v. Ideas in General Circulation in Popular Irish Culture at the Turn of the Century

Beyond acting as indicators of Joyce's familiarity with Irish literature and history, the periodicals are also useful in illuminating Joyce's literary program in Ulysses . Even from a small sampling, what quickly emerges is that much of what is taken as original to Joyce's views and a Joycean aesthetic was widely discussed in the popular press in Ireland before Joyce's departure in 1904. The following discussion, which could be broadened considerably, is restricted to the way popular culture influenced Joyce's treatment of Irish mythos and literary tradition in Ulysses . More general values and positions affecting Joyce's role as an artist are deferred to another occasion, but the following sampling should indicate how promising an area of research this is for Joyce scholars.

[32] The widespread knowledge of many stories is indicated in articles in the United Irishman , for example. On 3 March 1900, in a review of the Irish Literary Theatre, Frank Fay writes, "Maeve which would probably succeed in mystifying an English audience was listened to with rapt attention and with an instinctive understanding of its symbolism"; cf. Gregory, Our Irish Theatre 28–29. Again on 26 October 1901, in writing about Diarmuid and Grania , Fay indicates that the story was familiar to the audience and the public at large; Holloway (16–17) indicates that the symbolism of Cathleen ni Houlihan was likewise familiar to its initial audiences. Such examples of the observed familiarity of Irish audiences and the Irish readership with a "canon" of Irish stories and a repertory of Irish symbols is thus well documented.

The method here is to contextualize features of the contents and poetics of Ulysses by juxtaposing materials from contemporary sources with Joyce's views and his manipulation of Irish literature. Examination of related materials from the popular press makes it easier to apprehend the ways in which Joyce continued to be influenced by popular Irish culture, even after he had left Ireland. Working on the Continent, he nonetheless took partisan stands in the nationalist debates of Ireland; as Manganiello has put it, "Exile did not mean escape but a widening of political consciousness; it did not mean indifference but preserving his intimacy with his country by intensifying his quarrel with her. . . . In whatever part of Europe he resided, Joyce, like Dante, carried with him a consciousness of the political situation of his city and of his country" (41–43). An examination of the periodical literature that Joyce read in his formative years enables us to position his poetics in the spectrum of the discourse of Irish cultural nationalism and to understand his writings, particularly Ulysses , as a partial response to the issues raised in contemporary Ireland.

Discussions of Racial Identity: The Everyday Celt

Joyce's interest in racial identity, discussed in chapter 2, is in part an outgrowth of a discourse about race and nationality that had been a leitmotif of Western thought for more than a century and that is in turn reflected in Irish journals at the turn of the century.^[33] The connection between political autonomy and racial or cultural distinctiveness was an issue of paramount interest, and it partly underlies the emergence of the movement toward cultural autonomy in Sinn Féin. For example, in the Illustrated Irish Weekly Independent and Nation of 29 March 1902 an article entitled "Language and Nationality" argues against the thesis that Ireland has forfeited her right to autonomy because (unlike Hungary, Bohemia, Finland, and Norway) she has put aside her native language and adopted the dress, customs, speech, and literature of her conquerors. The writers of the Anglo-Irish literary revival all carry on a dialogue about Irish racial and cultural identity: such figures as A. E. and Yeats stress the mysticism of the Irish, thus following in Matthew Arnold's wake, while others such as Gregory focus more on the simplicity and integrity of the

[33] See the discussion of these issues in Martin Bernal, Black Athena .

Irish countrypeople, and still others such as Synge subvert the views of fellow writers by writing of the earthy, sensual aspects of country life.

Joyce's concern about race must be understood in the context of this dialogue; he is interested in retaining English as a language in Ireland, and he is content with international urban dress, customs, and mores, but his search for an Irish identity, even as he rejects the notion of Irish racial purity, suggests the force of this dilemma for him. Although the surface of Joyce's narrative appears to be less involved in this question than are the overt treatments of it by his contemporaries, the racial parameter of the architectonics from The Book of Invasions in Ulysses also shows that these issues were important to Joyce. Joyce's architectonic structure permitted him to engage in a dialectic about Irishness and the characteristics of "the Irish race" in Ulysses while submerging the topic in the mythic structuring, thus giving him scope to comment on a central issue of his culture without being polemical or didactic. Such mythic discourse, whether implicit or sublimated, provided Joyce an opportunity to speak to the ideological concerns of his time while remaining within the bounds of art as he viewed it.

In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce has characters who are worlds apart from the mystical nature of many of Yeats's mythic Irish figures. This is one of the many polarities in the treatment of Ireland-as-literary-world by Yeats and Joyce; still another is the dichotomy of city and country. Joyce's stand on how to represent Ireland is related to views debated in the popular press. The United Irishman , for example, observes as early as 6 May 1899 that "there are other things in Ireland beside the rowancrested rath, the dew upon the grass, or the reeds above the rivers." The debate can best be illustrated by an article in the Leader on 7 May 1904 entitled "The Different Kinds of Celt":

The new Celt is the Yeats type, to say which should be almost enough. The new Celt is a mixture of moonshine, and mist, and dreams; he wanders (both corporeally and mentally) in waste places, such as bogs, moors, mountain sides, woods, and so forth. He is haunted by the lapping of lakes . . . by the murmur of druid forests. . . .

A striking peculiarity of the new Celt is that he does not eat or drink. How does he live, then? On dreams, thou fool, on dreams!—plus "visions," occasionally. He does not sully the soulfulness of his nature with sordid mundaneity; he lives as a spirit, and is consequently a cut or two above bread or bacon.

Now this sort of Celt, the "literary" Celt let us call him, had begun to gain a certain amount of acceptance in London—that is, in literary London. . . . However, a revulsion of feeling seems to have set in, and it appears to be dawning even on literary London that the new Celt does not quite square with facts. A writer in the Spectator . . . . had been reading Dr. Joyce's Social History of Ancient Ireland , and it began to strike him that the Celt of mere history was not quite like the Celt of Mr. Yeats. . . . We are all with the writer when, after some bantering remarks he adds: "But seriously, it is time to turn from the mystic to the more human sides of the Gael: the men of the ancient epics could dream, but they could love and fight on occasion, and could look on Nature without an ever-boding sense of the presence of unseen powers."

Quite so. Now there is another, and altogether un-Yeats-like Celt—the Celt I want to see. I mean the everyday Celt. The Celt who doesn't live on visions or mists, but who eats rashers and eggs; who smokes a pipe and drinks a pint; who may be met with in the streets, on the country roads, in third-class carriages, and on the tops of trams; who reads the ha'penny evening papers, goes to "the bob place" in the theatre or music-hall now and then, and to a football match whenever he can; I want to see that Celt.

The article proceeds to call for the representation of the everyday Celt in the contemporary novel:

Do you know what Ireland badly wants? She wants a great novelist. Not simply a very high-class second-rank one, but a great one, and no mistake about his—or her—greatness. We want a novelist with as good a head, as much solid culture, as much genuine knowledge of the people as George Eliot possessed. . . . We want to have Irish life thrown into the alembic of genius and drawn off as literature; given back again to us in a sort of sublimated realism, delightful, yet recognisably true, and free from all the mud and vitriol of politics and polemics. We want to get rid of that tenuous exiguity, the "literary" Celt, no less than of that over-whiskified person, the Celt of the "rollicking" school of writers. We want the Irishman that we know; a man that we can mix with, and not feel revolted at; that we can laugh with rather oftener than at ; a man that we are not ashamed of, because we see that he is not only quite human, but has no mean sordid faults, and no inherent coarseness of soul. In a word, we want justice done to the Irish character through the medium of prose literature—of the novel.

Leopold Bloom is cousin to this everyday Celt, and it is perhaps no accident that Joyce shows him eating and drinking repeatedly, leaving none of these repasts to the gaps between episodes. The note of "the everyday Celt" is sounded at the first appearance of Bloom: though Bloom rejects

eggs because of the drouth and prefers animal organs to rashers, and though his trip to the jakes would no doubt have offended the sensibilities of the writer of this Leader article, Joyce makes clear from the outset that Bloom lives on more than dreams and visions. Bloom is met in the streets, in carriages, on trams; he reads ordinary papers and goes to common amusements. He loves and occasionally fights like the men of the ancient epics. It is only gradually in the course of Ulysses that the reader realizes that Bloom also has the decency and refinement of soul that the article calls for. As this article indicates, criticism of Yeats's mystic Celt was common in contemporary Irish culture; thus, Joyce's revisionism is inscribed in a wider cultural context.

Bloom and the characters of Ulysses are in part representative of the Irish in virtue of the subtext from The Book of Invasions, but in their realistic or everyday guise they are also continuous with the types to be found in Dublin. Ulysses fits the criterion set forth in the Leader article of having Irish life thrown into the alembic of genius and drawn off as literature—given back in realism sublimated by form, a form delightful, playful, yet recognizably true. For all the objectionable matter in the book,^[34] in its own way Ulysses is free from "the mud and vitriol of politics and polemics," and it is written by an author with "solid culture" and "a genuine knowledge of the people."

Irish Meet Greeks Meet Jews Meet Spaniards Meet Norse

In the popular press the Irish character is often defined through comparison and contrast with a wide variety of other "races" being used as a standard. The English naturally come in for a variety of invidious comments, but other groups are also discussed. There are, for example, discussions of the "racial" characteristics of the Jews; in the Leader of 4 June 1904, an article entitled "The Jew Question in Ireland" characterizes the Jews as possessing the virtues of sobriety, thrift, and providence. The Norse (e.g., All Ireland Review 12 May 1900) and the Spanish (discussed, for example, at length in the All Ireland Review, which carried a series in the spring of 1901 entitled "The Spaniards in Ireland") also come in

[34] See, for example, Bernard Shaw's comments quoted in JJ 2 506–7, 576–77.

for examination. These issues pervade Ulysses as, for example, in the leitmotif of discussions about the characteristics of the English (e.g. 2.243–54, 7.483–501). The question of Jews in Ireland was particularly topical before Bloomsday because of an episode of persecution of Jews in Limerick in spring 1904 (cf. Leader 7 May 1904);^[35] the historical context may explain much of the sensitivity to the question of Bloom's "racial" background among the characters of Ulysses on Bloomsday. Joyce's interest in these questions is also pursued in Ulysses through the substructure from The Book of Invasions, by means of which Joyce represents the relations of the Irish to the Jews and the Spanish, just as in Finnegans Wake the affinities and contrasts between Gael and Gall, Irish and Norse, are embodied in HCE's mixed ancestry.

A frequent topic in the popular press is a comparison of Irish and Greek character and culture. O'Grady in the All Ireland Review compares the unity of thought and feeling in Ireland to that of Greece in the issue of 2 March 1901; two weeks later he compares Irish and Greek myth; and on 4 May of the same year he compares the interlacing of history and myth in both cultures. In a similar vein the Illustrated Irish Weekly Independent and Nation of 29 March 1902 carries a report about a lecture to the Irish Literary Society in which the speaker stresses that the Irish nation dates back to the time of Greece and Rome. At times the comparison could turn to the advantage of the Irish: thus, in an article entitled "Gael and Greek" of 10 May 1902, the Leader criticizes a lecture delivered by Dr. Barry to the National Literary Society and maintains that Greek ideals are not worthy of imitation.

Because of the prestige and status associated with Greek culture, either to equate or to prefer early Irish culture to Greek culture was a means of validating Irish literature and society. Such comparisons became topoi of Irish nationalism, and they were found in monographs as well as in the popular press. Obviously this discourse conditions Ulysses with its melding of Greek and Irish character, myth, and literature; rather than comment on or argue for the parity of Greek and Irish culture, however, Joyce presupposes this nationalist position in the conflation of the mythic systems, a mythic method that makes Bloom simultaneously a Greek hero and Irish Milesian. The mythic structuring presents the two traditions as

[35] Manganiello (52) discusses this episode in relation to Joyce's views about anti-Semitism.

equivalent, thus asserting Joyce's estimation of the ranking of Irish culture while permitting him a certain ironic disengagement from both.

Localism

Joyce's detestation of "nationalisms" is well known,^[36] and in a letter of 25 September 1906 to his brother Stanislaus he criticizes Arthur Griffith and the United Irishman in these terms: "What I object to most of all in his paper is that it is 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" (Letters 2: 167). Joyce's desire to be European and universal is generally stressed in critical works on his texts. Though Joyce objected to nationalism, at the same time he believed that artists had to be national. Let us return to the encounter between Joyce and Arthur Power in 1921. When Power objected that he was tired of nationality and wanted to be international like all the great writers, Joyce responded:

But they were national first . . . and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international in the end, as in the case of Turgenieff. You remember his "Tales of the Sportsman," how local they were—and yet out of that germ he became a great international writer. For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal. (Quoted in Power, From the Old Waterford House 64–65)

The same quality that he praises here in Turgenev he found in Ibsen; in his January 1900 lecture entitled "Drama and Life" he contends, "Ghosts, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import" (CW 45). For Joyce the universal in literature is manifest in the local, and it is interesting to find that the views he expressed to Power were anticipated twenty years earlier by articles in the popular Irish press.

The polarities of localism and universality were debated in the pages of the United Irishman. A particularly telling article, "Localism in Poetry," appeared on 18 August 1900, signed "Hy Faely":

Now, no man ever was, or in this life, ever can be universal in the sense of knowing all things. But he who has studied his fellows around him, and

[36] See, for example, MBK 174 and JJ 2 66.

he who has studied himself, if he have the power of wielding a pen, can give you such a representation of the whole working of humanity from his knowledge of a few, that would almost make us think his mind was all-seeing and his knowledge unlimited. Nowhere, have we found more real philosophy compressed into a few words than in this line from an Irish poet "I sing of what I know." He sang of the lives and pleasures of those he knew, "of the hills and the streams and glens that he knew and loved," and, unconsciously, perhaps, he was singing the great paean of humanity. The greatest minds that have ever illumined the world have gone no further than this. Take up the works of any great writer you will who has made a romance and a story of our follies and our passions and you will find him, while universal, yet local. . . .

. . . Localism in literature is a distinctive mark of genius! But I wish to be understood. When I say localism I mean the localism that will suggest to any man home-thoughts and feelings. William Allingham sang of the "Winding Banks of Erne," of the town of Ballyshannon, of the townspeople and the boatmen, of all he knew there. His poems must touch everyone, not because he writes of Ballyshannon, but because he sang a universal song, the love of home; but that it should touch the hearts of others the song required to come from his own heart. To me his poem brings up in visionary light another town upon the coast, another stream, another harbour, other ruins than those of Assaroe, and other people. Because he sang our song, because he felt our feelings, because he pictured what we all would picture, he is universal. Thus is localism universal.

But to be a distinctive mark of genius, this localism must represent universality. To make this localism universally felt the poet must possess genius. Without the localism the genius is wasted. No man can sing of what he knows not; both powers must go hand in hand. A poet may sing of nothing but home scenes, and yet because he lacks the power to make his picture representative he will fail to reach us; he may have genius, and yet, wanting the power of localising, he is lost. . . .

To our poets, I would say: speak from the heart; doing so you must speak of what you love; love will lend you power; and singing, as Allingham did, of what you know, if you are poets possessing the Promethean fire, you will sing the while the mighty song of humanity all the world over.

In a sense this view of localism informs the work of the entire Irish literary revival. It is the striving to write "what they knew"—what they knew that English writers did not—that forms the theoretical ground of the Irish literary movement. In the case of the principal writers localism takes a variety of forms. Thus, Augusta Gregory attempts to represent

peasant life and peasant speech, particularly the Anglo-Irish dialect of Kiltartan. J. M. Synge turns his hand principally to life in the Gaeltacht and to the transposition of the Irish language into English. Yeats shows his localism chiefly in his use of Irish myth, hero tale, and legend—localism of the imagination rather than localism of geography or dialect. Localism of various sorts is the driving force behind the minor figures of the revival as well, and it has continued to dominate Irish literature throughout the twentieth century, from O'Casey and Austin Clarke to Kavanagh, Kinsella, and Heaney.

In the United Irishman time and again we also find the view that preservation of the knowledge of Irish geography, topography, local legend, and local history are of particular importance. These concerns are stressed in an article entitled "Irish Topography" by William Rooney on 24 November 1900:^[37]

It does not need the present writer to point out how inseparably intertwined with each other are geography and topography. Both are fascinating studies, but the latter is possibly the more fascinating, because it is the local and the homely, it tells us of things about us, it brings us from the generalities of geography to the particularities of the places we have grown up in. It is the blending of tradition, history, and locality that makes the past live and keeps the memory of great things and abiding influence to inspire the present.

Rooney himself is particularly interested in preserving the Irish nomenclature, concerns echoed recently in Brian Friel's Translations. He continues:

We, by turning our backs on our language, have lost the power that these memories would give us. . . . We feel not the sympathy [in places]. . . . which the knowledge of the story of their names would give us . . . These old names carry us back even beyond historic days, recall names and deeds that loom on the border line of history, in those dim days where the mists of tradition bide and all the figures have a mighty majesty. They tell us of the origin of loughs and rivers, why this hollow is so called, and where is the cairn that has lived down time upon yon mountain top. They teach us of the work of the centuries, hold within them the secrets of the far off years. . . . The value

[37] This article is signed "Shel Martin," one of Rooney's pseudonyms; for a list of the pseudonyms, see the obituary on Rooney in the United Irishman, 11 May 1901.

of such knowledge cannot be overestimated. It is a priceless heirloom, for the loss of which no amount of commercial success can compensate.

In the article Rooney recommends P. W. Joyce's Irish Names of Places; despite its defects he finds it "the only volume on the subject yet obtainable . . .an excellent book."

Knowledge of local sites and topography at the turn of the century was accordingly considered an index of nationalism in some quarters. On 18 February 1905 the United Irishman ran an article entitled "The Study of Local History," from which the following excerpts are taken:

The attitude of immovable apathy and unconcern towards all things Irish which characterises so many of those whom, by courtesy, we call Irishmen, is nowhere more evident than in their ignorance of Local History, and of the traditions (veracious or legendary), of the fine old ruins that in bewildering profusion dot every parish of our country . . .

There are, for instance, Dubliners who would distinguish themselves in a discussion on the Legends of the Rhine, but are unaware of the existence of Kilgobbin Castle. . . .

One reason why the study of local history would not be without profit to us is that it could hardly fail to develop a feeling of national self-respect, a virtue with which it will not be contended that we are unduly gifted at present. . . .

. . . The writer who is sufficiently energetic to apply himself to such necessary and patriotic work will earn the gratitude, not only of his thoughtful contemporaries, but of generations of Irishmen yet unborn.

Though there is much in these articles that Joyce would have found objectionable, it is clear that the role of topography in Joyce's works is related to ideas concerning localism in literature and the importance of Irish topography that were widespread in Ireland at the turn of the century. Joyce begins with the impulse toward localism that is characteristic of the Irish literary revival as a whole; as Joyce himself noted to Arthur Power, his localism is seen in the fact that all his works are written about Ireland and about Dublin in particular. Like O'Casey, Joyce's localism is expressed in terms of Irish urban life rather than country life, but the scrupulous attention to the topography and traditions of Dublin found in Joyce's writings fit squarely in Rooney's program, even though Joyce rarely has Irish nomenclature to preserve in virtue of his geographical

purview. While Joyce preserves many of the features of the generic and literary tradition of the medieval dindsenchas^[*] in his attention to geography and topography in Ulysses, thus acting as senchaid for his age, he is at the same time responsive to the calls of the nationalists for localism in literature.

The Relationship of History and Literature

In the article of 24 November 1900 quoted above, Rooney distinguishes between geography and topography, noting the importance of local history to the latter. The interest in the role of history in literature is a topic found elsewhere in the popular press. O'Grady's All Ireland Review has some of the most illuminating material related to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on this subject, for in a series of articles in 1901 O'Grady stresses the interrelation of history and myth. On 9 February 1901, in an article that was part of a series entitled "Pre-Historic Ireland," O'Grady makes a telling argument that one must understand myth in order to comprehend the history and character of a people:

An escape from the actual is supplied to some more favoured or more gifted nations in the possession of a great mythical age lying behind their progress through time, imparting to their lives its own greatness and glory, inspiring life and hope and a buoyancy which laughs at obstacles and will not recognise defeat. . . .

To the Greek bards who shaped the mythology of Hellas we must remotely attribute all the enormous influence which Greece has exercised on the world. But for them the Greece that we know would not have been; without them the Iliad and Odyssey would never have arisen, nor the Athenian drama, nor Greek art, nor architecture. All of these, as we find them, are concerned with the gods and heroes who were the creation of pre-historic bards. . . .

As compared with the history of Greece, that of our own land is, of course, a small thing, its real greatness lying in the promise of the future, not in the actualities of the past; of which future that far off mythic age is a prophecy. But no more than Grecian is Irish History comprehensible without a knowledge of those Gods, giants, and heroes, with whose crowded cycles prehistoric pages are filled.

O'Grady's position is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's view that Joyce's mythic method gives structure and stature to modern life, and it is interesting that O'Grady sees the Irish mythic age as prophetic of the future, a view

that is compatible with Joyce's use of material from The Book of Invasions on the eve of Irish statehood.

On 2 March 1901, in a later article in the same series, O'Grady goes on to discuss the merger of history and literature, views that are obviously related to Joyce's historical impetus in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as well as his mythic structuring of the two works:

I think Ireland alone among the nations of the world exhibits as to its history, the same progress from the mythological and heroic to the mundane, not even excepting that of Greece, which comes next. In the history of Greece, there occurs between the two regions an era of mere barren names which indicate that here is debateable and uncertain land. On one side is the purple light of imagination, amid which loom and glitter the heroes and the gods—a land illuminated by the mind of Hesiod and Homer and the great tragedians; on the other the clear dry light of history prevails. We see clearly that one is history and the other fiction. But in the progress of the Irish national record the purple light is never absent. The weird, the supernatural, the heroic, surround characters as certain as Brian Borom—events as trustworthy as the Norman Invasion. The bards never relinquished their right to view their history with the eyes of poets, to convert their kings into heroes and adorn battles and events with hues drawn from mythology.

O'Grady could here be describing the merger of the supernatural and the heroic with the mundane and the everyday that so characterizes Joyce's major works; and insofar as Joyce was conscious of writing in a tradition, he may have viewed himself as appropriating the prerogatives of the Irish poets that O'Grady describes. It is interesting that in a letter to the editor printed in the 16 March 1901 issue of the All Ireland Review, an unnamed correspondent writes: "I am very glad to see that notwithstanding many intimations which would discourage a less resolute man you are going to deal with the mythology no less than the written and actual history of our race. History itself is daily and hourly approaching the inevitable period when it too will be mythical." Such a Joycean statement from an anonymous correspondent suggests that widespread cultural sentiments underlie Joyce's integration of fiction, history, and mythology.

Clearly the blending of myth and history that O'Grady delineates is related to the strand of pseudohistory in Irish literature and also to the historicization of mythic figures. O'Grady's most apt statement about this quality of Irish literature is found in his essay "Introduction of the Bardic History of Ireland":

There is not perhaps in existence a product of the human mind so extraordinary as the Irish annals. From a time dating for more than three thousand years before the birth of Christ, the stream of Hibernian history flows down uninterrupted, copious and abounding, between accurately defined banks. . . . As the centuries wend their way, king succeeds king with a regularity most gratifying, and fights no battle, marries no wife, begets not children, does no doughty deed of which a contemporaneous note was not taken, and which has not been incorporated in the annals of his country. To think that this mighty fabric of recorded events, so stupendous in its dimensions, so clean and accurate in its details, so symmetrical and elegant, should be after all a mirage and delusion. . . .

Doubtless the legendary blends at some point with the historic narrative. The cloud and mist somewhere condense into the clear stream of indubitable fact. But how to discern under the rich and teeming mythus [sic ] of the bards, the course of that slender and doubtful rivulet. . . . In this minute, circumstantial, and most imposing body of history, where the certain legend exhibits the form of plain and probable narrative, and the certain fact displays itself with a mythical flourish, how there to fix upon any one point and say here is the first truth. It is a task perilous and perplexing. (23–24)

The blending of history and myth, as well as the creation of a pseudo-history in Ulysses, recapitulates the narrative mode of early Irish literature and also fits in the context of the discourse of Joyce's contemporaries about the relations of history, literature, and myth.

The Role of Humor in an Irish Literature

In the popular Irish press of Joyce's youth, the question of humor is sensitive: because of the stigmatization associated with the Stage Irishman,^[38] there is widespread sensitivity in the periodicals about laughter at the expense of Irish subjects or subject matter, as well as frequent denunciations of portrayals of the Stage Irishman. This stereotyping of the Irish had contributed to the political and cultural oppression of the nation; thus, for the Republican movement and the movement of cultural nationalism the entire question of humor was a prickly issue. In some periodicals, notably the United Irishman, a counterreaction set in, and the overwhelming burden

[38] See Duggan, particularly 279–96; Hunt 3–5; Waters, esp. 1–57; Cave; and Kiberd, "Fall of the Stage Irishman."

of the editorial policy was to demonstrate that the Irish were serious, heroic, and noble (e.g., United Irishman 4 Mar. 1899, 11 Mar. 1899, 18 Mar. 1899, 12 Apr. 1902; Sinn Féin 19 Jan. 1907, 4 May 1907). Such a viewpoint was in part fueled by Matthew Arnold's delineation of "Celtic melancholy" as an important "racial" trait.

At the same time other views were more receptive to humor. We have seen above that in 1904 the Leader called for a portrait of the Celt as a man "that we can laugh with rather oftener than at ."In an earlier article of 1 March 1902 entitled "The Comic Irishman," after deploring the image of the Irishman as fool and menial both at home and abroad, O'Grady's periodical continues:

The revolution in Irish thought caused by the Irish Revival has given the Irish mind an earnest and dignified tone, and has given the country a basis for the growth of a healthy and intellectual school of humour.

There is, perhaps, nothing that this country needs more than the free play of real humour. The "humour" that we have been accustomed to, labelled "Irish humour," was lacking in thought, the basis of all true humour.

Joyce's interest in humor thus has a broader cultural context. In his desire to revive Elizabethan gaiety (JJ 2 150), in his own estimation of the importance of the humor of Ulysses, Joyce participated in a dialectic of Irish nationalism that was debated hotly in the press at the turn of the century. Joyce's choice of a nativist epic style that mixes the heroic and the humorous is thus a formal correlate to a position in an ideological debate that preoccupied Irish cultural nationalists year after year.

The Question of a National Literature

The main agenda of the Irish literary revival was the development of a national literature, but that said, there was a good deal less unanimity about what a national literature would consist of. The May 1904 issue of Dana summarizes some of the problems:

Of the various forms which patriotic ambition takes in the minds of Irishmen at the present time, perhaps the most generally favoured and the least impracticable, is a zeal for the promotion of a national literature. . . .

Since the days of the worthy Thomas Davis, who made a great, a noble, and an epoch-making effort to turn the national spirit in the direction of literature, Irish literary enterprise has concerned itself mainly with the aim of

securing the nationality of Irish literature by the choice of Irish subjects, the revival of the Irish language, and so forth.

The essay continues that the movement has failed to secure "the elemental freedom of the human mind which is really the essential of all independent and therefore national literature"; this freedom has "hardly made its appearance in the Irish literary movement" because of a fashion of promoting an artificial and sentimental unity of Irish life by ignoring matters on which the Irish have held diverse opinions. The result, the article maintains, is a hollowness of Irish literature. The Leader (5 July 1902) had earlier criticized the Irish literary revival for, among other things, Augusta Gregory's sentimentalized view of CuChulainn and her use of a "half-way house English" reminiscent of the "broken English" of "Irish slavery" in Cuchulain of Muirthemne; Yeats is taken to task for his view that the volume was "the best book that has ever come out of Ireland." Such particular criticisms of individual figures are widespread.

In the 7 June 1902 issue of the Leader, Peter O'Leary had taken another tack, criticizing the use of English literary forms in an Irish literature. In "Irish Poetical Composition" he writes,

If you are a real poet, an Irish poet, born into the Irish language, there is one thing which you certainly will never do. You will never write in the shape of the English rhyming couplet, nor in the shape of English blank verse, nor in fact in any of the shapes in which English poetry is composed and written. . . .

. . .The very thing which the builders of an Irish literature have got to do at the very start is to put the English models completely out of sight. They must build their Irish literature as if there was no English literature in existence.

O'Leary here is primarily addressing the importation of English poetics into literature into Irish, but the points relate to the development of an Irish literature in English as well. For an advocate, like Joyce, of the use of English to create an Irish literature, the question of an Irish poetics would be raised by arguments such as those of O'Leary. I have taken the position that Joyce did in fact reject English models, building an innovative poetic in English that is based in part on Irish genres and literary conventions; the kinds of arguments regarding Irish poetics and an Irish literature found in the nationalist press at the turn of the century

indicate that Joyce built his literary program as a concomitant of a nationalist position.

Summary

These are but a few issues discussed in the popular press that can be related to Joyce's poetics in his major writings. A great deal remains to be done in contextualizing Joyce's thought in terms of Irish discourse. In his treatment of history and myth, his use of Irish content and symbols, his realistic decor of time and place, and his manipulation of humor and heroism, Joyce shows himself to be working out in a literary forum some of the ideological questions that were at the heart of the nationalist debate in the three decades prior to the appearance of Ulysses.