Political Economy, Tourism, and the Future of Ireland in Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

Writing to brother Stanislaus from Rome in November of 1906, James Joyce expressed belief that the nascent Sinn Fein party would best advance the cause of independence in the post-Parnell era. You ask me what I Would substitute f r parliamentary agitation in Ireland. I think the Sinn Fein policy would be more effective. Of course I see that its success would be to substitute for English capital but no-one, I suppose, denies that capitalism is a stage of progress. The proletariat has yet to be created. A feudal peasantry exists, scraping the soil but this Would with a national revival or with a definite preponderance of England surely disappear. (Selected Letters 125) The letter registers understanding of the centrality of economics to the so-called Irish Question. As Dominic Manganiello argues, by endorsing Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein movement, which sought to counter British hegemony in Ireland through the non-violent tactics of economic resistance, Jovice voices frustration with a parliamentary party that he regarded as compromised by its connection to both Church and State (126-28). Joyce goes on to write that he would call himself a nationalist were it not for the Sinn Fein movement's support of the language revival, and, distancing himself from the nationalist cause, he ironically declares himself an exile: and prophetically, a repudiated one (125). Joseph Valente argues that Joyce's identification of the language question as the point of rupture with Griffith's Sinn Hill program registers Joyce's ambivalence about the project of decolonization and suggests his own place in a embodied in the English tongue (66).Yet if it suggests identification with the Symbolic order of England at moment of self-exile from Ireland, Joyce's objection to reviving might also be regarded as evincing a pragmatic understanding of English as the established language of economic exchange both within and beyond the British empire. Joyce's letter to brother, then, invites us to read within the broader context of cultural and economic conditions at the time of departure. Indeed, the immediate cause of Joyce's leaving Ireland appears to have been the financial demands of medical studies. Writing to Lady Gregory in November of 1902, the twenty-two year old Joyce declared intention to leave Dublin for the Continent, and planned to fund medical studies at the University of Paris by teaching English after the Royal College authorities refused to provide him with financial aid (Letters 8). After abandoning medical studies, he wrote to father hoping to land a position as a foreign correspondent for the Times. Joyce's leaving Ireland thus markedly contrasts with Stephen Dedalus's idealistic view of exile in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's own state when leaving Ireland is more aptly expressed in Stephen's ironic mention in diary of the new secondhand (221-22) packed by mother. New only in the sense that they are unknown, the clothes serve as a metonym for the young artist's impoverished inheritance and figure the tenuousness of project of artistic self-fashioning. On the Rocks in Ulysses Joyce's advocacy for Sinn Fein in letter to brother calls attention to the absence of economic base in Edwardian Ireland upon which independent economy might have been built. Large working-class populations existed in the Ireland of Joyce's day only in the industrialized cities of the North, and, as F. S. Lyons has suggested, cities such as Belfast had more in common with Liverpool or Glasgow in their economic integration with the British economy than with the rest of Ireland (Lyons 7). In Ulysses the economic hegemony of Northern Ireland is personified by the authoritarian Mr. Deasy, the Ulsterman who tells Stephen that Money is power and who brandishes a savings box that organizes coins, including sovereigns that bear the image of Edward VII. …