Like many migrants in the decades since, Joyce performed in central Europe his own research and field work, his own reverse anthropology,2 while perpetually fretting that the homeland he had abandoned was about to disappear. "If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake", he wrote in 1907, "or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever".3 The migrant intellectual is forever assailed by the feeling that he or she is speaking before a tribunal, and so it was with Joyce. He tried in journalistic articles to convey to the developed world something of his people's desolation. He had no great faith that his meaning would be understood. Adopting, for strategic purposes, the urbane tone of a central European, he described a bizarre and unjust murder-trial of a speechless defendant back in Ireland. "The figure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of a civilization not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge", he told his Triestine readers, "is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion".4
That old prisoner's problem was a version of his own: how to express the sheer fluidity and instability of Irish experience in a form which would be nonetheless comprehensible to the arbiters of international order. Ireland was indeed a precarious invention, a fiction which might yet be sufficiently imagined to become a fact: but in 1907 its people were estranged from the past, a nation of exiles and migrants, caught on the cusp between tradition and innovation. They were in but not of any situation in which they might find themselves, their reality the experience of perpetually crossing over from one code to another. The shortest way to Tara, the ancient centre of Celtic civilization, was indeed through Holyhead, that clearing-house for exiles en route to the cities of England and continental Europe. Yet into his own exile Joyce took with him the ancient Gaelic notion that only in literature can the consciousness of a people be glimpsed.
There were so many different levels of national experience to comprehend: and yet there was available to Joyce no overarching central image, no single explanatory category, no internal source of authority. Too mobile, too adaptable, the Irish were everywhere and nowhere, scattered across the earth and yet feeling like strangers in their own land. The fear which gripped Pearse, MacDonagh and Desmond FitzGerald in 1914 – that a great historic nation was about to disappear as tens of thousands of its men went willingly to the slaughter of another country's war – had also assailed Joyce. He began Ulysses in the hope of discovering through it a form adequate to this strange experience, one which might allow him eventually to proclaim the tables of a new law in the language of the outlaw, to burrow down into his own "Third World" of the mind. For an audience in the made world, he wished to evoke a world still in the making.
He was, in that sense, one of those migrants who create newness out of the mutations of the old. The novel in the hands of a Rushdie or a Naipaul has come to be seen as a form through which the members of an educated native élite address their former masters: but, decades before they wrote, Joyce had used prose narrative to capture the jokes, oral traditions and oratory of a people, who might never have committed these to print themselves, unless they had been part of a more achieved, self-confident culture. Though Ulysses is indeed the collective utterance of a community, it is hard to imagine anyone within the world of the book (except possibly Stephen) actually writing it all down. "I have put the great talkers of Dublin into my book", boasted Joyce, "they – and the things that they forgot".5 For all that, there will be few to imagine either a Leopold or Molly Bloom reading it, which makes it in this respect too a supreme instance of the post-colonial text.
Yet these characters are in no way unmodern or unsophisticated. Joyce set his book in the "centre of paralysis" that was Dublin in 1904, in the conviction that if he could get to the dead heart of that city, he could render the discontents and estrangements of the modern world. As an Irishman, he could never condone the glib assumption that "undeveloped" countries like his own were like the developed ones at an earlier stage of their growth: not for him the easy evolutionism of Darwin or Marx. Joyce was radical enough in Ulysses to present Mr. Deasy's optimistic Christianity and the socialist's vision of a classless society as two sides of the same oppressive coin. He knew better than that. He knew from personal experience that to be modern is to experience perpetual disintegration and renewal, and yet somehow to make a home in that disorder. The Irish, through the later nineteenth century, had become one of the most deracinated of peoples; robbed of belief in their own future, losing their native language, overcome by feelings of anomie and indifference, they seemed rudderless and doomed. Though Ulysses is set on a day in 1904, it is necessarily a portrait of the late-Victorian Ireland which went into its making and, as such, a remarkable outline of colonial torpor.
What had happened in Ireland was what would happen across the world in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century: traditional patterns of living had been gravely disrupted, but without the material compensations which elsewhere helped to make such losses tolerable. The people were suffering from that most modern of ailments: a homeless mind. Their small but persistent hope was that somehow they might yet manage to modernize in a human mode and put an end to the loss of meaning which was all they knew. Very few of them nursed regressive dreams of a return to the past, but they did yearn for a more bearable version of modernity. Against that backdrop, both the 1916 Rising and Ulysses can be interpreted in rather similar ways: as attempts to achieve, in the areas of politics and literature, the blessings of modernity and the liquidation of its costs. In other words, the Irish wished to be modern and counter-modern in one and the same gesture.
By the time that Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914, most of the industrial world, and not just its colonial outposts, was overcome by a sense of anomie. indeed, the Great War was proposed by many as a heroic alternative to such meaninglessness. Joyce's project of recounting "the dailiest day possible" takes on a radical significance in that context: he wished to reassert the dignity of the quotidian round, to reclaim the everyday as a primary aspect of experience. But this was in no way intended as a surrender to that colonial life which had been evoked so unerringly in Dubliners. There Joyce had described an Ireland filled with echoes and shadows, a place of copied and derived gestures, whose denizens were turned outward to serve a distant source of authority in London. Such a collection of prentice stories would be written in later decades by many another member of an emerging national élite ashamed of his or her colonial setting, and taking bitter consolation in an ability to render all the futility with a wicked precision. Writing it all down may well have been Joyce's personal alternative to acts of political violence, his way of seizing power.
Each of the stories in Dubliners chronicles an abortive attempt at freedom, an attempt which is doomed precisely because it couches itself in the forms and languages of the enemy; and this becomes a prophecy of the failure of a nationalism which would insist on confining its definitions to the categories designed by the colonizer.
Each narrative in Dubliners tells a similar tale, of an impulse arrested or else enacted to a point where it becomes self-negating: in either case, the gesture of revolt is fated always to have the old, familiar tyranny inscribed in it.
The short-story genre promised Joyce an escape, a line of flight from the formal inappropriateness of the novel, which was calibrated to a settled society rather than one still in the settling. But the escape-route which it offered Joyce proved just as illusory, just as self-defeating as that which beckoned and then frustrated his characters. When he had finished the stories, he was rewarded by no sense of difficulties overcome: though they are bound together by themes, symbols, even characters, the collection does not quite become a novel. Each story moves to an epiphanic revelation of an impasse, a paralysis which marks its termination, because if it were to proceed any further it would exfoliate into a much more extensive and unlimited type of narrative: the process which was allowed to happen just once when "Mr. Hunters Day" became Ulysses. Latent in Ulysses was this vast and multi-faceted asse
mblage: as Yeats shrewdly observed, the stories contained the promise of a novelist of a new kind.6 However, their author was at that early stage no more able than his characters to fit that narrative together. All he could work with were shreds and patches, assembled to no clear overall purpose other than the revelation of such fragmentation to its victims. As Deleuze and Guattari were to write in a somewhat similar context of Kafka's stories: "never has so complete an oeuvre been made from movements that are always aborted, yet always in communication with each other".7
The style in which the stories of Dubliners was written was one of famished banality, whereby Joyce found his own appropriate level of linguistic under-development, taking Hiberno-English in its post-famine, post-Gaelic disorder to a degree of "scrupulous meanness".8 Irish was for him no longer a feasible literary medium, but a means whereby his people had managed to reshape English, to a point where their artists could know the exhilaration of feeling estranged from all official languages. Joyce never felt tempted to try to write in Irish, and he affected to scorn its senile folk narratives on which no individual mind had ever been able to draw out a line of personal beauty: but deeper than the disdain went a kind of fear, a sense of shared trauma at the loss, in most parts of Ireland through the nineteenth century, of the native language.
The fate of a sullen peasantry left floundering between two official languages, Irish and English, haunts the diary entries by Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English.9
Joyce there mocks the widespread hopes of a language revival, of opening the lines of communication to a Gaelic past: but it is obvious from A Portrait that neither was he fully happy with the English-speaking Ireland of the present. Though the old peasant might struggle to recall a few phrases of Irish for the Gaelic Leaguer's notebook, the truth (as Joyce saw it) was that English did not provide a comprehensive expressive medium for Irish people either. That is part of the tragicomedy of non-communication pondered by Stephen Daedalus during a conversation with the Englishman who is dean of studies at his university:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.10
The death of language takes many forms besides fatigued cliché, and one of them – in Ireland, at any rate – was the loss of the native tongue.
The moment when Joyce wrote in English, he felt himself performing a humiliating translation of a split linguistic choice. In his writings, he seeks to express that sundering; and, eventually, in Finnegans Wake he would weave the absent texts in the space between standard Irish and standard English. But in the passage just quoted, he posits a harassment of the Irish student's emotional nature by the Englishman's intellectual culture. On such a subject, Joyce was resolutely conservative. He knew that the colonial education system offered Irish children an alien medium through which to view their native realities. To interpret those realities through literary forms which were alien to them would serve only to make the people seem even more unknown and unknowable. Hence Stephen's unrest of spirit.
No matter how brilliant Joyce's use of English, it would always run the risk of being seen as his way of serving his colonial master: English would be the perceptual prison in which he realized his genius, and the greater his achievements, the greater the glory reflected on the master language. In A Portrait, Stephen goes on to complain to a Gaelic Leaguer: "My ancestors threw off their language and took another . . . They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made".11 The hatred in that sentence is not so much for the Irish language as for the fact of its humiliation and repression: but pay the debt Joyce does. Shreds of Irish would turn up repeatedly in Ulysses: and by the time he wrote Finnegans Wake, Joyce had learned to emphasize the ways in which Irish caused its speakers to rework English, so that the book's underlying idiom is his own idiolect of Hiberno-English. But his treatment of the language and its speakers is never confident or final: beneath the pose of disdain lies a real fascination and an even deeper fear.
In the treatment of Mulrennan's peasant in Stephens diary at the close of A Portrait, split-mindedness has grown to near-hysteria:
I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through the night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till . . . Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.
Joyce turned his back on Gaelic Ireland with mixed feelings, and no final certainty that silence, exile and cunning were answers to the challenge posed by the native tradition. And well might he have been afraid:
Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:
– Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.12
This is not just a caustic parody of Synge's peasants, but a terrified recognition that Joyce's liberation from Ireland was more apparent than real: it haunted him forever in the form of his wife. He knew in his heart that the writing of a post-colonial exile is a satanic pact, a guilty compromise, a refusal of a more direct engagement. As he wrote in near-confessional mode much later in Finnegans Wake: "he even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through a hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea".13
Joyce may well have left Ireland because he sensed that it was a country intent on using all the old imperialist mechanisms in the name of a national revival. In Dubliners he offered the people a look at themselves in his nicely-polished looking-glass: but his enraged audiences broke the mirror, only to find their rage fruitless, since they were left with a fragmented mirror and a broken image of themselves. The gesture of revolt merely deepened the crisis of representation. Salman Rushdie has said that the exiled writer is "obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost".14 For Joyce, writing was a measure of his own exile from Ireland, but also of that Ireland from its past, of Hiberno-English from standard languages, and of writing itself as a fall from oral culture – emigration simply emblematized these denials. Yet Joyce struggled hard with censorious printers in order to publish Dubliners in Ireland, because he was convinced that it represented a necessary first step "in the spiritual liberation of my country".15 He was well aware of what happens when a colonial writer loses contact with his native audience and writes only for an international élite: he wanted to mediate between Ireland and the world, but most of all to explain Ireland to itself.
If Dubliners was Joyce's exposé of an Ireland frozen in servitude, A Portrait was his exploration of the revivalist illusion. It offers one of the first major accounts in modern English literature of the emergence of a post-colonial élite. The fat young man in the final chapter who rapidly listed off the results of the examinations for "the home civil" and "the Indian" was for Joyce the living incarnation of those forces which made it imperative for him to emigrate.16 The emerging middle class did not see literature as something which might be made an element of daily vision: for them an education was a means to an administrative post. In this, too, Ireland had much in common with the experience of other emerging nations, where traditional codes often accommodated themselves happily enough to administrative mechanisms. In his 1907 essay tided "Home Rule Comes of Age", Joyce painted a devastating picture of the new comprador middle class, the constitutional nationalists whom he portrayed as working hand-in-glo
ve with the imperial exploiters:
. . . the Irish parliamentary party has gone bankrupt. For twenty-seven years it has talked and agitated. In that time it has collected 35 million francs from its supporters, and the fruit of its agitation is that Irish taxes have gone up 88 million francs and the Irish population has decreased a million. The representatives have improved their own lot, aside from small discomforts like a few months in prison and some lengthy sittings. From the sons of ordinary citizens, peddlers, and lawyers without clients they have become well-paid syndics, directors of factories and commercial houses, newspaper owners, and large landowners. They have given proof of their altruism only in 1891, when they sold their leader, Parnell, to the Pharisaical conscience of the English Dissenters without extracting the thirty pieces of silver.17
Joyce was scathing about the kind of revival which would be possible under such leadership at home: more torpor, more betrayal, more unconfessed self-loathing. He foresaw the plight of an "independent" state under the constraints of neo-colonial economics: "the Irish government about to be born will have to cover a deficit ably created by the British treasury". Nobody should be fooled or persuaded by "the fact that Ireland now wishes to make common cause with British democracy".18
In essay after essay written in the first decade of the century, Joyce asserted his conviction that the Irish were understandably disloyal to the British monarch because they were the victims of misrule. "When a victorious country tyrannizes over another, it cannot logically be considered wrong for that other to rebel",19 he told Triestine readers, adding that nobody could any longer believe in purely Christian motives for such policies. "A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State ..." Joyce astutely predicted that the same divide-and-rule policy which had carved up Africa would lead British conservatives to incite Ulster Unionists to rebel against any settlement with the leadership in Dublin (this was one of the most accurate predictions of partition). Ireland remained poor, he averred, because English laws were designed systematically to ruin the country's industries. The Irish Parliamentary Party might pursue reconciliation with unionists for its own Home Rule purposes, but ordinary Irish men and women could never forget the centuries of broken treaties and industrial sabotage: "can the back of a slave forget the rod?"20 Nor was Joyce at all convinced by the good intentions of enlightened British liberals: in an essay called "Fenianism" in 1907 he brutally declared: "any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet".21
Inventing Ireland Page 41
