, made a ‘conscious effort to achieve greater intimacy with things and to exert a different determination for them’. Surrealists transferred ‘the bricolage of the dreamwork into the practise of everyday life’ to register ‘their refusal to occupy the world as it was’.49

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This dream-transference effect that characterises surrealism is also typical of Bowen’s fiction, as Renée Hoogland observes when she describes the fiction as doing ‘away with the comforts of realism’ and throwing us ‘upon a world where objects feel things [to] . . . shock us into bizarre acts of feeling recognition’.50 Henrietta, the adolescent girl in The House in Paris (1935), undergoes just such a shock, in a novel featuring one of Bowen’s personified houses. Henrietta, travelling to stay with her grandmother, is put up for a day in Paris with a friend of her grandmother’s, in a house she finds ‘antagonistic’: ‘She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry’.51 She is accompanied by her own ambiguous object, a toy monkey named Charles. Like all children, she understands that a toy can be simultaneously animate and inanimate. Even though she will deny that Charles is alive to an adult in the house, she says to Leopold, another child in temporary residence, when asked whether she believes that he feels, ‘Well, I think he notices. Otherwise there’d be no point in taking him everywhere.’52 In this comic exchange, the damaged, prematurely aged Leopold is puzzled by this answer. Rigid with the pain of rejection by his mother, Karen, Leopold’s uncanny failure to resemble a child fascinates Henrietta, who wonders ‘what was going on inside him’, as if he were a clockwork figure. She examines him closely, looking for human resemblance in a boy the narrator likens to ‘an unconscious little tree: moving her elbow his way she felt his arm as unknowing as wood’. She struggles to find him ordinary, but his most banal utterance sounds ‘supernatural’.53 Wooden-boy Leopold will paradoxically become ‘human’ toward the end of the novel when, discovering that his longed-for mother has once again refused him, he bursts into sobs and Henrietta joins him sympathetically in his thing-ness: Leopold turned round facing the mantelpiece and suddenly ground his forehead against the marble. . . . After a minute, one leg writhed round the other like ivy killing a tree. . . . Leopold’s solitary despair made Henrietta no more than the walls or table. . . . Being not there disembodied her, so she fearlessly crossed the parquet to stand beside him. . . . Finally, she leant her body against his, pressing her ribs to his elbow so that his sobs began to go through her too. . . . After a moment like this, his elbow undoubled itself against her and his left arm went round her with unfeeling tightness, as though he were gripping the bole of a tree. . . . [r]eposing between two friends, the mantelpiece and her body.54 Luciano and Chen might ask of a scene like this, what ‘other ways of being might emerge from transmaterial affections’.55 The establishment early in the novel of Henrietta, via Charles, the toy monkey, and her response to the house, as someone sensitive to what Jane Bennett calls the ‘very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman’,56 allows her also to overcome the divisions between humans dictated by ‘propriety’ and to gesture toward the expansive potential of transmaterial affections. In the final taxi ride from the house to the train station with Karen’s husband, Ray, who is going to take Leopold to his mother, the restraints of adult propriety slacken in a comic scene in which Charles comes to bumptious life in the hands of suddenly child-like Henrietta, overcome by ‘a throe of the fidgets’, which communicates itself to Leopold, so that Ray feels he is ‘boxed up with two restless octopi’.57

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Like the later novel The Little Girls (1964), The House in Paris is structured nonchronologically, the present narration split in two by the past, the story of Karen and Max, both of whom were engaged to marry other people when they have the affair that produces Leopold. These novels offer examples of Bowen’s ‘spellbound world’, in which traditional temporalities no longer contain and define experience.58 Many commentators note Bowen’s unusual handling of time, but without linking it explicitly to the comic. Regina Barreca attributes Bowen’s comic effects to resisting the logics of progress and teleology,59 though she does not observe the Irish specificities of her disjointed temporalities. To some extent, this resistance can be explained by what Ina Ferris calls the ‘unstable matrix of Irish temporalities . . . one that places the present inside the past and the past inside the present’.60 This is related to the ‘Irish chronotype’, which Julie Anne Stevens identifies, a ‘carnival time when animals and humans have equal significance’.61 Recent ‘analyses of queer temporality’ corroborate the postcolonial dimension of representations of time in their interest in examining ‘the part which various time schemes played in the production of the human and its subhuman and inhuman others’.62 Novels that share new materialism’s contention that human agency is not unique, but dependent on the inhuman,63 present time and space in unexpectedly interpenetrated ways. According to Barad, space and time are ‘intra-actively produced in the making of phenomena; neither space nor time exist [sic] as determinate givens, as universals, outside of phenomena’; the ‘“Past” and “Present” are iteratively enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity’.64 Against this inter- and intra-active doing and undoing of the temporal stand clocks, both symbols and arbiters of organised, teleological movement through space; they are also objects that inspire fear or neglect in Bowen’s fiction. The maid Matchett, in The Death of the Heart (1938), the character most receptive to and respectful of the emotional life of furniture, nevertheless repeatedly expresses her disbelief in the clock in a tense but comic, rambling monologue delivered to an unsympathetic taxi driver. In A World of Love (1954), a collection of calendars from previous years, along ‘with the disregarded dawdlings and often stoppings of the cheap scarlet clock wedged somewhere between the bowls and the dishes, spoke to the almost irrelevance of Time, in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen’.65 The short story ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) centrally features a terrifying ‘skeleton clock’, ‘threatening to a degree its oddness could not explain’. The clock’s uncanniness lies in its refusal to countenance (literally) metonymy, in its startling lack of a ‘face’; it rebukes the fiction of a division between the human and the non-human, shockingly exposing its own ‘anatomy’.66 Just as clocks have ‘faces’, they tell the time by pointing their ‘hands’. A ‘dead’ clock in Eva Trout; Or, Changing Scenes (1968) is manipulated by Eva, the least ‘humanly’ embodied of Bowen’s characters, who, in one of her many unconscious refusals of the normative, prises the clock’s ‘glass face open and stood moving the hands around to imaginary hours’.67 Extremities, especially hands, are the body parts most likely to betray the non-humanness of the human assemblage in Bowen’s work. Mrs Cadman, of ‘A Queer Heart’ (1941), finds that her toes, when released from tight shoes, wiggle ‘of their own accord; they seemed to have an independent existence’.68 Eight-year-old Herbert’s feet, as he arrives at a Christmas party at the Tommy Crans, in the story of that name, ‘die of cold in his boots: he stamped the couple of coffins’.69 More sinisterly, Prothero, the murderer in ‘The Disinherited’ (1934), helplessly compelled to

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write out the story of the killing every night, believes his fingers are complicit with the unnameable force driving his nightly confessions.70 Max and Karen’s affair appears to be initiated by their hands acting without their owners’ conscious intent: ‘Their unexploring, consenting touch lasted; they did not look at each other or at their hands’.71 Portia’s hands in The Death of the Heart have to be subdued when they behave like ‘a pair of demented kittens’.72 In The Heat of the Day, Stella’s hands often seem scarcely to belong to her. In a photograph, her hand appears ‘as though it had been someone else’s’. After Harrison tells Stella that her lover, Robert, is a Nazi spy, ‘her fingers, having exhausted any capacity to tremble, any further to feel the touch of each other, lay in an inanimate tangle in her lap’, and, late in the text, when she has become most alienated from herself, nothing but an ‘image’ behaving automatically, her ‘dead gloved hands crossed in her lap’.73 The hands of Iseult, Eva Trout’s former teacher who buries her talent and ambition in a conventional marriage, betray a ghostly trace of residual animation; she is ‘a carcase: only her hands livingly twisting themselves together’. Eva herself consoles one of her ‘rejected’ hands by lying on it.74 Eva’s hand in this early scene has been ‘rejected’ by a ‘transistor’ that surprises Eva in its uninviting, unhuman coldness. Eva expects sympathy from objects, especially mechanised and electronic objects, perhaps because, as Tina O’Toole has suggested, of all of Bowen’s creations, she is the most ‘cyborgian’.75 O’Toole uses the adjective in the sense established by Donna Haraway in her 1991 essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: a feminist analysis of the modern hybridisation of machine and (human as well as nonhuman) animal and its implications for subjectivity, especially for women. Haraway’s essay aims ‘to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism’, and to present ‘the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’.76 Eva’s imaginative couplings include transmaterial affections. While comic questions associated with her – like ‘So these were humans and this was what it was like being amongst them?’ or ‘what is a person?77 – make Eva sound extraterrestrial, she is not the only character in Bowen who betrays the already alien, partly mechanical nature of human embodiment. Citing the author’s own reported creative process, her stated lack of interest in ‘personalities’, Ellmann observes that Bowen ‘creates men and women “without qualities”’ who do not act as ‘independent agents’.78 Emmeline, in To the North, is particularly prone to seeing the machine rising up in others. Her office assistant, Miss Tripp, has to remind her that ‘I am human’, and Emmeline stares ‘so fixedly’ at Cecilia that she sees ‘little cogs interlocked, each clicking each around each other. She sat blinking at this machinery of agitation’.79 In the 1934 short story ‘The Tommy Crans’, ‘Nancy, standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you cut the string at the back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers’.80 In The House in Paris, both Naomi, described by Max as having ‘always been hard-working, mechanical with her fingers’, and Karen, who ‘felt like a wound-up toy’, share this mechanical quality with Iseult in Eva Trout, whose ‘movements as a housewife were those of a marionette’.81 For these particular female characters, their mechanisation points to a deadening submission to limiting heterosexist imperatives, including tearaway Nancy, who, though only nine, is facetiously toasted as a bride when cutting the Christmas cake. In Bowen’s last novel, the character of Eva Trout, despite her tragic fate, suggests other, liberating possibilities, more in line with Haraway’s cyborg. Eva is an object of fascination and

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frustration in her disregard for social expectations, including those organising sex and gender. As Iseult observes, ‘she belonged in some other category. “Girl” never fitted Eva.’82 When Iseult’s husband attempts a clumsy declaration of erotic interest, Eva’s refusal to engage makes him look ludicrous. Eric’s reaction confirms Eva’s flat acknowledgement of his silliness: Eric got hold of Eva by the pouchy front of her anorak and shook her. The easy articulation of her joints made this rewarding – her head rolled on her shoulders, her arms swung from them. Her teeth did not rattle, being firm in her gums, but coins and keys all over her clinked and jiggled.83 The reward is short-lived, however, as Eva confirms her unyielding, non-reactive thingness, her impenetrability and imperturbability. Eric is ultimately neutralised by her passive resistance to his performances of masculinity. As has been noted by O’Toole and others, Eva’s passions tend to be directed toward other women, her schoolfriend, Elsinore, and her former teacher, Iseult. Luciano and Chen discuss the ‘lesbian body’ as exemplifying ‘the machinic or cyborgian condition of the (post)human body’: ‘In these formulations and others, the figure of the queer/trans body does not merely unsettle the human as the norm; it generates other possibilities – multiple, cyborgian, spectral, transcorporeal, transmaterial – for living.’84 Eva, whose ‘irrational female body has put her in possession of a non-normative identity’,85 generates ‘other possibilities for living’ in her explicitly machinic transmaterial affections. She puts the existing furniture, the ‘old guard’, on notice when furnishing her newly acquired independent home with ‘outstanding examples of everything auro-visual on the market this year, 1959’. Not only are the old walls ‘surprised’ by this takeover, but even the ageless sun illuminating the equipment is transformed into something thoroughly up to date, taking ‘on the heightened voltage of studio lighting’.86 ‘Cyborg figures’, according to Haraway, ‘are the offspring of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural and artificial.’87 In Bowen’s fiction, the non-human, whether deemed ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, perversely enables enhanced communication with other versions of being and identity than those conventionally operative. One of the organising ‘organic’ temporalities that Bowen transgresses is that imposed between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’, a teleology that discounts the possibility of realms and experiences other than those allowed for by reason and science. If a continuity is assumed between the human and the non-human, between subjects and objects, then the meaning attached to death is transformed. Barad’s call for an ethics predicated on the ‘entanglement’ of all phenomena draws significantly on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, in which he argues that our relationship with the dead is one of responsibility, including recognising the power of the non-living to live on. It has often been noted that the lives of Bowen’s characters are powerfully shaped, if not determined by, the dead, and that living characters can seem less animated than those who have passed away. Bennett and Royle extend this trope of haunting to suggest that the material human body, not just consciousness, memory or emotion, can be haunted, specifically by itself, by its own otherness.88 These textual moments that reveal the body as object and as abject create liminal spaces of possibility, open up identity ‘to its provisional vicissitudes, its shimmering self-variations that enable it to become other than what it is’.89 Fluid exchanges occur between the dead and the living, the human and the non-human, the subject and object all at once, most

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uncannily in the preserved animal which approaches the figure of metonymy, only to disable it in scenes of frustrated desire and barely suppressed comic absurdity. In The Death of the Heart, teenage Portia writes in her journal about Eddie, a somewhat older man who is misleading her about his feelings in order to enjoy an extended flirtation: ‘When he woke up, he said that if he was a lady’s fox fur and I was him, I would certainly stroke his head. While I did, he made himself look as if he had glass eyes, like a fur.’90 In a foreign boarding house, where Karen, in The House in Paris, has arranged to meet Max, ‘a real ram’s head glared from the hall wall; the manageress looked through her hatch with glass eyes too’.91 The short story ‘A Walk in the Woods’ follows a woman conducting a depressing affair with a younger man. The couple meet in a park, having nowhere else to go. Other haunted couples come together in this in-between space, and ‘The still, damp glittering woods, the majestic death of the year were reflected in the opaque eyes of these women – hardly more human, very much less pathetic than the glass eyes of the foxes some of them wore’.92 The haunted body of the stuffed animal refuses stable figuration, the foundational technology of difference that secures the sovereignty of the human subjective. The multiplying slippages here between fur and fox, between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, as well as organic eyes and synthetic eyes, instantiate the kind of commingling of ‘phantasmagoria and anthropomorphism’ that Bennett and Royle identify in their discussion of Bowen’s ‘dream wood’, which stages a ‘fairytale collusion of the oneiric and arboreal’.93 Traditional fairy tales often take place in the mysterious woods, where natural and supernatural forces act in collusion with each other. As the woman in Bowen’s ‘A Walk in the Wood’ notes of such places, they ‘continue an everlasting terrible fairy tale, in which you are always lost’.94 The loss of self is at once ‘terrible’ and exhilaratingly dangerous, the ultimate loss of self to be realised in death. As Ellmann has observed of Bowen’s work, ‘every object has a psyche; in fact, her objects even have neuroses’,95 and every object has an opportunity to be resurrected from its material death, according to Laurence. When death (and possibly resurrection) is shared across the human–non-human divide, when it is part of a communal process and not individualised, its horrors recede. Bowen’s fiction features dead mills and executed houses (in The Last September), as well as dresses that can be martyred and which have funerals (‘The Needle Case’ and A World of Love). In this enchanted, through-the-looking-glass world, it is ‘human life and human culture’ that appear ‘spectral’,96 while the non-human takes on ‘the value of the magical’.97 The magic that inheres in objects, ‘their force as a sensuous presence or a metaphysical presence’,98 runs through Bowen’s fiction, testifying to the disquieting but potentially reassuring truth that we are not isolated from the natural world, not marooned in selfmade exile, but intrinsically implicates a wide range of forces, internal – such as the human biome – and external – including weather systems and planetary movements. The metaphysical significance of the non-human promises radical epistemologies born of the kind of ‘fruitful couplings’ enabled by Haraway’s cyborg. The promise of non-human couplings is suggested in Bowen’s acknowledged ‘animist sensibilities’. To return to The Good Tiger, when the tiger runs away from his friends’ house in fright and goes on to discover that not all humans are happy to see him, he retreats to the forest, where he falls asleep and dreams of his younger self running free, a vision of the past that is also a kind of alternative present and future that exists in a parallel world. Bowen’s work often evokes a parallel world. As Paul Muldoon says of Bowen’s fiction,

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‘There’s a sense of two discrete coexistent realms. . . . Concomitant with that, though, is the fact there’s no distinction between one world and the next.’99 Neither world exists on another planet or on another plane of existence; we inhabit both, but refuse to acknowledge more than one. In Bowen’s Court, Bowen attributes the depth of her family’s ‘continuous religious experience’ to their ‘emotional ties to nature’: ‘the children in this bare house surrounded by light and weather grew up with a constant sense of the nearness of god’,100 a spirituality closer to animism than to Anglican orthodoxy. In The Death of the Heart, the woods are described as having a ‘secret vitality’101; in The Heat of the Day, even the city soil seems to ‘generate more strength’ in its springtime rebirth102; and in To the North the narrator refers to ‘this breathing outline of earth, these little mysterious woods, each aloof from each other’103: descriptions that echo the Gaia principle that the world itself is a living organism. Inglesby suggests that Bowen felt wedded, intellectually and emotionally, to the idea of a parallel universe of things that cool rationality and suspicion of her own motives seemed to want to take away from her. . . . She felt that the material world had the capacity for morality, agency, and even feelings, but that these qualities remained at best obscure, and in some ways, unreachable.104 Inglesby casts Bowen’s relationship to the non-human as a source of unease and insecurity in Bowen’s writing, a site of artistic failure. In my reading of Bowen, however, it is the joyful erotic playfulness galvanising her worlds that makes the fiction at once very odd and irresistible. While there is much that is valuable in Inglesby’s readings, a new materialist approach allows for an interpretation of writerly frustration with the ineffability of the non-human world as productive, not as a deficiency or failure of vision. Pointing out the limits of our comprehension of the unseen world is, in the words of Bennett, a chance ‘to change radically what people can “see”’. New materialist analysis, like Bowen’s work, ‘overthrows the regime of the perceptible’.105 The novelist’s use of the comic also plays a role not only in suggesting revised perceptive possibilities, but also in staging ethical interventions. Her insistence on the sustaining and undeniable bonds that deeply entangle the human and non-human confronts us with our responsibilities. Nearly a century after Bowen began her writing career, in our present time of climate emergency, the urgency of an awareness of the connections between the human and the non-human cannot be overstated, and the most serious subjects are, arguably, most effectively, even appropriately, conveyed in the comic mode. In the words of Joseph Meeker, ‘As comedy sees it, the important thing is to live and to encourage life even though it is probably meaningless to do so. If the survival of our species is trivial, then so is comedy.’106

Notes 1. Bowen, The Last September, pp. 55–6. 2. Inglesby, ‘Expressive Objects’, pp. 307, 306. 3. See, for example: Ellmann, Shadow; Bennett and Royle, Dissolution of the Novel; Coulson, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’; Inglesby, ‘Expressive Objects’; Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen; SummersBremner, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things’; Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds’; Osborn, ‘How to measure’; Dutoit, ‘& co-graphy’.

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the queer and comic non-human in elizabeth bowen 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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Rohman, Stalking the Subject, p. 26; Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 50. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, p. 453. Teekell, ‘Language at War’, p. 61. Ó’Faoláin, ‘A Reading and Remembrance’, p. 15. Bowen, qtd in Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 118. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, p. 147. Bowen, The Last September, p. 170. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. 71. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 9–10. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. xvii. Osborn, ‘How to measure’, p. 57. Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, p. 32. Bowen, ‘The Jungle’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 231–41. Ibid., pp. 231, 236, 235. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 8. Bowen, Collected Stories, p. 237. Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 69. Many Bowen critics have discussed the ‘non-standard sexual arrangements of various kinds throughout her work’ (Coughlan, ‘Bowen’, p. 48), the fact that her ‘female characters tend to be bewitched by members of their own sex, while officially attached to members of the other’ (Ellmann, Shadow, p. 2). Coughlan, ‘Women and Desire’, p. 105. Luciano and Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, p. 185. Barad, Interview, p. 59. Bowen, To the North, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 148, 55, 17. Ibid., pp. 7; 106; 76; 79; 82. Bowen, Friends and Relations, p. 116. Bowen, Hotel, p. 33. Bowen, ‘The Dancing-Mistress’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 251–62, p. 256. Coulson, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’, p. 388. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, pp. 13, 141, 316. Ibid., pp. 43, 114. Ibid., pp. 216, 217, 226, 228, 231. Bowen, ‘The Easter Egg Party’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 529–38, p. 532. Bowen, ‘The Parrot’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 112–23, p. 117. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. xv; Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 42. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, p. 73. Colletta, Dark Humour, p. 1. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. 66. Bennett and Royle observe of Bowen’s animal metaphors that her ‘comedy is the incisive deflation of human sense’ (ibid.). Bowen, Good Tiger, p. 15. Coulson, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’, p. 378. Bowen, ‘The Cat Jumps’ (1934), in The Cat Jumps, pp. 31–42, pp. 38, 31. Ibid., pp. 40, 42. Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 144. Bowen, The Cat Jumps, pp. 40, 41. Ibid., pp. 123, 203. Rohman, Stalking the Subject, p. 27. Walsh, ‘Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist’, passim. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 11. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 30.

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418 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

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maureen o’connor Bowen, House in Paris, p. 11. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., pp. 218–19, 220. Luciano and Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, p. 186. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 3. Bowen, House in Paris, p. 263. Ellmann, Shadow, p. 143. Dutoit has observed ‘the way in which a former now inhabits, haunts our current now’ in Bowen’s fiction (‘& co-graphy’, p. 188), while Bennett and Royle make note of the ways in which Bowen’s treatment of space is implicated in her idiosyncratic narrative temporalities: in the ‘uncannily fissured’ presents of her fiction, there are ‘impossible and non-temporal moments that traverse the mobilities of people’ (Dissolution, pp. 28, 3). Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed, p. 110. Ferris, ‘Writing on the Border’, p. 99. Stevens, ‘The Art of Politics’, p. 150. Luciano and Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, p. 187. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 98. Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements’, pp. 260, 261. Bowen, World of Love, p. 21. Bowen, Ivy Gripped the Steps, p. 36. Bowen, Eva Trout, p. 138. Bowen, ‘A Queer Heart’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 556–562, p. 559. Bowen, The Cat Jumps, p. 9. Bowen, ‘The Disinherited’ (1934), in The Cat Jumps, pp. 49–97. Bowen, House in Paris, p. 128. Bowen, Death of the Heart, p. 262. Bowen, Heat of the Day, pp. 90, 39, 283. Bowen, Eva Trout, pp. 25, 47. O’Toole, ‘Angels and Monsters’, p. 169. Haraway, Promises of Monsters, pp. 149, 150. Bowen, Eva Trout, pp. 51, 193. Ellmann, Shadow, p. 23. Bowen, To the North, pp. 120, 98. Bowen, ‘The Tommy Crans’ (1934), in The Cat Jumps, pp. 9–17, p. 12. Bowen, House in Paris, pp. 119, 190; Bowen, Eva Trout, p. 23. Bowen, Eva Trout, p. 243. Ibid., p. 88. Luciano and Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, p. 187. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 246. Bowen, Eva Trout, p. 118. Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 12. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. 142. Grosz, Becoming Undone, p. 91. Bowen, Death of the Heart, p. 158. Bowen, House in Paris, p. 150. Bowen, ‘A Walk in the Woods’, in The Collected Stories, pp. 488–96, p. 489. Bennett and Royle, Dissolution, p. 65. The yoking of the oneiric and arboreal recalls the subtitle of a short story by another comic Irish writer, Oscar Wilde, ‘The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealist Romance’, which similarly closes the received distance between ‘realism’ and the fantastic using a ligneous adjective.

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the queer and comic non-human in elizabeth bowen 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

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Bowen, Collected Stories, p. 495. Ellmann, Shadow, p. 6. Sturrok, ‘Mumbo-Jumbo’, p. 55. Inglesby, ‘Expressive Objects’, p. 311. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 5. Muldoon, To Ireland, I, p. 25. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, p. 147. Bowen, Death of the Heart, p. 158. Bowen, Heat of the Day, p. 86. Bowen, To the North, p. 252. Inglesby, ‘Expressive Objects’, pp. 308–9. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 107. Meeker, ‘The Comedy of Survival’, p. 12.

Bibliography Barad, Karan, Interview, in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (eds), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 48–70. Barad, Karan, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, Kvinder Køn og Forskning, 1:2 (2012), pp. 25–53. Barad, Karan, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010), pp. 240–68. Barreca, Regina, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humour in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995). Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Bowen, Elizabeth, A World of Love (London: Vintage, 1999). Bowen, Elizabeth, Bowen’s Court (Cork: Collins Press, 1998). Bowen, Elizabeth, Eva Trout; Or, Changing Scenes (London: Vintage, 1999). Bowen, Elizabeth, Friends and Relations (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). Bowen, Elizabeth, Ivy Gripped the Steps (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Collected Stories (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1981). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Death of the Heart (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Good Tiger (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Hotel (London: Vintage, 2003). Bowen, Elizabeth, The House in Paris (New York: Anchor Books, 2002). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Last September (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Little Girls (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964). Bowen, Elizabeth, To the North (New York: Penguin, 1986). Brown, Bill, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1, 2001, pp. 1–16. Colletta, Lisa, Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel: Triumph of Narcissism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Corcoran, Neil, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Coughlan, Patricia, ‘Bowen, the 1920s and “The Dancing Mistress”’, in É. Walshe (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Irish University Press, 2009), pp. 40–64. Coughlan, Patricia, ‘Women and Desire in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen’, in É. Walshe (ed.), Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 103–34.

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Coulson, Victoria, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’, in A. Poole (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 377–92. Dutoit, Thomas, ‘& co-graphy’, The Oxford Literary Review, 41:1 (2019), pp. 68–87. Ellmann, Maud, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Ferris, Ina, ‘Writing on the Border: The National Tale, Feminism and the Public Sphere’, in T. Rajan and J. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Reforming Literature 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Foster, Roy, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993). Grosz, Elizabeth, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflection on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011). Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). Haraway, Donna, Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Hoogland, Renée, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). Inglesby, Elizabeth, ‘“Expressive Objects”: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53:2 (2007), pp. 306–33. Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Lee, Hermione, Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999). Luciano, Dana, and Mel Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:3 (2015), pp. 183–207. Meeker, Joseph, ‘The Comedy of Survival’, The North American Review, 257:2 (1972), pp. 11–17. Mooney, Sinead, ‘Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian Affinities’, in S. Osborn (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), pp. 13–33. Muldoon, Paul, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Ó’Faoláin, Seán, ‘A Reading and Remembrance of Elizabeth Bowen’, London Review of Books, 4:4 (March 1982), pp. 15–16. Osborn, Susan, ‘“How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees”: The Strange Relation between Style and Meaning in The Last September’, in S. Osborn (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), pp. 34–60. O’Toole, Tina, ‘Angels and Monsters: Embodiment and Desire in Eva Trout’, in É. Walshe (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Irish University Press, 2009), pp. 162–78. Rohman, Carrie, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994). Stevens, Julie Anne, ‘The Art of Politics in Somerville and Ross’s Fiction with Emphasis on Their Final Collection of Stories, In Mr Knox’s Country’, in Heidi Hansson (ed.), Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), pp. 142–60. Sturrok, June, ‘Mumbo-Jumbo: The Haunted World of The Little Girls’, in S. Osborn (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), pp. 83–95. Summers-Bremner, Eluned, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Paris and Death of the Heart’, in S. Osborn (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), pp. 61–82. Teekell, Anna, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Language at War’, New Hibernia Review, 15:3 (2001), pp. 61–79. Walsh, Keri, ‘Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist’, Éire-Ireland, 42:3 (2007), pp. 126–47.

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24 Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity Sarah E. McKibben

T

his chapter explores Irish-language modernism as a sociocultural mode that emerges from precarity to pose a series of challenges to orthodoxies in the literature, thought and political praxis of its time.1 I hope to expand understanding of this under-studied topic by sketching the historical context of Irish modernism and by examining two important works that address the lives of characteristic Irish speakers under modernity. Yet twentieth-century Irish-language modernism cannot be contextualised by socioeconomic or political information alone, but must be recognised as unavoidably shaped by majoritarian, English-language representations that characterise the language and its speakers as premodern. My first text offers a well-known example: Robert Flaherty’s fictionalised docudrama, Man of Aran (1934), purports to depict the lives of Irish-speaking islanders in the west of Ireland, but instead romanticises a carefully edited version of Irishness to portray an ‘indomitable’ struggle for ‘existence, bare though it may be’ (in the words of the opening titles).2 My second text, Pádraic Ó Conaire’s early modernist 1910 novella, Deoraíocht (‘Exile’), counters such mythologisation with a grim picaresque about the alienation and stigma suffered by a poor Irishman disabled while seeking work in London. By means of this exploration, I hope to enrich our understanding both of certain narrative texts in Irish and of Irish-language modernism itself so as to critique some persistent misconceptions concerning Irish modernism and Irish-language literature. To be sure, literature in Irish remains, for the most part, so marginalised even within Irish Studies, and certainly within literary and cultural studies more generally, that relatively modest claims about this symbolically freighted yet endangered medium – including its sophistication, value or relevance to theoretical debates – still constitute heresies against a smugly indifferent, often condescending Anglophone status quo. I begin by enumerating the simple yet evidently controversial claims that inform my explorations. First, Irish-language literature was a part of modernism, regardless of whether people recognised it as such, and notwithstanding its sometimes marked differences from Anglophone modernism(s). Second, modern Irish-language cultural production is unavoidably conditioned by the ongoing experience of postcolonial marginalisation and cultural displacement. This marginalisation enables modern Irishlanguage literature to speak presciently to the ruptures and contradictions of (post) modernity, as well as to the modes of resistance and creativity these ruptures incite.3 Third, if we are to critique the relentless self-promotion of Anglophone modernism and its proponents, then we must expand Irish modernism to include Irish-language

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cultural production. Fourth, consequently, full understanding of Irish modernism will elude us as long as its Irish-language iterations remain disregarded, superficially referenced, or treated only in translation rather than confronted directly. Close attention to these Irish texts, on the other hand, offers the potential to transform conversations defining and redefining what we think we know about modernism – both within and beyond Irish studies. Before turning to Ó Conaire’s 1910 thematisation of marginalisation, I take up Robert Flaherty’s enormously influential work in English as exemplifying the double bind faced by Irish-language participants in modernist cultural production. Produced by a British film company seeking to replicate the success of Flaherty’s surprise hit Nanook of the North (1922), Man of Aran similarly employs the quintessentially modern genre of film to portray its subjects as archaic survivals of a lost world.4 Man of Aran was shot for Gaumont-British film company on Árainn, the largest of the Aran Islands, then a predominantly Irish-speaking though functionally bilingual community. Shot episodically and rather haphazardly as a silent film, with selective dubbing added later, and set to a full orchestral score by John D. H. Greenwood, the widely acclaimed though controversial film has been termed by a later critic ‘une rêverie poétique sur la condition humaine’ (‘a poetic reverie on the human condition’).5 In Man of Aran, exquisitely crisp shots alternate between medium close-ups of its doughty, telegenic characters toiling resolutely in the rugged landscape, and dramatic, extended takes of the sea surging and battering the rocks. As in Nanook, the Irish–American filmmaker dramatised the epic struggle between ‘man’ [sic] and ‘nature’ in a traditional society whose way of life is passing, using a fictional husband, wife and son, portrayed by unrelated locals who had not acted before. This trio undertake what were thought to be more or less characteristic activities of island life, performed for the camera.6 Hence, we see the son catching a crab, which he later uses as bait to fish from the edge of enormous cliffs, the wife tending the home, and the threesome gathering seaweed to interleave with laboriously broken rock to create precious garden soil. A famous sequence shows a male crew harpooning huge basking sharks – a long defunct practice – which is followed by a dramatic scene of men heroically rowing through high seas to get to shore, where they lose their craft to the waves after beaching it. Though the film shows more than relentless struggle, it recurs to the spectacle of the collective wresting a meagre subsistence from ‘this desperate environment’ (as the opening titles put it) through enculturated skill, physical prowess and sheer tenacity.7 Thus the film romanticises the Aran community’s poverty, hard labour, danger and risk-taking in an unforgiving yet majestic landscape: an enduring representation of primitivism that was immediately embraced by official Ireland – the Irish Free State created in 1922 – as a nationalist touchstone. In place of the stage Irish buffoon, here was a vision of archaic, manly strength and courage in which all Irish people could take pride.8 Since the Aran islanders were understood (erroneously) to be ‘pure’ descendants of the original Celts, the film authenticated the ancestral heroism of an implicitly racialised collectivity. To portray this idealised premodern image, however, the film famously leaves a great deal out. We do not see the better land just out of view, the class antagonisms and complex politics of the island, emigration, government schemes or markets. Nor do we see whatever activities or items might belie the stark, premodern struggle the film portrays, such as musical gatherings, books, fashionable clothing,

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contemporary hairstyles or complex verbal wit, not to mention non-conformity and human variation. As one critic said, the real story of Aran was ‘the fight to hold the land against eviction . . . seaweed is a poor substitute for story’.9 To portray the islanders as living remnants of the past, the ‘documentary’ filmmaker has to fictionalise their daily life again and again. Correspondingly, to produce the mythologising, marketable, modernist vision of the filmmaker and, latterly, the state, the islanders must be made non-modern, a strategy that once again relegates Irish-speaking communities to a stereotyped, if idealised, past. But the film does more than enact precarity: it exacts it. Not only did the actors flirt with danger in the quotidian island way – the boy who fishes, climbs, and looks out from massive cliffs from which he might fall or which might collapse beneath him at any time, for instance – and which, in fact, did collapse not long after filming.10 The islanders were also required by Flaherty to go out repeatedly on perilous seas so that he could get his shots, taking uncharacteristically foolhardly risks.11 Put simply, the Aran islanders’ endangerment, injury and potential death over the course of filming enabled Flaherty’s dramatic filmic representation.12 That said, though money was a very real inducement, it was not the only one: inculcated patterns of respect for wellto-do outsiders intensified the economic power dynamic. Despite various factors that disempowered all of the amateur actors, at least some of the islanders also shared a desire to challenge negative representations in order to do Aran proud before the world, and came to feel some degree of ownership over the film. As fixer Pat Mullen writes, the film ‘was to be of my Island and of my people’, and for this reason he was very anxious that the film, when finished, would be ‘a really great piece of work’.13 To forestall individual or collective dishonour, Mullen, on his own initiative, mocked the men to get them to go out on dangerous seas. If Mullen is to be believed, at least some of the risks he induced islanders to take were done despite Flaherty’s expressed alarm and anger at the thought of the actors endangering themselves. And yet the fact remains that Flaherty and his film prompted all of the risk-taking.14 Thus the islanders did more than contribute to the artwork: their material bodies, risk-taking, physical know-how and shared scene-crafting co-created it. Their bodies, with which they were encouraged to take repeated physical risks in perilous waters, are, of course, the material with which the filmmaker creates his vision. Their shapes – mistaken for mere form – are what we see outlined against the cloudy sky or straining at the oars to create the modernist filmic object. Theirs, too, the embodied, implicit cultural knowhow and characteristic ways of acting that are deployed against a fearsome ‘Nature’ to make the film.15 The irony is that the islanders co-create the modernist object, collaborating in this new representational mode – in which they none the less symbolise the archaic non- or premodern on screen, through which the film discovers and retails its own modernity. In a further irony, Man of Aran leaves out something else – the very thing that sonically confirms the islanders’ supposedly archaic difference, the key to their authenticating function in the youthful Irish state: the Irish language. After filming Man of Aran as a silent film, to which antiquated titles were added, Flaherty brought the actors to a London studio, where they recorded the overwhelmingly English-language script.16 The replacement of Irish with English presumably served the interests of marketability, accessibility and, perhaps, authorial control. Irish is not completely eliminated, however, but is visible (and potentially legible) in the film on busy lips that rarely

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synchronise with the repetitive, over-simple English script. Irish is also audible at certain moments, though it is unclear whether the actors were told to use some Irish or spontaneously burst forth as they re-enacted scenes doing the voiceover in the London studio.17 Incidentally, it was then that Flaherty shot the first Irish-language film on a mocked-up Irish cabin, borrowing the feature film’s leads: the recently recovered, eleven-minute, state-sponsored Oidhche Sheanchais (‘A Night of Storytelling’) (1934), which was intended to demonstrate folk tradition in the schools, thus simultaneously centring Irish and retrospecting it in a further act of romantic, eleventh-hour ethnography.18 It was not Oidhche Sheanchais but Man of Aran that captured the world’s imagination and left an enduring mark on how Irish and its speakers were known. Man of Aran demonstrates the conundrum faced by its speakers, who help construct, yet are devoiced by, the modernist text. Accordingly, we might give Man of Aran’s lead, Colman ‘Tiger’ King, a final, deflationary word. Shortly before his death in 1976, he looked back on the experience as ‘cuid eile do mo shaol’ ([just] ‘another part of my life’) and recalled the media hoopla at the opening as not signifying much, either: ‘Bhí a fhios agam go maith gur bullshit a bhí ann’ (‘I well knew it was bullshit’).19 Inconceivable and indeed unsayable within the film’s own frame, these words capture a freshly modern scepticism about the whole process of its creation. Whereas Man of Aran retails the supposed premodernity of an Irish-speaking community, Galway-born, Gaeltacht-raised Pádraic Ó Conaire starkly thematises the precarity and consequent devoicing experienced by Irish speakers, including in his own life as the first professional writer in Irish for many centuries. As an outspoken defender of the need to engage with the modern in Irish, Ó Conaire helped to develop the short-story genre in Irish in the early years of the twentieth century.20 Ó Conaire’s stories view modernity from the vantage of a community suffering its dislocating effects, particularly soul-crushing poverty that forces constant emigration to the harshly indifferent, alienating city. Yet as bleak as the city appears in his work, Ó Conaire’s Gaeltacht offers no romantic refuge.21 O’Conaire’s rural Ireland is an unsentimental, difficult place, very much at odds with conventional, idealised representation or folktale. His stories provided a ‘jolt out of the age of the traditional storytelling and into the twentieth century’ for his contemporaries – that is, the shock of the modern.22 From its very title, Ó Conaire’s novella, Deoraíocht (‘Exile’) (1910), pays particular attention to the psychological effects of marginalisation in modernity, as well as its critique of, and challenge to, devoicing. Never polished, but left jagged with gaps and inconsistencies, the work stands as both the earliest instance of modernist fiction in Irish and ‘an t-aon úrscéal sóisialach atá againn sa Ghaeilge’ (‘the only socialist novel we have in Irish’).23 Drawing upon personal knowledge of London, radical politics, the modes and motifs of oral storytelling, and his study of contemporary European and Russian literature, Ó Conaire depicts life in London in blunt, evocative language studded with neologisms.24 He breaks from the ‘stíl reitriciúil líofa’ (‘fluent rhetorical style’) that persisted in Irish before and long after, demonstrating how a varied and interiorised language could tackle novel subjects and express Revivalists’ profound scepticism about urban life, the alienation of which is registered in most characters’ lack of proper names.25 Though the work is unpolished, its themes of alienation partake of the central concerns of European modernism, and the radical impact of the new – so much so that both this work and Ó Conaire’s 1906 short story collection,

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Nora Mharcuis Bhig, were removed from the National University syllabus ‘on the grounds of sensuality and perversity’.26 The novella lays bare the experience of modernity from the vantage of the vulnerable, beginning where so many of Ó Conaire’s stories end, with a terrible accident.27 After a failed romance, the narrator, Mícheál Ó Maoláin, has emigrated to London. Yet unlike the author, who found work as a civil servant in Whitehall, spending fifteen years in London before returning to Ireland to become a full-time writer, Mícheál has not found steady work. Indeed, ‘ní mórán achair eile a d’fhanfainn ann’ (p. 1) (‘I should not have stayed there much longer’, p. 9), he says, if he could have afforded to go home.28 Instead, he was struck by a car while looking for work, losing an arm and a leg – unfortunately, he says, not dying then and there. Right from the novella’s first page, then, Ó Conaire foregrounds the entrapping poverty that pursues the Gaeltacht emigrant in exile. Instead of finding work, Mícheál is severely injured by the emblematic machine of modernity – the automobile – so that he can no longer do the heavy manual labour that had long been the lot of poor Irish migrants. Like Ó Conaire’s earlier, prize-winning story, ‘Páidín Mháire’, whose protagonist also suffers maiming and receives financial compensation, Ó Conaire’s Deoraíocht shares a similar focus on the dangers of modern industry and capitalism on the people pulled from the country to make both function.29 The novella centres on the plight of poor Irishmen (and other subordinated groups) who create the means of characteristically modern acceleration, building the channels – from canals to railways to modern roads, as well as the bridges and tunnels they required – that (some) goods and people can traverse with unprecedented speed. But these workers do so at great personal cost30 – just as the actors in Man of Aran endanger themselves to make modernist art. If modernism can be defined as a ‘celebration of dynamism, the delirious multiplication of the possibilities of self’ or ‘essentially as acceleration’, how you perceive it depends a lot upon whether you’re driving – or being run over.31 Physical impairment and Mícheál’s facial disfigurement, with ‘éadan casta millte scólta’ (p. 2) (‘a twisted, warped and ruined face’, p. 10), brings psychic anguish along with incapacity for work. His overwhelming sense of social death and worsening alienation as a now-disabled foreigner provokes a mixture of pity and fear. Depressed and raging, Mícheál squanders his £250 accident compensation on drink and bad company. After a drinking companion portrays him as a German who murdered eight people in a fit of madness before becoming a lion hunter who was savaged by a lion (!), an impresario in the pub, identified as Yellowman, offers Mícheál a place in his travelling sideshow as a wild man for £3 per week. Desperate for money, Mícheál accepts, despite being warned against this abasement by the Big Red-Haired Woman, a fellow Gaeltacht migrant who overhears him drunkenly rambling in Irish. Mícheál is employed to terrify the crowds by shouting madly with his good leg tucked under him, wearing a wig, brass chains and grotesque makeup, a prospect that humiliates him even before he begins his performance. Illustrating both the alienation and the narrow, debasing prospects for emigrants’ work, Mícheál becomes ‘uafás agus feic saolta’ (p. 23) (‘a horror and a public spectacle’, p. 31) before the world. As Angela Bourke points out,32 the initial stigma of being a colonised subaltern seeking work is worsened by Mícheál’s injuries, before being intensified yet again when he becomes a wild man in a freak show who must roar rather than speak. Here, disability functions as both metaphor and signifier, legible as a sign of Mícheál’s alienated vulnerability

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under modernity and as a plausible product of that precarious position, just as the story retains its grounding in the sociopolitical even as it plumbs the depths of a damaged subjectivity. By dwelling on Mícheál’s emblematic suffering and alienation, Deoraíocht opposes the devoicing and dehumanising stigma experienced by poor emigrants whose stories were either unheard or falsified in both languages. Two powerful moments in the story make the work’s implicit protest against oppression and misrepresentation more explicit. Having been paraded earlier on a cart around his home town of Galway as advertising for the freak show– with no one recognising him – Mícheál is still further humiliated by having his supposed betrothal to the (equally stigmatised) Fat Lady announced as part of the show. At this point, embittered and enraged, he throws off his disguise to disclose the hoax, and a riot breaks out as the people protest at having been tricked. In this moment, Mícheál takes back his power of speech and, ‘in ard mo ghutha’ (‘at the top of [his] voice’), explosively demands ‘cead cainte!’ (p. 57) (‘permission to speak!’, p. 68) to give the lie to the impresario’s stories. Angela Bourke sees this protest against oppression, and Mícheál’s later incitement of women workers outside a burning chemical factory, as key moments when ‘he recovers his lost self’ and ‘finds his voice in his native language’.33 Certainly, his explosive refusal to be silenced dramatises the need for political awakening among those subjected to modernity’s costs for the benefit of others, and for artistic expression in their own language by those silenced by stigma. But Ó Conaire is too much a modernist – too sceptical and worldly – to end there. In the absence of adequate work, community, support, status, rights or a place in the world, Mícheál’s protest is symbolically resonant but ultimately futile, just as the women’s protest expresses solidarity and nascent resistance, but hardly changes the destructive forces of capitalism. Mícheál returns to London, alienated and penniless once more, and ultimately dies alone in a park with a toy weapon in his pocket, along with the handwritten ‘papers’ from which his story is said to have been reconstructed. Ó Conaire’s story asserts the need and right of people to tell their own stories – to counter the wholesale devoicing experienced by Irish and its speakers, and to produce a sustained critique of the socioeconomic forces that keep them disempowered. He points to the necessity of a larger process of collective voicing in the face of Irish speakers’ marginalisation and tokenisation, while reiterating the inherently political nature of writing in Irish (or any marginalised language).34 Ó Conaire thus self-referentially and metafictionally makes the case for a modern literature in Irish. Early on, Mícheál looks about, seeing ‘A scéal féin ag gach aon duine agus mo scéal mór brónach agam féin’ (p. 2) (‘Every one with his own story to tell, and I myself with my own great, sad story’, trans. modified, p. 10), to which people should attend: ‘Bhí fearg orm nár bacadh liom – nár fiafraíodh scéala díom’ (p. 2) (‘I was angry because nobody noticed me, because nobody asked me for my story,’ p. 10). Instead, others look at him with pity or fear that worsens his alienation. Ó Conaire’s text underscores the need for new representational protocols. Toward the end of the book, Mícheál invents romantic stories about his neighbour’s love for his wife, when the man is actually a drunken abuser who nearly kills her. Mícheál interrogates himself (and the writers and readers of contemporaneous literature in Irish), ‘Nach bhfuil an dul amú céanna ormsa, a chum úrscéal bréagach . . . an dul amú céanna is a bhíonn ar na filí úd nach bhfuil in dhá dtrian a saothair agus a saoil ach aislingí bréagacha, béithe nár mhair riamh agus spéirmhná nach raibh riamh sna spéartha?’ (p. 104)

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(‘Was I not equally mistaken, making up a false romance . . . just as mistaken as those poets whose life and work were filled with illusory dreams, with Muses who never existed and Venuses who were never in the skies?’, p. 121). Mícheál’s own painful story stands as a defiantly unromantic one, illustrating Ó Conaire’s insistently modernist disposition.35 After Mícheál meets fellow Connamara native, the Big Red-haired Woman, the two of them stay up late into the night by the fire, ‘ag cur síos ar a bhfacamar den saol, agus ar a tharla dúinn ó chasadh sa tír seo sinn’ (p. 25) (‘talking over all we have seen of life, all that has happened to each of us since we arrived in this foreign country’, p. 33). That is, they do not tell the classic folktales of home but urban stories of woe: ‘Agus nach ag an mbean mhór rua atá na scéalta móra ach nach scéalta sí ná finscéalta bréagacha iad ach scéalta uafáis agus bróin agus náire’ (p. 25) (‘And it was many the story the Big Red-haired Woman had to tell, although they were not fairy tales or tales of heroic fiction, but stories of horror, grief and shame,’ p. 33). In place of the ‘scéalta móra’ (‘the great stories’, the major stories of a top storyteller’s repertoire within oral tradition), each migrant has new, ‘great’ stories to tell – though we do not hear her stories, suggesting further testimonies untold. In this way, Ó Conaire encapsulates the development of a modernist literature that replaces, yet draws upon, the older tradition to synthesise the novel experiences of modern life. He also affirms the collaborative insight and self-authorising narrative generativity (that even exceeds this particular text) of the community itself. Despite the precarity of literature in Irish – which is manifest in Ó Conaire’s gap-ridden text itself – this literature would none the less persist as both challenge and resource for a community fighting for rights and voice into the new millennium and beyond. Having examined our two central texts, I now circle back to consider definitional and historical questions. How well do current understandings of modernism function in light of the particular conditions of the Irish language and its writers in the early decades of the twentieth century? Condemned by Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical as ‘the synthesis of all heresies’,36 modernism has only become more unsettled over time – and in time, as some critics detect modernism generations or even centuries earlier than used to be the norm, while others push it far forward into the twentieth century and beyond.37 The nature of modernism has also come under question, as now-canonical cosmopolitan touchstones have been recast as (simultaneously) regional, while local or ‘bad’ iterations of modernism have been brought into the debate – opening up space for divergent Irish-language texts such as Ó Conaire’s.38 Modernism, whether euphoric or alienated, has also been unmoored from its traditional, Eurocentric, metropolitan base and detected in new locations and languages.39 So far, so good (or, bad). Yet familiar definitions of modernism fail to capture much of the experience of marginalised communities due to their metropolitan / majoritarian bias. For instance, modernism has conventionally been considered ‘an early twentieth-century reaction against the constraints of nineteenth-century, and more particularly Victorian, culture and society’, encapsulated by such slogans as ‘make it new’ and ‘épater le bourgeois’.40 But in a vulnerable and unsettled society like Ireland, so marked by a sense of inferiority that it had already eagerly cast aside its inherited language and traditions in favour of English ones, and where the pursuit of urban, middle-class Victorian norms meant the embrace of Victorian anti-Irish derision, what did it mean to ‘make it new’? Was it to anglicise further an already greatly transformed society, long culturally obeisant to

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the adjacent global imperial power – or to see tenacious cultural survivals with fresh eyes? In a classic study, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane claimed that subjecting audiences to ‘shock’ typified modernist style; but what if you cannot afford to shock your audience – as that pitifully small and tentative group, in the case of Irish, is not only raw from ongoing affront but poised for flight?41 Ó Conaire ‘jolted’ his contemporaries, but could hardly write with the kind of unfettered experimentalism available to those with more resources – whether financial, cultural or literary–linguistic. Other common definitions emphasise the experimentalism and breaks with traditional forms, genres and conventions characteristic of modernism as it sought to express urban life.42 Certainly, this definition helps focus attention on modernism’s distinctive disposition, and accords with Ó Conaire’s text, if not with Flaherty’s technologically but admittedly not thematically modernist text. But what of political, sociolinguistic and ideological experimentation in and by texts that are not especially formally experimental? What if there are major constraints on an author’s ability to be ‘experimental’ in the formal terms set by metropolitan definition? What if merely writing in a modern idiom and from a novel vantage constitutes a radical experiment? A more capacious definition highlighting the transhistorical conditions of modernity in a variety of styles and moments may be necessary.43 That said, as we have seen, the work of Irish-language modernist authors does accord with certain conventional definitions: for example, by breaking with old genres and modes, addressing the alienation of urban life and the accelerating pace of technological and economic change, creating and exploring new forms, and explicitly seeking to express modern life in its own idiom.44 Crucially, the case of Irish reminds us that the definition of ‘experimental’ or ‘radical’ is necessarily contextual. The Irish language reached the twentieth century quite disadvantaged in comparison to English, which had become a world language as well as Ireland’s dominant tongue. To compose in Irish was to take up a language with a storied history but a parlous present. A violent early modern conquest decapitated native Gaelic and Gaelicised leadership in recurrent wars; ensuing legally codified subjugation and socioeconomic degradation had largely reduced the Irish-speaking Catholic experience to extractive colonial capitalist underdevelopment and marginalisation. For many generations before the late nineteenth-century Revival, Irish speakers were under pressure to adopt English as the language of government, law, commerce, politics and economic advancement (whether within Ireland, as seasonal migrant workers in the United Kingdom, or as emigrants abroad). Irish was depicted as a useless relic of the past and even its admirers assumed it was doomed. Long into the nineteenth century, however, Irishspeaking communities persisted in cherishing their language and embracing a nimble, adaptive bilingualism in place of the default monolingualism of the dominant culture that dismissed the language of the colonised as inimical to modernity.45 Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, the number of native speakers of Irish had declined precipitously, after seismic socioeconomic, cultural and demographic transformations. Both the rise of mass political movements in Ireland that strategically employed the English language in the 1820s, and the imposition of English-only national schools in the 1830s powerfully influenced language politics in Ireland. Most destructive, however, was the Great Famine of 1845–9, which caused the death or emigration of a disproportionate number of Irish speakers, along with concomitant sociocultural disruptions resulting in ‘the hollowing-out of indigenous Irish culture’ and widespread anglicisation.46 In the wake of the Famine, the devotional revolution

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replaced vernacular expressions of faith with a radically new, institutionalised Catholic religion that was more ritually and architecturally demonstrative, rigid, harshly social-policing, hierarchical, authoritarian – and decidedly Anglophone in its public face, if not yet in its liturgy. At the same time, the antagonism of the state, in tandem with the educational system, compelled Irish speakers to master English to defend their rights and to ensure their socioeconomic options.47 By the end of the nineteenth century, the communities of Irish speakers that remained had been decimated, denigrated, demoralised or driven abroad – though their structural inequality fuelled a thread of political recalcitrance and piercing ideological critique born of ‘fuath aicmeach’ (‘class hatred’).48 These communities were among the most impoverished on the island. Their decline, symbolically understood as the living residue of the worst failures of English colonial authority, therefore functioned both as a source of communal shame and as Exhibit A in metropolitan cultural nationalism’s denunciations of English rule. Against this backdrop of longstanding subordination and derision, countering the orthodoxy of anglicisation emanating from the centres of power in Irish life posed an enormous challenge. Opposing this orthodoxy, however, was the goal of the Gaelic Revival (1881–1921), a multifaceted, transatlantic, cultural nationalist movement of writing, scholarly recovery, communal revitalisation, psychological and economic uplift, activism and pedagogy.49 A still greater challenge for the revivalists was the overall problem of reversing the direction – and assumed inevitability – of sociolinguistic change in order to revive Irish as a second or even first language and to create a modern literature in it.50 While Irish had sustained a rich literary and scholarly tradition up to the seventeenth century, by the end of the nineteenth century its medium of transmission was overwhelmingly oral. Since public education occurred through the medium of English, the main audience for Irish-language writing was largely illiterate in Irish. As one of the earliest writers in Irish, Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire, wrote in a letter in 1900, Irish ‘is speech address[ed] by a speaker to a listener, not by a writer to the general public. A writer of Irish has really, as yet, no general public to address himself to.’51 Indeed, the very forces that had preserved the Irish language now posed their own difficulties for revival, presenting would-be writers with an audience steeped in the living practices of verbal performance in traditional song, story and wit, but unfamiliar with the norms of polite literature. By the late nineteenth century, the Irish language survived in three distinct, geographically separated dialects of great verbal richness (which their respective speakers often found mutually incomprehensible), but lacked a settled orthography, agreed-upon stylistic norms or an official standard, which provoked intense debates over what form (if any) these should take. Would-be authors, more often than not, were learners, with a shaky command of their medium, for writers in Irish could turn to neither reference works, nor editions of earlier literature, nor an established publishing tradition, nor a comprehensive, contemporary vocabulary in the language. Instead, writer–activists had at once to recover and create needed linguistic tools all at the same time, from words to dictionaries, literacy movements to magazines, lesson plans to political campaigns defending the inclusion of Irish in public education. Yet, Revival authors were markedly less anxious about the endangered language’s capacity as a literary medium than they were about their own ability to use it.52 Despite all of these drawbacks, working within Ireland’s ancestral language conferred a sense of legitimacy and authority absent from much Anglophone Irish writing.

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Given the state of Irish at the end of the nineteenth century, Revivalist efforts to forge a new literary tradition in a language thought to be on its last legs were remarkably audacious. Here was something new, experimental and shocking: a ‘radical challenge to the ideology which identified “progress” with the English language and the British state’, and Irish as static, inflexible and doomed.53 Revivalists were themselves products of the British colonial education system that sought to make them dutiful, anglicised subjects of empire, yet they rejected British Victorian denigration of Irish culture while embracing its optimistic reforming spirit to transform their oral tradition for modern literary use.54 The resulting infusion of a specific mode of adventurous modernity fostered a small but vibrant literary movement prepared to see Irish afresh, as supple, precious and dynamic. Imagine the boldness of trying to resuscitate a profoundly marginalised vernacular, reversing a language shift centuries in the making while challenging the worldwide extinction of minor languages that was an effect of modernity itself.55 In creating a new minority literature in Irish, these authors arguably overturned the nationalist orthodoxy that deployed Irish exclusively as symbol of Irishness. And though these linguistic crusaders did not make all of Ireland Irishspeaking, they did disrupt linguistic assumptions as modernism is often said to do – not through their syntax but through their very medium, by employing a language long thought dead or dying: ‘the corpse that sits up and talks back’.56 They thereby ensured that Irish would not die in the new century, but would be transformed from something to be left behind into something to cherish. The Revival is thus not archaic, as some Anglophone modernists claimed, but part of the ferment of modernism, as exemplified by revivalists’ and modernists’ shared sense of experimentation with the new and critique of what they inherited. Both revivalists and modernists adopted experimental attitudes and activities, whether embracing avant-garde drama or Montessori education, rural subjects or urban ones, cooperative industry or the new genre of the short story. Alike committed to countering nineteenthcentury givens through ideology and praxis, these supposed antagonists were both highly critical of the cultural / linguistic erasure and moral corruption associated with modernity.57 The ideological connections are striking, as both revivalists and modernists recoil from the homogeneity, commercialism and unthinking materialism of the modern world.58 The persistent ‘critical manicheanism’ that opposes the two movements obscures their shared convictions and mutual support.59 Each movement sought a new path to a new future for art and for the nation. Even the Revival’s antimodern invocation of tradition – the key to its misrepresentation by contemporaries and later critics, who flattened out its internal diversity and nuance60 – reads differently now. That antimodern stance now appears not as kneejerk archaism opposed to modernism but as something shared with both Irish and other modernists, as well as a sign of a marginal or alternative modernism itself. When the Gaelic Revival presents itself as a return to a lost authenticity, as a continuation of a disrupted tradition, that does not mean we should mistake rhetoric for reality. Irish Revivalists deployed the evocative rhetoric of recovering an idealised lost identity to urge people to speak and use Irish. By portraying their goals and methods as a return to tradition in a time of epochal change, they concealed the daunting novelty (and difficulty!) of their agenda.61 Moreover, they sought to elevate and valorise the past to reverse the dismissal of tradition and stigmatisation of Gaeltacht communities.62 Many revivalists emphasised the cultural continuity and value of Irish in the face of the

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tensions of modernisation.63 But they did so knowing that they were thereby creating something new.64 Anthropologists and historians have repeatedly drawn our attention to the polemical nature of invocations (or inventions) of tradition, whether performed under the sign of a ‘return to origins’, the recovery of proper forms, the persistence of an unbroken lineage, or a heroic rescue in the teeth of extinction. Linguistic revitalisation movements, by definition, operate under the sign of return / recovery, but are at once product and expression of modernity – even if they vehemently oppose a ‘modernity’ understood to be antithetical to native vernaculars. It follows that ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ must be grasped as ideological / discursive stances rather than as factual / objective qualities somehow inherent in cultural forms.65 Just as the modern requires the non-modern to define itself, so Anglophone Irish modernists differentiated themselves from their ‘antimodernist’ compatriots by ridiculing the Revival as antithetical to their own pathbreaking. At the same time, they found the idea of a ‘lost’ Gaelic language and civilisation a powerful stimulus to their own work.66 Yet the cultural capital accruing to English ensured that Anglophone modernism would predominate, and that Irish would continue to be thought of as that which modernists sought to escape. James Joyce disparaged Revivalist thought as simplistic and parochial, hectoring and hypocritical, even though its abiding concerns with identity, community, signification and the (im)possibility of communication permeate his own work, which is preoccupied with Irish as a symbol of (lost) identity or language loss itself.67 Later, Samuel Beckett, too, would contrast the Revivalists’ sentimentality with what he saw as the incisive understanding of rupture grasped by modernists.68 Joyce and Beckett, like other Anglophone modernists, were engaged in strategic acts of self-positioning with long-reaching effects on how Irish and its authors were (and to a significant extent still are) caricatured by the dominant culture. (Mis)representation by others – whether literary or political – continued to plague Irish and its speakers. Anglophone texts persisted, as they had for centuries, in portraying but not listening to ‘Gaelic’ figures, whose often untranslated speech stood for tragic, alienating or even terrifying archaism and incomprehensibility. In the political sphere, Irish speakers, not officially recognised as a minority in their own country, faced longstanding struggles over local autonomy and access to authority of all kinds, prompting recurrent civil rights agitation to win government concessions.69 The generally limited focus of the Revival itself contributed to the failures that followed Independence. Though some revivalists sought socioeconomic development and redistribution of land in the remaining areas of Gaeltacht, with Pádraic Pearse notably coming to espouse an ‘idiosyncratic socialism’, the majority espoused a cultural nationalism that focused on language as intrinsic to national identity, cultural distinctiveness and group cohesion, thereby tending to reinforce the symbolic status of Irish rather than addressing the practical needs of its speakers or the larger population.70 The founding institution of the Revival, Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League), emphasised non-utilitarian, narrowly linguistic progress instead of targeting the class inequality that caused people to abandon Irish.71 Even though the Revival inspired first rebellion and then independence, the conservative, solidly middle-class regime that subsequently emerged did not fundamentally alter either class relations or the underdevelopment that kept Irish speakers disempowered and poor, or pushed them to emigrate in droves. Certainly, the new state took significant measures to enact its Revivalist principles, making Irish the first official language, a required subject in schools and civil service

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examinations, and the beneficiary of publishing subsidies, grants and promotions. Yet all these efforts, and the resulting production of a significant number of schooleducated bilinguals, as well as a rich vein of native scholarship and historiography, did not come close to reaching the lofty goals envisioned by the most radical Revivalists. Instead, to authenticate itself against far more radical republicans, the new state increasingly invoked the symbolic role of Irish – or rather, an idealised, abstracted and purified version of the language – alongside religion, as twin bulwarks of ethnic identity against the dangerous influence of the wider world, even as the actual speech of the Gaeltacht continued to be condemned as ‘hopelessly impure’ and its cultural productions censored.72 English remained the medium of an Irish public life and government presided over by self-replicating Anglophone elites, while the state invoked an imaginary, homogenised native language to legitimate itself. Irish was conceptualised as a traditional relic indexing the progress of the state into modernity, and thus as extraneous, if not antithetical, to it.73 Ultimately, the ongoing peripheralisation, precarity and nationalist fetishisation of Irish and its native speakers at once devoiced and delimited Irish-language modernism – while simultaneously giving it some of its most powerful and enduring tropes, as the insistent demand for ‘cead cainte’ (‘permission to speak’) against marginalisation echoes from the Revival to the present.74

Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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I wish to thank Margot Backus, Carol Bradley, Aedín Clements, Steve Coleman, Kate Gustafson, Susan Harris, Mariann Jelinek, Sara Maurer, Susannah Monta, the ANAs, Aoife Ní Neachtain, Ellen Samuels and the editors; mistakes and infelicities are my own. For cognate reflections, see McKibben, ‘Amach Leis’; on periodisation, see de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, but cf. McCrea, Languages of the Night. Titles transcribed from 2003 DVD of Man of Aran. Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac, p. 14. See Winston, ‘Documentary’, pp. 72–5. Pilard, ‘L’Homme d’Aran’, p. 66. Temple-Herr, ‘Re-Imagining “Man of Aran”’, p. 12. On enculturated skill, see Temple-Herr, ‘Re-Imagining “Man of Aran”’. See Gibbons, ‘Romanticism’, p. 195, and Messenger, in ‘Literary vs. Scientific’. C. A. Lejeune of The Observer, qtd in Calder-Marshall, Innocent Eye, pp. 164–5; cf. Gibbons, ‘Romanticism’, p. 201, Winston, ‘Documentary’, and Stoney, How the Myth was Made, included in the 2003 DVD. Also see fixer (local arranger) Pat Mullen’s memoir, Man of Aran. Mullen, Man of Aran, pp. 176–7. Ibid., pp. 16, 85. See Seán Crosson and Deirdre Ní Conghaile in A Boatload of Wild Irishmen, DVD. Mullen, Man of Aran, pp. 82, 88. Winston, ‘Documentary’, p. 77. Temple-Herr, ‘Re-Imagining “Man of Aran”’, pp. 13–15. On critical outrage at this linguistic erasure, see O’Leary, Gaelic Prose, p. 497. Irish is audible (though not subtitled), for example, during the shark hunt, where we repeatedly hear ‘Coinnigh air anois’ (‘Carry on now’), and just prior, when Tiger King says ‘Níl aon deifir’ (‘There’s no hurry’) as he walks to the strand, when Maggie addresses Mikeleen ‘a mhac’ (‘son’), and at the end, when Maggie beseeches God, ‘Dia ár réiteach!’ (‘God save us!’), as the boatmen risk their lives.

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18. Sumner et al., ‘A Night of Storytelling’. 19. See Breandán Ó hEithir’s 1976 film interview on Ó Curraidhín’s A Boatload of Wild Irishmen DVD. 20. See Ní Dhonnchadha, An Gearrscéal, pp. 71–113. 21. O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 130; de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, p. 164. 22. Liam Ó Briain, qtd and translated by O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 130. 23. Angela Bourke, ‘Legless in London’, p. 54; Kiberd, ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’, p. 45. 24. Bourke, ‘Legless in London’, p. 55. 25. Kiberd, ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’, p. 48; on lack of proper names, see O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 425. 26. de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, p. 164; on censorship, see O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 35. 27. Kiberd, ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’, p. 52. 28. Irish text is Ó Conaire, Deoraíocht, with translation by Gearailt Mac Eoin, in Ó Conaire, Exile. Page numbers are given in the main text of the chapter. 29. Bourke, ‘Legless in London’, p. 57. 30. Ibid., p. 65. 31. Pinkney, ‘Modernism’, p. 4, italics in original. 32. Bourke, ‘Legless in London’, p. 66. 33. Ibid., pp. 60–1. 34. See Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac. The great mid-century Irish writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain said ‘gur gníomh polaitiúil ann féin ab ea roghnú na teanga san mar mheán liteartha – gur léirigh san a dhílseacht do na bochtáin agus don chosmhuintir’ (‘that choosing that language as a literary medium was a political act – that showed one’s devotion to the poor and to the proletariat’) (Kiberd, ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’, p. 45). 35. Kiberd, ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’, p. 55. 36. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis: De Modernistarum Doctrinis (‘Feeding the Lord’s Flock: On the Doctrines of the Modernists’), Latin encyclical and translation, available at (last accessed 22 October 2019). 37. See, for example, Josipovici, What Ever Happened, pp. 11–12. When targeted by a particularly destructive form of colonial modernity, early modern Irish literati had a precocious encounter with artistic precarity, which their work registers in strikingly modern tropes of alienation and loss, proto-nationalist recalibration of identity, and prescient critiques of systems of authority and legitimation (see McKibben, Endangered Masculinities). 38. See Mao and Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms. 39. See Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, as well as Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, and Wollaeger and Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. 40. Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, p. 3. 41. Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, p. 24. 42. Lewis, Cambridge Introduction, p. xvii. 43. See Friedman, Planetary Modernisms. 44. See germinal quotations from 1906 and 1909, qtd in O’Leary, Prose Literature, pp. 76, 405. 45. See Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture; Wolf, Irish-Speaking Island; J. J. Lee, Ireland, pp. 658–72. 46. Whelan, ‘Cultural Effects’, p. 138. 47. On the unjust 1882 execution of monoglot Irish speaker Maolra Seoighe (Myles Joyce), see Kelleher, The Maamtrasna Murders. 48. Ó Cadhain, qtd in Coleman, ‘Centralised Government’, p. 179. 49. See O’Leary’s essential Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, on which I draw extensively here.

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434 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

sarah e. mckibben On confusion about what revival meant, see Ó Laoire, ‘Historical Perspective’. Qtd in Ó Fiannachta, ‘Ag Cogarnaíl’, p. 117, italics in original. de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, p. 161. Coleman, ‘Centralised Government’, p. 179. de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, p. 165. Ibid., p. 163. Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Why I Choose to Write in Irish’. See O’Leary, Prose Literature, pp. 32–45. McDonald, ‘Irish Revival’, p. 52. Cf. McCrea on the modernist quest for ‘new languages of art’ coincident with ‘the Irish nationalist search for an autonomous mode of cultural expression’ making Irish paradoxically ‘a more authentically “native” language’ for all Irish people – even English speakers (‘Style and Idiom’, p. 63). Cleary, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. On the diversity of revivalists, see O’Leary, Prose Literature, esp. pp. 20, 49. Cf. Kiberd, ‘Patrick Pearse’, p. 67. See O’Leary, Prose Literature, pp. 122–3, and Bourke, ‘Imagined Community’, p. 141. Ó Laoire, ‘Historical Perspective’, p. 55. See Pearse, qtd in O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 46. Thanks to Steve Coleman for this formulation. Cf. de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, p. 161. McCrea, ‘A Note’. McDonald, ‘Irish Revival’, p. 54. Coleman, ‘Centralised Government’, p. 180. O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 143; Ó Laoire, ‘Historical Perspective’, pp. 55–6. Coleman, ‘Centralised Government’, p. 180. Coleman, ‘The Nation, the State’, p. 389. Coleman, ‘Centralised Government’, p. 177. McKibben, ‘Amach Leis’, p. 80.

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Coleman, Steve, ‘The Nation, the State, and the Neighbors: Personation in Irish-Language Discourse’, Language & Communication, 24 (2004), pp. 381–411. de Paor, Louis, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 161–73. Doyle, Laura, and Laura A. Winkiel (eds), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Flaherty, Robert Joseph, director, Man of Aran [1934], Gaumont British Picture Corp., Gainsborough Studios, Home Vision Entertainment [Firm], DVD release of the 1934 motion picture production, 2003. Friedman, Susan Stanford, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Gibbons, Luke, ‘Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (eds), Cinema and Ireland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 194–257. Josipovici, Gabriel, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Kelleher, Margaret, The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in NineteenthCentury Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2018). Kiberd, Declan, ‘Pádraig Ó Conaire agus Cearta an Duine’, in Gearóid Denvir (ed.), Pádraic Ó Conaire: Léachtaí Cuimhneacháin (Indreabhán: Cló Chonamara i gcomhar le Raidió na Gaeltachta, 1983), pp. 45–57. Kiberd, Declan, ‘Patrick Pearse: Irish Modernist’, in Roisin Higgins and Regina Uí Chollatáin (eds), The Life and After-Life or P.H. Pearse = Pádraic Mac Piarais: Saol agus Oidhreacht (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), pp. 65–80. Lee, J. J., Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Lewis, Pericles, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). McCrea, Barry, ‘A Note on Joyce and the Irish Language’, Dublin James Joyce Journal, 6–7 (2013–14), pp. 148–57. McCrea, Barry, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). McCrea, Barry, ‘Style and Idiom’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 63–74. McDonald, Rónán, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 51–62. McKibben, Sarah E., ‘“Amach Leis!” (Out with it!): Modernist Inheritances in Micheál Ó Conghaile’s “Athair” (“Father”)’, in Paige Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (London: Anthem, 2016), pp. 75–89. McKibben, Sarah E., Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540–1780 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010). Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Messenger, John, ‘Literary vs. Scientific Interpretations of Cultural Reality in the Aran Islands of Eire’, Ethnohistory, 11:1 (1964), pp. 41–55. Mullen, Pat, Man of Aran (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1935, rpt. 1970). Nic Eoin, Máirín, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005). Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, ‘Why I Choose to Write in Irish, The Corpse that Sits Up and Talks Back’, The New York Times (8 January 1995), Section 7, p. 3. Ní Dhonnchadha, Aisling, An Gearrscéal sa Ghaeilge, 1898–1940 (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1981).

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Ó Ciosáin, Niall, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Ó Conaire, Pádraic, Deoraíocht, preface by Mícheál Mac Liammóir (Baile Átha Cliath: An Comhlacht Oideachas, 1994). Ó Conaire, Pádraic, Exile, trans. Gearailt Mac Eoin (Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1994). Ó Curraidhín, Mac Dara, director, A Boatload of Wild Irishmen, DVD (Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2010). Ó Fiannachta, Pádraig, ‘Ag Cogarnaíl le Cara: An tAthair Peadear mar a Nochtann Litreacha Airithe dá CHuid Dúinn É’, Irisleabhear Mhá Nuad (1991), pp. 105–20. Ó Laoire, Muiris, ‘An Historical Perspective of the Revival of Irish’, in Sue Wright (ed.), Language and the State: Revitalization and Revival in Israel and Éire (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1996), pp. 51–63. O’Leary, Philip, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). O’Leary, Philip, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Pilard, Philippe, ‘L’Homme d’Aran: Une rêverie poétique sur la condition humaine’, Positif – Revue mensuelle de cinéma (June 1995), pp. 66–9. Pinkney, Tony, ‘Modernism and Cultural Theory’, Introduction to Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 1–29. Reynolds, Paige, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sumner, Natasha, Barbara Hillers and Catherine McKenna, ‘A Night of Storytelling and Years in the “Z-Closet”: The Re-discovery and Restoration of Oidhche Sheanchais, Robert Flaherty’s “Lost” Irish Folklore Film’, Folklore, 126:1 (2015), pp. 1–19. Temple-Herr, Cheryl, ‘Re-Imagining “Man of Aran”: The “First Wave” of Irish Cinema’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 29:2 (2003), pp. 11–16. Whelan, Kevin, ‘The Cultural Effects of the Famine’, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 137–54. Winston, Brian, ‘Documentary: How the Myth Was Deconstructed’, Wide Angle, 21:2 (1999), pp. 71–86. Wolf, Nicholas M., An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Wollaeger, Mark A., and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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25 Affective Alchemy: W. B. Yeats and the Transformative Heresy of Joy Wendy J. Truran

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f, as George Watson argues, heresy is a ‘doctrine or opinion . . . at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative’, and a heretic ‘proclaims something the world does not admit and hesitates to even consider’, one could argue that artistic modernism is a heretical project and W. B. Yeats a heretic par excellence.1 Yeats was heterodox and syncretistic in his approach to religion and this, inevitably, placed him at variance with established standards.2 In his poem ‘Vacillation’ (1932), Yeats states two core convictions that fuel his quarrel with orthodoxy: first, ‘Between extremities / Man runs his course’ (‘Vacillation’, lines 1–2) and second, ‘Test every work of intellect or faith / And everything that your own hands have wrought’ (‘Vacillation’, lines 30–1).3 Not merely heretical for the hell of it, Yeats developed a theory that understood life as a continual fluctuation between two extremities, or what he called ‘antinomies’.4 Yeats’s system, developed in A Vision, states that all existence, at all levels – civilisations, nations, individuals – consists of the struggle between antimonies.5 ‘I call to my own opposite’ (line 8), says Ille in Yeats’s poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (1918): the poet achieves fulfilment not by expressing himself but by calling forth his anti-self, or Daimon. Artistic creation and spiritual progression, for Yeats, come from spiritual conflict. One core conflict is between doubt and faith. Yeats had a deep need for belief but was vexed by scepticism. He could not live without the transcendence in religion because ‘the creative energy of men depends upon them believing that they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable’.6 He also deeply desired mystical experience: ‘I believed the truth I sought would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of passionate experience.’7 He hoped that with the right rituals he would be granted visions and that these mystical experiences could then be the source of poetry, and conversely, poetry might offer access to the divine.8 Given his idiosyncratic philosophy, it is inevitable that Yeats found himself ‘at variance’ with authoritative positions on religion and art; his nature and beliefs demanded that he wear the mask of a heretic. A careful reading of Yeats’s œuvre reveals a form of poetic and affective alchemy that places the transformative capacity of joy at its heart. Alchemical transmutation is the ‘conversion of one element or substance into another through the agency of the philosopher’s stone’.9 Typically, the conversion is understood as changing lead into gold but, metaphysically speaking, transmutation is considered ‘the conversion of the earthly man into the illumined philosopher through the tincture of divine love, grace and wisdom’.10 At an affective level, we might consider transmutation as the modification of base emotions into more active, productive ones. For Yeats, the transformation of feeling is an

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integral part of the process of poetic and spiritual progress. Joy is key to understanding both the material and the metaphysical transmutation. Unlike the energy of joy, intense sorrow brings submission; according to Yeats, sorrow is a true ‘passion’ in that it signals passivity and suffering. Yeats claimed that ‘[because] there is submission in pure sorrow, we should sorrow alone over what is greater than ourselves nor too soon admit that greatness’.11A great poet, Yeats suggests, takes in pure sorrow and transforms it into pure joy, weaving it into the gold of poetic language for his own sake and to communicate the transformative passion to others. Transformative alchemy, Yeats asserts, is a vital tool for poets: ‘joy because it must always be making and mastering, remains in the hands and tongue of the artists but with his eyes he enters upon a submissive, sorrowful contemplation of the great “irremediable things”’.12 To feel joy is to exult, to delight; it is a satisfaction achieved and experienced rather than a desire deferred. Joy is not merely a mental state or a felt emotion but also a vivid experience that impacts the bodymind. Joy affects our physical bodies and, in a transformative instant, takes our breath away, moves us deeply and leaves us different from before. In fact, philosopher and famously excommunicated heretic Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) theorised that joy, along with its contrary sorrow, formed the passionate forces of life. Reminiscent of Spinoza’s position, Yeats thought that joy is the only means by which to find strength enough to truly live, not merely exist: ‘For only when we are gay over a thing, and can play with it, do we show ourselves its master, and have minds clear enough for strength.’13 Yeats must master the baser, all-consuming affects such as hate, rage and bitterness, and exult, transforming them into empowering emotion.14 By formulating an understanding of Yeats’s affective alchemy and its connections to heresy we gain a deeper understanding of Yeats’s poetry and a more nuanced account of modernist emotion. In the following section I will show three ways in which Yeats is connected to heresy: first, by touching upon his eclectic esotericism and focusing on alchemy; second, by placing his spirituality in conversation with religious Modernists; and last, by discussing how joy stands ‘at variance’ with other literary modernists’ approach to religion and emotions.

A Modernist Heretic One might think of Yeats as a collector of heresies, given his eclectic metaphysical and aesthetic positions, including heterodoxy, apostasy, religious syncretism, Gnosticism, free spiritism and reincarnationism, to name but a few. Yeats placed the supernatural and occult at the heart of his search for truth: ‘[t]he mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write’.15 He studied esoteric Buddhism, the Kabbalah and Eastern mysticism. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, where he studied with Madame Blavatsky, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and he was active in ritual forms of magic.16 Alchemy, as a system of thought that seeks the connections between humanity and the cosmos, greatly appealed to Yeats. Resembling his theory of antinomies, alchemists were ‘concerned with the union of substances, the reconciliation of opposites’.17 Mark Morrisson describes alchemy as ‘a scientifically and spiritually serious pursuit from antiquity through the Middle Ages, with roots in Egyptian metallurgy, Aristotelian philosophy of matter and form, and Jewish, Arabic, early Christian, and Hermetic sources’.18 A proto-science, it sought to create the ‘philosopher’s stone’ to attain wealth (lead to gold), longevity (age to youth) and spiritual purification

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(natural to supernatural existence). William T. Gorski argues that such ‘spiritual alchemy’ was Yeats’s primary interest in alchemical thinking: ‘Yeats conceived the creative process (for all kinds of art) as a form of alchemy and, moreover, thought that the artist himself became transformed through the act of creation.’19 Alchemy has always been considered radical and, at times, heretical. In 1317, Pope John XXII condemned the practice of alchemy as heresy and forbade it, driving it underground and making it part of secret societies.20 The alchemist’s aim is to ‘explore the inner workings of nature, and this meant delving into the very secret of God’s creation’, which impinged on the prerogative of the Church to control the understanding of man and cosmos.21 Alchemists such as Gerard Dorn, in the sixteenth century, understood alchemy to be primarily about the transmutation of the soul of the alchemist rather than metals; he stated, ‘transmute yourselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones’.22 For many alchemists, God becomes the Divine Alchemist, thus implying the heresy of making themselves akin to God, or assuming God-like powers. In 1907, Pope Pius X wrote an encyclical entitled Pascendi Dominici Gregis (‘Feeding the Lord’s Flock’), condemning Catholic ‘Modernism’ as ‘the synthesis of all heresies’.23 Modernist heretics, according to the Holy See, were ‘striving by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church’.24 In actuality, Modernist theologians – such as French biblical scholar Alfred F. Loisy and Irish-born Jesuit priest George Tyrrell – like artistic modernists, sought to integrate the innovations of their contemporary era with their faith. Religious Modernists argued that the thinking of the Church should incorporate current developments in science, philosophy and psychology. Doctrine, they felt, should evolve. As Frederick S. Roden explains, Catholic Modernists were ‘concerned with the freedom to pursue historical study of the Bible and take seriously those implications for theology’.25 Such ideas contradicted Neo-Scholastic orthodoxy. George Tyrrell was dismissed from the Jesuits for his Modernist positions, such as his argument that each age had the right to express Christianity in light of contemporary knowledge. Tyrrell retained his belief in Christianity at the same time as strongly criticising the Papacy, stating: ‘I believe in the Roman Church so far as it is Christian and Catholic; I disbelieve in it so far as it is papal.’26 Similarly, Yeats reserved his vitriol for the organisation of the Church rather than religion itself. In his work as Senator of the Irish Free State, when the Free State passed the Censorship of Publications Act in 1929, Yeats accused the Senate of allowing Catholic doctrine to dictate political policy. In his speech on divorce, he stated: ‘Once you legislate on purely theological grounds, there is no form of religious persecution which cannot be justified.’27 Like the religious Modernists, Yeats emphasised the historical and cultural context of a living religion and human fallibility in interpreting the divine: ‘the living, changing, discovering, advancing human mind cannot base its legislation, as its clergy would have it, upon some doubtful interpretation of some doubtful passages in the Gospels’.28 If Yeats showed sympathy for the Modernist movement in the Church, his religious yearnings deviated from the secular tendencies of literary modernism. Reflecting on his youth, Yeats felt alienated from a generation aligned with agnostic rationalism: ‘I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived . . . of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion . . . of poetic tradition.’29 Desirous of the religious sources of poetry – or a religion of poetry – Yeats looked for emotional verification of his truths: ‘I believed the truth I sought would

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come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of passionate experience.’30 T. E. Hulme decried such sentiment as a form of ‘spilt religion’, and T. S. Eliot, in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, criticised Yeats for searching for tradition ‘a little too consciously perhaps’ and so creating ‘a somewhat artificially induced poeticality’.31 Though Yeats’s expression of his religious passion soured in later years, his commitment to spirituality did not, thereby risking what the ideologues of literary modernism regarded as the heresy of sentimentality. In numerous manifestos and poetic statements, modernist poets inveighed against sentimentality. Ezra Pound attempted to escape ‘emotional slither’ and T. S. Eliot discouraged Romantic self-expression; both sought to distance the poem from the poet’s feelings, insisting that great poetry should be impersonal.32 Interestingly, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot also invokes a form of alchemy to explain the transformation of personal passions into aestheticised emotion. Unlike Yeats, however, Eliot’s metaphors draw on the ‘modern alchemy’ of chemistry.33 Eliot also sought the transmutation of the baser, personal emotions into the permanence of impersonal art. For modernists like Eliot, Pound and Hulme, intense emotions – and the linguistic registers through which emotions are expressed – must be tightly controlled and depersonalised to be artistically valid. Yeats, in ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ (1937), also distances the personal from the poetic: a poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.34 Yet Yeats also sought to create a phantasmagoria of feeling alongside his symbolic phantasmagoria in order to revivify the ‘slow dying of men’s hearts’.35 Yeats commits what Eliot might see as the heresy of expressing joy and using it as an element for poetical and personal transmutation. Alchemy began as a union of art, science and religion, but gradually split into two differing branches of knowledge: as Allison Coudert explains, ‘the balance between the spiritual and the physical, which had characterised alchemical thought throughout its long history, was shattered, and alchemy was split into two halves, theosophy and the practical laboratory science of chemistry’.36 This split between the material and the metaphysical anticipates Yeats’s antinomy between sensual joy and divine joy.

Vacillation: Extremities of Joy The poem ‘Vacillation’ (1932) exemplifies Yeats’s exploration of affective alchemy in search of the philosopher’s stone of poetic perfection and spiritual transformation. Just as alchemists follow a multistage process in order to separate constituent elements into prima materia, before reconciling the material into a new, more perfect substance, so Yeats in ‘Vacillation’ explores the antimonies of sorrow and joy, expansion and restriction, that move a person through the extremities of life. Vacillating between religious rapture and earthly sensuality, transcendence and immanence (discussed in more detail as divine joy and sensual joy below), the alchemist–poet must choose between ‘Perfection of the life or of the work’, as Yeats puts it in his poem ‘The Choice’ (1932, line 2). Over the course of eight stanzas, the speaker in ‘Vacillation’ attempts to answer the question ‘what is joy?’:

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Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night; The body calls it death, The heart remorse. But if these be right What is joy? (lines 1–10) To ask ‘what is joy?’ is also to ask ‘what is the point of life?’ Once the antinomies of life are extinguished in death and we move on to the peace of the afterlife, Yeats asks, how can there be joy? Yeats compares the conflicting antinomies to the esoteric ‘Tree of Life’, a tree which ‘Is half all glittering flame and half all green’ (line 12).37 The tree signals the connection and tension between spiritual and worldly concerns; the ‘half and half’ of the tree, which consumes what it renews, refers to the perpetual cycle of birth and rebirth, but also to the half-human, half-divine nature of humanity. The ending of all antinomies is to reach a perfection that is usually achievable only in the afterlife, resulting in a reunion with the divine and escape from the wheel of rebirth. However, if divine joy is embodied – contrary to Christian ideas of heaven - might the escape from life mean a loss of joy or bliss? Unable to wait for the afterlife to answer such questions, the earth-bound poet and occultist asks ‘how is respite from vacillation achieved’? ‘Vacillation’ explores this alchemical aim of ‘finding the philosopher’s stone’ and of transforming the imperfect life to perfection. The clearing of all antinomies is identified in different ways: ‘the body calls it death, the heart remorse’ (lines 7–8). A heart that is haunted by regrets and self-accusations fails to live life fully; a remorseful, guilt-ridden life is a living death. Joy, the poem hints, is a means of attaining a better life, not in moral terms, but in terms of the perfection of life and art. ‘Vacillation’ likens the poet to Attis-Dionysus, a deity whose sacrifice is an ecstatic, bloody, sensual experience and who symbolises the union of the mortal and the divine. Similarly, the poet is caught between two joys, divine and sensual: A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew, And he that Attis’ image hangs between That staring fury and the blind lush leaf May know not what he knows, but knows not grief. (lines 11–18) The Yeatsian poet is always torn between opposing forces. He is trapped between earthly, sexual joy – ‘Abounding foliage moistened with dew’ – and the furious, unblinking stare of the ascetic intellect. Sexual joy and divine joy are both ways to fuel creativity. The accumulation of personal status and material wealth described in stanza three is like ‘Lethean foliage’ (line 27), a soporific that causes the creative mind to be tangled in worldliness and transient pleasure, forgetting real joy. The poet thus

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suspects that, in order achieve perfection of the work, he must assume the mask of divinity and, like Attis, be castrated, thus forgoing perfection of the life. The conflicting forces are staged once again in a dialogue in stanza seven. Originally entitled ‘Dialogue of Soul and Heart’, the poem stages an explicit choice between divine joy and sensual joy: The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem. The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme? The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire? The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire! The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within. The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin? (lines 72–7) The soul counsels the heart to ‘Seek out reality, leave things that seem’ (line 72). This line suggests the Platonic idea of reaching the reality-behind-the-illusion of earthly concerns. Yet Heart replies, ‘What, be a singer born and lack a theme?’ The heart is filled with passion and longing; it is an organ that registers sensual and physical desire. Soul proposes a mystical purging with ‘Isaiah’s coal’, the purifying fire of divine revelation and atonement, where ‘salvation walks within’ (line 76). But the heart prefers to sing and be understood, to live mortally and imperfectly like Homer: ‘What theme had Homer but original sin?’ The Attis-like poet ultimately chooses to remain within the cycle of life, death and rebirth. He elects the sweetness of life symbolised in ‘the lion and the honeycomb’ (lines 88–9). He will work, bee-like, in the chambers of the heart, to create the sweetness of poetry. ‘Vacillation’ is linked thematically to another of Yeats’s dialogue poems, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ (1929), in which the Soul insists that the poet escape the ‘crime’ of ‘death and birth’ (line 24). The Self sings its defiance in the closing four stanzas, refusing remorse and preferring to ‘Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!’ (line 67). The body casts out remorse, electing to live a mortal life: ‘I am content to live it all again’ (line 57). In ‘Vacillation’, the poet makes a similar choice. Inspired by a real incident from Yeats’s life, the earthly body can lead to affective revelations if it is moved by joy: My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessèd and could bless. (lines 41–4) Joy becomes one means of linking the mortal and divine. Similarly, in the final stanza of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, body and soul need one another to transform into something greater than their parts: When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest. (lines 68–72)

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The casting out of remorse leaves room in the heart for joy. In transforming dull emotion via the vibrancy of joy, the poet achieves ‘sweetness’ and blessedness. Yeats closes ‘Vacillation’ with a reference to Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a Catholic and religious Modernist sympathiser. Von Hügel emphasised the role of individual conscience and emotion in religious life: ‘[t]ruth known by conscience as opposed to truth known by orthodoxy’.38 Yeats claims that he and von Hügel are ‘much alike’ since they both ‘Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity’ (‘Vacillation’, lines 78–9): a questionable affinity, as Martin Green has argued.39 Regardless of von Hügel’s position on miracles, Yeats eagerly embraced them. As Unterecker points out, Christianity fascinated Yeats. Accepting all its miracles, he found only its rejection of the personal ultimately distasteful. For if he were to reject the personal, he would, Yeats felt, be rejecting the way of the artist, the only way open to him.40 Yeats banishes von Hügel in ‘Vacillation’, ‘though with blessings on your head’ (line 89). Ultimately, Yeats rejects Christianity, preferring to embrace a spirituality that emphasises art, sex, love and divinity, thus concluding that ‘Homer is my example and his unchristened heart’ (‘Vacillation’, line 87). Yeats was fascinated by both humanity and divinity, matter and immateriality, immanence and transcendence. By considering the conflict between two forms of joy – divine joy and sensual joy – one can understand Yeats’s process of affective alchemy more clearly.

Divine Joy – The Perfection of the Soul The search ‘for ontological origins outside of language, the body, and the natural world’, Gorski points out, fascinated Yeats and drove both his hermetic studies and his poetry. Yet this search for truth threatened to ‘“refine” the self out of physical existence’.41 The difficulty in perfecting the soul of a mortal poet is that the soul cannot be distilled from the flesh. In emotional terms, desire, hatred, rage and other all-consuming emotions must be sloughed away to enable the soul to perfect its ‘monuments’. How this is achieved is the problem Yeats explores in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927). The speaker in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in the autumn of his life, realises that his old age excludes him from the sexual joy of those in the full bloom of summer, so he turns his mind instead to the possibility of more lasting, ‘monumental’ forms of joy: That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, – Those dying generations – at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. (lines 1–8) The appeal of abundant life is seductively set against the cold, unageing intellect. But this stanza’s musicality betrays the difficulty that the speaker experiences as he attempts to contemplate, and create, ‘higher’ things. The consonance of the sibilant

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‘s’ sounds is entwined throughout the first stanza. Just as the young are locked in ‘one another’s arms’, so birds, trees, song, salmon, seas and summer all sound their sensual music. Soft ‘f’ sounds from ‘fish, flesh, or fowl’ waft across the different categories of life, hinting at a harmony between them. The connection between living things is reduced to a three-word synopsis of life – ‘begotten, born, and dies’, the plosive ‘b’ giving birth to the triad and rushing headlong to the solid ‘d’ of ‘dies’. The homophone ‘foul’ in ‘fowl’ hints at the bodily corruption that will inevitably follow on from the ‘sensual music’ of ‘those dying generations’. In contrast to the fertile pleasures of flesh and fauna of the first stanza, the rest of the poem emphasises the joy to be gained from attending to the soul: O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. (lines 17–20) The emphasis shifts from mortality to divinity – ‘God’s holy fire’ – fire being the element that represents the unchanging Divine world. This holy fire refines the soul by fanning the flames of divine joy. In a letter to Olivia Shakespear written on 27 October 1927, Yeats calls this holy fire ‘ecstasy’.42 But ecstasy, unlike joy, suggests a putting out of place (medieval Latin extasis), and can imply insanity or bewilderment. The late Greek etymological meaning explains that ecstasy is maddening, a ‘withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance’. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ implies that the soul must renounce the flesh in order to escape from the cycle of life and death, achieving what Yeats calls ‘ecstasy’. Joy, on the other hand, keeps the soul in life, in place, and thereby in the body, and so the alchemy for which Yeats strives to bring the divine and the sensual into a joyful – if not ecstatic – union. The poet must relinquish flesh and feeling in order to be gathered in to the ecstasy and ‘the artifice of Eternity’ (lines 23–24). For this reason, Yeats appeals to the ‘sages’ to ‘consume [his] heart away, sick with desire’, because that heart is ‘fastened to a dying animal’ (lines 21–2). Life and death are absurd unless they are alchemised into ‘the artifice of eternity’, or the eternity of art and artifice. For Yeats, it is poetry (or ‘song’), rather than the Christian God, that performs that alchemy. The ‘song’ can transfigure absurdity and sorrow into divine joy: An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress. (lines 9–12) An obsolete meaning of the noun ‘paltry’ is rubbish; the Oxford English Dictionary traces the adjective to a Middle Low German word for ‘rag’, which chimes with Yeats’s ‘tattered coat’. Casting aside the paltry waste of the dying body, the aged man must attempt to make song from ‘monuments of its own magnificence’, that is, song from song or art from art (line 14). Only through art can the artist experience divine joy, the soul’s joy, which becomes a form of creative discipline. This emotional artistry must be cultivated to counteract the indignities of bodily disintegration and to create an immortal work. Divine joy, if it necessitates the denial of the body, becomes less attractive to Yeats because it denies the divinity of the body. Even in his early poetry, Yeats had struggled

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to transfigure desire into divinity, doubt into belief. His later vision of divine joy seeks the transformation of bodily life in the immortality of art. The problem, though, is that there is no escape from the desiring heart. For while the artistic creation may be divinely inspired, the body is a necessary vehicle for soul-making. It is precisely because of fleshly life that the poet is able to sing his way into Byzantium. Alchemy, as Gorski points out, speaks of harmony, distillation, divine perfection, but also stresses ‘dissolution and demolition’.43 To effect transmutation, the alchemist must distil opposite elements, one from the other, in order to recombine them into something more perfect. The opposite of divine joy is sensual joy.

Sensual Joy – the Power of the Body The antinomy of divine joy is sensual joy. Yeats, controversially in twentieth-century, majority-Catholic Ireland, suggests that sensual joy can provide access to creativity and spirituality. As he succinctly states in ‘The Spur’ (1938), sex fuels poetry as effectively as soul singing does in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ – itself a tellingly bodily metaphor: You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song? (lines 1–4) This is an example of Yeats’s joyful posturing, a performative poetic act that offers energy to the flagging heart. The sexually defiant stance taken in ‘The Spur’ evokes Yeats’s wandering Beggar–Poet, a persona that first emerges as Red Hanrahan (1905) in his early work and ultimately manifests as ‘The Wild Wicked Old Man’ in his New Poems (1938). In the poem ‘The Wild Wicked Old Man’, the Beggar–Poet claims: ‘A young man in the dark am I / But a wild old man in the light’ (lines 37–8), signalling his sexual prowess and stamina combined with the wisdom of age. Rather than gamble on the uncertain pleasures of a Byzantine afterlife, the Beggar–Poet advocates taking pleasure wherever and whenever it can be had. He acknowledges that all ‘right taught’ men know that the end of suffering can come from divine intervention, but he confesses: a coarse old man am I, I choose the second-best, I forget it all awhile Upon a woman’s breast. (lines 59–62) He may not have the stamina of a young man, but he can pierce the heart more meaningfully with words than flesh, ‘Words I have that can pierce the heart, / But what can he do but touch?’ (lines 16–17). The ‘Wild Wicked Old Man’ urges sexual pleasure and joy – the sensuality of the body coupled with the joy of poetic sensuality. The Old Man claims that the capacity of words to ‘pierce the heart’, to move their reader or auditor emotionally, is a joy more satisfying than sexual union, as it offers a potential union of heart with heart, as well as body with body. The ‘mad’ passion of the beggar, for Yeats, promises an alternative joyful union that is more accessible but no less holy than prayers. Yeats’s ironic coupling of ageing sexuality to wickedness clearly defies the strong pressure to be respectable in a society dominated by Catholic moralism.

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Yeats takes this defiance even further in the figure of the sensual heretic Crazy Jane. Through Jane, Yeats insists on a fundamental interdependence between body, heart and soul. Elizabeth Cullingford suggests that Yeats offers ‘an eroticized politics of female transgression’ in the figure of Jane.44 ‘Against the power he called the ‘“ecclesiastical mind, Protestant and Catholic”’, Cullingford claims, Yeats ‘pitted Crazy Jane’.45 Reversing the hermetic understanding of the human and the divine, Crazy Jane proves that ‘the low provides access to the high’.46 In fact, Jane’s lowliness enables her, and Yeats through her, to speak truth to power. Creating her persona enabled Yeats to escape ‘his own carefully constructed mask’ as the ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ of ‘Among School Children’ (1928).47 Through Jane’s voice, Margaret Mills Harper claims, Yeats was ‘loosened from what he perceived as sexual, social, and aesthetic constraints’ and able to ‘“sing” some of his profound ideas’.48 As an outsider estranged from society and the Church, Jane gains an imaginative and emotional freedom that fosters a more creative, non-normative relationship to others – including God. Margaret Mills Harper characterises Crazy Jane as ‘an older and multiply disenfranchised woman, without privileges provided by youth, gender, and class, including health (and perhaps sanity), normative sexuality, and social respectability’.49 Jane’s status as poor, partnered but unmarried, non-reproductive, and in charge of her own sexual and spiritual destiny challenges the norms of respectability in twentieth-century Ireland. The ‘Crazy Jane’ sequence of poems challenges orthodoxy by endorsing an outspoken alternative sexual and spiritual morality to that of Irish Catholicism. Yeats not only defies orthodoxy through Jane’s audacious speech about sex, but also returns to his hermetic and occult commitments by coupling Jane’s power to ancient magic. Jane takes power from the ancient magic of the land to cast curses upon the head of the Bishop – a representative of the Church who damned Jane and Jack years ago (lines 3–4) – in ‘Crazy Jane and the Bishop’. The Bishop vilified the lovers for living ‘like beast and beast’ (line 13), particularly because their sexual union was not sanctified by the Church. But in emphasising the longevity of their union – ‘Jack had my virginity’, she says, and indicates that her ‘dear Jack’ remained her lover until his death (lines 22, 5) – Yeats hints at an older form of marriage, an irregular union recognised by neither Church nor State. In nineteenth-century Ireland, as Dympna McLoughlin has shown, ‘destitute paupers believed themselves to be married, since they had paid a small sum of money to a “couple beggar” and in return he performed a rudimentary ritual over them’.50 Already beneath the notice of Church or State, the poor gained nothing from a sanctified marriage. Irregular unions, on the other hand, improved their chances of survival, for themselves and for any children they might have. Just as Jane turns to an alternative power to sanctify her life with Jack, so she invokes an older power to consecrate his death. She curses the Bishop, who represents a religion that did not bless Jack alive; nor will it bless him now he is dead: Bring me to the blasted oak That I, midnight upon the stroke, ... May call down curses on his head Because of my dear Jack that’s dead. (lines 1–2, 4–5) In Celtic mythology the oak is believed to represent the connection between heaven and earth, and in the Ogham alphabet it is symbolic of strength, stability and the healing of the heart after a loss. In alchemy, the oak is identified as the ‘philosophical tree’

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and represents the alchemical process itself: the transformation of lead into gold, the creation of the philosopher’s stone, and the expansion of the mind and soul of the philosopher. The oak offers safety for Jane – ‘there is shelter under it’ (line 26) – but also the pleasure of magical power. Jane’s ancient curses have ritualistic overtones and hint at her access to an older magic than the Church admits to. Her outspoken denunciation of the Bishop also recalls Yeats’s clashes with the Irish Church in print and in the Senate. Jane’s argument with the Bishop thus hints at the performative power of words. In the best-known of the Crazy Jane poems, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ (1933), Yeats tests his theory that making poetry, like making love, is a physical, embodied, sensual experience. Jane confronts her opposite, and they argue their positions on theology and sensuality. The Bishop suggests that Jane should look beyond the mire of blood and veins, the fleshly vehicle of life. He counsels her to consider the next life – ‘Live in a heavenly mansion’ – and reject her desiring body – ‘Not in some foul sty’ (lines 5–6). Just as the Bishop condemns her profane union as bestial, he sees Jane as morally degenerate, a pig living in a foul sty. The irony is that Jesus, of whom the cleric is meant to be an institutional representative, was born in a sty among animals, and yet he is still divine. Pointing out that Jane’s breasts are ‘flat and fallen’ and her veins bloodless and ‘dry’, the Bishop insinuates that her bodily disintegration mirrors her alleged degenerate soul. As her body is no longer attractive or reproductively useful, the Bishop argues, she should renounce her earthly concerns and instead attend to the state of her soul. This reveals the Church’s misogynistic view of women, valuable only if they are non-sexual (the ideal of Virgin Mary) or married and breeding. Yet Jane defiantly and joyfully celebrates her sexual pleasure – ‘Men come, men go’ (‘Crazy Jane on God’, line 5) – flesh must be given its due. Jane makes no complaint about the transitory nature of her lovers, rather she finds pleasure in them: ‘My body makes no moan, / But sings on’ (‘Crazy Jane on God’, lines 22–3). Though ‘no moan’ may suggest a lack of sensual pleasure, her body ‘sings on’, rejoicing in its own abjection. Her unconventional union may be understood as an ‘alchemical wedding’: a colloquial term for the union of the mercurius (philosophical mercury), which contains the ‘male’ principle (hot, dry, active), and the argent vive, which contains the ‘female’ principle (cold, moist, passive).51 Even though Jane has learnt her unorthodox truth ‘in bodily lowliness’, neither grave nor bed can make her repent her heresy: ‘“Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul”’ (lines 7–8). In spiritual alchemy, the descent of the soul into matter is a necessary part of the progress to enlightenment. As Sendivogius explains in ‘A Dialogue of the Allchymist and Sulphur’: ‘For what has not descended never can / Ascend to heaven’s bright Meridian.’52 Though she is low in status, Jane’s heart is proud and elevated; thus, she contains the low and the high. The last two lines of each stanza pair a high / low dichotomy – mansion / sty, lowliness / pride, whole / rent – demonstrating in the union of opposites that ‘fair needs foul’. Yeatsean antinomies depend on one another and need one another to move forward. Jane’s ability to embody both high and low makes her a figure much closer to an ideal wholeness or unity of being, imperfect and immanent though it is. She shows that pride is pointless, for: Love has pitched its mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. (lines 15–18)

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Jane, in her earthly wisdom, concludes that love (both romantic and spiritual), like inspiration, arises from ‘the place of excrement’ – the body and its refuse. Joy and love may be excrementitious, but if one can embrace this paradox, be ‘crazy’ and unify those two opposites, then ‘the place of excrement’ can be creative and joyful. The sanity of Jane’s ‘craziness’, as well as the Old Man’s ‘wickedness’, is associated with their joy in sex and life-affirming defiance of prudery. Their instinctual and sensual knowledge is an embodied knowing which, in Yeats’s view, is not in conflict with greater wisdom, but represents another aspect of this wisdom, beyond the confines of the rational mind. If divine joy is the way of soul and intellect, and sensual joy is the way of the body and heart, both forms of joy find expression in the figure of Jane. For Yeats, affective alchemy is key to poetic creation. The alchemist’s task is to unite opposing substances in a chemical wedding and bring forth something new. For Yeats, the poem becomes the alembic for distilling and reconfiguring the symbols, intellect, emotions, body and spirit of the poet and the context in which he lives. Divine joy and sensual joy, first divorced and then reconciled, are brought together into something transcendent. If the heretic, as Watson says, ‘proclaims something the world does not admit and hesitates to even consider’,53 Yeats’s view that great poetry can unify the material and immaterial, the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent could be seen as a heresy. Writing near the end of his life, Yeats concludes that ‘when I try to put all into a phrase I say, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.” I must embody it in the completion of my life.’54 To confine oneself to body or mind is to limit life and art; rather the poet must vacillate, doubt, struggle, suffer all the joys and sorrows of the spirit and the flesh in order to achieve a fully affectively transmuted creative life.

Notes 1. Watson, Heresies & Heretics, p. 10; ‘heresy, n’. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Peter Gay, in his history of modernism, finds little coherence across self-defined modernists but claims that ‘the lure of heresy’ is a foundational attitude common to all. He suggests that modernists found satisfaction in ‘the sheer act of successful insubordination against ruling authority’: see Gay, The Lure of Heresy, p. 4. 2. Nicholas Allen, in ‘The Church in Ireland’, p. 233, suggests that Yeats ‘slipped with guile between heresy and the orthodox’. 3. All poems are taken from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, unless otherwise stated. 4. As Yeats put it in his philosophical treatise, A Vision (1937), p. 137: ‘The whole system is founded upon the belief that the ultimate reality, symbolised as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness . . . into a series of antimonies’. There is extensive work on Yeats’s occult systems: for excellent introductions and notes, see the 1925 and 1937 Scribner editions of A Vision, edited by Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul; see also Mann et al., W. B.Yeats’s ‘A Vision’. 5. Yeats summarised this position as this: ‘I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self.’ Per Amica Silentia Lunae, in Mythologies, p. 334. For more on Yeats and his masks, see Richard Ellmann, The Man and the Masks. 6. Yeats, qtd in Materer, ‘Occultism’, p. 242. 7. Yeats, Autobiography, p. 180.

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8. The ‘invisible gates would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme’ (ibid., p. 70). 9. Abraham, Alchemical Imagery, p. 204. 10. Ibid., p. 204. 11. Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’, in Essays and Introductions, p. 252. Yeats distinguishes between active and passive suffering, linking passive suffering in poetry to raw personal feelings that have not been transformed and intensified through language into art. Active suffering transforms the personal into poetic language and shifts it towards a mythic or historic scale. 12. Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’, in Essays and Introductions, p. 254. 13. Ibid., p. 252. 14. For a discussion of laughter and tragic joy, see Ramazani, ‘Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime’, pp. 163–77. 15. Yeats in a letter to John O’Leary (July 1892), cited in Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, p. 97. 16. For foundational scholarship on Yeats and his hermeticism, see the work of George Mills Harper, Margaret Mills Harper and Kathleen Raine. 17. Abraham, Alchemical Imagery, p. 35. 18. Mark Morrisson, Modern Alchemy, p. 3. 19. Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy, p. 17. 20. Abraham, Alchemical Imagery, p. xv. 21. Ibid., p. xvii. 22. Qtd in Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy, p. 3. 23. Pope Pius X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’, p. 25. 24. Ibid., p. 1. 25. Roden, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 26. Tyrrell, qtd in Wells, ‘The Pope as Antichrist’, p. 271. 27. Yeats, ‘Divorce’, in Later Articles and Reviews, p. 188. Yeats gave his speech on 11 June 1925 and arranged for it to be published in The Irish Times the next day; see Later Articles and Reviews, p. 379. 28. Ibid., p. 189. 29. Yeats, Autobiography, p.77. 30. Ibid., p. 180. 31. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’; Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 44. 32. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’; Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, pp. 946–7. For more on impersonality and its limitations and contradictions, see Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. 33. For an exploration of alchemy, atomic physics and radioactivity in modernism, see Morrisson, Modern Alchemy. 34. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, in Essays and Introductions, p. 509. 35. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in Essays and Introductions, p. 162. 36. Coudert, ‘Renaissance Alchemy’, n.p. 37. Yeats, qtd in Jeffares, A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 256. 38. Von Hügel cited in Green, Yeats’s Blessings on von Hügel, p. 13. Green is highly critical of Yeats’s interpretation of von Hügel, stating: ‘Yeats does not know who von Hügel is. His blessings, consequently, are worth very little’ (p. 2). 39. Ibid. 40. Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats, p. 220. 41. Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy, p. 31. 42. Jeffares, A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 256. 43. Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy, p. 167. 44. Cullingford, Gender and History, p. 229.

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 243. M. M. Harper, ‘The Problem of Crazy Jane’, p. 14; ‘Among School Children’ (1928), line 8. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. McLoughlin, ‘Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, p. 270. The philosopher’s stone is born from the distillation and recombination of these principles, bringing together body, soul and spirit, and producing the ‘illumined philosopher’. See Abraham, Alchemical Imagery, p. xv. 52. Sendivogius, qtd in Abraham, Alchemical Imagery, p. 56. 53. Watson, Heresies & Heretics, p. 10. 54. Yeats, ‘Pages from a Diary in 1930’, in Explorations, p. 301.

Bibliography Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Allen, Nicholas, ‘The Church in Ireland: Protestant and Catholic’, in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (eds), W. B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 227–36. Coudert, Allison, ‘Alchemy: Renaissance Alchemy’, Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia. com (2 July 2020), (last accessed 21 October 2020). Cuda, Anthony, The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010). Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Eliot, T. S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1933). Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (eds), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1, 3rd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2003), pp. 941–7. Ellmann, Maud, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Ellmann, Richard, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999). Gay, Peter, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010). Green, Martin, Yeats’s Blessings on von Hügel: Essays on Literature and Religion (London: Longmans, 1967). Gorski, William T., Yeats and Alchemy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). Harper, George Mills, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (Basingstoke and London, 1987) Harper, George Mills (ed.), Yeats and the Occult (Toronto and New York: Macmillan, 1975). Harper, George Mills, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Harper, Margaret Mills, ‘The Problem of Crazy Jane’, Nordic Irish Studies, 17:1 (2018), pp. 13–30. Harper, Margaret Mills, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hulme, T. E., ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1911–12), in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengari (Clarendon Press, 1994). Jeffares, A. Norman, A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968).

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McLoughlin, Dympna, ‘Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, Irish Journal of Psychology, 15:2–3 (1994), pp. 266–75. Mann, Neil, Matthew Gibson and Claire V. Nally (eds), W. B. Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: Explications and Contexts (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2012). Materer, Timothy, ‘Occultism’, in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (eds), W. B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 237–46. Morrisson, Mark, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Pius X, ‘Pope, Pascendi Dominici Gregis’ The Holy See, 1907, available at (last accessed 24 October 2019). Pound, Ezra, ‘A Retrospect’, in Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divagations (New York: New Directions, 1918). Principe, Lawrence M., The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Raine, Kathleen, Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W. B. Yeats (1898; Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1990). Ramazani, R. Jahan, ‘Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime’, PMLA, 104:2 (1989), pp. 163–77. Roden, Frederick S., ‘Introduction: The Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms’, in Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith (eds), Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Unterecker John, A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1959). Vermeersch, Arthur, ‘Modernism’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), (last accessed 21 October 2020). Watson, George, Heresies & Heretics: Memories from the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2013). Wells, David F., ‘The Pope as Antichrist: The Substance of George Tyrrell’s Polemic’, The Harvard Theological Review, 65:2 (1972), pp. 271–83. Whitaker, Thomas, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1964). Yeats, W. B., A Vision: The Original 1925 Edition, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul (New York Scribner, 2013). Yeats, W. B., A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul (New York Scribner, 2015). Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Yeats, W. B., Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962). Yeats, W. B., Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900, ed. Colton Johnson (New York Scribner, 2000). Yeats, W. B., Mythologies (New York: Collier Books, 1969). Yeats, W. B., The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd edn (New York: Scribner, 1989).

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26 Watery Modernism? Mike McCormack’s SOLAR BONES and W. B. Yeats’s JOHN SHERMAN Claire Connolly

I

n what follows, I analyse two Irish novels that share a deep concern for the west of Ireland as imperilled cultural resource and watery environment. Published over a hundred years apart, on either side of the period of literary modernism, both Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) and W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman (1891) mobilise modernist forms and themes in partial and selective ways. In doing so, they imagine forms of rupture that are none the less conceived in terms of permeable points of connection: in both novels, bodies of water link people, places, species and materials, and stimulate us to think about water as political, cultural and environmental threshold in the Anthropocene. The novels also turn to infrastructure (pipelines, bridges, quays and roads) as constitutive of a modernity made in watery places. In experimenting with their contemporary worlds, Solar Bones and John Sherman inscribe the contours of a broken world but also invoke the prospect of a salvaged modernity. My consideration of Irish modernism with and through water is animated by the charged temporality of the Anthropocene: broadly understood as the period in which humans have had a decisive impact on the planet, polluting and acidifying the oceans, causing the extinction of plant and animal species, and altering the atmosphere. ‘A poetics of the Anthropocene’ can, suggests David Farrier, work to connect up different points in time and ‘point us toward a careful retying of the knots that bind us together, in deep time, with the fate of the Earth’.1 The two novels discussed here imagine forms of connection that animate a renewed modernity in ways that are closely related to, but also swerve away from, modernist styles. Rather than practise forms of breakage or disruption, Solar Bones and John Sherman concern themselves with forms of aesthetic and cultural practice that take root in time and space, pursuing self-conscious questions about representation but also finding resilience in ordinary activities such as driving, fishing and gardening. Water expresses and enables a porous form of connection between places and worlds, shaped by histories at once environmental and political. The bodies of water that surround, permeate and shape our islands are the result of both gradual geological or climatic change over time but also carry centuries of colonial and imperial history, played out on environmental thresholds, including riverbanks, coasts and shores (Plate 31).The fractures and pressures consequent upon that history are part of a wider Atlantic modernity that affects cities such as London as much as port towns like Sligo or Galway, and both novels seek to test these pressures across different points while measuring their effects in space and time. To address their points of connection is to

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reimagine ‘the enduring potentiality of modernist forms, themes and practices’ in Irish culture while also moving towards a more multidirectional account of ‘the degrees of ideological, intellectual and artistic distance that separates divergent modernisms from their equally diverging legatees’.2 The action of Solar Bones is dated All Souls’ Day, 2 November, a threshold time in the Celtic calendar during which the souls of the faithfully departed find their way back to the homes of the living. With a first-person narrator whose remarkable single-sentence monologue is voiced from beyond the grave, Solar Bones has been hailed as testament to the vibrancy of modernism’s modes in contemporary Irish culture. Writing in the New Statesman, Stephanie Boland hailed the novel as the ‘latest addition to a growing canon of experimental Irish writing’,3 nothing less than a ‘resurrection for Irish modernism’. As befits a novel with a protagonist whose profession is engineering, Solar Bones is constructed via a set of intricate and gripping dilemmas. Marcus Conway is a public servant, a husband and a father. He is also, we learn at the novel’s end, dead, having suffered a heart attack in his car. As county engineer, Marcus discovers that lazy expediency has resulted in the use of poor-quality materials in the foundations of a new school building; meanwhile, repairs to a bridge are delayed due to political corruption. Via the filter of Marcus’s consciousness, readers witness the unfolding of a public health crisis caused by a tainted water supply: hundreds are hospitalised and his wife, Mairead, suffers a protracted and violent illness. Relations with his son in Australia and his artist daughter, Agnes, are frayed: late-night Skype conversations fail to bridge the distance with the son, while Marcus finds himself tested by viewing Agnes’s artwork in the nearby town of Galway. Agnes’s installation is called ‘The O Negative Diaries’ and uses her own menstrual blood as its main medium, and Marcus finds himself ‘standing in the middle of a municipal gallery with its walls covered in a couple of litres of her own blood’.4 Red words shine through the ‘finely emulsified’ light, meaning that even if the crowd broke up the continuity of the space there was no doubting that the light served to make everyone part of a unified whole that occupied the whole gallery, Agnes’s blood was now our common element, the medium in which we stood and breathed. (p. 44) The novel connects experimental and political art with forms of knowledge rooted in an embodied locality, challenging a ‘commonplace modernist hostility for the provincial’.5 Agnes’s art is challenging to her father not only because it is made using the medium of her own menstrual blood but also because of the way in which the ‘livid words and sentences’ she displays on the walls of the gallery incorporate ‘snippets of new stories’ from local Mayo newspapers (p. 44). In Agnes’s own words, Marcus suspects his daughter of ‘a cheap shot, that I’m standing on some urban stage and poking fun at culchies’, ‘Uncle Tomming here, gratifying urban audiences with the comedy capers of their country cousins’ (p. 55). But Agnes’s powerful defence of the use of provincial newspapers is expressed in terms of the value of forms of ‘local reckoning’, suggesting a shared immediacy between avant-garde art, menstrual blood and provincial print. The novel’s central crisis involves a reference to a real event in the west of Ireland, the widespread contamination of drinking water in 2007. In the novel, Marcus’s wife

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Mairead drinks poisoned water in the restaurant that they visit following Agnes’s gallery opening and suffers gut-wrenching cramps and vomiting as a result. Official civic explanations of the episode refer to ‘the convergence of adverse circumstances – decrepit technology and torrential rains, overdevelopment and agricultural slurry’ but fail to ‘point the finger at farmers or engineers or those planners and developers who had allowed the city to grow beyond its ability to keep itself supplied with potable water’ (p. 196). It falls instead to the narrative to sketch out a map of a world made by and with water, ranging from Marcus’s painstaking account of a supply ‘severely contaminated with the coliform Cryptosporidium, a viral parasite which originates in human faecal matter’ (p. 31) to Agnes’s more ‘lurid’ images of ‘civil collapse and destruction’ (p. 109). Such connections between private and public realms are integral to a narrative that moves along and between ‘mountains, rivers and lakes past, present and future’ (p. 57). A hydrological landscape forms the permeable ground of the novel’s plot, serving to bring into view the centrality of infrastructure (in particular, roads, bridges and water pipes) to the lives of the main characters. The relationship between lived territory and the technical systems that underpin civic society shapes the question of connection as a sinuous, elusive presence in the novel – a fragmented prose style that is assembled to form a single capacious sentence stretching the entire length of the novel; a broken public realm seen through the eyes of a man with a fundamental belief in the human value and spiritual beauty of large technical solutions: a rich emotional life realised within the narrative of a dead man. While much of the acclaim for Solar Bones’s modernism focuses on its experimental narrative, the novel also asks us to go beyond questions of style and to make connections between the specificities of matter (concrete, bodies, cars) and the abstract world of politics (county council corruption, lax implementation of essential safety guidelines for public construction projects). To adopt Bruno Latour’s terms, the non-human actors in the novel are never ‘simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection’6 but rather possess forms of agency that serve to remake the social world: most strikingly, when Marcus experiences the heart attack he suffers while driving home as an operatic coming apart ‘in sheets and waves’, with different parts of the car (steering wheel, passenger seat, windscreen, accelerator, engine) each sounding their distinctive notes as part of ‘my post mortem aria my engineer’s lament’ (p. 263). Though Marcus Conway cannot at the end reach out across ‘that vast unbroken commonage of space and time’ that makes up the unknowable world beyond mortal life, he considers the possibility of God as a ‘fellow engineer’. In that suggestion, we see the promise of a remade modernity in which we ‘regain the capacity to do our own sorting of the elements that belong to our time’,7 a reconnection of natural and social worlds. In Solar Bones, that work of sorting and connecting is imagined a search for ‘accuracy’ in a world of awkward angles (p. 221). Marcus Conway finds solace in the memory of his own father’s efforts at ‘fixing an accurate scale and placing of himself in the world’ but is also haunted by a childhood story ‘of how, when he was a child himself a massive ship came into Clew Bay’. The size and power of the mysterious ship impresses itself in awed memory: a huge ship which bow-to-stern was over a mile long and with four massive funnels on it coughing up big balls of black deatach and armed with cannon and other artillery along its sides when it anchored in the middle of the bay for a full day before it fired two shells onto the mainland. (p. 88)8

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The boat unloads its timber on to the quay in Westport, and the hardness of the raw wood is part of the texture of the memory: ‘this timber was so dense and closegrained it destroyed every saw blade that was set to it, shearing teeth and buckling so many, one after another, that Kelly’s timber yard had to send to Sheffield for specially tempered blades’ (p. 88). The strange story of the ship draws imperial history into the narrative: the quays at Westport were built in the early 1800s by the Brownes of Westport House to facilitate connections with the family slave plantations in Jamaica and to encourage Atlantic trade.9 The link with empire becomes deadly as his father remembers how the Sheffield blade cut ‘smoothly’ through the tropical hardwood but released a poisonous substance: any man who ever worked on the cutting of that timber never had the full of his health afterwards because there was nothing but blue dust out of it, which lodged in their lungs and sent several of them to early graves, five or six men with young families left behind them, drifting away into oblivion the same way the ship itself left the bay, turning on its own central axis with its massive diesel engines churning and pushing it out into the Atlantic beyond whence it came and to where it returned. (pp. 88–9) The modernism of Solar Bones lies not only in forms of syntactical innovation borrowed from Joyce but also in these contradictions of time and space. In an interview with the author, Treasa de Loughry describes McCormack’s west of Ireland as hyper-modern and underdeveloped at the same time – the landscape is contradictory, so that we have the ruins of older energy regimes like peat bog lands and the older technologies we used to mine or to transform the land, but then that coexists with wind turbines and the hypermodernity of gas fields.10 These contradictions in turn open into a diffuse relationship with an earlier west of Ireland novel: W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman. Like Solar Bones, John Sherman routes its social and political concerns via bodies of water. The lines that connect the two novels cross the century and move in multiple ways; in sketching a series of possible connections, I set questions of precedence and influence to one side and proceed in the spirit of the ‘offbeat temporality’ invoked by Paige Reynolds in her account of Irish modernist afterlives.11 Yeats was twenty-two when he began work on John Sherman and its companion piece, Dhoya. He described the former as a fiction of ‘latter day Ireland’, intended to accompany the latter, ‘a short romance of ancient Ireland – somewhat over dreamy and florid but quite readible [sic] any way’.12 The legendary tale Dhoya, completed first, depicts an occult world in which a young mortal man grows to be a giant and falls in love with a fairy, a theme shared with ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, on which Yeats was working at the same time.13 Encouraged by his father to write ‘a story with real people’, Yeats then began working on John Sherman in 1887, and by May 1888 told Katharine Tynan that ‘it goes on fairly well the style quite sane and the theme modern, more character than plot in it’.14 He compared the novel to national tales by the Banim brothers and Gerald Griffin, and to the poetry of William Allingham.15

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As R. F. Foster remarks, however, both John Sherman and Dhoya ‘lack artistic confidence’: ‘the author’s voice was still uncertain: ironic social and psychological observation alternates uneasily with romantic introspection’.16 Emer Nolan’s observation that Yeats imagined ‘fin-de-siècle Ireland as the site of a collision between ancient tradition and commercial civilisation’17 rings true for John Sherman, but the novel draws only obliquely on currents of cultural decolonisation. Perhaps this is because Yeats’s desire to imagine the path towards a whole and renewed artistic life is always countered by the inevitable experience of division between Ireland and Britain. The references are in part personal and Yeats reported to John O’Leary that ‘hatred of London’ was the book’s ‘motif’.18 But the book’s treatment of the theme of an artistic life divided across the islands goes beyond autobiography and inscribes a set of conditions attendant upon Ireland’s colonial modernity. Forms of necessary but painful connection are expressed in the novel via the bodies of water that connect Sligo and London. As such, John Sherman prompts us to take further steps in the recalibration of the relationship between revivalism and modernism begun by Emer Nolan. With the Irish Revival now ‘regarded as a signal aspect, even one of the incubators, of modernism’,19 we can see how John Sherman holds in balance a rural Irish landscape rendered via romantic aesthetics with the urban cityscapes of modernism, but also how it undoes this distinction via a closely focused and intensely realised account of the natural world and a particular focus on water. In contrast to a periodised account of Irish modernism that focuses on short-lived political and stylistic revolutions, the style, imagery and themes of John Sherman invite a consideration of issues such as longevity, resilience and sustainability. The resonance of these issues for Yeats’s novel can be more fully grasped in relation to Dhoya, published alongside John Sherman by T. Fisher Unwin in a volume bearing the pseudynom ‘Ganconagh’. Dhoya immerses its readers in deep time: its fantastic plot is tied together via references to ancient Japanese art, the pyramids of Egypt and a legendary warrior from Germanic mythology. These disparate invocations of a deep past are knitted together to create what Yeats would later call a ‘phantasmagoria’: an obscure but powerful invocation of an ancient culture.20 Just as Dipesh Chakrabarty tells us that the Anthropocene ‘entails a constant conceptual traffic between Earth history and world history’, so an immersion in deep time is recursively connected to Yeats’s late nineteenth-century contemporary moment.21 The placing of the two fictions side by side – a fiction set in a slightly rendered present alongside a resonant mythic fable – expresses a version of ‘ethical proximity between the most fleeting event in our present and planet-shaping effects that will play out over millennia’.22 The setting of Dhoya is the Bay of Ballah, on the western shores of a mythological but recognisable Ireland. Just as the town of Ballah serves as a version of Sligo in John Sherman, the Bay of Ballah is a lightly disguised Sligo Bay. John Sherman is an unusual experiment in fiction by a writer whose global reputation rests on his poetry. In classic Bildungsroman style, the narrative closely tracks the intense experiences of its protagonist, a young man in search of artistic identity and personal fulfilment. The opening establishes coordinates in time and space (‘On the evening of the 9th of December, in the coffee-room of the Imperial Hotel, there was nobody but this guest’) and the novel tracks its protagonist’s journey in a realist fashion, moving from Ballah to London and back again.23 The narrative shapes itself to the emerging psychology of the protagonist but is not characterised by the kind of linguistic innovations we encounter in the best-known Irish modernist Künstlerroman,

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Sherman’s agonised sincerity stands in contrast to the delicate ironies of Portrait. Neither is John Sherman a naturalist fiction in classic late nineteenth-century style: the novel does offer a Zola-esque depiction of a wretched, doomed environment but ends with marriage and the cautious promise of a renewed society.24 Unlike Solar Bones, then, the modernism of John Sherman does not clearly reside in an identifiable stylistic signature. Rather, the novel experiments with forms of social life, sending its protagonist on a recognisable journey in search of professional and emotional fulfilment that is punctuated by periods of doubt and uncertainty. Just as Mike McCormack describes ‘the real experiment at the heart of Solar Bones’ as the challenge to tell a story ‘about a white middle-aged man who has no material want, who loves his wife, son, and daughter, and he lacks nothing’,25 so John Sherman absorbs itself in the ordinary world of an idle young man who needs to find a profession. With Solar Bones, an intense focus on ordinary life and the ‘natural rhythms of light and weather and time’26 yields a style and a syntax that are characteristic of modernism. Similarly in John Sherman, the uncertainty of the protagonist in Yeats’s plot shapes a ‘narrative unfolding’ of conflict, overlaps and connections.27 John Sherman is possessed of a strange, unsettled consciousness that slips away from everyday reality into the territory of dreams. The pictures that he sees have a vividness that disrupt the onward movement of the plot. Sherman’s dreams are illuminated by a dazzling light that ‘flowed from the vague and refracting regions of hope and memory’, nearly but not quite extinguished by ‘the too glaring lustre of life itself’.28 This attention to ‘life itself’ makes for a slow-paced narrative, gapped by pauses and longueurs that enact the drift of the plot. Solar Bones and John Sherman share a sceptical attitude to what Latour calls ‘the calendar or the flow that the moderns had constructed for us’.29 With this resistance to modernity as progress comes an interest in forms of networks and connection that cut across the linear movement of the plot, often routed in both plots via water. Latour’s imagery of modernity as tide is helpful here: There is no tide, long in rising, that would be flowing again today. There has never been such a tide. We can go on to other things – that is, return to the multiple entities that have always passed in a different way.30 In John Sherman, the ‘other things’ of which Latour writes can be seen to flow through and past watery places, as the narrative feels its way towards a fuller domain of the social (taking in, for example, animal as well as human life). Neither fully realist, naturalist nor modernist, John Sherman stands apart from both old and new: a novel not of breaks but of strange continuities and flowing water. Foster describes John Sherman as a ‘novel [that] evokes a sense of place, and a passion for a homeland, which at certain key points conveys homesickness and alienation both powerfully and precisely’.31 But John Sherman is not simply a book that contrasts Sligo and London. Rather it brings into view ‘the salt-water networks of the nineteenthcentury Anglophone world’,32 part of a wider effort made by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘writers [who] grappled with the challenges of representing the geography of an island undergoing rapid and shocking change’.33 John Sherman leaves his home town of Ballah to work as a clerk in his uncle’s shipbuilding firm in London; he

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finally returns, breaking his London engagement in order to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton. The Sligo shipbuilding context is informed by biography and family history but also links the novel to wider efforts within Irish modernism to register the effects of Atlantic modernity. Yeats’s mother’s family, the Pollexfens, were shipowners in Sligo, while his father’s family were associated with art and bohemia. Foster refers to the autobiographical ‘Yeats / Pollexfen dichotomy’ that informs the novel,34 and we see this when Sherman drifts from indecisive thoughts about art and life to an office job in London. There, John Sherman works for his uncle Michael at the firm of Sherman and Saunders. A man who has regard only for ‘his family and his ships’, Michael Sherman is depicted as holding humans and boats in a strange, loveless form of affinity with one another: His family were represented by his nephew and his nephew’s mother. He did not feel much affection for them. He believed in his family – that was all. To remind him of the other goal of his thoughts hung round his private office pictures with such inscriptions as ‘S.S. Indus at the Cape of Good Hope’, ‘The barque Mary in the Mozambique Channel’, ‘The barque Livingstone at Port Said’, and many more. Every rope was drawn accurately with a ruler, and here and there were added distant vessels sailing proudly by with all that indifference to perspective peculiar to the drawings of sailors. On every ship was the flag of the firm spread out to show the letters.35 The pictures on Michael Sherman’s wall represent shipping networks that span the globe, tracing the sinews of Britain’s maritime empire, while the reference to the typical artistic style of sailors suggests marine art pursued in a utilitarian mode: drawings that glorify ships as possessions and advance the geographical imagination of empire. Where the plot might appear to divide John Sherman’s undefined artistic vocation from his office work in London, then, the scene presented holds commerce, art and empire in close relationship. These questions of artistic representation, scale and perspective are echoed throughout the novel. John Sherman opens with a highly self-conscious debate about artistic and individual identity, staged as an argument between two serious young men with differing outlooks. They meet ‘in the west of Ireland, on the 9th December, in the town of Ballah, in the Imperial Hotel’. While the eponymous John Sherman hails from the town, a Protestant curate named William Howard finds himself ‘in Ballah among the barbarians’ and enjoys a pleasant sense of superiority over the inhabitants of ‘this halfdeserted town’: ‘Here everybody lives in the eighteenth century – the squalid century! Well I am going tomorrow you know. Thank Heavens I am done with your grey streets and grey minds!’ (p. 8). John Sherman has a friendly loathing for the resident curate, a cosmopolitan who has ‘read much, seen operas and plays, known religious experiences and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland’ (p. 7). This shallow admiration for Swiss scenery contrasts with Sherman’s deep knowledge of his own west of Ireland place. Howard, in turn, regards Sherman as a ‘mercenary’: a young man who, living only in a small town dominated by ‘facts’, fails to take nature for his ‘compass’ (p. 9). These debates about the natural world and its meanings are worked out in close proximity to water. The two men stand on a bridge that crosses the town’s river,

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debating their different approaches to the world. The two men cannot agree on their future plans but the river meanwhile makes its own meanings: ‘It bade him who loved stay still and dream, and gave flying feet to him who imagined’ (p. 10). In conversation with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres suggests that we resist the familiar connection between the flow of river water and the movement of time in linear modernity, turning to the Seine as an example: ‘Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine . . .’ [Beneath the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine . . .] – thus flows classical linear time. But Apollinaire, who had never navigated, at least on fresh water, hadn’t studied the Seine enough. He hadn’t noticed the counter-currents of the turbulences. Yes, time flows like the Seine, if one observes it well. All the water that passes beneath the Mirabeau Bridge will not necessarily flow out into the English Channel; many little trickles turn back toward Charenton or upstream.36 Following Serres and Latour, we can say that Yeats observes the river well: in John Sherman, ‘time flows in a turbulent and chaotic manner; it percolates’.37 Similarly, Mike McCormack has written of the narrative of Solar Bones as fluvial in highly particular ways, closely connected to the actual movement of water: it’s riverine in the later meandering stages of a river, when its meanders loop round on each other, but it is always heading to the sea. And there was going to be no full stop because I was interested in chasing a rhythm and seeing where the exercise would go. There are small little oases of clarity and then it loops off and it repeats.38 Seen from boats, bridges and quays, Ballah is a place pervaded by water, flowing in many different directions. When the curate first leaves his hotel in John Sherman and walks to the bridge, past the fish market, the entire town seems waterlogged, soggy with rain that promises well for John Sherman’s eel trapping: ‘The town was dripping, but the rain was almost over. It was the hour of ducks. Three or four had squeezed themselves under a gate, and were now splashing about in the gutter of the main street’ (p. 6). The conversation quoted above ends with Sherman turning from abstract talk of nature to the simple act of baiting his hooks, meaning that the narrative understanding of the creative process remains close to the natural world on which it relies for material. A near-contemporary poem by Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (written in the summer of 1897) imagines fishing as a singular act animated by fire, mystery and light: I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.39

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In John Sherman, however, the casting of lines affords a less dazzling experience and tends rather towards silence, doubt and abstraction. Yet fishing in Yeats’s novel possesses something of the intimacy promised in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’: ‘You need some occupation peculiar to the place’, said the other, baiting his hooks with worms out of the little porringer. ‘I catch eels. You should set some night-lines too. You bait them with worms in this way, and put them along the weeds at the edge of the river. In the morning you find an eel or two, if you have good fortune, turning round and round and making the weeds sway. I shall catch a great deal after this rain.’ (p. 8) The association of fishing with a slow-paced, immersive and authentic relationship to place is also familiar from Yeats’s later great poem, ‘The Fisherman’, published alongside ‘September 1913’ in the 1914 collection Responsibilities.40 Yet in John Sherman, the focus remains on the water itself rather than the qualities that it represents. While the curate stares intently at the water, spinning a web of connections from the water to himself – ‘Some meaning must it have,’ he thinks – John Sherman is content to simply set his lines and wait for the eel to take the bait. In John Sherman, the flow of the river expresses neither rupture nor connection, but rather realises a wider natural environment with its own agency, not yet exhausted by its deployment as metaphor. John Sherman’s absorption in the unpredictable movements of water under the bridge calls to mind Yeats’s famous image of a stone that troubles the ‘living stream’ of time in ‘Easter 1916’, itself an image that offers a striking instance of ‘the reciprocal relationship between life and nonlife’41: Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. 42 Critics often read the obdurate stone in relation to the troubled water, with the latter representing the unrest of time and history. Those lines from ‘Easter 1916’, however, allow the stone its own magical agency in its encounter with water. Rather than expressing an ephemeral understanding of the ‘flux and reflux to nature’s changes: forward or backward’,43 it is possible to see Yeats’s ‘living stream’ as a material manifestation of multiple movements across time: ‘a reprise, repetition or revisiting of a past that has never truly disappeared’.44 These overlapping and criss-crossing temporal vectors are embodied in John Sherman by the restless movements of its protagonist, a man described by his mother as ‘a rolling stone’ (p. 21). Layered among these vectors is Yeats’s powerful vision of a mythic past, already at work in this early experiment in prose fiction. Eve Patten compares the opening scenes of John Sherman to the opening of A Vision, with Sherman and Howard prefiguring the dialogue between Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, or Will and Mask.45 At first glance, the simple plot of John Sherman may seem far from the complex mathematical system, historical fantasies and occult imagery of A Vision. Yet if A Vision is a poem in which ‘the bewildering present is recast as a necessary phase

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of transition’,46 then John Sherman too works to transform present uncertainties into the stuff of epochal change. In Patten’s account of the connections between the two texts, ‘If we regard Sherman as primary man, then it follows that his movement against himself will be destructive, and the stupor into which he falls in London is made intelligible by A Vision’.47 Primary man in A Vision is associated with the dominance of ‘individuality and Creative mind’, and John Sherman as a whole prefigures the ‘system of contraries’ mapped out in A Vision.48 In Patten’s reading, ‘there are enough similarities between the ideas in each to allow one to provide a gloss upon the other’.49 John Sherman ‘contains the essences of division and quarrel, and of the contemplative spirit that can master them’,50 suggesting that a sternly modernist concern with abstract symbol lies beneath the texture of Yeats’s effort at realism. The complexity of the relationship between plot and symbol can be glimpsed by further reference to A Vision, in particular the section entitled ‘Gates of Pluto’, where Yeats turns to childhood memories of fishing in Sligo in order to speculate on the relationship between lived experience and abstraction: Much of this book is abstract, because it has not yet been lived, for no man can dip into life more than a moiety of any system. When a child, I went out with herring fishers one dark night, and the dropping of their nets into the luminous sea and the drawing of them up has remained with me as a dominant image. Have I found a good net for a herring fisher?51 Though Ballah can seem at times like ‘a formless dreamscape’,52 it is none the less associated with highly particular and placed activities. Both fishing and gardening in John Sherman express a form of placed relationship to time: a ‘deep and complex intimacy’ expressed as ‘an uncanny coincidence of ancient resources, rapid change, and long consequence’.53 Howard accuses Sherman of rotting in Ballah and ‘vegetating’ there, using a word that ties Yeats’s protagonist to the activity of gardening (in Solar Bones, Marcus ‘potters’)54. As Patten argues, ‘Sherman’s irrepressible instincts to “garden” his land, both in Ballah and in London, connect him with this primary and organic sensibility, elaborated by Herbert Spencer, and William Howard’s accusation that he is “vegetating” becomes a compliment’.55 John Yeats had drawn on Spencer’s Education (1861) when considering his son’s future and its influence is felt in the novel, which Patten suggests should be read as a defence of an ‘authentic imaginative evolution’ founded in idle dreaming.56 In Ballah, we encounter John Sherman checking his tulip shoots, forcing sea-kale and sorting seeds; later, in London, he tackles dock leaves, dandelions and ‘patches of untimely grass’ (p. 34). Sherman’s garden, together with his book and a letter from Mary Carton, represent ‘the three symbols of his life, summing up as they did his love of out-of-door doings, his meditations, his anxieties’ (p. 13): Every morning he worked in that garden among the sights and sounds of nature. Month by month he planted and hoed and dug there. In the middle he had set a hedge that divided the garden in two. Above the hedge were flowers; below it, vegetables. At the furthest end from the house, lapping broken masonry full of wallflowers, the river said, month after month to all upon its banks, ‘Hush!’ (p. 13)

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The agency attributed to the splashing, speaking river shapes Sherman’s sense of Ballah as a place apart. Accused by the curate of rotting in this provincial west of Ireland town, Sherman replies: No, I am seeing the world. In your big towns a man finds his minority and knows nothing outside its border. He knows only the people like himself. But here one chats with the whole world in a day’s walk, for every man one meets is a class. The knowledge I am picking up may be useful to me when I enter the great cities and their ignorance. (p. 9) Sherman’s sense that ‘every man one meets is a class’ in the west of Ireland might be compared to a naturalist’s interest in the specimen as representative of the wider ecosystem of which individuals form a part. The natural and social worlds are interconnected as the novel seems to reject a modernity that depends on an artificial separation of ‘the human multitudes and the nonhuman environment’.57 These observations of humans as class and type further resonate with John Millington Synge’s west–of– Ireland observations. Synge notes ‘the absence of any division of labour’ on the Aran Islands and ‘the correspondingly wide development of each individual, whose varied knowledge and skill necessitates a considerably activity of mind’.58 In Yeats’s novel, just such a wide and varied knowledge is brought to bear on a world made in miniature, bordered by the river which flows under the bridge on which the two men have their conversation. The younger Yeats was an avid reader of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He recalls in Autobiographies that his ‘favourite book’ as a boy was ‘a small green-covered book given to my father by a Dublin man of science; it gave an account of the strange sea creatures the man of science had discovered among the rocks at Howth or dredged out of Dublin Bay’.59 Methods drawn from natural history can be seen to inform the narrative of John Sherman, which often seems to hold Sherman’s strange creaturely consciousness up for readerly inspection. Sherman is himself associated with inductive methods inseparable from close observation of nature. When he first visits Mary Carton’s schoolhouse in Ballah (following the mysterious guidance offered by a beetle in his garden), the two young people sit watching a mouse carrying away a crumb. Sherman’s time as a shipping clerk in London is largely spent absorbed in the activity of inspecting the movement of fourteen flies on the ceiling of his office. Reflecting on his own passage at a crucial point in his London time, Sherman decides that ‘I am not going forward; I am at present trying to go sideways like the crabs’ (p. 61). Solar Bones, too, draws on metaphors from marine life in order to imagine the uncanny location of its narrative voice: the dead Marcus describes a compulsion ‘to keep moving, drifting from room to room like one of those sea creatures who cannot stay still for fear they may sink and drown’ (p. 264). In both examples, metaphors drawn from marine life support and sustain unconventional forms of human identity. The maritime aspect of Yeats’s novel is most notable in the depiction of John Sherman’s travels on the Irish Sea. Mother and son cross to Liverpool on a ‘cattle boat’ in order to save money and share a rough passage over the ‘many miles of uneasy water’ that separate London from Ballah (p. 69). Sherman’s mother suffers below while he is ‘pretty happy on deck’, listening to squealing pigs and sitting in close proximity to an old woman and the

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geese that she brings to market in Liverpool every month. Sherman’s own state of suffering is realised in close relation to the human and non-human environment that surrounds him. He writes a letter describing his ‘desolation’ as he watches puffins sleeping on the waves: ‘each one of them had its head tucked in a slightly different way. “That is because their characters are different”, he thought’ (p. 22). Puffins are different from humans but their difference from one another prompts an awareness of their connection to the human world. Yeats’s strangely compelling account of the puffins can be read in terms of Patricia Yaeger’s account of ocean as ‘assemblage’: ‘it is now our task to see it as an assemblage, to denaturalise entities we have come to call “Earth” and “Sea”, human and animal’.60 If, as Yaeger suggests, ‘the quasi-ocean is the speaking ocean, and our task is to look for the turbulence that occurs when humans and nonhumans try to interact or speak’, then the puffins, along with the corks that Sherman sees floating by in the water, express forms of potential interconnection.61 Yeats’s novel helps us to develop an approach that grasps the shaping power of the sea in ways that cross and connect human and non-human alongside environmental and cultural histories. In London, Sherman courts but finally resigns the affection of a young woman, Margaret Leland, who eventually marries the self-absorbed curate, Howard. Midway through the novel, John Sherman makes his first journey home, arriving in Ballah by rail, having connected from Euston via Holyhead and Dublin. On this occasion, he tells his childhood friend, Mary Carton, that he is to be married, and he returns to London once more by rail, travelling from Holyhead to London and experiencing en route ‘one of those dangerous moments when the sense of personal identity is shaken, when one’s past and present seem about to dissolve partnership’ (p. 47). Despite the threatened severance of the self across time, however, water once more is the medium of a cloudy form of connection: ‘The rain beat on the window of the carriage. He began to listen; thought and memory became a blank; his mind was full of the sound of rain-drops’ (p. 47). Remaining dissatisfied in London, Sherman returns to Ballah once more. This time he proposes to Mary and is first rejected, then accepted. On this second and final return to his home place, Sherman travels again on the S.S. Lavinia; this time on a boat with ‘no cattle, but many passengers’ (p. 67). On board ship, Sherman engages in close observation of his fellow passengers: restive cattle dealers who ‘lean over the taffrail, smoking’, a consumptive clerk from Liverpool, a nervous governess with her luggage heaped around her (p. 67). He watches gannets striking the water and porpoises that gleam in the sun. Sherman subjects these human and non-human creatures to his scrutiny, just as when, on the first journey east, he had contemplated the characters of puffins sleeping on the waves. Meanwhile, the narrative describes the boat’s return journey via the northwestern islands of Tory and Rathlin with some care, noting how the Donegal cliffs come into view.62 Sherman looks from the sea to the ship, and the vessel itself acquires an uncanny life: ‘this thing, crawling slowly along the sea’ (p. 68). Just as the question of where and how to live is closely connected with Sherman’s journeys on the Irish sea, so the journey towards personal and artistic fulfilment in the novel is often realised in terms of uncertain boundaries between water and land. The exchange between river and sea is replicated and echoed in the novel’s London scenes. In the city, Sherman follows pathways along the edge of the Thames and thinks of Sligo, like London a settlement shaped by an estuarine relationship between river

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and sea. In one remarkable prose sequence, John Sherman revisits and rewrites Yeats’s poem of 1888, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet balanced a wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds at Ballah. Wandering among these memories a footstep went to and fro continually and the figure of Mary Carton moved among them like a phantom. He was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday morning to the border of the Thames – a few hundred yards from his house – and looking at the osier-covered Chiswick eyot. It made him remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake, whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry-gathering. At the further end was a little islet called Inniscrewin. Its rocky centre, covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often when life and its difficulties seemed to him like the lessons of some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes – full always of unknown creatures – and going out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds. (pp. 56–7) The Chiswick eyot (eyot is an Old English term for an islet) is a small, narrow, uninhabited island in the River Thames. Its covering of osier, a type of willow used to weave baskets, suggests the wattles of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, while the wooden hut in which the hero might live yet more clearly echoes Yeats’s famous poem. Rather than an imagined journey from ‘the pavements grey’63 of London to a lonely island in Lough Gill, however, the transition undertaken by John Sherman is from one abandoned waterway to another. With London ‘a reef’ (p. 41) upon which John Sherman is ‘cast away’, the oceanic identity of Britain’s imperial capital comes into view. When Mary finally accepts him, it is as fellow castaway: she says, ‘We have been shipwrecked. Our goods have been cast into the sea’ (p. 78). Both the evocation of homeland beside a Sligo river and that of homesickness at the edge of the Atlantic involve an ethical relationship to place in its fullest sense: an environment that has emerged over time, and where ‘the whole world’ includes nonhuman as well as human others. To phrase these issues in more contemporary terms would be to consider with Kate Rigby ‘the kinds of stories that we tell about ourselves and our relations with one another, as well as our nonhuman others and our volatile environment’.64 Lonely in London, John Sherman finds himself considering his own artistic past, in particular the childhood artworks preserved by his fond mother. As he ponders practical questions of artistic education, John Sherman’s mind turns to home and to the memory of the cruelty of a peasant child towards a dog. Revisiting the earlier description of the problems of perspective affecting the pictures of ships in Michael Sherman’s office, the prose sequence is beautifully arranged, tracking a delicate set of connections between the protagonist’s childhood, his remembered absorption in the practicalities

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of drawing and the memories of animal abuse. Natural and social worlds are brought into a kind of charged, painful connection: Round the walls were one or two drawings, done by him at school. His mother had got them framed. His eyes were fixed on a drawing of a stream and some astonishing cows. A few days ago he had found an old sketch book for children among some forgotten papers, which taught how to draw a horse by making three ovals for the basis of his body, one lying down in the middle, two standing up at each end for flank and chest, and how to draw a cow by basing its body on a square. He kept trying to fit squares into the cows. He was half inclined to take them out of their frames and retouch on this new principle. Then he began somehow to remember the child with the swollen face who threw a stone at the dog the day he decided to leave home. (p. 49) Harriet Ritvo’s account of depictions of cruelty to animals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books aimed at children helps us to see this ‘old sketch book’ as part of a wider culture of sentimental improvement. Such books were able not only to open up wider questions of cruelty to animals but also to express a ‘complex relationship between sympathetic concern for animals and manipulation of people’, addressing issues such as class and empire (p. 131). For John Sherman, the problem of how to represent animals is connected to the issue of how to treat them: together, these connected forms of benevolent thought help to bolster the ethically informed relationship to place that culminates in a return to Ballah and marriage to Mary Carton. The questions raised in John Sherman – issues of epistemological, ontological and artistic identity – are connected to forms of ethical living as imagined in terms borrowed from the natural world and suggestive of a responsibility for its future grounded in locality. Like Solar Bones, John Sherman might be read as practising the kind of ‘anthropocene poetics’ that can, in David Farrier’s terms, ‘help frame the ground we stand on as we consider which way to turn’.65 The novel’s conclusion stays resolutely close to the terrain on which the narrative opens and closes, retaining its steadfast commitment to the material conditions of modern life on streets, quays, squares, boats and trains. When Mary Carton finally accepts Sherman, it is following an anxious walk along the ‘gritty and barren roads’ of home. These concluding scenes are at once emotionally intense and unstable in tone – Foster refers to ‘[t]he book’s hasty but striking finale’66 – as if the narrative itself mirrors Sherman’s impassioned but uncertain ascent of Knocknarea. I have been arguing that John Sherman imagines a connected world permeated by water, as if in defiance of a critical orthodoxy that juxtaposes a romanticised Irish natural landscape with urban modernity. When John Sherman reaches for forms of mythic unity that can shore up the protagonists’ disintegrating sense of self, the search is presented not as a private one, but rather as a dilemma shared with children, insects and animals, and experienced on boats, trains, quays, squares and roads. As with Solar Bones, geography mutates through and against infrastructure, as journeys unfold along shipping routes, roads and railways. John Sherman asks readers to pay attention to the kinds of public systems that tend to escape attention, that ‘drop off the radar because they seem to constitute a minimum threshold, an earth-bound

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zone in which the large irresolutions of politics can for once be ignored and decisions safely left to the technocrats’.67 An interest in the ‘large irresolutions of politics’, as expressed by infrastructure, reconnects Yeats’s novel to Solar Bones, which not only finds ‘ways to denaturalise and revalue our taken-for-granted conveniences’, but also suggests ‘love and care as a possibility, a prospect’ for public utilities.68 McCormack’s narrative locates us ‘on the edge of this known world with Sheeffry and Mweelrea to the south and the open expanse of Clew Bay to the north’ (p. 8). It is a place made of ‘mountains, rivers and lakes’ that have been here since ‘the beginning of time’, but that is also hewed from water pipes, engineering schemes and local building projects. The river itself tells the story of these connections: the Bunowen ‘flows north to the sea, carving out that floodplain to which all roads, primary and secondary, following the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands the village of Louisburgh’ (p. 9): ‘our little village here on the Western Seaboard’ (p. 27). In the New York Times review of Solar Bones, Martin Riker writes: ‘Where modernism took a world that appeared to be whole and showed it to be broken, “Solar Bones” takes a world that can’t stop talking about how broken it is, and suggests it might possibly be whole.’69 In John Sherman, too, the arc that connects different aspects of human and non-human life is traced in minute, agonising detail. Michael Wood has described Yeats’s poetics as practising a kind of deceptive modernism, which, rather than offering ‘a faithful reflection of an altered or broken world’ via fragmented forms, develops instead a mode that, ‘to be difficult in its own way, often hides the breakage in simplicity or song’.70 In John Sherman, a pained reach for wholeness and completion is stretched over the skin of a fragmented world. Faithful to the flow of water between and across places that are normally understood as separated by time, culture and politics, the novel channels watery networks, passages and energies to make its own difficult connections.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 128. James, ‘Afterword’, p. 178. Boland, ‘Bedad he Revives’, n.p. McCormack, Solar Bones, p. 44. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. MacDonald, ‘Internal Others’, p. 91. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 10. Ibid., p. 76. ‘Deatach’ is a Hiberno-English word meaning ‘smoke’. Howe Peter Browne (1788–1845; second Marquess of Sligo) was Governor General of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands during the period of the abolition of slavery. The community of Sligoville, Jamaica, is named for him. de Loughry, ‘A Conversation’, p. 109. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya, in Collected Works, vol. 12, p. ix. Ibid., pp. x, xi. Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii. Foster, A Life, I, pp. 68–9. Nolan, ‘Modernism and the Irish Revival’, p. 158.

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18. Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya, in Collected Works, vol. 12, p. xxv. For details of the novel’s autobiographical resonances, see Finneran (ed.), vol. 12, pp. xxv–xxvi. 19. MacDonald, ‘Irish Revival’, p. 56. 20. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 204. 21. Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene Time’, p. 6. 22. Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 2. 23. Finneran (Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya, pp. xxvi–xxvii) describes a copy of John Sherman and Dhoya with an inscription from Yeats that reads ‘all Sligo and Hammersmith’. 24. The narrative arguably shows the influence of Émile Zola, whose essay on ‘The Experimental Novel’ was published in 1890 and whose observations on the value of authenticity over accuracy in prose style are quoted by Yeats in his 1902 essay on ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ (Yeats, Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 18, 239n). 25. De Loughry, ‘A Conversation’, p. 109. 26. Ibid. 27. Levine, Forms, p. 20. 28. Yeats, John Sherman, p. 57. 29. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 75. 30. Ibid., p. 76. 31. Foster, A Life, I, p. 69. 32. Mentz and Rojas, ‘Introduction’, p. x. 33. Parsons, The Ordnance Survey, p. 2. 34. Foster, A Life, I, p. 111. 35. Yeats, John Sherman, pp. 23–4. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 36. Latour and Serres, Conversations, p. 58. 37. Ibid., p. 59. 38. De Loughry, ‘A Conversation’, p. 112. 39. Yeats, The Poems, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 55, lines 1–8. 40. That poem was echoed in its turn by ‘Casualty’, Seamus Heaney’s elegy for his eel-fishing friend, Louis O’Neill, setting in motion a resonant metaphorical chain of connection. 41. Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 17. 42. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in The Poems, vol. 1, p. 153, lines 41–4. 43. Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, p. 21. 44. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 74. 45. Patten, ‘Afterword’, p. 102. 46. Allen, ‘Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire’, pp. 210, 211. 47. Patten, ‘Afterword’, p. 102. 48. Ibid., p. 103. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Yeats, A Vision, Collected Works, vol. 13, p. 206. 52. Patten, ‘Afterword’, p. 104. 53. Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 16. 54. Yeats, John Sherman, p. 9; McCormack, Solar Bones, p. 4. 55. Patten, Afterword’, p. 99. 56. Ibid., p. 104. 57. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 76. 58. Synge, Works, pp. 156–7. 59. Yeats, Autobiographies, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 59. 60. Yaeger, ‘The Ocean as Quasi-Object, p. 181. 61. Ibid., p. 182.

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62. The Speckled Bird, an unpublished autobiographical prose fiction by Yeats that exists in outlines and variant versions written by Yeats between 1896 and 1902, began when the publisher A. H. Bullen gave the writer advance royalties of £2 a week and some travel expenses for him to write a novel about Tory Island. 63. Yeats, The Poems, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 35, line 11. 64. Rigby, Dancing with Disaster, p. x. 65. Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, p. 128. 66. Foster, A Life, I, p. 68. 67. Robbins, The Smell of Infrastructure’, p. 31. 68. Ibid., pp. 31, 28. 69. Riker, ‘A Stylistically Daring Novel’, n.p. 70. Wood, ‘Yeats and the Revolutionary Poetics of Age’, p. 176.

Bibliography Allen, Nicholas, ‘Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire’, in Richard Begam and Michael Moses (eds), Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 209–25. Boland, Stephanie, ‘Bedad he Revives: Why Solar Bones is a Resurrection for Irish Modernism’, New Statesman (4 July 2016), (last accessed 23 June 2019). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Anthropocene Time’, History and Theory, 57:1 (2018), pp. 5–32. De Loughry, Treasa, ‘“a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid”: A Conversation with Mike McCormack’, Irish University Review, 49:1 (2019), pp. 105–16. Farrier, David, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Henn, T. R., ‘The Place of Shells’, in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats, Sligo and Ireland: Essays to mark the 21st Yeats International Summer School (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 73–88. James, David, ‘Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation’, in Paige Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Culture (London and New York: Anthem, 2016), pp. 175–82. Joyce, Simon, ‘Naturalism and the Literary Politics of Irish Modernist Fiction’, in Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 111–27. Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Latour, Bruno, and Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Oxford and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Longley, Edna, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). McCormack, Mike, Solar Bones (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2016). MacDonald, Ronan, ‘Internal Others: Cultural Debate and Counter-Revival’, in Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 91–108. MacDonald, Ronan, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in Joe Cleary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 51–62.

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Mentz, Steven, and Martha Elena Rojas, ‘Introduction: “The Hungry Ocean”’, in Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (eds), The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–14. Nolan, Emer, ‘Modernism and the Irish Revival’, in Claire Connolly and Joe Cleary (eds), Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 157–72. Parsons, Cóilín, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Patten, Eve, ‘Afterword: A Family Romance’, in W. B. Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya (Dublin: Lilliput, 1990), pp. 95–104. Reynolds, Paige, ‘Introduction’, in P. Reynolds (ed.), Modernist Afterlives in Irish Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 1–8. Rigby, Kate, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Time (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). Riker, Martin, ‘A Stylistically Daring Novel Considers Fundamental Questions’ (5 January 2018), New York Times, (last accessed 24 June 2019). Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Robbins, Bruce, ‘The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes towards an Archive’, boundary 2, 34:1 (2007), pp. 25–33. Synge, John Millington, The Works of John M. Synge, vol. 3 (Dublin: Maunsel and Company, 1910). Vendler, Helen, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Wood, Michael, ‘Yeats and the Revolutionary Poetics of Age’, in Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (eds), A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 176–90. Yaeger, Patricia, ‘The Ocean as Quasi-Object, or Ecocriticism and the Doll from the Deep’, in Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (eds), The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 166–84. Yeats, W. B., A Vision: The Original 1925 Version, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 13, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper (New York: Scribner, 2008) Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 3, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1990). Yeats, W. B., ‘Introduction’ (1937) for the never-published Charles Scribner’s Sons ‘Dublin Edition’ of W. B. Yeats; published in Essays and Introductions (1961) as ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 5, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp. 204–16. Yeats, W. B., John Sherman and Dhoya, vol. 12, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1991). Yeats, W. B., The Irish Dramatic Movement, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (Scribner: New York, 2003). Yeats, W. B., The Poems, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Scribner: New York, 1997).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Those followed by n refer to notes.

Abbey Theatre, 152–6, 161n, 175, 244, 260, 329 Abrams, M. H., 388 Adorno, T. W., 63 Æ (George Russell), 6–7 ‘Nationality and Imperialism: ‘The Police Intelligence’, 322, 325–6 ‘Village Libraries’, 327 aesthetic heresies, 11–17, 217–98 aesthetics of failure, 395–400 alchemy, 437–51, 450n Allen, Nicholas, 116, 256, 448n Allingham, William, 455 An Túr Gloine studios, 235, 241, 243–5, 247 Anderson, Benedict, 12 Imagined Communities, 73 Anglicisation children, 142–4 education, 131, 132–5 Famine, 428–9 Irish Literary Revival, 321–2 Revival, 152 Angulo, A. J., 144n animals, 408–10, 417n anti-British sentiment, 131–2 anti-Semitism, 44–5, 67 Antliff, Allan, 201 anxieties of the future, 51–66 Anzieu, Didier, 107–8 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 359 architecture, 15, 26n, 338, 345 Ardagh Chalice, 237–8, plate 19 Arendt, Hannah, 52 Arensberg, Conrad M., Family and Community in Ireland, 304–5 Arts and Crafts movement, 234–51, 239; see also Irish Arts and Crafts movement The Arts and Crafts Society, 241, 245, 247 Asia, 82–95, 182–3

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Aslan, Reza, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, 287 Athill, Diana, 347 Atlas of Prejudice, 182 Attridge, Derek, 73 Auden, W. H., ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, 132 Auge, Andrew, 375, 377 avant-garde, 152–3, 272–5, 278 Ayim, Maryann, 76 bachelors, 301–19 eviction order, plate 29 Bachelor’s Digest, 307, 307 Bacon, Francis, 3–4, 24n Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, plate 1 Bairnsfather, Bruce, 277 Balázs, Béla, 52, 53, 55, 62 Ballah, 452–66 Banim brothers, 455 Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 15 Barad, Karen, 406, 407, 412, 414 Barmann, Lawrence, 4 Barreca, Regina, 412 Barry, Kevin, Night Boat to Tangier, A Novel, 112 Barthes, Roland, 62 Bartley, P. J., 303 Barton, Ruth, 253, 255, 262, 264 Bascom, William R., 374 Batten, Guinn, 371 Battle of Waterloo, 73–5 Bean an Leasa, 372, 374–6 Beckett, Mary, Give Them Stones, 105 Beckett, Samuel aesthetics of failure, 22 and affect, 387–91 ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’, 331 ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’, 390

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index Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett’s Dream Notebook), 388–9, 391–2 Eleuthéria, 394 Endgame, 5, 292–4, 297n Happy Days, 331–3, 387–404 ‘Homage to Jack Yeats’, 10 L’Innommable, 392 Molloy, 389, 393–4 Murphy, 331 Not I, 12 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, 220, 331 Revival, 431 the sea, 123 slapstick humour, 105 Texts for Nothing, 392 Trilogy, 392, 394 Waiting for Godot, 294–5, 394 Yeats, Jack B., 10 Benjamin, Walter, 47, 76, 141 Bennett, Andrew, 406–7, 409, 414–15, 416, 417n, 418n Bennett, Jane, 406, 411 Bertolotti, Tommaso, 76 Bh., P. M., 277 Big House, 4, 20 98–104, 326, 338–40, 344–7, 406 Bixby, Patrick, A History of Irish Modernism, 17–18 Blather, 273, 278 Blitz, 268–83 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 90–1 Blythe, Ernest, 171, 172 Boland, Eavan, 370, 371 Boland, Stephanie, 453 Bold Emmett, Ireland’s Martyr (1915), 255, 259 Bollas, Christopher, 400n Bongiovanni, Lynne A., 71–2 The Book of Durrow, 238 The Book of Kells, 238, 246 The Bookman, 220 borderation, 96–111 Boucicault, Dion, 256 The Colleen Bawn, 254, 256, 280n Bourdieu, Pierre, 370 Bourke, Angela, 372–3, 376, 425–6 The Burning of Bridget Cleary, 374 Bourke, Joanna, 302 Bowe, Nicola Gordon, 236, 239, 245 Bowen, Elizabeth, 405–20 Bowen’s Court, 101, 406, 416 ‘The Cat Jumps’, 410 ‘The Dancing Mistress’, 408 The Death of the Heart, 412, 413, 415, 416 ‘The Disinherited’, 412–13 ‘The Easter Egg Party’, 409 Eva Trout; Or, Changing Scenes, 412, 413–14

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471

Friends and Relations, 408 The Good Tiger, 409, 415 The Heat of the Day, 408–9, 413, 416 The Hotel, 408 The House in Paris, 411–12, 413, 415 ‘The Inherited Clock’, 412 Jellett, Mainie, 13 ‘The Jungle’, 407 The Last September, 25n, 98, 338, 405–6, 410, 415 The Little Girls, 412 ‘The Needle Case’, 415 non-standard sexual arrangements of characters, 417n To the North, 407–8, 413, 416 ‘The Parrot’, 409 ‘A Queer Heart’, 412 the sea, 123 self-control, 393 short stories, 99 ‘The Tommy Crans’, 412–13 ‘A Walk in the Woods’, 415 ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, 252, 253–4, 264 A World of Love, 412, 415 Bradbury, Malcolm, 428 Brannigan, John, Archipelagic Modernism, 9 Brexit, 96–7, 98, 108, 260–1 Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of the Affects, 388 British Army, 96–7, 97, 107 ‘British Atlantic’, 112–24, 124n British media, 98 British Post Office, 166, 168 Britishness, 112–15 Knocknagow, 261 Northern Ireland, 9 Occidental, 144n sea, 112–13 Wilde, Oscar, 202 Brodsky, Joseph, ‘San Pietro’, 51 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 353 Brooker, Joseph, 272, 278, 280n Brooks, Peter, 192 The Brothers documentary, 302 Brown, Bill, 406, 410 Brown, Terence, 2–3, 90, 270 Bunting, Basil, Briggflatts, 222 Bürger, Peter, 272, 278 Burgess, Anthony, 7 Joysprick, 39 Burnard, Trevor, 124n Burns, Anna borders, 109n Brexit, 98 Milkman, 104, 351–2, 353, 360–4, 364n No Bones, 99, 104–8

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index

Byrne, Barry, 15 Byrne, Mairéad, 371 Camille, Michael, 238 Campbell, George, 15, plate 8 Carroll, Siobhan, 113 Carson, Edward, 203 Carville, Justin, 235 Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, 159 Casement, Roger, 19 Castle, Gregory, A History of Irish Modernism, 17–18 Catholic Church architecture, 15 and Arts and Crafts, 241 and bachelors, 301–13, 315n and female readers, 320–35 iconic feminine, 368–80 Irish language, 428–9 modernism, 4–5 oppression of Protestants, 115–16 scandals, 19 schools, 131, 133–5 subjects on stamps, 171, 179n Celtic and Christian iconography, 13–14, 167, 244 Celtic Ardagh Chalice, 237–8, plate 19 ‘Celtic Cross’ stamp, 169–70 ‘Celtic design’, 238 Celtic Revival as antimodernist, 151 Birthright, 154 and the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, 234–46 and postage stamps, 160 soil, 150 streetlamp, Kildare Street, Dublin, 239 censorship, 13, 72, 77, 258, 327–8, 331 Censorship of Films Act 1923, 329 Censorship of Publications 1929, 304, 329, 439 Césaire, Aimé, 47 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 6, 456 Chang, Hanliang, 187, 191 Chang, Sung-sheng, 190 changelings, 131–46, 374 Chase, Malcolm, 261 Chen, Fang-ming, 190 Chen, Mel, 407 Cheng, Vincent, 73, 75 Chesterton, G. K., 5 Child, A. E., 236, 241 Childers, Erskine, 174 The Riddle of the Sands, 116 children, 131–46

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Chiu, Kuei-fen, 190 Christian comedy, 284–99 Chung-Wai Literary Monthly, 186 Church of Christ the King, Cork, 15 cinema, 252–67 affect, 388 The Heat of the Day, 408 second sight, 51–6 At Swim-Two-Birds, 330 Clare, Aingeal, 369, 377 Clarke, Austin, 220, 221, 222 Clarke, Harry book illustrations, 245 Geneva Window, 234, 245, 246 Gothic Revival, 240 Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 243–4, plate 21–4 ‘intricate modernism’, 241 St. Brendan window, 244, plate 21, plate 22 St. Gobnait window, 244, plate 23, plate 24 stained glass, 235 studios, 247 women, 247n Cleary, Bridget, 374 Cleary, Joe borders, 97, 99, 106, 109n colonialism, 21, 115 Irish literary masterpieces, 1 Irish Revival, 191 Cleveland Street Scandal, 205, 212n Clissmann, Anne, 269 Clutterbuck, Catriona, 377 Coffey, Brian Advent, 229 Death of Hektor, 229–31 Missouri Sequence, 229 Coghill, Rhoda, 221, 371 Cohen, Margaret, 113, 124n Cohn, Dorrit, 360 Colletta, Lisa, 409 Collins, Lucy, 377 Colum, Padraic The Fiddler’s House, 147 The Land, 156 combat literature, 183, 185 Condon, Denis, 254 Conley, Tim, 75 Connolly, Claire, 120 Conrad, Joseph, 113 Heart of Darkness, 114 Constitution of Ireland 1937, 270, 302, 304, 311 Córas Tráchtála (Irish Export Board), 176 Corcomroe Abbey, 85–7

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index Corcoran, Neil, 409 Corkery, Daniel, 152 Cosgrave, W. T., 16, 170, 179n Costello, Peter, The Life of Leopold Bloom, 49n Coudert, Allison, 440 Coughlan, Patricia, 407 Coulson, Victoria, 408, 409–10 Counter-Revival, 3 Cousins, James, 83–4, 91 Covid-19, 108 Craft, Christopher, 203–6 The Crane Bag, 19 ‘Crazy Jane’, 446–8 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, Labouchère Amendment, 205, 212n crip theory, 21–2 critical heresies, 21–4, 385–469 Croke, Archbishop, 321 Cronin, Anthony, 269, 277, 278 Cronin, Michael, A History of Ireland, 276–7 Cronin, Michael G., Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism, and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 305 Cuala Press, 235, 242 Cubism, 6–7, 12, 355 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 71, 446 Cummins, Geraldine, Fidelity, 155, 161n Cummins, Maria, The Lamplighter, 328 Cumann na mBan, 46 Curry, Michael J., 103 Cusack, Michael, 189, 321 cyborgs, 413–14, 415 Dadaism, 268–83, 281n Dáil Éireann, 173–4, 175, 304 Daily Telegraph, 97 Dante, Divine Comedy, 286 Darwin, Charles, 462 Davidson, Michael, 389 Davis, Alex, 223, 226 Davis, Thomas, 149 ‘Tipperary’, 260 Day, Susanne, Fidelity, 155, 161n De Burca, Seamus, The Boys and Girls are Gone, 157 De Loughry, Treasa, 455 de Man, Paul, 84 de Valera, Eamon, 18–19, 173, 252, 253, 270 ‘comely maidens’ speech, 368 Deane, Seamus, 21, 149, 160n The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 17, 47 Reading in the Dark, 123–4 December Bride, 302 degeneration, 387–404

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Deleuze, Gilles, 312 Department of Finance, 167, 172, 174 Department of Industry and Commerce, 245–6 Department of Posts and Telegraphs (DPT), 165–81, 178n Derrida, Jacques, 73 Spectres of Marx, 414 Derrig, Thomas, 314n Devlin, Denis, 220–1 Dirlik, Arif, ‘Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made’, 183 disability, 21–22, 387–404 Dolan, Joe, ‘The Westmeath Bachelor’, 302 Dolling, Susan Wan, 195n Dolmetsch, Heinrich, Ornamental Treasures, 238 Dominican Church at Athy, 15, plate 8 Donoghue, Emma, 344 Room, 352–3, 354–7 Donovan, Kevin, 345 Dorn, Gerard, 439 Doyle, Laura, Geomodernisms, 132 Driver, Tom, 389, 390 Dublin and the ‘Sinn Féin Rising’, plate 10 Dublin General Post Office, 36–7, 46, 175 telephone silence cabinet, 36 Dublin Mean Time, 311 Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, 236, 241 Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 13 Duffy, Enda, 40–1, 45, 152 Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 320 Duffy-MacCabe ‘local row’, 219–20 Dun Emer Guild, 241–3 Dun Emer Industries, 235 Dún Laoghaire convent, County Dublin, 235, 246, plate 28 Dunbar, Holly Teresa, 304, 305–6, 308, 309 Dunne, John William, 63 An Experiment with Time, 52, 58–9 The Serial Universe, 58–9 Dutoit, Thomas, 418n dynamiters, 206–8, 213n Eagleton, Terry, 153, 206–8, 240 ‘archaic avant-garde’, 13 Easter Rising, 35–50, 90 commemorative booklet published by Wilson Hartnell & Co., Dublin, plate 9 Ebury, Katherine, 69, 92 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 58 Edgeworth, Maria, Castle Rackrent, 98 Edmund, Jacob, 193 education arts and crafts movement, 236 Catholic schools, 131, 133–5 Catholic women, 322

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474

index

education (Cont.) Harvest, 155 Irish language, 273, 429 John Sherman, 461, 464–5 miseducation, 141–2, 144n nuns and, 379 Revival, 430 Taiwan, 184 Eglinton, John, Irish Literary Portraits, 189 Einstein, Albert, 52, 58, 59 Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, 5, 440 Four Quartets, 58 ‘mythical method’, 229–30 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 392–3, 440 about Ulysses, 225 The Waste Land, 51, 52, 114–15, 221–2, 225–7 water, 118 Ellmann, Maud, 69 Ellmann, Richard, 138, 201–2, 413, 415 Epstein, E. L., 39 Esty, Jed, 152 European Economic Community (EEC), 157–8 European integration, 147–64 Fabian, Johannes, 6 Fahey, Tony, 304 fairy tales, 21, 131–46, 374–6, 415, 427, 455 Famine, 134, 137, 148, 168, 222–3, 347, 428–9 Farrell, M. J see Keane, Molly Farrier, David, 452, 465 Fascism, 52, 89, 90 fathers and sons, Christian comedy, 292–5 Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury, 354 Felski, Rita, 263 feminine, iconic, 368–85 feminist criticism, 1, 17–18 Fenian essays, 165–8 Fenian Rising 1867, 116 Fenians, 206, 208–9, 212n, 213n Fenollosa, Ernest, 87 Certain Noble Plays of Japan, 88–90, 92 Ferris, Ina, 412 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 17, 47 Field Day collective, 21 Film Company of Ireland (FCOI), 254–5, 258, 260, 261–2, 264 Finland, 271, 273–4 Finnegans Wake animal imagery, 79n ‘borderation’, 96

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degeneration, 390–1 gospels, 287–8 gossip, 76–7 ‘Museyroom’, 73–5, 77 nation’s past and future in, 67–81 ‘Nightlessons’, 72, 75 sexuality in Christian comedy, 291–2 time, 6 washwomen section, 77–8 Fitzgerald, Mark, 14 Fitzgibbon, Henry M., 260 Flaherty, Robert Man of Aran (1934), 252–3, 421, 422–4 Nanook of the North (1922), 422 Oidhche Sheanchais (‘Storyteller’s Night’), 424 Flannery, Eoin, 21 Flaubert, Gustave, 393 Fogarty, Anne, 223–4, 371 The Force Awakens (2015), 264 Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier, 354 Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel, 355 A Passage to India, 114 Foster, Roy, 83, 144n, 456, 457–8 Foucault, Michel, 308, 312 Fraser, James Alexander, 69 Frazier, Adrian, 150, 302 Freeman, Elizabeth, 311 The Freeman’s Journal, 321, 324 French, Tana, The Witch Elm, 302 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 193 Friel, Brian, Translations, 86 Friel, Ian, Maritime History of Britain and Ireland, 117 Frost, Laura, 254 Froude, James Anthony, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 202 Fullerton, Lady Georgina, The Heir of Radcliffe, 322 Gaelic, Irish language, 428–31 Gaelic Athletic Association, 176, 179n, 321 Gaelic League, 169, 321–2, 431 Gaelic Revival, 429–31 Gale, Matthew, 281n Galway Cathedral, 15 ‘Galway Line’, 116, 122–3 Game of Thrones (2011–19), 264 Ganiel, Gladys, 370 Gardiner, Michael, 114 Gatland, Maria (née Maguire), 96–7 Gaumont-British film company, 422 Gauntier, Gene, 255, 256, 257–9, 261–2, 264 Gay, Peter, 4, 448n Geddes, Wilhelmina, 235, 245

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index The Fate of the Children of Lir window, 245, plate 26 gender and sexuality, heresies of, 17–21, 299–384 General Film Supply, 254–5 Gibbons, Luke, 13, 37, 166, 241, 247n Cinema and Ireland, 253 Gibson, Andrew, 131, 144n Gilmartin, Sophie, 113 Gladstone, William Ewart, 208–9, 213n Gleeson, Evelyn, 241–2 Goering, Hermann, 269 Goldberg, Molly, 46 Goldberg, Rebecca, 46 Gonne, Maud, 290, 323 Gontarski, S. E., 331 Good Friday Agreement 1998, 98 Good Gossip, 76 Gore-Booth, Constance, 25n Gorski, William T., 439, 443, 445 gospels, 287–8 gossip, 75–8 Gothic Revival, 236, 240, 242, 244 GPO (General Post Office), 36–7, 46, 175 telephone silence cabinet, 36 Gray, Eileen, 25n Green, Martin, 4, 443, 449n Greenslade, Roy, 98 Greenwood, John D. H., 422 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 26n, 90, 147, 284 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 18 Griffin, Gerald [nineteenth-century writer], 455 Griffin, Gerald, T. [Irish-American philatelist], 173 Griffith, Arthur, 44–6, 48n, 167, 289, 290 The Resurrection of Hungary, 44–5 Groo, Katherine, 253 Grosz, George, 281n The Guardian, 347 Guattari, Félix, 312 Guild of Art Workers, 241 Guinnane, Timothy, 304 Guinness, May, 6, 25n Gunn, Neil, Second Sight, 58, 59 Hadley, Elaine, 148 Halberstam, Judith, 311 Haraway, Donna, 406, 414, 415 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 413 Harmsworth, Albert, 327 Harper, Margaret Mills, 446 Harrington, Tim, 70 Harris, Frank, 211n Harris, Susan Cannon, 289, 290, 297n, 307, 326 The Playboy of the Western World, 297n

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Hartigan, Marianne, 25n Hartnett, Michael, 374 Harvie, Christopher, A Floating Commonwealth, 117 haunting, 414–15, 418n Hayden, Mary, 325 ‘Women, Citizens – Their Duties and Training’, 322–3 Heaney, Seamus, 107, 108, 222 ‘Casualty’, 467n Heartfield, John, 281n Heffer, Byron, 388 The Unnamable, 389 Heffernan, M. R., 172 Hegglund, Jon, 113 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 75–6 Hemingway, Ernest, 187 Henry, Emile, 209 Henry, Grace, 6 heresies aesthetic, 217–98 critical, 385–469 definition, 5 of gender and sexuality, 17–21, 299–384 of joy, 437–51 of nationalism, 8–11, 129–216 of time and space, 6–8, 33–128 Hickman, Mary J., 302–3 Higgins, Michael D., 264 ‘high modernism’, 2, 134–5, 221 Hilliard, Michael, 175 Holloway, Joseph, 289, 290 Home Rule, 46 Homer, 219–20, 230–1 homosexuality, 19, 205–6 Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 241, 243–4, 243, plate 21–4 Hone, Evie Composition, plate 2 modernist women artists, 6, 25n My Four Green Fields window, 245–6, plate 27 St. Brigid window, 245 stained glass, 245–6 Hoogland, Renée, 411 Howes, Marjorie, 125n, 235–6, 242 Hsiau, A-chin, 186, 194n Hughes, Eamonn, 104 Hulme, T. E., 5, 392, 440 Hungary, 44–5, 236, 279 Hutcheon, Linda, 261 Hyde, Douglas, 117–18 ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, 321–2, 325 identity, 406–7

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476

index

illustrated manuscripts, 238, 246 Imagism, 221–2, 392–3 imperial whiteness, 131–5, 142 Inghinidhe na hÉeireann (Daughters of Ireland), 323 Inglesby, Elizabeth, 416 Inglis, Tom, 305, 370 Intermediate Education Act 1878, 134 International Labour Organisation building, Geneva, 234, 246 ‘Irish,’ definition, 2–3, 151–3 Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, and the Celtic Revival, 235–7; see also Arts and Crafts movement Irish Arts and Crafts Society, 245 Irish Film Board, 264 Irish Free State Catholic Church, 9 censorship, 329 constitution, 18–19 founding of, 1 housing, 314n music, 14–15 postage stamps, 165–6, 168–70, 172, 178n At Swim-Two-Birds, 330–1 visual art and culture, 246–7 Yeats, W. B., 439 Irish Homestead, 327 An Irish Honeymoon (1910), 255 Irish Independent, 171 Irish Jews, 44–6 Irish Land Wars, 149–50, 159 Irish language, 270–83, 372–6, 421–36 Irish Literary Revival, 221, 320–33 alienation, 424–5 Catholic female readers, 320–3 iconic feminine, 371 Ireland and Taiwan, 184, 186, 191 Irish Arts and Crafts movement, 234–5, 236 Irish language, 428–32 John Sherman, 456 Loughrea banners, 242 McDonald, Rónán, 248n Irish migration, 115–16, 116–24, 302–3 Irish Museum of Modern Art, 249n The Moderns exhibit, 246–7 Irish Pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939, 245–6 The Irish Press, 252 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 46, 96, 97, 168, 338 Hunger Strike, 107 Irish Revival see Irish Literary Revival Irish Theatre Company, 260 Irish Times, 168–9, 176, 252, 253, 268–83 Irish Women’s Franchise League, 323

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James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady, 405 What Maisie Knew, 352–3 Jameson, Fredric, 261 Japan, 91, 183, 194n, 195n, 276 Japan Times, 89 Jellett, Mainie, 6–7, 12, 13–14, 25n Achill Horses, plate 4 ‘Decoration’, 6, 13 (cover image) The Virgin of Éire, plate 3 Johnson, Dr Samuel, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 57 Johnson, Edmond, 238, 243 Johnston, Denis ‘A Note on What Happened’, 330 The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, 329–30 Jones, David, The Anathemata, 222 Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament, 238 Jones, William, 71 Jordan, Carmel, 85–6 Le Journal de Genève, 46–7 joy divine, 443–5 heresies of, 437–51 sensual, 445–8 Joyce, James anachronism, 35–50 ‘The Boarding House’, 96, 327 Catholic schools, 131 changelings, 134–5 childhood, 144n and Christian stories, 284 cinema, 254 ‘The Dead’, 116 dining, 347 Dubliners, 96, 121, 185, 194n, 327 Easter Rising, 46–7 education, 133 ‘An Encounter’, 327 ‘Eveline’, 116, 121, 327 Homeric parallels, 230 Il Piccolo della Sera, 96, 126n influence on Taiwan, 182, 182–99 ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, 68–70, 71–3 ‘Ireland at the Bar’, 68–71, 72–3, 76–7 Irish brand, 9 Irish nationalisms, 132 Irish realities, 327 lost (and recovered) children, 137–44 narrating for redemption, 357 ‘odyssey of style’, 3 ‘A Painful Case’, 301 postage stamps, 169 realism, 192

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index Revival, 431 sexuality in Christian comedy, 288–92 stream of consciousness, 360 truth of feeling, 394 see also Finnegans Wake; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses Joyce, Myles (Maolra Seoighe), 69–71, 76, 433n Kafka, Franz, 393–4 Kalem Company, New York, 254–8, 261–2, 264 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 391, 394 Kavanagh, Patrick, 311 ‘Epic’, 219–20, 221 ‘The Great Hunger’, 222–3, 301, 305, 312 Keane, John B. The Chastitute, 301, 302 The Field, 158 Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer, 310 Sive, 301, 306 Keane, Molly Good Behaviour, 336–50 Loving and Giving, 336–50 Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking: Well-Loved Recipes from Childhood, 336–9, 346–7 pleasures of subversive consumption, 336–50 Queen Lear see Loving and Giving Time After Time, 336–50 Keating, Kenneth, 372 Keating, Seán, Irish Industrial Development mural, 246 Kelleher, Margaret, 70 Kennedy, Brian P., 178n Kennedy, Hugh, 170 Kennedy, Róisín, 13, 24n, 246, 247n Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, 104 Kennelly, Brendan, 115–16 Kenner, Hugh, 39, 151, 280n, 290 Kermode, Frank, 151 Keyes, Michael, 174 Kiberd, Declan After Ireland, 312 ‘bourgeois epic’, 12 Castle Rackrent, 98 The Colleen Bawn, 280n Inventing Ireland, 305 nostalgia, 69 Revising the Rising, 47 Ulysses and Us, 40 Wilde, Oscar, 200, 202, 210 xenophobia in nationalist movement, 77 Yeats, W. B., 135 Kickham, Charles, Knocknagow, or The Homes of Tipperary, 117, 259–60 kidnapped children, 131–46

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Kiely, Benedict Drink to the Bird, 103–4 Proxopera, 98–9, 102–4, 109n Kierstead, Mary, 347 The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), 264 Kimball, Solon T., Family and Community in Ireland, 304–5 Kincaid, Andrew F., 116 King, Colman ‘Tiger’, 424, 432n King, Richard, 247 Kinnahan, Linda A., 371 Kinsella, Thomas, 115–16, 229 Kirkley, Laura, 374 Klein, Melanie, 98–9, 103 Knocknagow (1918), 259–64 Knowlson, James, 395 Kracauer, Siegfried, 52 Kreilkamp, Vera, 240, 338, 340, 345–6 Kuch, Peter, 200 Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party), 183–4, 185 National Language Movement, 183, 194n Labouchère, Henry, 212n Labouchère Amendment, Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, 205 Lacan, Jacques, 391–2, 392 The Lad from Old Ireland (1910), 255, 256–8, 263 land and soil, 147–64 Land Commission, 304 Land League, 149–50, 155, 158 landscapes, 82–95, 371–2 Lane, Hugh, 13, 26n Lanigan, Liam, 77 Lanthimos, Yorgos, 264 Laoghaire, Father Peadar Ua, 429 Latour, Bruno, 454, 457, 459 Lau, Joseph, 188, 191 Laughton, Freda, 371 Laverty, Maura, 336 Lawrence, D. H. ‘Snake’, 291 Sons and Lovers, 187 Women in Love, 114 Le Brocquy, Louis, A Family, 13, plate 7 Lee, Hermione, 410 Lemass, Seán, 175 Lennon, Joseph, 71 Leonard, Garry, 139 LGBTQ, 19 Lifton, Robert Jay, 64n Limerick boycott, 44–6 Lin, Hsiao-Ting, 194n Literary Revival, 3

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478 The Little Review, 96, 286 Lloyd, David, 10, 84, 369, 371–2, 376 Under Representation, 394 The Lobster (2015), 264 Logue, Cardinal Michael, 324 Loisy, Alfred F., 439 London, 452–66 Longley, Edna, 3, 17, 21 Loughrea Cathedral, County Galway, 241–2, 242, 244–6, plate 20, plate 25 Love, Oscar, 277–8 Lovett, Ann, 374–6 ‘low modernism’, 2 Luciano, Dana, 407 Lusty, Natalya, 303 Lutyens, Edwin, 26n Lye, Colleen, 152 Lynch, J., 173 Lynch, Sister Concepta, 235, 246 stencilled decoration in housepaint, oratory of the Dominican Convent at Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, plate 28 Lyotard, Jean-François, 392

Macardle, Dorothy, 18 The Seed Was Kind, 58 The Unforeseen, 58, 59–63 McBride, Eimear, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, 352–3, 357–60 McCabe, Eugene, ‘Victims’, 97, 98–9, 99–102 McCormack, Mike, Solar Bones, 452–69 McCrea, Barry, 434n McDiarmid, Lucy, 90 McDonald, Rónán, 151, 248n, 310 McDonough, Martin, The Cripple of Inishmaan, 253 McFarlane, James, 428 McGahern, John, The Dark, 123 McGee, Patrick, 48n MacGreevy, Thomas, 10, 221 McGuckian, Medbh, 371 McHugh, Roland, 74–5 McIlroy, Brian, 257–8 McKenna, Stephen, 290 McKibben, Sarah E., 131 Mackinder, Halford, 113, 116 McLoone, Martin, 264 McLoughlin, Dympna, 446 McMullen, James F., 243 MacNamara, Brinsley, 152 McNamee, Eoin, Resurrection Man, 25n MacNeill, Eoin, 252 McNeillie, Andrew, 9 MacNeice. Louis, 220

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index Macrae, Norman Highland Second-Sight, 57 Magnani, Lorenzo, 76 Maguire, Pauline, The Last Move, 157 Mahaffey, Vicki, 203, 204, 210 Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, 134–5 States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment, 12, 281n ‘Mainstream Literature,’ Taiwan, 185 Makdisi, Saree, 144n Malone, Alan, 277 Man of Aran (1934), 252–3, 260, 264, 421–5 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, 353, 365n Mao, Douglas, ‘New Modernist Studies’, 2 maps, 82–95 Maritain, Jacques, 229 Martin, Violet, 25n Martyn, Edward, 241, 244 church construction, 241 Marxism, 47, 261 masculinity, 301–13, 313n Maurer, Sara, 149 Mauthner, Fritz, 394 Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 391–2 Critique, 394, 395 Mayne, Rutherford, Red Turf, 154 Meath Board of Health, 303–4, 306 Meeker, Joseph, 416 Meisel, Perry, 236–7, 240 Melchiori, Barbara, 213n Melville, Herman, Redburn, 117 Merriman, Brian, The Midnight Court, 133–4 Metcalfe, Percy, 170–1 #MeToo movement, 351, 364n Mezzeroff, Professor, 208, 213n Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 15 Mill, John Stuart, 149 Mills, Lia, 370 Milton, John, ‘Lycidas’, 139–40, 143 Mitchel, John, Jail Journal, 116 Modern Literature, 183–6, 194n modernism definition, 2–5 Moglen, Seth, Mourning Modernity, 313n Molotov, Vyacheslav, 271 Montague, John, 220 Montgomery, Niall, 278, 280n Moore, Brian, 19 Lies of Silence, 9 Moore, George, 150, 247n Moore, Thomas, ‘You Remember Ellen’, 256 Moran, D. P., 322 ‘The Battle of Two Civilizations’, 325 ‘The Gaelic Revival’, 321 Morash, Chris, 83, 85, 86, 89

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index Moretti, Franco, 9 Morrisson, Mark, 438–9 Muldoon, Paul, 373, 373–4, 415–16 ‘The Boundary Commission’, 97 Mullen, Pat, 423 Mullin, Katherine, 125n Murphy, John, 178n The Country Boy, 157 Murray, T. C. Aftermath, 153–4 Birthright, 153–5 music, 14–15 Catholic women and, 320–3, 327–32 The Countess Cathleen, 143 Cruiskeen Lawn, 269 Happy Days, 395–6 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 443–4 Troubled Bachelors, 307 Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, 353, 365n Nadel, Ira, 71 na gCopaleen, Myles see na Gopaleen, Myles; O’Brien, Flann na Gopaleen, Myles, 268–83, 280n; see also O’Brien, Flann Nairn, Tom, 9 ‘nameless lake’, 98–9, 104 Nanook of the North (1922), 253 The Nation, 149, 321 National Gallery of Ireland, 13 National Taiwan University, 184 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 21 nationalism, heresies of, 8–11, 129–216 Nativism, 186–90 Nativist Literature Debate, Taiwan, 182, 189–90, 190, 195n Naumann, Hans, 391, 393 New Ireland Review, 321 New Materialism, 1–2 New Statesman, 453 New Women, 303, 312 New York Times, 22, 466 The New Yorker, 347 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 368–85 The Brazen Serpent, 378 ‘Celibates’, 376–7 ‘The Crossroads’, 368–9 ‘Fireman’s Lift’, 378 ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’ (‘I have pain in our teeth’), 377 ‘The Real Thing’, 378–9 ‘St Margaret of Cortona’, 377, 378 ‘St Mary Magdalene Preaching at Marseilles’, 377 ‘Studying the Language’, 377

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‘The Water Journey’, 378, 379 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 368–83 ‘An Crann’, 374 ‘Deora Duibhshléibhe’, 372–3 Féar Suaithinseach, 374 ‘Fuadach’, 374 ‘Lá Chéad Chomaoineach’ (‘First Communion’), 373 ‘Thar mo chionn’ (‘On my behalf’), 374–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69 Nishikigi, 87–8 Noguchi, Yone, 89, 90–1, 95 Noh drama, 82–95 Pound, Ezra, 87 Nolan, Emer, 8, 45, 77, 119, 456 Nordau, Max, 6–7, 395 Degeneration, 387–91 Norridge, Zoe, 75–6 Norris, David, 19 Norris, Margot, 141 Northern Ireland abortion, 19 borders, 3, 96–111 cinema, 264 Irish Free State, 1 nationalism, 9 Protestants, 25n terraced streets, 352 time, 311 nostalgia Celtic Twilight, 3 children, 136 cinema, 256, 260–3 Endgame, 293 The Field, 158 Kiberd, Declan, 69 O’Higgins, Kevin, 9 pirate novels, 116–17 soil, 149 Taiwan, 183 Ó Conaire, Pádraic Deoraíocht (‘Exile’), 421, 424–7 Nora Mharcuis Bhig, 424–5 Ó Criomhthain, Tomás, An t-Oileánach (The Islander), 278–9 O’Brien, Ellen, 336, 337 O’Brien, Flann, 268–83, 280n, 281n ‘archaic avant-garde’, 13 Cruiskeen Lawn, 268–83 The Dalkey Archive, 58–9 At Swim-Two-Birds, 268, 330–1 The Third Policeman, 268, 285, 296 time, 58–9 see also na Gopaleen, Myles O’Brien, John, The Vanishing Irish, 304

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480

index

O’Casey, Seán Juno and the Paycock, 120–1, 326–7 The Plough and the Stars, 330 Occidental Britishness, 142, 144n O’Connell, Daniel, 171, 254 O’Connell, Eileen, Lament for Art O’Leary, 115–16 O’Connor, Frank, 99 O’Donnell, F. Hugh, ‘Souls for Gold!: PseudoCeltic Drama in Dublin,’ 324–5 O’Donoghue, Bernard, ‘Ter Conatus,’ 311–12 O’Donovan, Father Jeremiah, 242 O’Donovan, Fred, 260 O’Donovan, John, 86–7 O’Dowd, Mary, 133 O’Driscoll, Mervyn, 157 Ó’Faoláin, Seán, 246, 259, 406 O’Higgins, Kevin, 9 Oidhche Sheanchais (‘Storyteller’s Night’), 253, 424 O’Keefe, Tim, 58–9 Olcott, Sidney, 255, 256, 257–9, 261–2, 264 Old, Walter Richard, Second Sight: A Study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance, 57 O’Leary, John, 456 O’Neill, Henry The Fine Arts and Civilization of Ireland, 237, 238 Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland, 238 O’Nolan, Brian see na Gopaleen, Myles; O’Brien, Flann O’Rahilly, Michael Joseph, 35–7, 37 Ordnance Survey, 86–7 O’Reilly, J. J., 169 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 202 Orientalism, 71–2 Orvell, Miles, 278, 280n Orwell, George, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, 132–3 O’Toole, Tina, 413, 414 Pai, Hsien-Yung, 184 Taipei People, 182, 185, 194n Palko, Abigail, 19 Parsons, Cóilín, 120 Patten, Eve, 460–1 Patterson, Glenn, The International, 109n Pavel, Thomas, 76 Pearse, Pádraic, 36–7, 100, 104, 150–1, 190, 330, 431 Petronius, The Satyricon, 289 Phillips, Adam, 138 Phillips, Stanley, 172 Phoenicia and Ireland, 71–2, 76

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physiognomy of objects, 52–8 Picasso, Pablo, Guernica, 355 Pierce, David, 74, 76 Pilgrim Hill (2012), 311 Playboy riots, 286 The Plough and the Stars, 47 PMLA, 2 poetry and the heresy of modernism, 219–33 women’s, 368–85 Poggioli, Renato, 272–3, 274–5, 279 The Pogues, 14–15 Poland, 269 Police Intelligence, 325–6, 329 Pope Pius X, 427 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 4, 439 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The Countess Cathleen, 288 ‘Irish’, 2, 5 Irish Bildungsroman, 105, 456–7 leaving Ireland, 193 nationalism, 137–8 sea, 116, 121–2 sexuality in Christian comedy, 291–2 Taiwan, 187–8 ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, 143 postage stamps, 165–81 airmail stamp, 165 ‘Arms of the Provinces’ stamp, 170 Catholic subjects on, 171, 179n ‘Celtic Cross’ stamp, 169–70 ‘The Fenians’ 1- and 24-cent stamps, plate 13 George V stamps, 168–9, plate 15, plate 17 Guinness stamp, 175–6 Irish Free State, 165–6, 168–70, 172, 178n Irish independence, 171 Irish White Cross Society stamp, 168, plate 16 Joyce, James, 169 ‘Map of Ireland’ stamp, 169, plate 18 press, 173–4 Rialtas Sealadac na hÉireann 1922 overprint, 168, plate 17 stamp ‘Vox Hiberniae’, plate 12 ‘Sword of Light’ stamp, 169 Yeats, W. B., 167, 170 Potts, Donna, 372 Pound, Ezra Cantos, 222, 230 distortions of language, 359 emotions, 440 Imagism, 221–2 ‘modernism’, 3 Noh drama, 87–9, 92 Yeats, W. B., 90–1 Powell, David, 278, 280n

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index Powell, Kerry, 210 Power, Arthur, 192 premonitions, 64n Preston, Carrie, 88–9 printed materials, 235 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 36–7, 38 Proctor, Adelaide, 322 propaganda labels, 165–70 with official cancellation marks, plate 14 Sinn Féin, plate 15 property, 147–64, 160n staging, 153–6 Protestantism Ascendancy, 20, 25n, 98, 101, 323, 337–50 children, 134 Christian stories, 284, 295 The Countess Cathleen, 323–4 ‘Crazy Jane’, 446 Irish Literary Revival, 320 Irish Times, 269–70 John Sherman, 458 The Last September, 405 No Bones, 106 Northern Ireland, 25, 97 oppression of Catholics, 115 Proxopera, 102–3 sea, 117 Synge, J. M., 290, 326 Ulysses, 327 ‘Victims’, 100–1 Yeats, W. B., 144n Purcell, Siobhán, 389 Purser, Sarah, 235, 241, 244–5 St. Brendan window, 244–5, plate 25 Quayson, Ato, ‘Aesthetic Nervousness’, 389 Queensbury, Marquess of, 203, 205, 212n queer theory, 1 queerness, 311, 407–8 Radio Éireann, accent, 14 Ramazani, Jahan, 272 Redmond, John, 258 Reisman, Mara, 337, 338 reproductive futurism, 306, 315n Revival see Irish Literary Revival La Revue indépendante, 279 Reynolds, Paige, 151, 264, 364, 455 Richards, Shaun, 83 Riker, Martin, 466 Ritvo, Harriet, 465 Robinson, Lennox, 153 Harvest, 155–6 Rockett, Kevin, Cinema and Ireland, 253 Roden, Frederick S., 439 Rohman, Carrie, 406

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Roling, Bernd, 71 Romanets, Maryna, 373 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 253 Rory O’More (1911), 255, 257–8 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 208, 213n Rothery, Seán, 15 Royle, Nicholas, 406–7, 409, 414–15, 417n, 418n ‘ruins’, 371–2, 376, 377 rural drama, 147–64 Russell, Deputy, 175 Russell, George (Æ) see Æ (George Russell) Russia, 271, 273–4 Said, Edward, 69, 72, 88 Saint-Amour, Paul K., Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, 63 Salkeld, Blanaid, 371 Scandinavian Design Report, 176–7 Sceats, Sarah, 337, 340 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 312 Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 304–5 Schmitt, Natalie Crohn, 85 Schopenhauer, Arthur392 Scott, David, 35 Scott, W. A., 242, 243 sea, 112–15, 115–24, plate 11 see also water second sight, 51–66 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 308–9, 407 Sendivogius, ‘A Dialogue of the Allchymist and Sulphur’, 447 Senghor, Léopold, 47 Seoighe, Maolra (Myles Joyce), 69–71, 76, 433n Sepharial, Second Sight: A Study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance, 57 Serres, Michel, 22, 459 sexuality, 125n in Christian comedy, 288–92 heresies of, 17–21, 299–384 homosexuality, 19, 205–6 queerness, 311, 407–8 Shakespear, Olivia, 444 Shan Van Vocht, 18, 98–9, 101, 103–4 Shanahan, Desmond, 174–5 Shanahan’s Stamp Auctions, 174–5 Shaw, Christopher, 261 Shaw, George Bernard, 201 Memories of Oscar Wilde, 211n Sheehy, Jeanne, 237, 246, 247 Sheridan, Monica, 175 Sheridan, Niall, 278, 280n Sheils, Barry, 90 Shih, Shu, 184 short stories, 99

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482

index

Shriver, Lionel, Ordinary Decent Criminals, 98 Shu, James C. T., 187, 191 Siebers, Tobin, 389 Sinn Féin Film Company of Ireland (FCOI), 260 Japan, 276 propaganda labels, 166–70, plate 15 Ulysses, 44–6, 48n Yeats, W. B., 90 ‘skin-ego’, 107–8 Sligo, 135, 452–66 Smith, Neil, 88 Smith, Russell, 389, 394 Smyllie, R. M., 269–70 Smyth, Gerry, 14 Snyder, Katherine, 309 soil, 148–51 Solomons, Estella, 46 Somerville, Edith, 25n Somerville and Ross, 25n, 99 The Big House of Inver, 99 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 76 Spencer, Herbert, Education, 461 Spinoza, Baruch, 438 Spoo, Robert, 39 stained glass, 15, 235, 236, 243–4, 244–6 stamps see postage stamps Stanford, Professor, 174 Stanley, A. J., Troubled Bachelors, 301–2, 304, 306–11, 311–13 Stein, Gertrude, 99 Sterne, Laurence, Tristam Shandy, 353 Stevens, Julie Anne, 412 Stoker, Bram, 58 Dracula, 144n, 160n The Lady of the Shroud, 56–8, 62 The Mystery of the Sea, 53–6, 60 Stokes, Margaret, Early Modern Art in Ireland, 238 Stoney, George, How the Myth Was Made (1978) documentary, 253 Storrs, John, 15 ‘Stroller,’ ‘Around About’ gossip column, 305–6 suffragists, 322–3 Sullivan, James Mark, 260 The Sunday Press, 47 surrealism, 410–12 Swanzy, Mary, 6, 25n Sweetman, Deputy Gerard, 175 Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels, 133–4 ‘A Modest Proposal’, 133–4, 135 Synge, J. M. Aran Islands, 462 The Aran Islands, 120, 244, 289

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dialect, 186 The Playboy of the Western World, 120, 284–5, 293, 325–6, 330 Riders to the Sea, 85, 120 sexuality in Christian comedy, 288–92 In the Shadow of the Glen, 147, 288–90, 297n The Well of the Saints, 84–5 Taaffe, Carol, 191, 275, 280n Taiwan, 182–99 Tandy, Jessica, 395 tapestries, 235 Tara Brooch, 237–8, 237 Taylor, S. Allen, 167 Thatcher, Margaret, 104 time, 411–13 Time (Ireland) Act 1916, 37 time and space, heresies of, 6–8, 33–128 Times Literary Supplement, 189 Tower of Glass studios, 244 Tracy, Tony, 255, 256 Trevelyan, Charles, 148 Trieste, Italy, 68–71, 126n Trinity College Dublin, 133, 174 Troubles, 97, 98, 104, 105–8 Troubles fiction, 102–3, 109n Tynan, Katharine, 455 ‘Twenty-Five Years’ Reminiscences’, 322 Tyrrell, George, 439 Ulysses ‘Aeolus’ episode, 39–40, 48n anti-Semitism, 44–6, 67 bachelors, 301 burned by US Postal Authorities, 96 ‘Calypso’ episode, 142, 328 ‘Circe’ episode, 41–3, 141–2 ‘Cyclops’ episode, 40–1, 45, 71, 73, 77, 123, 189 disability, 22 Easter Rising, 35 ‘Eumaeus’ episode, 39, 122–3, 125n everyday Irishness, 327–9 fathers and sons, 293 history, 67–8 Homeric parallels, 225 influence on Taiwan, 188–9 interior monologue, 353 ‘Ithaca’ episode, 46 lost (and recovered) children, 137–44 ‘Lotus Eaters’ episode, 39 multiple voices, 12 music, 14 ‘Nausicaa’ episode, 284–5, 286, 328, 329 ‘Nestor’ episode, 39–40, 139–1, 141–3

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index ‘Penelope’ episode, 44, 328–9 ‘Proteus’ episode, 6, 121–2 realism, 192 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode, 365n the sea, 121–3 ships, 116 ‘Sirens’ episode, 365n ‘Telemachus’ episode, 138 ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode, 328 ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, 142–4 World War I, 39–40 Union (1800–1912), 116 Unterecker, John, 443 Utell, Janine, 77 Valente, Joseph, 154, 297n, 310 Vallancey, Charles, 71–2 Victoria Station, 207–9, 210, 212n ‘The Disastrous Explosion at Victoria Station’, 208 violence, 105–6 Virgin Mary, 18 Volta Electric cinema, Dublin, 254 von Hügel, Baron Friedrich, 4–5, 443, 449n ‘Vox Hiberniae’ (Voice of Hibernia), 165, plate 12 Walker, Simon, 15 Walker, Tom, 236 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., ‘New Modernist Studies’, 2 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 462 Walsh, Keri, 410 Wang, Wen-hsing, 192–3 Family Catastrophe, 182, 185, 186–90, 191–2, 195n ‘Nativist Literature: Its Merits and Demerits’, 189–90 Warner, Michael, 308 water, 112–29, plate 31 see also sea Waterhouse, George, 237–8 watery modernism, 452–69 Watson, George, 437, 448 Weaver, Harriet, 169 Weeks, Abraham, 46 Weiler, Gershon, 392 Werbart, Andrzej, 108 ‘West-Briton-Nationalist’, 277–8 Westmeath County Board of Health and Public Assistance, plate 29 Westmeath Examiner, 303–4 Wilde, Oscar bombs and comedy, 200–17 ‘The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealist Romance’, 418n De Profundis, 203

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homosexuality, 19 humour and violence, 281n imperialism, 211n The Importance of Being Earnest, 200, 203, 203–17, 211n ‘modernism’, 12 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 210, 212n reversal of artistic mimesis, 363 socialism, 200–1 ‘Sonnet to Liberty’, 202–3 The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 200, 201, 203 Vera, or the Nihilists, 201 Wilder, Gary, 35, 47 Williams, Lily, 169–70 Wills, Clair, 36, 38 Wilson, Ann, ‘Arts and Crafts Revivalism,’ 248n Wilson, F. A. C., 85 Wilson, Robert McLiam, Eureka Street, 25n Wingfield, Sheila Beat Drum, Beat Heart, 223–9, 232n A Kite’s Dinner: Poems 1938–1954, 223 Sun Too Fast, 226 Winkiel, Laura, Geomodernisms, 132 Winston, Greg, 67–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus LogicoPhilophicus, 62 Wolf Collection, 168 Wollaeger, Mark, 39 Woman’s Home Companion, 255 women artists, 25n Catholic readers, 320–35 Clarke’s depiction of, 247n feminine, iconic, 368–85 gender and narrative agency in fiction, 351–67 No Bones, 105–6 poetry, 368–85 women’s rights, 18–19 Wood, Michael, 466 Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse, 113 stream of consciousness, 360 Woolsey, Judge John M., 328 Worden, Daniel, 303 World War I, 277 Bairnsfather, Bruce, 277 Knocknagow, or The Homes of Tipperary, 260 Stoker, Bram, 53 Ulysses, 42, 67–8 World War II, 268–83, 344–5 Beat Drum, Beat Heart, 224 The Boys and Girls are Gone, 157

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484 World War II (Cont.) Cruiskeen Lawn, 269, 274, 276 ‘the Emergency’, 14 ‘Epic’, 219 Proxopera, 103 Taiwan, 183, 192 Time After Time, 344–5 ‘Victims’, 100 Wu, Grace Hui-Chuan, 192 Wylie, Donovan, 97 Wyndham Land Purchase Act 1903, 150, 156 Xiangtu, 186, 192 Yaeger, Patricia, 463 Yan, Yuanshu, 187–8, 191 Yeats, Elizabeth, 241–2 Yeats, Jack B., 9–10, 241 Morning in a City, plate 5 Old Walls, plate 6 Yeats, Mary Cottenham, 241 Yeats, Susan, 241–2 Yeats, W. B. active and passive suffering, 449n ‘Among School Children’, 446 Anglo-Irishness, 125n architecture, 26n Autobiographies, 462 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 18, 147, 201, 297n changelings, 134–5 childhood, 144n ‘The Choice’, 440 church construction, 241 ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, 84 The Countess Cathleen, 143, 201, 288, 323–4, 330 ‘Crazy Jane’, 446–8 ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, 447 degeneration, 393 Dhoya, 455–6 ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, 442–3 The Dreaming of the Bones, 82–95 ‘Easter 1916’, 41, 460 education, 133 ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, 437 ‘The Fisherman’, 393, 460

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index Four Plays for Dancers, 91, 91–2 ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, 440 ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’, 119 At the Hawk’s Well, 89–90 Imagism, 221 ‘Introductory Rhymes’, 118–19 Irish Literary Revival, 322 Irish nationalisms, 132 John Sherman, 452–69 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 464 The Land of Heart’s Desire, 324–5 Man of Aran (1934), 252 modern Irish poetry, 222 a modernist heretic? 438–40 monumentalisation of, 220–1 nostalgia, 260 Poems, 324 postage stamps, 167, 170 ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, 115, 118 Purgatory, 88, 92 ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, 1 Responsibilities, 118–19, 460 Reveries over Childhood and Youth, 170 Revival, 152 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 443–5 ‘The Second Coming’, 12, 83, 85, 118 ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, 459–60 The Speckled Bird, 468n ‘The Spur’, 445 ‘The Statues’, 118 ‘The Stolen Child’, 135–7, 137–44 Thoor Ballylee, also known as Yeats’s Tower, County Galway, frontispiece, plate 30 and the transformative heresy of joy, 437–51 ‘Vacillation’, 4–5, 437, 440–3 A Vision, 83, 91–2, 437, 448n, 460–1 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, 455 ‘The Wild Wicked Old Man’, 445–6, 448 Wilde, Oscar, 202 You Remember Ellen (1912), 258–9 Young, Steven, 272 Young Ireland rebellion 1848, 116 ‘Ypres on the Liffey’, 38, plate 9, plate 10 Zasulich, Vera, 201 Zola, Émile, ‘The Experimental Novel’, 467n

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Plate 1 Francis Bacon (1909–92), Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2020.

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Plate 2 Evie Hone (1894–1955), Composition, 1924. Oil on canvas, 116 × 90 cm. NGI.4378, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photograph © National Gallery of Ireland. © The Artist’s Estate.

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Plate 3 Mainie Jellet (1897–1944), The Virgin of Éire, 1940s. Oil on canvas, 64 × 92 cm. NGI.4319, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

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Plate 4 Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), Achill Horses, 1941. Oil on canvas, 61 × 92 cm. NGI.4320, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

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Plate 5 Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), Morning in a City, c.1937. Oil on canvas, 61 × 91 cm. NGI.1050, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin.

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Plate 6 Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), Old Walls, 1945. Oil on canvas, 46 × 61 cm. NGI.4716, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin.

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Plate 7 Louis le Brocquy (1916–2012), A Family, 1951. Oil on canvas, 147 × 185 cm. NGI.4709, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin.

Plate 8 Photograph of the Dominican Church at Athy. Photo credit: Fergal Mac Eoinín, Irish Dominican Photographers.

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Plate 9 Cover of Easter Rising commemorative booklet published by Wilson Hartnell & Co., Dublin, 1916. Photograph in public domain.

Plate 10 Dublin and the ‘Sinn Féin Rising’, cover photograph, detail. Photograph in public domain.

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Plate 11 Photograph of lighthouse in Ireland. Public domain: https://www.needpix.com/photo/940696/lighthouse-ireland-seawater-landscape-coast-nature-scenic

Plate 12 Stamp, ‘Vox Hiberniae’. Reproduced from the original held in the author’s private collection.

Plate 13 The Fenians’ 1- and 24-cent stamps, 1967. Reproduced from the original held in the author’s private collection.

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Plate 14 Labels with official cancellation marks. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame.

Plate 15 Sinn Féin labels and George V stamps, 1920. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame.

Plate 16 Irish White Cross Society stamp, 1922. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame.

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Plate 17 British King George V stamp with Rialtas Sealadac na hÉireann 1922 overprint. Reproduced from the original held in the private collection of John A. Ulin.

Plate 18 Map of Ireland stamp, 1922. Reproduced from the original held in the private collection of John A. Ulin.

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Plate 19 Electrotype facsimile of a Celtic Ardagh Chalice, attributed to the firm of Edmond Johnson, Dublin. 25 × 18.5 × 15cm. Edmond Johnson Collection at the Spurlock Museum, acquired 1916. Courtesy of The Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Plate 20 Hand-carved figure on congregation bench, Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 21 Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Brendan, stained glass, detail showing Celtic interlace decorating stalactites above St Brendan. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 22 Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Brendan, stained glass, detail showing St Brendan’s pampooties. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 23 Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Gobnait, stained glass, detail showing honeycomb and stylised bees. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 24 Harry Clarke (1889–1931), St. Gobnait, stained glass, detail showing Harry Clarke self-portrait as a plague victim. Honan Hostel Chapel, Cork, 1916. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 25 Sarah Purser (1848–1943), St. Brendan, stained glass, 1903. Loughrea Cathedral, Loughrea, County Galway. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

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Plate 26 Wilhelmina Geddes (1887–1955), The Fate of the Children of Lir (1929), stainedglass panel in leaded frame. Collection Ulster Museum, BELUM.U2120. © The Geddes Estate, reproduced courtesy of Elizabeth Kerr and family, WM Geddes legacy trustees. Photograph reproduced courtesy the Trustees of National Museums Northern Ireland.

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Plate 27 Evie Hone (1894-1955), My Four Green Fields, stained glass, 1938. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / IVARO, Dublin. Image by Tomás Maher 2014, South Dublin County Libraries.

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Plate 28 Sister Concepta Lynch (Lily Lynch) (1874–1939), stencilled decoration in housepaint, oratory of the Dominican Convent at Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, 1920–36. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

Plate 29 Bachelor eviction order from the minutes of the Westmeath County Board of Health and Public Assistance, 14 April 1939. Image courtesy of the Westmeath County Library, used with permission.

Plate 30 Original photograph of Thoor Ballylee, also known as Yeats’s Tower, County Galway. Image courtesy of Edita Kapović, used with permission.

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Plate 31 Photograph of river in Ireland. Photograph in public domain.