Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett by Nels Pearson

Abstract

Nels Pearson opens Irish Cosmopolitanism with an acknowledgment of the paradox embedded in his title: how can we speak of a particular, national variety of cosmopolitanism when cosmopolitanism makes claims for the affiliation of human beings as an inclusive, transnational community? What makes it possible for Pearson to speak or write of an “Irish Cosmopolitanism” is a series of developments in the discourse on cosmopolitanism dating back to the end of the last century. At that time, commentators in a variety of fields, including many dedicated to postcolonial studies, began to question the simple opposition between “national” and “global” experiences and to assert a more nuanced awareness of the relationship between a familiar homeland and the broader world, between cultural specificities and universal sympathies. Despite its more limited scope, Irish Cosmopolitanism takes its place alongside field-defining studies of literary cosmopolitanism from this period, such as Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (2001), Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitanism Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006), and Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), which have addressed the transformation in ways of writing about local and global affiliation in the twentieth century. As these books indicate, the transnational turn in the new modernist studies involves an examination of how colonial writers respond to the influence of imperialism around the world and of the role of cultural nationalism in staging anti-imperial resistance. Pearson’s study contributes to another important direction in this transnational turn with his exploration of new models for cosmopolitan community that link local concerns to global contexts.What makes Pearson’s contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism distinctive, of course, is the other term in his title—Irish. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, along with the somewhat lesser-known Elizabeth Bowen (each of whom commands two chapters in this study), are writers of unquestionable international standing, who spent much of their careers living abroad in a variety of European capitals. They nonetheless retained a certain affiliation, however conflicted or attenuated, with Ireland and its vexed history of colonial occupation, nationalist agitation, hard-won independence, and state building. This is not to say that, before their various departures, their connections with Ireland were somehow stable, that this history was somehow complete, but that their relationships with this history remained always in process, never entirely settled or certain. No doubt this sense of being unsettled is to be found at the source of much of the writing we call modernist, but for Pearson the colonial contexts of Irish modernism are crucially related to how these writers imagine the world beyond those contexts. In other words, Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett share a set of unsettling historical contingencies that bind them together as “Irish.” Neither their life stories nor their creative work comprise linear narratives from national belonging to global affiliation; rather, they demonstrate “a rigorous, nonhierarchical, and mutually transformative interplay of national and global consciousness” (20). Each writes with a cosmopolitan sensibility that simultaneously, not sequentially, pursues some form of local or national belonging and calls on a sense of transnational humanity in an environment that is always contested and contingent. Viewing “expatriate Irish modernism” in this way allows Pearson to harness postcolonial responses to the concept of cosmopolitanism that have questioned its rush to abstract universalism and global unity, while moving beyond postcolonial assessments of Irish modernism that tend to focus intently on contexts of nationalism or anticolonialism at the expense of attention to forms of transnational connection, experience, and consciousness.In this regard, Pearson’s book can be viewed as a response of sorts to Walkowitz’s groundbreaking study, which begins with the question, “What does it mean, today, to be a British novelist, or even an English writer?” (2006, 1). Over the course of six chapters—on Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald—Cosmopolitan Styles demonstrates just how flexible those terms of national affiliation have become after a century that saw the dissolution of the British Empire, the mass migration of former colonial subjects to former imperial capitals, and the ever-increasing mobility of peoples within and between the United Kingdom and the Continent. Nonetheless, Walkowitz retains the term “British” because it serves to bind together a particular tradition of literary modernism, one that spans the twentieth century and a variety of transnational affiliations but participates in the ongoing project of “testing the protocols and boundaries of British culture” (28). The label remains useful precisely because it is contentious, allowing for an analysis of multiple places, languages, and periods suggesting alternative groupings that do not rely on the nation as a concept or category. For Pearson, expatriate Irish modernism presents a similarly useful category because it brings together a body of writing that challenges “presumed opposition between national location and global dislocation, historical rootedness and temporal displacement, the familiar terrain of tradition and the strange new world of the modern” (4). The writers examined in the study, he contends, do not generate a modernism out of some abstracted, ahistorical, or postnationalist form of cosmopolitanism, but from a continuous condition of statelessness that they experience both at home and abroad. In this sense, Irish cosmopolitanism is very much a form of irresolution but one that produces “a rigorously expansive, decolonial and democratic mind, for it involves scrutinizing the dislocations of modernity—alienation, transience, social uprooting, loss—from the standpoint of a preexisting, subnational or presovereign experience of those same kinds of dislocation” (18).That Joyce plays an important role in both studies of cosmopolitanism should be no surprise. Earlier generations of critics and scholars viewed him as a key exemplar of international modernism, whose experiments in literary form had somehow lifted his writing out of the morass of Irish history and placed it on a universal aesthetic plane. Of course Joyce criticism took a decidedly more historicist turn in the 1990s, as scholars began to pay increasing attention to the myriad ways that his writing inflects the social and political conditions of late colonial Ireland. It is the tension between these two perspectives, these two critical traditions, that makes Joyce such an interesting case study for the contemporary scholar of literary cosmopolitanism. Both Walkowitz and Pearson draw on the insights of postcolonial theory and criticism in order to reconsider the national and international dimensions of his writing. But where Walkowitz focuses on Joyce’s critique of British colonialism and Irish nativism, Pearson seeks to move the critical conversation beyond the national and nationalist concern with decolonization in order to examine how Joyce’s brand of modernism participates in new ways of imagining the global. Thus, Walkowitz develops a chapter-long analysis of the “style of triviality” (60) that Joyce employed to contest the social attitudes of “acquiescence” and “cheerful decorum” (59) that both British colonialism and Irish nativism employed to fix Irish culture firmly in place. In chapter one of Irish Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, Pearson pursues his investigation of the “Paradox of Irish Internationalism”: the seeming contradiction between the development of national culture in the movement toward decolonization and the obstacles this process throws onto the pathway toward international legitimacy and recognition. With attention to the many images of the Irish coastline found in Ulysses, as a site of departure, of transition, of commerce, the chapter makes a compelling argument for understanding the novel as a response to the condition of “being pulled between a potential world society and a contested colony not yet able to be absorbed equally into any imagined global community” (31). Ulysses, then, is a novel not just concerned with resistance to British imperialism but with the broader transnational project of Irish culture. This becomes evident for Pearson in the “Cyclops” episode of the novel, long the focus of postcolonial scholarship due to its repeated allusions to nativism, nationalism, and imperialism. For Walkowitz, the debate between Bloom and his fellow Dubliners in the episode is significant because it is trivial—that is, “it emphasizes vernacular, personal, and economic details, which Joyce uses to disrupt philosophical abstractions both of nationalism and of cosmopolitanism” (2006, 73). But for Pearson the verbal battle is important because it comprises “a layered, self-reflexive revelation of how deeply and pervasively the lack of democratic sovereignty impacts the global identity of the colonized” (29).This line of thought is extended in a number of ways, many of them unexpected, in chapter two, which focuses on the interplay of silence and voice in Joyce’s writing, and especially in Finnegans Wake (1939). In recent years, the novel’s innovative language has increasingly been read as giving voice to the silenced traditions of ancient Ireland, which had succumbed to the forces of British imperialism, and to silenced voices of both the sovereign artist and Irish womanhood. But this is not to say that these voices announce a new cosmopolitan identity. Rather, for Pearson, they are “an expression of the unresolved contradictions” among “gender, nation, and human universals that inhere in the effort to represent a developing, marginalized Ireland on the international stage” (43). This expression amounts to a form of “critical cosmopolitanism” because it refuses the tendency to rush colonial or postcolonial subjects onto the stage of some global multicultural community at the expense of an identity that is still in process, still emerging from its own complex historical circumstances. Again, a comparison with Walkowitz’s perspective is telling. Her notion of “cosmopolitan styles” emphasizes “the salient features of modernist narrative, including wandering consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, and portmanteau language” in the development of “a critical cosmopolitanism” (2006, 2) that denies epistemological privilege and heroic notions of progress. Joyce’s attention to the trivial poses a threat to such notions by refusing to separate the paltry and transient from more “serious” concerns about politics and history. Pearson’s focus, on the other hand, falls on “the act of breaking silence” (47) in Joyce’s writing, which he associates with both the effort to transcend narrowly national preoccupations in favor of a liberated national conscience and the possibility of hearing the voices of a subaltern population that has been too long subjugated and ignored. This double movement is for Pearson exemplary of Irish cosmopolitan writing, in its desire to speak for a suppressed or defaced national identity and, at the same time, to address a broader transnational set of concerns and a broader transnational audience of readers.As both Walkowitz and Pearson demonstrate, it is on the level of form, as a register of shared affects and an engine of political critique, that literary cosmopolitanism is most significant—and Irish Cosmopolitanism does much to add to our understanding of how modernist innovations merge with transnational imaginings. Perhaps ironically, this is particularly true in the chapters on Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, which was long overlooked or downplayed in discussions of Irish modernism due to the pervasive sense that her prose was less innovative than that of her male modernist contemporaries. Pearson’s account, however, skillfully teases out the aesthetic novelties in Bowen’s style: “Sentences that are ostensibly meant to move the narrative forward by describing a setting, character, or event,” he shows us, “are also laced with suggestive, oddly weighted words and syntaxes that tease the reader’s mind into more abstract, conceptual registers” (63). This weighting often produces the effect of distorting the representation of time and space, so that the world of the text is destabilized in a manner that belies realism, as well as the subjective time and spatial form often attributed to high modernism. For Pearson, then, the example of Bowen’s style helps to disrupt the accounts of modernist style as an indicator of some mode of universalized cosmopolitan belonging that once dominated critical accounts of international modernism, and especially British modernism. Like Walkowitz, in other words, he identifies a critical capacity in modernist form that works to unsettle our sedimented notions about cosmopolitanism itself; but Pearson finds this capacity in a rather different set of verbal mannerisms, with a rather different array of political implications. For example, in The Last September (1929), a novel set during the Irish War of Independence, he provocatively reads Bowen’s description of an encounter between her protagonists and a gunman in an abandoned mill as “rendered in strangely mixed idiom of elegy and nightmare,” which summons up both Ireland’s waning agricultural economy and its violent decolonizing present. This “disjunctive, but never universally abstracted” manner of approaching time and space, then, is the stylistic correlative to a cosmopolitanism that views Ireland as suspended “between assimilation into the generality of history and irreducible resilience” (76).Bowen’s writing is therefore exemplary of an expatriate Irish modernism that views the notions of home, origin, and belonging as radically contingent and perpetually suspended in a process that resists both fulfillment and nullification. Pearson’s account of her “European novels,” The House in Paris (1935) and Heat of the Day (1948), in chapter four develops this notion of a cosmopolitanism that resists the fixity of national identity, as the dislocated individual makes halting entries into more expansive international or transnational perspectives. In this way, Irish Cosmopolitanism provides an important supplement to readings of The Heat of the Day in recent studies of late or wartime modernism, such as Patrick Deer’s Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Culture (2009) and Kristine Miller’s British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (2008), which focus on Bowen’s deepening ambivalence about her class privilege and wartime mobility but also about official secrecy and British patriotism. At the same time, Pearson’s study might be accused of underestimating the significance of the rather exceptional circumstances that allowed Bowen to travel unhindered between a devastated London and her familial estate in rural Ireland during the war. Pearson’s reading of the novel highlights the uncertainty shared by Bowen and her protagonist about the status of both familial and national history, as Stella retreats to her Anglo-Irish Ascendancy property in County Cork from the unnerving modernity of the British capital. What this account seems to miss is the further ambivalence in Bowen’s personal history, which surely inflected her cosmopolitanism, her Irish cosmopolitanism: the writer was granted the freedom to move between England and Ireland during the war because she had consented to pass intelligence about the Irish ruling class on to the British Ministry of Information.Pearson’s study perhaps overlooks another opportunity when it moves on to a discussion of status of place and space in Beckett’s writing, without providing a more explicit comparison with what has just been suggested about these categories in Bowen’s novels. Due to their Protestant backgrounds, and despite their obvious privilege, both Dublin-born writers experienced a kind of marginalization as Irish public life was increasingly defined by Catholic and Gaelic interests after independence. But while Bowen developed her own idiosyncratic brand of novelistic realism, which Pearson sees as less committed to the depiction of abstract space and subjective time typical of British modernism, Beckett became well known for his increasingly spare and cartographically indeterminate settings. Acknowledging that this movement toward unnamed spaces has often been read by modernist critics as a movement toward cosmopolitan abstraction or universalism, Pearson again seeks to controvert the received wisdom about expatriate Irish modernism by asserting that this movement is always contingent and never complete. More recent postcolonial readings of Beckett’s aesthetic of unnaming have suggested that it works as a politics of deterritorialization, which renders an imaginative cartography haunted by Irish history even as it opens up those spaces to a sense of estrangement that strains against the bounds of that history. Starting from these insights, Pearson’s argument seeks to move toward new conclusions about Beckett’s cosmopolitanism: his nouvelle “The Calmative” (1955), for instance, deals in both the investigation of abstract philosophical crises and the repetition of halting departures and failed returns that dramatize “the impossibility of negating a place one has yet to understand” (120). According to Pearson, it is precisely this push and pull between the philosophical and the historical around the postcolonial departure that generates Beckett’s unique variety of cosmopolitan modernism, which refuses all forms of familiarity and reconciliation.This distinctive quality of Beckett’s writing, its unnaming of Ireland and the world, serves Pearson’s thesis well. For it demonstrates an idea of world citizenship for those who are perennially displaced from their native land even when they are at home, and who thus “experience separation from home not as an estrangement but as an extension, or broadening out, of an alienation that already exists” (126). The final chapter of Irish Cosmopolitanism, which addresses Beckett’s trilogy of novels written in the late 1940s, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, explores the pervasive sense of disorientation in these texts brought on by the simultaneous inability of the narrators to comprehend either their home regions or the wider world as a “geo-social abstraction” (125). The novels can thus be read rather convincingly in terms of a “cosmopolitics” that denies the primacy of the ideas about the “human condition” in relation to “inquiries about our identity and belonging relative to place” (140). The crucial tableau here is one that appears as various afterimages in his writing but derives from his own biography: standing somewhere on the coast south of Dublin in 1945, looking out over the Irish sea, Beckett had an epiphany of sorts that led him to strip away what was knowable or recognizable or familiar in his art. This liminal position, on the same stretch of coastline where Ulysses opens, suggests to Pearson “the contradictions of Irish internationalism” (135) that combine “disorientation and estrangement” with “rootedness or provinciality” (134); it also hints at the alternative political geographies and alternative modes of belonging that John Brannigan associates with the coastal and oceanic, as opposed to the national or global, in his recent Archipelagic Modernism (2014). Like Brannigan and Nicholas Allen, who have sought to revise the histories of modernist writing from the North Atlantic archipelago in these terms, Pearson ultimately provides us with a model for understanding the conundrums of the national community and global affiliation that were so generative for expatriate Irish modernists: neither contentedly “Irish” nor serenely “universal,” their writing is “irreducibly situated between these two abstractions” (143). In developing this model, Irish Cosmopolitanism persuasively advances many of the more expansive perspectives of postcolonial studies, without adopting a fully postnational viewpoint, and thus offers an important contribution not just to Irish studies but also to the study of literary cosmopolitanism and modernism more broadly.