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James Joyce and Ireland: An extract from Colm Tóibín’s The Music of the Future

Introducing One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a major exhibition hosted by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York

James Joyce's British Passport, issued 1924. Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © The Estate of James Joyce

Mon Jul 25 2022 - 06:49

This summer, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York is presenting a major exhibition, One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on view until October 2nd, 2022. Created in collaboration with the author Colm Tóibín, the installation comprises more than 100 artefacts, exploring Joyce’s trajectory from lyric poet to modernist genius, the family that shaped him as a man and as a writer, and the storied history of the novel’s creation, publication, and reception. Below is an excerpt from Tóibín’s catalogue essay, The Music of the Future.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, as violence and fanaticism increased in Ireland, as Ireland began to question its relationship to England more intensely and to interrogate and recalibrate its own sense of tradition and its relationship to myth, as Ireland began to summon up in its own imagination a new political reality, Irish writers, including James Joyce, dramatised the relationship between community, including an imagined community, and violence. Poems and novels and plays were not only arguments that the writers were having with themselves but also serious and deliberate interventions in a debate about history, tradition, nationhood, violence, and politics. In Ireland, poems and novels and plays sought to capture, encapsulate and indeed influence and formulate what the future might be, not merely the future of the imagination or the life of the mind or the spirit but life itself, politics, public memory, the nation, the state.

Thus, placing a novel in a city that seemed detached much of the time from the nation - with a Jewish man of great independence of mind, a born noticer, whose response to life is original and sensuous and intelligent, at its centre - is a political act. Creating an Irish hero who is not insular but tolerant, open to life and to modernity in a book to be published in 1922, offers a blueprint for a state-in-the-making about how private life, and perhaps even public life, should be conducted. But the blueprint is subtle and exalts doubleness, contradiction. In Joyce’s Politics, Dominic Manganiello writes, “In Ulysses there is constantly at work a double motive which Joyce is not at pains to make single or crystal clear. The desire to bring Ireland to a new self-awareness is matched by the equally urgent need of preventing its acceptance of any rigid control by Church and State.”

While Joyce wrote Ulysses in exile, he had deep roots in a changing Dublin. He would have viewed the 1916 Rebellion not as a remote event in a city he had abandoned but as led by people with whom he had associations, some close, including Patrick Pearse, the president of the Republic, as declared in Easter Week 1916. Joyce attended a few Irish-language classes given by Pearse at University College Dublin in the spring of 1899. Joyce gave them up because he found Pearse a bore and objected to his efforts to denigrate English in favour of Irish. Joyce decided to study Norwegian instead so that he could read Ibsen in the original.

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The clash between the two young men over ideas of language and cultural identity would make its way into the encounter between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s story The Dead. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium “partly to keep in touch with the languages”, she replies, “And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish?” To which Gabriel replies, “Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.”

In Joyce’s Stephen Hero, a figure whose ideology is close to that of Pearse roundly denounces Stephen Daedalus when he delivers a paper on “Drama and Life” to the University College Literary and Historical Society: “Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitanism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country - you must first have a nation before you have art.”

Both Pearse and Joyce wrote for the theatre and wrote poetry and fiction, Joyce rather more successfully than Pearse. Both, as the soft wax hardened around them, needed to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival, which was led by Yeats and Lady Gregory.

In the front hall of St Enda’s, the school that Pearse founded, were written up the words ascribed to the legendary hero Cuchulainn: “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night provided my fame and my deeds live after me.” This idea of living a heroic rather than a domestic or an ordinary life is alluded to at the end of Joyce’s story The Dead, when Gabriel is pondering death. The sentence “One by one they were all becoming shades” is followed by: “Better pass boldly into that other world, in all the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” It was this same idea, which for Gabriel was merely a passing thought, that would animate Pearse and inspire some of his followers in the years leading up to the 1916 Rebellion.

During the Rebellion, one of Joyce’s oldest friends in Dublin, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was shot dead by firing squad on the orders of an officer who was later declared guilty but insane. Sheehy Skeffington and Joyce had published a pamphlet together, and Sheehy Skeffington inspired the character of McCann in Portrait.

The 1916 Rebellion came as a shock not only to the British authorities but to many in Ireland. Yeats’s poem Easter 1916 is filled with questions and uncertainties. Like Joyce, who has Leopold Bloom invoke “love” in the Cyclops episode, Yeats uses the word in a question about the level of emotion in the politics of the leaders of the Rebellion: “And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?” The playwright Sean O’Casey, whose play The Plough and the Stars is set during Easter Week, found himself outside the nationalist fold by the time of the Rebellion. Early in 1914, however, he had written the constitution for the Irish Citizen Army, one of whose main principles made its way, using some of the same language, into the Proclamation of Easter 1916 read by Patrick Pearse on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin.

The Proclamation’s opening phrase would have interested Joyce. It began: “In the name of God and of the dead generations. . . .” As he worked on Cyclops, the episode that deals most intensely with politics, the idea of the dead generations gave him considerable ammunition for parody.

The Cyclops episode takes place in Barney Kiernan’s pub; it is narrated by a nameless man. Although the narrative in Wandering Rocks cuts between scenes and characters, the tone of each scene is relatively stable. It is written, as it were, by the same person in the same place. On the other hand, the narrative in Cyclops comes in two guises. The first is pub talk, pub argument, some of it parody, some serious; the second is parody of types of discourse, much of it current in 1904.

At the heart of the pub talk is a set of speeches and rants by the Citizen, who has strong nationalist views. He is more fluent and sure of himself than Bloom, whose voice is hesitant and whose interventions have a tentative sound. Bloom is like a man attempting to say something true in the company of quick-witted men who want to win an argument using tones that are filled with cliche.

Many critics have insisted that Cyclops allows us to read Joyce’s politics clearly. Some parts do allow this, but not all. But even when his politics emerge, Joyce seems to belong to the disruptive party rather than any more widely followed political factions in Ireland. In this, he has much in common with Yeats and O’Casey, who got energy from disrupting an evolving consensus in Ireland; their work was nourished by an impulse to provoke. It is unlikely that Yeats’s Crazy Jane, O’Casey’s Rosie Redmond, or Joyce’s Cunty Kate were created to console the authorities in Ireland or win friends for the authors among the faithful.

In sections of Cyclops, Joyce sought to disrupt his very own opinions, or at least unsettle them. For example, if we are invited to take the Citizen’s speeches as the sounds made by a diehard nationalist talking in a pub, then we have to look at the connection between his views on Irish industry and those of Joyce himself, expressed in the 1907 essay Ireland: Isle of Saints and Sages. In the essay, Joyce writes, “Ireland is poor because English laws ruined the country’s industries, especially the wool industry, because the neglect of English governments in the years of the potato famine allowed the best of the population to die from hunger.” In Cyclops, the Citizen says, “Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome.”

One possibility is that Joyce is parodying himself, finding good use for the opinions he expressed in Trieste to an irredentist audience that supported Triestine withdrawal from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Joyce gives the Citizen lines to speak that have been heard many times, including in his own iteration. Bloom’s tone, on the other hand, is simpler, with shorter, starker sentences. He uses words that have their source in the personal rather than the communal. And there are no verbal flourishes in Bloom’s statement: “Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.” It feels almost as though Bloom is speaking to himself, or thinking aloud. All around him there are jokes and quips, but he does not join them. He is the least noisy of men. When asked what his nation is, he answers, “Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.” It is not possible to read this as parody; it stands apart from the rest of the talk in the pub, as though orchestral sound were suddenly replaced by single piano notes.

This scene might offer evidence that, writing during the first World War and in the aftermath of the Easter Rising in Dublin, Joyce wanted to rehearse the arguments about violence. When he has Bloom say, “But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life,” he will be asked what the opposite is, and he will say, “Love.”

This is a major argument being made in a minor key. Bloom’s refusal to use a higher rhetorical tone means that his interventions stand apart from the conversation rather than become engaged with it. The others can become angry, or make fun of him, but they cannot speak without approaching self-parody. He, on the other hand, speaks in a tone that is lonely, melancholy, modest. Everything they say has been said before. Bloom speaks as though he is saying these words for the first time.

In this scene, when Bloom speaks, what we see is the importance of being earnest; all of Joyce’s playfulness has abandoned him while Bloom is actually speaking. But, as though to compensate, or offer alternate systems, in the elaborate parodies of public speech and writing in Cyclops, Joyce allows his imagination a soaring, trouble-making freedom. Not only do some of these parodies disrupt the talk in the pub but they disrupt a decorum on how to write about the martyred dead; they are full of mischief and they are desperately funny. Emer Nolan, in James Joyce and Nationalism, quotes from a letter Joyce wrote to his brother at the time of Dubliners, saying that his pen “seems to me so plainly mischievous”. She also quotes him when, after the 1916 Rebellion, he was asked “whether he would visit an independent Ireland,” and he responded, “So I might declare myself its first enemy?”

There is one parody in Cyclops that would have especially helped Joyce’s candidacy for “first enemy”. It occurs just when the Citizen is shouting out some tired slogans. It begins: “The last farewell was affecting in the extreme.” It is a parody of a florid description of the execution of Robert Emmet that slowly becomes a parody of the event itself. At the end of the previous episode, Robert Emmet has made a brief appearance when Bloom sees an image of him in a window. The last words of Emmet’s famous speech from the dock in 1803 are, “When my country takes its place among the nations of the earth then and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” As Bloom sets out to fart, he uses these words, reserving a broken-up version of “I have done,” until the fart has been completed.

Now, having connected a famous Irish heromartyr with the act of farting, Joyce sets about making fun of his execution, an event that has been commemorated in songs written by Thomas Moore as well as by Hector Berlioz. The memory of Robert Emmet was venerated by many. While Joyce’s version of Emmet’s execution is not pious, it is, in all its comic flourishes and deliberate irreverence, glorious. Among those who witness the execution in Ulysses are such unlikely Joycean inventions as “Bacibaci Beninobenone . . . Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi . . . Hokopoko Harakiri,” an “Archjoker” and a “Grandjoker,” and a man whose first name is “Goosepond”. The knife to be used on Emmet is tested first on a flock of sheep, and there is a saucepan “to receive the most precious blood of the most precious victim,” thus making the passage even more offensive by connecting Emmet to Christ, associating God with the dead generations.

Since this was written after the 1916 Rebellion, whose leaders were shot by the British, becoming martyrs in the same tradition as Emmet, the sheer mischief in the passage is even further emphasised. Nothing was more sacred at the time than the names of those who had died for Ireland. By making one such execution into hilarious spectacle, Joyce insists that what is sacred has an even more sacred need to be laughed at.

The description of the execution appears in one very long paragraph, lasting almost five pages, that ends with “the stern provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel” who oversees the execution speaking in a Cockney accent. He is given a background in India: “he who had blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching.” The name given to him is glossed in Ulysses Annotated, by Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, as a “fictional name that suggests extraordinary pretension to ‘good family’ backgrounds”.

The name is “Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson.” It is difficult to see why Tomkin or Tomlinson might have been chosen. The name ffrenchmullan could relate to the revolutionary and labour activist Madeleine ffrench-Mullan, who took part in the 1916 Rebellion, but it is hard to connect her with a man who oversees an execution. The part of the long name that jumps out from the text, for an Irish reader of Ulysses, is Maxwell.

Sir John Maxwell, who had served in Egypt and the Sudan, oversaw the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion, having been sent to Dublin in the week of the Rising as a military governor with plenary powers. He was in sole charge of the trials of the leaders, which were conducted in camera and without any defence. His decision to have so many of the leaders shot was soon questioned by the very British government that had empowered him. In Ireland, his name was associated with the executions. In evoking his name, Joyce had to be careful. His novel remains set, ostensibly, in 1904. Putting the word Maxwell in the longer name is not an anachronism; rather, it is a sly clue that Joyce is writing Cyclops in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising and that his Emmet parody is a sideswipe at Irish martyrology at a time when it had risen to new heights. He does not draw attention to it, but the use of the name “Maxwell” is a small example of Joyce’s engagement with events in his own country as Ireland moved toward independence - and as he set about invoking the music of the future.

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