Authors: Declan Kiberd
Accordingly, later chapters like "Oxen of the Sun" find in the rise and fall of the Irish nation echoes of a more general decline of European civilization. In a voice parodic of Haines, an Englander confesses his imperial crimes. Joyce plays with the notion that the self-discipline needed to run an empire finally drove many of its rulers mad, or into drug-dependency:
– My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language (he recited
some),
laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah! Destruction! The black panther!
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Within the chapter is enacted the rise and decline of English literary tradition also.
The shipwreck in Homer's Book Twelve is re-enacted in the disintegration of all major literary styles of English literature, from
Anglo-Saxon to the present. But the mockery of the Holy Family myth of Christendom extends the attack to western civilization as a whole:
everything
is negated. Early critics, in their terror at this, devoted themselves to the analytical pleasures of hidden symmetry in order to absolve themselves of the search for meaning, perhaps because they suspected in their hearts that there might be no meaning at all.
Ulysses,
therefore, offers a challenge more difficult than that held out by any sacred text, yet it refuses to become a sacred text itself.
To confront the void within the self is the awesome task addressed in the final chapters. Their schematizing of experience is intentionally excessive on Joyce's part – for example, the catechism form of "Ithaca" parodies the attempt by the Catholic Church to ravish the ineffable and to submit the mystery of life to a form imposed from without. Society is increasingly experienced by Bloom and Stephen as an autonomous, external force; and though both men meet, they feel less in direct relation to one another than they feel towards the force which oppresses them and prevents them from becoming themselves. Joyce concludes that there can be no freedom for his characters within that society: they exist in their interior monologues with a kind
of
spacious amplitude which proves impossible in the community itself. So his refusal to provide a "satisfactory" climax in their final meeting is his rejection of the obligation felt by realists to present a coherent, stable, socialized self.
In the macrocosm of Joyce's world is a "principle of uncertainty" which leads him and his characters to attempt an almost manic precision in the microcosm. The attempt at rigid control of the empty space which mocks all human life is a colonization by the masculine principle which loves to order, to tabulate, to map and to judge – the tradition represented by the written book. "Oxen of the Sun" had thrown that tradition into deep question: now the large full-stop at the close of "Ithaca" may signalize the cessation of the written word, the better to make way for the oral, feminine narrative of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle.
What Yeats wrote in another context in 1906 might be apposite here: "In Ireland today, the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or another in Irish imagination and intellect . . . The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated love of print and paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions".
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Joyce concurred: his own texts increasingly substituted a sentient ear for an imperial eye, and, like his disciple Beckett, he trained himself to process
the
voices which came, as if unbidden, from his unconscious.
Ulysses,
judged in retrospect, is a prolonged farewell to written literature and a rejection of its attempts to colonize speech and thought. Its mockery of the hyper-literary Stephen, of the writerly talk of librarians, of the excremental nature of printed magazines, is a preparation for its restoration of the human voice of Molly Bloom; and, in a book where each chapter is named for a bodily organ, the restoration of her voice becomes a synecdoche for the recovery into art of the whole human body, that body which always in epic underwrites the given word. A restored body becomes an image of the recovered community, since the protection of a body from outside contact has often been the mark of a repressive society.
Like Yeats, Joyce presented himself as a modern Homer, a type of the epic narrator even in his reluctance to begin ("Who ever anywhere will read these written words?").
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He knew that his national culture, in which a centuries-old oral tradition was challenged by the onset of print, must take due account of both processes.
Ulysses
paid a proper homage to its own bookishness, but, caught on the cusp between the world that spoke and the world that read, Joyce tilted finally towards the older tradition. Like all epics, his would only be given its full expression in the act of being read aloud.
In the 1920s James Joyce liked to joke that his country was entering "the devil's era"; and historians now tend to agree that the next three decades were indeed "the age of
de Valera". More had died in the Civil War than in the War of Independence, but once again out of the ashes of defeat the republican phoenix arose.
The new government was conservative in social policy, impartial in its handling of the civil service (most of those servants who had been trained under the British scheme happily worked on in unchanged
structures), and had a proper arm's-length relationship with the army and police. The country was slowly recovering from the devastation of war and poverty was still widespread, made worse by the international economic recession of the late twenties and thirties. In 1926 de Valera and his followers left Sinn Féin and founded
Fianna Fáil, which its members liked to call "a slightly constitutional party".
1
They took their seats in the Dáil as the largest opposition party (it was rumoured that some of them carried small firearms in their pockets, should any difficulty arise). As the economy worsened and the government cut old-age pensions, it became clear that Fianna Fáil would win the election of 1932. Mr.
Cosgrave's government quietly and smoothly passed the seals of state office to men who just a decade earlier had denied the state's right to exist and sought to kill its representatives. A crucial test of the stability of a young democracy had been passed.
2
De Valera was something of a world figure, well known to Irish Americans and also to the leaders of decolonizing movements overseas. He was made president of the council of the
League of Nations in the year of his election. At home he announced a programme of industrialization and further deanglicization (he would remove the oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the 1922 Constitution). He also refused to pay land annuities of £5 million per year to the British, in defrayment of a loan advanced years earlier to farmers wishing to buy out landlords. Britain retaliated by taxing Irish cattle on point of entry, and the Irish duly
riposted with a surcharge on British imports. A so-called
Economic War lasted until 1938, further depressing the economy.
De Valera's main achievement in this decade was the legitimation of state institutions: those IRA veterans who protected his early election rallies from enemy attack in 1932 soon found themselves at odds with the disciplined new regime, but there were fewer and fewer dissidents as erstwhile republicans were drawn into the mechanisms and lured by the rewards of government. De Valera himself soon began to appear at ceremonial occasions sporting a top hat. A neo-fascist organization called the
Blueshirts (after their Continental counterparts the Brownshirts) had formed itself as a private army to meet the threat of "Dev's Bolsheviks", but (despite having some marching songs written for it by W. B. Yeats)
3
enthusiasm and membership soon evaporated. After decades of high theory and violent practice, Ireland was in no mood for ideological fanaticism: a pragmatic government which could knock down some Dublin slums and build housing estates in their stead seemed a preferable option.
The year 1932 marked one thousand five hundred years of Christianity in Ireland (at least if you were taught, as most were, that St. Patrick had come in 432). A large
Eucharistic Congress was held by the Catholic Church in the Phoenix Park, and both major party leaders, de Valera and Cosgrave, were permitted the honour of bearing the papal legate's canopy. As leader of Cumann na nGaedheal, Cosgrave had always submitted legislation with moral content for approval to bishops as a prelude to laying it before the Dáil; but de Valera, after the formal excommunication of republican troops by Catholic bishops in 1922 and despite his own extraordinary personal piety, had been rather slower to come onside. When he did, however, he came with a vengeance.
His 1937 Constitution was vetted by senior Catholic clergy before being unveiled to the public. Though Collins was now a part of history, for de Valera politics often seemed no more than the prosecution of their personal feud by other means. In theory, de Valera's Constitution was designed to replace that which had been framed by his rival under duress in the aftermath of the Treaty. So the new document declared Ireland "a sovereign, independent, democratic state" in the abstract: that mystical republic for which so many had longed. But there was nothing very republican about the "special position" accorded to the Catholic Church in Ireland as "the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of its citizens".
4
If northern unionists were offering a Protestant parliament to a Protestant people, ninety miles down a poorly-surfaced interconnecting road Mr. de Valera was offering a Catholic people a theocratic state, whose Constitution began with the preamble "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity ..."
Despite all this, the Protestant Douglas Hyde found no difficulty in accepting a unanimous nomination to become
president and guarantor of a Constitution which many felt was less than generous to his co-religionists.
Collins's 1922 model had sedulously avoided any special reference to the
Catholic Church and had provided for a Senate chamber
(Seanad)
to represent minority interests, one of the government nominees being W. B. Yeats.
Though Yeats (like other modern writers) was to flirt with
fascism in the foolish conviction that life for artists might be better under cultured despots, his fundamental political instincts remained those of a liberal republican.
5
He
opposed the ban on
divorce in 1925, arguing that "the price you pay for an indissoluble marriage is a public opinion that will tolerate cynical and illegal relations between the sexes".
6
He applied similar logic in arguing that to refuse married women the right to remain in the civil service would be to rob it of many gifted women and to encourage a more contemptuous attitude to the marriage vow.
On the censorship of art, he was never less than scathing. The government had defined the word "indecent" as meaning (among other things) "calculated to excite sexual passion".
7
Such a definition, while merely ridiculous to a man of Utters, constituted a sacrilege to a Thomist. Whereas
Plato had separated soul and body, St. Thomas had rightly laid down that on the contrary the soul is wholly present in the body and all its parts. This being so, it was unChristian as well as unkind to condemn sexual passion, a return to the dark ages when Platonic thought dominated the painters of Europe, who depicted Christ with a head of pitless intellect and a pinched flat-chested Virgin holding a stiff doll-like child. Such an art arose from a contempt for the God-given body, and therefore for the Creator who had assumed human form. Yet, within fifty years of the death of
Thomas Aquinas, that art had been transformed to a celebration of the body so liberal that nobody complained when
Raphael chose his mistress as a model for the Virgin – "and represented her", said Yeats, "with all the patience of his sexual passion as an entirely voluptuous body".
8
It was for similar reasons that Yeats praised
Aubrey Beardsley for painting
St. Rose of Lima ascending into heaven on the bosom of the Madonna, her face enraptured with love, but (he coyly added) "with that form of it which is least associated with sanctity".
9
As the protege's of the Irish system of education sought to legislate such art out of existence, it was no wonder that Yeats could complain that Catholic schools tended to destroy the great mysteries, symbologies and mythologies which the Catholic faith, more than most other versions of Christianity, can give. He never tired of reminding Irish readers that God had taken on the
indignity of bodily human form. When the Christian Brothers publicly burned a magazine containing the beautiful "Cherry Tree Carol" – in which the infant Jesus speaks from his mother's womb – Yeats mischievously accused them of not really believing in the Incarnation: "They think they believe in it, but they do not, and its sudden presentation fills them with fear, and to hide that horror they turn on the poem".
10
For his own part, Yeats never lost his humour. During one debate, he informed his fellow-senators that the three monuments in Dublin's main thoroughfare were all encouraging: the epic lecher Daniel O'Connell,
Admiral Nelson (whom Joyce had dubbed "the one-handled adulterer"), and finally Parnell, the Galahad
in extremis,
proclaiming that no man had the right to set the boundary to the march of a nation and pointing towards the nearest maternity hospital
.
However, by the time that Éamon de Valera came to frame his 1937 Constitution, Yeats was in poor health, the leading artists were either in exile or on the margins of Irish society, and the opposition to it was spearheaded by a group of remarkable women, many of them veterans of the old republican movement. Having caught a whiff of freedom in the revolutionary decades, they were not now willing to become second-class citizens for any man, even one widely believed by his followers to possess semi-divine attributes. They deeply resented a constitution which told them that their sole place was in the home.
The problem for these radical women lay deep in the psyche of Irish nationalism. The
aisling
poets of the eighteenth century had always imagined woman not as an autonomous person but as a site of contest: the wilting
spéirbhean
or skywoman lay back and languished until deliverance came from abroad in the person of a gallant national saviour. In vain did feminists point out that her original problems were due to a similar sort of English gallant: men were the smiters in this monodrama, women the smitten. Even the age-old notion of the land as female and the ruler as her lawful bridegroom conspired in the creation of this myth; and twentieth-century British propaganda posters, depicting Hibernia as a beautiful maiden torn between the demands of thuggish republicans and solid Saxons, did nothing to dispel it.
11
There were dozens of masterful women in the national movement who had challenged these stereotypes, in the home and outside it, providing leadership, ideas, art and military force: but whatever chance they might have had of forging a state which truly reflected their interests was lost.
There were many who argued that the chances of such liberation had never been great. In the years leading up to the Easter Rising
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington
–
who became well-known as a socialist and pacifist –
had developed a comprehensive critique of nationalist hypermasculinity. His letter to Thomas MacDonagh praised the rebels' ideals, but denied that the war which they proposed to wage could ever be "manly". The questions which he put were terse: why were arms so glorified! will not those who rejoice in barbarous warfare inevitably come to control such an organization? why were women not more centrally involved? "When you have found and clearly expressed the reason", he told MacDonagh, "you will be close to the reactionary element in the movement itself".
12
Skeffington, who was murdered by a British officer in the course of his attempts to prevent looting during the uprising became thereafter an inspirational figure for nonviolent Irish republicanism: but the misogynistic streak which he had detected in the national movement was not so easily purged. Despite the involvement of many strong-minded women – such as Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz,
Louise Gavan Duffy and, indeed, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington – the Irish political movement remained largely a men's club.
Anglo-Ireland watched all these developments with a mixture of fascination and horror, but it did not go untouched by them. Writers such as Elizabeth Bowen maintained the tradition of Somerville and Ross, leaving a priceless artistic account of events as viewed through Big House windows. Among the women of the
Catholic middle classes,
Kate O'Brien and
Mary Lavin faithfully recorded the small triumphs and quiet desperations of lives which might otherwise have gone completely unremembered and unremarked
.