Deriding the Rising: Joyce, Joyceans, and Political Sacrifice in Ulysses

Abstract

In this essay, I examine Joyce's derision in Ulysses of Irish republicans executed by the British state and engage with Joyceans' responses to that derision. Two main Joycean perspectives are addressed —historical revisionism and postcolonialism. Revisionists universally and postcolonialists predominantly view Joyce's derision positively. This assessment is justified by contrasting republicans' violent, emotional, and mythologizing celebration of sacrifice with Joyce's pacific, rational, and realist antipathy to it. I seek to demonstrate that these contrasts are irrelevant, false, or weaker than claimed. I argue that Joyce's antagonism towards executed republicans was largely the result of his contempt for collectivist challenges to his sense of individual autonomy. So deep was his contempt that it blinded him to the effectiveness of sacrifice in galvanizing the Irish population during the period he was writing Ulysses. Nor is this just an empirical problem; postcolonialist Joyceans face a normative dilemma because acceptance of Joyce's portrayal of republican deaths as farcical is not consistent with the anticolonialism that is purportedly at the core of their chosen paradigm.