The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism 9781474456708

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

6790_Ellmann.indd i

23/03/21 6:28 PM

Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Published The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Edited by Maggie Humm

The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts Edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English Edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts Edited by Josephine M. Guy

A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English Edited by David Johnson and Prem Poddar

The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio

A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires Edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke and Lars Jensen

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rowlinson The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts Edited by S. E. Gontarski The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts Edited by Stephen Prickett The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory Edited by Stuart Sim The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to NineteenthCentury American Letters and Letter-Writing Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature Edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies Edited by Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott

6790_Ellmann.indd ii

The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope Edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton and Ortwin Graef The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English Edited by Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East Edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Jeanne Dubino, Catherine Hollis, Celiese Lypka, Vara Neverow and Paulina Pająk The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

23/03/21 6:28 PM

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

Edited by Maud Ellmann, Siân White and Vicki Mahaffey

6790_Ellmann.indd iii

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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).

6790_Ellmann.indd iv

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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

6790_Ellmann.indd v

23/03/21 6:28 PM

vi

contents

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

6790_Ellmann.indd vi

387

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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

vii

405

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

421

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

437

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

452

Index

470

6790_Ellmann.indd vii

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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.

6790_Ellmann.indd viii

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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.

36 37 208

237 239

242

243

307

352

Plates Plate 1

6790_Ellmann.indd ix

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.

23/03/21 6:28 PM

x Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4

Plate 5

Plate 6

Plate 7

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

Plate 15

Plate 16

Plate 17

Plate 18

6790_Ellmann.indd x

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.

23/03/21 6:28 PM

list of illustrations Plate 19

Plate 20 Plate 21

Plate 22

Plate 23

Plate 24

Plate 25

Plate 26

Plate 27

Plate 28

Plate 29

Plate 30

Plate 31

6790_Ellmann.indd xi

xi

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.

23/03/21 6:28 PM

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

6790_Ellmann.indd xii

23/03/21 6:28 PM

notes on contributors

xiii

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.

6790_Ellmann.indd xiii

23/03/21 6:28 PM

xiv

notes on contributors

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

6790_Ellmann.indd xiv

23/03/21 6:28 PM

notes on contributors

xv

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

6790_Ellmann.indd xv

23/03/21 6:28 PM

xvi

notes on contributors

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.

6790_Ellmann.indd xvi

23/03/21 6:28 PM

Introduction: Out of Ireland Maud Ellmann

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

L

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 1

23/03/21 6:28 PM

2

maud ellmann

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,

6790_Ellmann.indd 2

23/03/21 6:28 PM

introduction

3

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 3

23/03/21 6:28 PM

4

maud ellmann

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 4

23/03/21 6:28 PM

introduction

5

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’.

6790_Ellmann.indd 5

23/03/21 6:28 PM

6

maud ellmann

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 6

23/03/21 6:28 PM

introduction

7

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 7

23/03/21 6:28 PM

8

maud ellmann

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 8

23/03/21 6:28 PM

introduction

9

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 9

23/03/21 6:28 PM

10

maud ellmann

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

6790_Ellmann.indd 10

23/03/21 6:28 PM

introduction

11

as the foundation for a prosperous Irish