Revolutionary Spaces in James Stephens's The Insurrection in Dublin

Abstract

Revolutionary Spaces in James Stephens's The Insurrection in Dublin John T. Crawford (bio) At roughly one o'clock on Monday, April 24, 1916, James Stephens, a young author and the registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland, left his office near Merrion Square to return to his home at 42 Fitzwilliam Place for lunch. In the hour that preceded his entry into the city, Irish Volunteer (Óglaigh na hÉireann) and Irish Citizen Army (ICA) battalions had commandeered nearly a dozen strategic locations throughout Dublin, and by 12:45, Pádraig Pearse had appeared on the front steps of the General Post Office and declared, as provisional president, the foundation of the free Irish Republic, thereby marking the sudden and confusing beginning of the Easter Rising. Like many of his fellow Dubliners, Stephens first encountered the onset of the Rising as an unwitting spectator. However, as a journalist and novelist, he felt compelled to document the momentous event in hopes of making some sense of what seemed, to many, to be a hastily staged and performed military resistance to British control in the Irish capital. That day-by-day record of the rebellion became The Insurrection in Dublin , which was published later that summer. About the hours leading up to the insurrection and his first entry into the occupied city, Stephens explains: "On the morning [of April 24] I awoke into full insurrection and bloody war, but I did not know anything about it. It was Bank Holiday, but for employments such as mine there are not any holidays, so I went to my office at the usual hour. … Peace was in the building, and if any of the attendants had knowledge or rumour of war they did not mention it to me." 1 Significant in Stephens's account is his ability to communicate the presiding public sentiment of surprise in response to the sudden onset of armed rebellion. He describes his experience as a sudden shift from "peace," not only in his building but also in the city at large, to being confronted by that same city, very suddenly, as a space of "insurrection and bloody war." The Dublin that he unexpectedly encounters in that first moment is a space that, for him, had unexpectedly become violently disengaged from its political and social status quo. It was [End Page 59] a city that demanded representation, especially as it found itself embroiled in a moment of historical and military revolution that for many, including Stephens, defied logic. While existing scholarship on Stephens's book has focused primarily on its journalistic qualities, often appreciating it more as a "contemporaneous account" of the Rising rather than a literary and philosophical engagement with the event, it is important to understand the ways in which The Insurrection in Dublin struggles to come to terms with what Stephens saw as a crisis in conceiving of a unified Irish nation or people, specifically in regards to geographical and sociopolitical space. 2 The rebellion creates for Stephens a feeling of alienation and isolation that divides not only his experience but also that of the Dublin citizens whom he encounters from the acts of political resistance being performed that week on their behalf and in the name of the newly declared Irish Republic. As a result, Stephens's account repeatedly juxtaposes the seeming "peaceful[ness]" of the colonial city with the disorienting and dislocating "surprise" brought on by the Volunteers' violent insurrection, thereby suggesting something akin to the incongruity that Yi-Fu Tuan identifies between definitions of "space" and "place." Tuan describes space as a "blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed"; it has "no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established meaning." Place, in contrast, is "[a] closed and humanized space"; it operates as "a calm center of established values." 3 Within that radical division between the allegedly "established" comfort of place and the unknowability of space lies what Tuan calls the threat of a "loss of power to order things … from one's unique perspective." 4 In many ways, Stephens's experience with the Dublin of Easter Week 1916 communicates that sense of uneasy becoming and unknowability, suggesting a spatial...