The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow Paul Fagan (bio) THE CELTIC UNCONSCIOUS: JOYCE AND SCOTTISH CULTURE, by Richard Barlow. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. 309 pp. $50.00. Richard Barlow's extensive study of Joyce's engagements with Scottish history, culture, politics, literature, and philosophy identifies a significant gap in the field.1 The monograph addresses Joyce's poems, non-fiction, and correspondence alongside the major works but focuses predominantly on Finnegans Wake, where, Barlow contends, the vestiges of Scottish culture are key to the author's obscured representation of a "Celtic Unconscious." In developing this claim, Barlow draws upon a wealth of Scottish history, from royal relics and tartan clothing to William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, from Macbeth and MacDiarmid to Bannockburn and Brexit—Celtic Football Club even receives a brief mention. The book's core argument, however, posits the importance of the modern Scottish literary and philosophical canon to an understanding of the Wake's social, racial, and aesthetic politics. This thesis is pursued along two interrelated strands, signaled by the study's subtitle and title. First, the focus on Joyce and Scottish Culture anchors Barlow's claim that Joyce intends "to place his work into what he regarded as a tradition of Celtic literature and philosophy (while simultaneously renewing and transforming that culture)" (22). This localization of the Wake's "universal history" in a regionalized geographical, cultural, and political milieu contributes to the ongoing turn against archetypal readings of the novel.2 Within this framework, Barlow's justification for a "devolved" examination of Joyce and Scotland is based on an unimpeachable premise (3). Despite the increasingly dominant picture of Joyce "as a writer engaged with the themes of imperialism, colonialism, and Irish history," too often these inquiries have proceeded in "the absence of any real deconstruction of the term Britain" so that, invariably, the rubric "Joyce and Britain" becomes synonymous with "Joyce and England" (1, 2). Barlow's pitch to provide nuance to social and historicist readings by acknowledging the more complex cross-currents of the Atlantic Archipelago offers a crucial corrective to this trend. Second, under the rubric of The Celtic Unconscious, the study advances a provocative thesis that Joyce's rejection of "racial purity" belies an interest in "quasi-Arnoldian" culturalist conceptions of Celtic identity and culture that is sustained in Finnegans Wake (8).3 Readers anticipating a Freudian or Jungian reading may be surprised, for, in deploying this organizing image, Barlow largely declines psychoanalytical [End Page 419] theory to attend to Joyce's own idiosyncratic understandings of concepts such as "Celtic," "unconscious," "interiority," and "history."4 The tensions inherent in an avant-garde literary project that both deconstructs "essentialized visions of nationality" and pursues an esoterically defined "Celtic spirit" lead Barlow to conceptualize the Wake's Celtic unconscious as an "internally divided, and obscured alternative reality" that provides a skewed vantage on the history and geography of the archipelago (212). Chapter 1 wheels through the Scottish-Irish "crossings and genetic mixings" (37) depicted in the pre-Wake oeuvre. For Barlow's purposes, Joyce's distinction between Celtic identity and racial essentialism is advanced in "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," where he "writes in the present tense of the 'five Celtic nations'" (28).5 Elsewhere, a sense of Celtic affinity is signaled in the description of Scotland as Ireland's "doom[ed]" "sister" in "Gas from a Burner" (90).6 Joyce's "Scottish theme," however, emerges through a critically neglected variation on the well-worn motifs of paralysis and escape in Dubliners–where the pull of industrialized Glasgow promises a dubious alternative "economic escape-route" to London (37, 41)7–and in the figure of Crotthers, who introduces Scots vocabulary into the multilingual Babel of "Oxen of the Sun" that anticipates the language of the Wake.8 Chapter 2 pursues Joyce's interest in the productive tension in the Scottish Enlightenment's contradictory drives towards illumination and obscurity. This principle is exemplified both in Joyce's ransacking of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to forge the Wake's aesthetic of "uncertainty, and doubt"9 and in his complex handling of the philosophical legacy of David Hume...