Sailing to Aranmor: James Joyce’s Transcultural View of the West of Ireland

Abstract

In the summer of 1912, James Joyce spent several weeks in Galway, visiting Nora Barnacle’s family and writing essays for Il Piccolo della Sera. Two essays produced during his stay in the West of Ireland are directly concerned with the region and its inhabitants: one describes the past and present of Galway city and the other is an account of his trip to Aranmor, the biggest Aran Island off the west coast of Galway. Joyce’s selective focus on the past glories of those places and utopian vistas connected with the development of the Galway Harbour is interesting as a counterpoint to the notion of the West of Ireland, shared by representatives of the Anglo-Irish Revival who saw a relatively homogeneous repository of traditional Celtic values in the region. Joyce’s journalistic representation of Galway and Aran deserves attention also because it anticipates late twentieth-century emphasis on hybridity, miscegenation and transcultural mobility. Finally, Joyce’s two 1912 essays are a significant reflection of his own fluctuating attitudes to Ireland and its history, at a point when he was gradually abandoning his epideictic rhetoric of “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” to embrace a more cosmopolitan view of the West of Ireland as a milieu shaped by various European influences.