James Joyce’s reputation in some circles for shunning the ordinary reader, and for producing incomprehensible fiction from a modernist ivory tower, is somewhat unfair. In fact, he showed an avid interest in Irish politics and current affairs.
When he first left Dublin for Europe, he had the periodical, The United Irishman, sent to him regularly, and around the time of the Civil War he used many newspapers, including The Irish Times and The Freeman’s Journal, as sources for his last novel, Finnegans Wake.
While Joyce famously wrote particularly about his native Dublin, he was engaged with all Ireland, and he was concerned about the divisions which beset the country before and after independence. Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake in 1923, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and Partition. He completed the novel in 1939, a timing which afforded him an ideal opportunity to explore the birth and growing pains of the Free State and Northern Ireland.
In my book, Finnegans Wake, Ulster and Partition, I explore the rich seam of references in the Wake to Ulster: its geography, its legend and history, and its complex identity. The book also examines Joyce’s many references in the Wake to the historical influences which drove the gradual estrangement of part of Ulster from the rest of Ireland. His portrayal of Ulster celebrates inclusivity and bemoans separatism.
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Joyce introduced important subjects early in his writings, and the very first page of Finnegans Wake hints at loyalist-nationalist conflict in Ireland: “the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green”. In the Wake, he takes his virtuosity with language to previously unattained levels. Far from being meaningless, words and phrases can be interpreted in several ways, and this phrase might also be considered to suggest orange being imposed on green land: plantation, in other words.
Joyce goes on to make many references to opposing groups and factions in Irish history: Williamite and Jacobite, Protestant and Catholic, pro-Treaty and republican, among others. Joyce hated physical violence, and he also bemoaned the human tendency to impose barriers, whether cultural, psychological or physical, which exclude others. Accordingly, in the Wake borders appear repeatedly, usually depicted in terms of sorrow or mockery. Undoubtedly, his principal target is the Anglo-Irish border.
Northeast Ulster long had a closer relationship, both physical and cultural, with Scotland than with southern Ireland. This was largely because, in Ireland’s early history, travel by sea was often easier than land travel across heavily wooded hinterland and mountain. The short waterway, the Moyle, provided simple passage between Ulster and Scotland, and Joyce refers several times to this channel in Finnegans Wake.
In the fifth century, Gaels from the Antrim kingdom of Dál Riada invaded southwest Scotland, thereby provoking decades conflict with the native Picts. Joyce would have appreciated the fact that the term “Scoti” first referred to the Irish people before being adopted across the Moyle. He would also have enjoyed the thought that Ireland, long perceived as being a victim of invasion and colonisation, in its early history exported raiders and invaders.
In later history, of course, the direction of colonisation and plantation was reversed. In his book, The Celtic Unconscious, Richard Barlow highlights the important Scottish dimension in Joyce’s works, a dimension which played a vital role in shaping Ulster’s history and identity.
Ulster’s great landmarks, the Giant’s Causeway and Lough Neagh, feature repeatedly in Finnegans Wake. Finn MacCool reputedly built the Causeway so he could travel to Scotland to fight a rival. Finn is also credited with creating Lough Neagh, a feat which he achieved by tearing up a land mass in anger and flinging it into the Irish Sea. The residual hole formed the lake, and the clump of earth the Isle of Man. Joyce celebrates Finn’s efforts in hilarious and irreverent fashion in the Wake.
Also in the text, Lough Neagh forms a watery grave for the “hero” of the novel, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. His grave is secured, aided by the legendary petrifying powers of the lake’s water: “Landloughed by his neaghboormistress and perpetrified in his offsprung”.
Finn, as leader of the Fianna, was associated more closely with the Leinster cycle of legend than with Ulster, but Joyce also pays homage to Finn’s northern counterpart, Cuchulain, and to Eamhain Macha (Emania), the Armagh headquarters of the Red Branch knights. Cuchulain repeatedly defends Ulster from raids from the south and west, most famously in the epic Táin Bó Cuailngne (Cattle Raid of Cooley). This tale highlights the long vintage of Ulster’s perceived separateness, and of its need to protect itself from its southern neighbours.
Thomas Kinsella, in his translation of the Táin, makes this distinction explicit. Recounting the negotiations led by the respective kings of Connacht and Ulster for a truce, in Kinsella’s words “Ailill agreed for the men of Ireland ... and Conchubhar agreed for the men of Ulster”: the rival armies are not seen as compatriots but as representing separate kingdoms, if not nations. It will come as no surprise to learn that Joyce alludes to the Táin in the Wake. In Joyce’s rich portrayal of the correspondence of opposites, adversaries are essentially the same, sharing similar insecurities and, no doubt, prejudices. Finn is a mirror image of Cuchulain, Emania of the Hill of Allen, stronghold of the Fianna, loyalist blue of nationalist green, and Joyce invokes all these images in the Wake.
As well as his forays into Ireland’s myth and early history, Joyce repeatedly refers to the events in modern history which reinforced the link between religion and politics, and which lined the road to partition. These events and epochs include the Jacobite war and the Battle of the Boyne, Oliver Cromwell’s devastating campaign, the 1798 Rising, the drives for Catholic emancipation and home rule, Easter 1916 and the War of Independence.
Comic undermining is one of Joyce’s main weapons against the powerful, and he is unsparing in his use of this weapon. For example, he offers “A big drum for Billy Dunboyne” as a gift to William of Orange, and he scolds the Lord Protector as “Bold boy Cromwell”. This depiction of Cromwell as a naughty boy takes ironic understatement to its extreme. Joyce was preoccupied with 1798, probably in part because of the violence committed by participants on both sides, and also because it was counterproductive.
Ulster Presbyterians were among the most enthusiastic of the rebels. While there were tensions between the two groups, Presbyterian and Catholic insurgents were allies in the early stages of the rebellion. The alliance gradually fractured, and it was fatally undermined when news reached the north of the reported killing of up to 200 Protestant non-combatants at Scullabogue, Co Wexford.
From then until today, Ulster Presbyterians have been among the staunchest and most intransigent of unionists. Joyce would have relished the irony of this drastic reversal in allegiance, and he mentions Scullabogue twice in Finnegans Wake. He is, however, even-handed in his distaste for sectarian violence and animosity, and he makes similar mention of the sectarian confrontation in 1845 at Dolly’s Brae, Co Down. Here, in the violence which ensued after an Orange march through a predominantly Catholic area, about 30 Catholics were killed and Catholic homes were burned. Joyce was interested in the tendency for history to repeat itself, and in citing Dolly’s Brae he arguably anticipates contemporary tensions and conflict concerning the right to march.
In contrast to the humour which pervades Finnegans Wake in general, Joyce’s references to Partition and the Border are usually negative and sorrowful. He portrays partition as a Judas-like betrayal: “A phantom city ... bowed and souled ... for a price partitional of twenty six and six”, and he describes the boundary as “borderation”, or botheration. He teases the names of Ireland’s newly created states – Saorstát Éireann (the Irish Free State) is “sorestate hearing” and the northern state is linked with anger – “Gently, gently, Northern Ire”.
The rivalry between Shaun and Shem, Earwicker’s twin sons, is one of the great themes of the Wake. Among other things, they symbolise fraternal conflict in Ireland. In the beautiful closing monologue of Anna Livia, mother of the twins, she laments: “Them boys is so contrairy ... Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun ... No peace at all”. Anna’s lament is surely for “two brothers as different as north and south”. Her pessimism was largely borne out by the outbreak of the Troubles half a century after Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake.
Joyce would then have been heartened by the accommodation signalled by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In the Wake, he strives to undermine rigid adherence to national, religious and political identities, and he would surely have welcomed the flexible approach to these identities facilitated by the agreement. In turn, he would have bemoaned the spectre of borders raising their heads again after Brexit, and he would have had a field day with the thought of a virtual border in the Irish Sea for trade and customs purposes. Joyce’s distaste for borders and exclusion, and his celebration of assimilation, are as relevant today as when he wrote Finnegans Wake a century ago.
Finnegans Wake, Ulster and Partition is published by Cork University Press
