vi. Conversation and Oral Transfer of Information about Early Irish Literature

In all his narratives Joyce portrays the importance of conversation in Dublin, but he does so particularly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, illustrating how information and attitudes were circulated among the intellectuals of Ireland and among the ordinary people as well. Material about Ireland's history, literature, and language became current in this manner; and in Ulysses Joyce gives a specific example of this sort of transfer when Haines explains to Mulligan the early Irish idea of the otherworld (10.1076–84). The book is full of other conversations and anecdotes about historical figures and patriotic history, indicating that such exchange was a commonplace; Bloom's stories about Parnell shared with Stephen stand as a convenient example (16.1480ff.). The conversation in "Cyclops" gives an idea of how allusions to Irish tales infiltrated Irish nationalist conversation at the period; a youth like Joyce growing up in the culture at the time either would have had to learn the repertory of materials upon which such conversation was based or would have remained a kind of cultural illiterate, something certainly alien to Joyce's nature. Finally, the library episode in Ulysses illustrates that the sorts of predispositions toward Irish tradition represented in the popular press were also discussed widely.

Joyce was particularly apt to have been influenced by the oral transfer

of material about Irish tradition, and the importance of oral culture, storytelling, and oral lore is signaled by the voice of the father as the primal memory of the boy-to-be-artist in A Portrait of the Artist. Joyce had a prodigious memory; even material to which he was exposed briefly in a conversational exchange could remain with him in a vivid manner. John Kelleher notes that in 1906 Joyce complained that Dublin was already growing hazy in his memory, and observes: "I doubt it ever really grew hazy. I doubt that his memory, particular and capacious as a bard's, ever relinquished anything once learned from books, from observation, or from his father whose knowledge of Dublin was as intimate and curious as his own" ("Irish History" 431). Joyce's ability to remember material presented to him orally stood him well during the years when he was virtually blind and could not read; we are indebted for much of his later work to his ability to compose without pencil and paper and to absorb material spoken to him. Thus, oral sources for Joyce's knowledge of Irish tradition cannot be ignored; at the same time, in the absence of a recorder, conversation is ephemeral by its very nature. Though Joyce at times acts as his own recorder and though we have accounts by others of conversations with Joyce, most of these transactions necessarily left no traces, and reconstruction of this level of Joyce's source material is inevitably conjectural.

The possibilities, moreover, are broad. In Joyce's childhood there were family members and friends, notably his father, who told him stories and instructed him in what it was to be Irish; but there were also schoolmasters and neighbors and priests speaking from the pulpit. In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen remembers being taken by his father to the ceremony in 1898 at which the cornerstone of a monument to Wolfe Tone was set by Maud Gonne and Yeats, among others; the speeches at this sort of public political event would also have been occasions on which the patriotic history of Ireland would have been transmitted orally to Joyce (PA 184; cf. MacBride 280–86). Later in his life, at University College, Joyce engaged in extensive conversational exchanges with his school friends, many of whom, like George Clancy, were involved in the activities sponsored by the cultural nationalists, supported the Gaelic League, attended cultural events and classes of various types, and adopted the "party line" as required (JJ 2 61ff.). And there was also Joyce's ubiquitous brother Stanislaus, himself devoted to conversation and argument and active in the same cultural milieu.

Joyce's teachers at University College must also be accounted as po-

tential oral sources. Though a complete inventory of the faculty is not necessary in this context, specific teachers should be noted.^[39] One of his English teachers at University College was Thomas Arnold, the brother of Matthew Arnold, whose essay "On the Study of Celtic Literature" was a milestone in the recognition of Celtic literature in the English-speaking world; and Édouard Cadic, his French professor, was a Breton. But more important members of the faculty were George Sigerson, who lectured and published materials on Irish poetry and poetics, and Edmund Hogan (editor of the placelore manual Onomasticon Godelicum ), who held the chair of Irish language, history, and archaeology (Gorman 56). Patrick Dinneen, later the compiler of the standard Irish-English dictionary, was professor of Irish (MBK 153; O Hehir vii). Eoin Mac Neill (the foremost Irish historian of his generation), Patrick Henry Pearse, and Douglas Hyde had all lectured on Irish topics at University College during the period Joyce was a student (Gorman 56). Joyce, persuaded by his friend Clancy to take Irish for some time, was also instructed in Irish by Pearse, whose classes would have contained more than grammar and who would have provoked conversation of a cultural and nationalist sort among the students (cf. JJ 2 61).^[40]

Members of the Anglo-Irish literary movement must also be numbered among Joyce's oral sources for Irish history and literature. A. E., Gregory, Yeats all had conversations with Joyce; it is inconceivable that their conversation at no time turned to Irish literature. In Ulysses when Stephen mentally acknowledges "A. E. I. O. U." (9.213), is there nothing but money that he owes to A. E.? As a source of this type John Millington Synge is probably a key figure since Synge had read and studied early Irish material extensively, even attending d'Arbois de Jubainville's Celtic literature classes in Paris (Greene and Stephens 72; cf. 64–65). Synge may have passed on important material orally to Joyce in the brief but intense period they spent together in Paris in March 1903;^[41] Joyce's acute mem-

[39] For a more complete discussion of the faculty in fields not related to Irish culture, see Gorman 54–56; JJ 2 58–60. Ellmann's omission of many of the faculty members in Irish history, language, and literature indicates the critical bias in Joyce studies.

[40] Cf. Hughes in Stephen Hero.

[41] I am grateful to Anthony Roche for the suggestion that Synge in particular may have been an important oral source for Joyce. Cf. Gorman (101), who says that Joyce and Synge met seven or eight times and that Synge's voluble talk was always of literature.

ory of Maurya's speeches in Riders to the Sea, which he gained from reading Synge's manuscript in March 1903 (JJ 2 124), suggests that this period was a particularly influential and stimulating one for him. Synge was aware of the differences between the early Irish originals and the processed versions promulgated by the Anglo-Irish revival, as his review of Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne makes clear:

For readers who take more than literary interest in these stories a word of warning may be needed. Lady Gregory has omitted certain barbarous features, such as the descriptions of the fury of Cuchulain, and, in consequence, some of her versions have a much less archaic aspect than the original texts. Students of mythology will read this book with interest, yet for their severer studies they must still turn to the works of German scholars, and others, who translate without hesitation all that has come down to us in the MSS. (Synge, "An Epic of Ulster" 370)

Possibly alerting Joyce to the way that the translators of the literary revival bowdlerized the medieval Irish texts, Synge may have been an influence on Joyce to read scholarly translations of the medieval texts or other scholarly treatments of the material, rather than rely solely on popularizations, but Synge may also have told Joyce orally of various elements in the Irish texts not found in any source texts that Joyce himself read. In conversations with Synge, Joyce may have received a fund of information about such elements as the humor and earthiness of Irish narrative, as well as its gappiness and inconsistencies. Synge was in a position to know and appreciate these things.

Just as in contemporary culture not everyone who "knows about" Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex has read Freud or even has read a written summary of Freud—it is not necessary to read about Freud because his work is in the air, and the ignorant are informed orally, in conversation, in classes and lectures, in jokes and repartee—so in Joyce's Dublin were Irish literature, history, and culture in the air. These topics were in fact privileged cultural material at the time, in part because cultural nationalism was a vehicle for the coalescence of the nationalist movement as a whole. Thus, the specific oral sources suggested here are really just indicative of the various conversational environments that Joyce was part of, environments that would have passed Irish cultural materials to him, varying in their shades of significance and detail but essentially converging on the main lines of Irish tradition.