Into the West: Joyce on Aran

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Joyce’s occasional journalism for the Trieste daily newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, arguing that Joyce is rehearsing some of the themes he would later recast into his fiction, mostly in a more humorous and sometimes in a more caustic key: namely, his interest (and the Irish Revival’s interest) in the West of Ireland, in the Irish islands in general, and the Aran Islands in particular. While arguing for the singularity and topicality of these pieces, a note of caution will be sounded against attributing excessive importance to them—and yet, at the same time, by the end of the article the “islands” that are Joyce’s individual works of fiction are seen, on closer inspection, to be interconnected, minutely and intricately, and to show such similar connections between Ireland and the European literary tradition.