That James Joyce had a political life might seem surprising. The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for political independence.
Frank Callanan, a distinguished barrister and historian who died in 2021 leaving this magnificently erudite book unfinished, devotes its many pages to demonstrating that the young Joyce, like his rumbustious father, was a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, and that he clung to this allegiance all his life. An extra-marital affair with Kitty O’Shea forced Parnell to retire as leader of the Irish nationalists in 1890, after which he was hounded by an unholy alliance of clerics and politicians, dying of pneumonia a year later. Joyce was only nine at the time, but Callanan argues persuasively that Parnell’s dramatic fall from grace was the primary scene that hurt him into politics. He wrote a precocious poem on Parnell’s death, which he later claimed had been printed and circulated in Dublin. The reviling of Parnell by the Catholic Church, which feared nationalism as a rival to its own sovereignty over the people, was an important source of his visceral anti-clericalism.
If it’s easy to mistake this haughty young recusant for a critic of nationalism, it’s largely because, with the Parnellites plunged into division and disarray over the fate of their leader, Joyce was now politically homeless. Parnell’s brand of nationalism had been civic rather than ethnic, political rather than cultural, constitutional rather than revolutionary and inclusive rather than sectarian (he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant). Joyce championed all these views, but found none of them adequately represented by the nationalist currents on offer after Parnell’s death. If Joyce’s politics were hard to decipher, it was partly because he concealed his Parnellism behind something of the politician’s reserved and enigmatic demeanour. There’s a touch of Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the youthful Joyce’s imperious, lip-curling, faintly demonic manner.
Though much of the patriotic sentiment of the time was parochial, Irish nationalism had an internationalist dimension. Thomas Davis, leader of the 19th-century Young Ireland movement, wrote against British colonialism in India and Afghanistan, and some later activists campaigned against the Boer War or threw their weight behind the anti-colonial movement in Egypt. Joyce himself was deeply sympathetic to the cause of Greek independence. As Perry Anderson wrote, ‘few rhetorics have been more repetitively general in [the 20th] century than claims for the ethnically particular.’ Nationalism is by definition international: if you are entitled to self-determination as a people, the same must go for everyone else.
Joyce despised the clericalism and chauvinism of some of his fellow nationalists, but that doesn’t mean that he had any love for the British. He grew up steeped in the nationalist culture of his country, during the first rumblings of the only political revolution the British Isles witnessed in the modern era. Ireland was Britain’s oldest colonial possession, as well as the first British colony to achieve (partial) independence in the 20th century. Joyce once wrote that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ suggesting a direct connection between his literary modernism and his anti-colonialist politics. Nobody who grew up in Dorking or Hastings could have written Finnegans Wake, with its insolent disfiguring of the language of the conqueror. It is a minor historical irony that Joyce spent some of his time in exile teaching English for a living.
He was deeply sceptical of cultural nationalism, not least the doughty efforts of the Gaelic League to revive the Irish language, which had been dealt a severe blow by the Great Famine. Most of those who died or were forced to emigrate were the poor, and the poor constituted the majority of Irish speakers. Joyce had an exceptional flair for languages, and may have attended a course in Irish taught by Patrick Pearse, one of the slain heroes of the 1916 insurrection. Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an enlightened, autonomous European nation-state, not as a land of saintly peasants (a few of them colourfully crazed) speaking what might seem gibberish. Ancient Ireland was in his view as dead as ancient Egypt, though he did not undervalue the achievements of its artists. In fact, his interest in ancient myths and legends was typical of both nationalism and modernism, which tend to be archaic and avant-garde at the same time. To imagine a future beyond modernity may mean dipping back into the pre-modern past. Irish nationalism certainly took an interest in the pre-modern: one 18th-century Irish scholar argued that Irish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. Yet nationalism is only about two and a half centuries old, and sees itself for the most part as a modern invention.
In his distaste for cultural nationalism, Joyce was also ferociously dismissive of the Irish Literary Revival. A lower-middle-class Dubliner was unlikely to feel much affinity with upper-class Anglo-Irish Protestants like W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory. Joyce was urban through and through, author of one of the finest anatomies of a city ever written, whereas the revivalists looked to the rural West. Joyce called Yeats ‘a tiresome idiot’ and told him with customary hauteur that he was too old to be of any use to him. He objected to what he saw as the weaponisation of art in the cause of politics, of which the revival could be seen as a high-toned version. He seems to have taken little interest in James Connolly, the most intellectually fascinating of the Easter Rising’s leaders, perhaps because he saw Connolly’s Marxism as promoting a linear conception of history at odds with his own cyclical view. He tried to read Capital, but found its opening sentence absurd and failed to get beyond it. He did, however, put in a good word for the abortive Fenian uprising of 1867. He also felt a degree of sympathy with Sinn Féin, and while living abroad assiduously read its newspaper, the United Irishman, to keep abreast of Irish political affairs. For a while he was in broad agreement with the programme of Sinn Féin’s leader, Arthur Griffith, although he accused the party of ‘educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred, whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly.’ By ‘racial hatred’ he meant a knee-jerk loathing of the British.
That Joyce should mention the proletariat not long after his arrival in Trieste is significant. Far from dimming his political awareness, his flight from Ireland enriched it. He began to call himself a socialist, regularly read the left-wing newspaper Avanti! and wrote to his brother Stanislaus of his ‘detestation of the stupid, dishonest, tyrannical and cowardly burgher class’. The Italian people, he claimed, had some potential for political action, whereas he felt that political progress in Ireland was irreparably stalled. The Irish masses, he thought, colluded in their own oppression. He was quick to dismiss as sentimental drivel attempts to portray them as helpless victims, driven to the pub by the sway of the Sassenach. In Stephen Hero, the protagonist wanders in despair through ‘warrens full of swarming and cringing believers’ and curses ‘the farce of Irish Catholicism’, a disease spread by those ‘black lice’ known as Jesuits. Ireland was a nation ‘in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement’. These are not the words of a dégagé liberal.
That Church and imperium were in cahoots was the source of Joyce’s political fury from start to finish. Yet most of the country freed itself from British rule not long after he gave the place up in frustration. Joyce was a product of European Christendom: if his sensibility was deeply shaped by Dante and Aquinas, it was because he came from Dublin rather than London or New York. He even attended Mass during Easter Week, though for aesthetic rather than religious reasons. He was, he observed, a Scholastic in everything but the premises – no doubt meaning such minor matters as the existence of God. He also remarked that he had a mind like a grocer’s assistant, dealing with commonplace things but in the scrupulously categorising style of the Schoolmen.
For a few years in Trieste, Joyce embraced revolutionary syndicalism and ploughed his way through a range of anarchist philosophers. Anarchism seemed to agree with his strong libertarian streak. He was perhaps less a political radical than a bohemian individualist, resentful of authority and restive with institutional restraints. Autocratic set-ups tend to breed their quota of heretics, men and women who like Joyce are often enough bound fast to what they reject. Stephen Dedalus’s Luciferian motto ‘Non serviam’ is the badge of one frozen in the posture of rebellion, not the harbinger of a new world. All the same, Joyce was moving closer to Sinn Féin during his time in Trieste, seeing in its commercial and economic programme a possible future for the stagnant homeland he called ‘the afterthought of Europe’.
Ireland in the early 20th century was peculiarly hospitable to artistic modernism. It’s been argued that modernism tends to spring up in societies that are still in some ways traditionalist but experiencing the excitements and alienations of modernity for the first time. Another precondition is that revolution is in the air. The Ireland in which Joyce grew up fulfilled all these requirements, as a country still under the thumb of the British, the Church and the landed gentry, but gradually industrialising. A modern-minded middle class with nationalist aspirations was challenging the established order, and Joyce, however reticent and heterodox on the national question, was born out of this conflict. Modernism is also a cosmopolitan affair, as small groups of artists in flight from different nations gather together in some polyglot metropolis to speak the lingua franca of art. Getting out of the place was among Ireland’s most venerable customs, one of the few forms of solidarity between the common people and the intelligentsia.
Modernism is a coterie culture, and the Irish had an elite to hand in the form of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The literary wing of the movement was highly self-conscious about the word, and so was Ireland, a country caught between two forms of speech. Finnegans Wake draws on several languages at once, while J.M. Synge was said to write in English and Irish simultaneously. Flann O’Brien sometimes writes English in a way that sounds like Irish. Anglophone Irish authors were using a language that was only ambiguously their own. The country also had an opulent store of mythology, a fertile breeding ground for modernist art. Besides, the transition from realism to modernism was easier to make in a place that didn’t have a robust tradition of literary realism in the first place. By and large, classical realism is the product of an enlightened, self-confident middle class comfortably at home in the world it has fashioned; such classes are unlikely to prosper in colonial conditions. In Ireland, however, this deficit could be made to yield a profit, as fantasy, fable, satire, myth and Gothic flourished in place of realism, from Gulliver’s Travels to Dracula. Released from the constraints of realism, writers like Joyce were free to be as outlandish and exotic as they wished. If they didn’t have a very usable past, they were at least uncurbed by an authoritative Tradition of the kind T.S. Eliot was advocating in England around the time Ulysses was published.
The politics of modernism are ambiguous. One aspect is elitist, racist, archaic, violent and hierarchical, while a more minor tributary is progressive, democratic and egalitarian. In Irish terms, this contrast is represented by Yeats and Joyce. The former is archaic, while the latter is avant-garde. Joyce celebrates the commonplace life of modernity, whereas Yeats is keenest on the commonplace when it takes the form of a crackbrained peasant. It’s doubtful that he knew anything of film, whereas Joyce established the first cinema in Ireland (in Dublin in 1909). The two writers are linked by their use of mythology; but whereas myth for Yeats is a source of primordial wisdom, Joyce uses it chiefly as a principle of artistic organisation. The modern and the ancient fuse in the structure of Ulysses, as the Homeric myth secretly shapes the account of modern Dublin; but the fusion is something of a joke, and another myth might have served his purpose just as well.
Joyce stands out among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the preciousness of the everyday. If he is outrageously experimental, he is also in thrall to the mundane and disregarded. He is indebted to the wit and iconoclasm of daily life in Dublin for his humour, a quality not prominent in the work of Rilke or Pound. As for tolerance, a number of eminent modernists were antisemites, whereas one of the heroes of Ulysses is a Jew. In a memorable confrontation in the novel, Bloom speaks up for love against the repulsive racism of the Irish Citizen. It’s a scene especially dear to liberal humanist critics, who contrast Bloom’s dignified demeanour with the Citizen’s xenophobic ranting. Yet as Emer Nolan points out in James Joyce and Nationalism (1995), what the Citizen says of British malpractice in Ireland is largely true, however lurid and uncouth his denunciations; and while he and his nationalist pals are opposed to capital punishment, not least because of its use by the British state against Irish rebels, Bloom is conspicuously less committed on the question. He may be an example of universal humanity, but he’s also a spineless liberal. It’s true that he speaks up for love against bigotry, but he describes it as the opposite of hate – a view which has only one defect, namely that it isn’t true.
Having made their strike for power, with all the drama that such insurrections involve, middle classes usually settle down to the unglamorous business of accumulating capital. But to do this requires order and stability, which means those insurrections must be thrust into the social unconscious. At the source of a country’s history lies a primordial trespass or violation that can’t be examined too closely without risk of trauma. Edmund Burke, the greatest Irish political thinker, held this view, and so did David Hume, who writes in A Treatise of Human Nature that in the origins of every nation we find rebellion and usurpation, which the passage of time will make appear just and reasonable. This means among other things that such a revolution, duly repressed, is less likely to provide inspiration to one’s disgruntled inferiors, who might entertain similar mutinous thoughts.
It was hard for the Irish to banish their own revolutionary past when the Troubles broke out just as the Irish Republic was becoming a paid-up member of the European capitalist club and about to surge ahead economically. This return of the repressed meant that revolutionary nationalism became a particular bugbear of Irish intellectuals. Historical revisionism valuably demolished a number of nationalist myths, while bleaching much of the pain out of Irish history. In the literary field, some of the most acclaimed Irish writers continue to cling to facile stereotypes of nationalism as invariably essentialist and ethnocentric, reducing the single most transformative political force in recent history to a question of chauvinism. Literary criticism becomes politics by other means, and some supposedly disinterested Irish liberals turn out to be sectarians in sheep’s clothing. Even the Famine, the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe and an embarrassing subject for the British, had to be discussed with some discretion during the Troubles in case it gave comfort to the IRA.
For nationalism to claim for itself the greatest of Irish anglophone writers won’t be palatable to some of its adversaries. What Callanan’s book shows, simply enough, is that one can hold that nations should be free to determine their own destiny without being either insular or supremacist, and that Joyce’s career is a case in point. In this respect, the book not only does invaluable service to Joyce studies, but constitutes required reading for those who insist that nationalism is nothing more than an ugly outbreak of tribalism.