Joyce, Galway and the Spanish Armada

Abstract

James Joyce visited Galway and the Aran Islands in 1912 and took advantage of the occasion to write two articles in Italian that he published in Il Piccolo della Sera in 1912. I analyse the vision that Joyce conveyed of the Spanish Armada both in these articles and later in Ulysses (1922) and in Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s knowledge of the 1588-Armada episode and of the shipwrecks of several Spanish vessels in the vicinity of Galway are the result of both the propagandistic narration usually provided by pro-British historiography and by his presumed readings on the history of the city and the nearby Aran Islands. In such writings, Joyce may have intended, on the one hand, to reflect his tacit acceptance of the imperialism exercised by post-Victorian Britain over Ireland, fully convinced that the decline of the Spanish Empire had begun with the Armada’s defeat against Elizabethan England in 1588. He believed this event gave rise to the birth of the British Empire. On the other hand, Joyce reflects in them his only moderate Irish pride for the supposed humanitarian actions of the population of Galway (the birthplace of Nora), a city he described both as “Spanish” and as sympathetic towards the Armada castaways in Ireland. Joyce’s employment of the Irish chapter of the Gran Armada’s historical episode contributes with a relevant insight about his perception of British imperialism in Ireland.