The Irish Joyce

Abstract

Review Article The Irish Joyce John McCourt Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory, Luke Gibbons (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 286 pages. Voices on Joyce, Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke (eds) (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2015), 346 pages. Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms, Luca Crispi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 336 pages. As we approach the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, an event which for some will surely provide at least momentary shelter from what will inevitably be the more fraught commemoration of the Civil War, it is perhaps apposite to reflect on the evolving state of what is neutrally referred to as ‘Joyce Studies’ and is more polemically known as the ‘Joyce industry’ in Ireland. Ulysses was met by a mixed response both in Ireland and abroad when it first appeared in February 1922. This was because of its undoubted stylistic complexity, because it was the work of an exiled writer seen by many to have ‘forsaken’ his homeland and family, only to then challenge, from his adopted home on the continent, the country’s secular and religious institutions and to interrogate its history, its received narratives and its collective beliefs and pieties. Not surprisingly, what Irish reaction there was to Ulysses was, for the most part, indifferent or hostile. There were many who saw his second novel as just more ‘muck-raking’, to use the term with which the Irish Independent had described Dubliners. In Catholic circles, some fretted about the effect Joyce’s work might have on the moral status quo. In the end, however, Joyce’s books, although ‘afflicted with a shameful mania’, were, as the Catholic Irish Monthly put it – as if to console its readers – ‘but little read by sane folk’. John McCourt Studies • volume 107 • number 428 490 Although there were many notable early exceptions (one thinks of positive reviews by a variety of figures who were increasingly uncomfortable in or had already left the newly forming Irish State, such as Mary (Molly) Colum, P S O’Hegarty, Eimar O’Duffy), Ulysses, along with Joyce’s other works, was simply not read by most people in Ireland in the decades that followed its publication, and it was largely ignored or dismissed by leading Irish critics for decades. As late as 1967, Fritz Senn, Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock, the organisers of the first international Joyce Symposium, which was held in Dublin in June of that year, struggled to find Irish academics who would address the gathering, although an impressive group of local, mostly literary, patrons was assembled: Seán O’Faoláin, despite his deeply ambivalent views about Joyce’s work, served as honorary chairman and was joined by Seamus Kelly of The Irish Times, novelists Benedict Kiely and Mervyn Wall, and Arland Ussher, the Anglo-Irish author of a lengthy and appreciative essay on Joyce in his book, Three Great Irishmen: Shaw, Yeats, Joyce.1 Also prominently present were the architects Niall Montgomery and Michael Scott. Newly appointed University College Dublin Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, Roger McHugh, and A J (Con) Leventhal of Trinity College Dublin also signed up. (Levanthal’s interest in Joyce was life-long and dated from his very early and very positive review of Ulysses, published in 1923 in a Dublin journal called Klaxon). But Irish academic interest was thin, even if Maurice Harmon of the University College Dublin English department did take part and later edited the rather quaintly entitled The Celtic Master: Contributions to the First James Joyce Symposium in Dublin.2 Contributors to the volume included poet, playwright and Dublin District Justice, Donagh MacDonagh, who looked at the importance of ‘The Lass ofAughrim’as background to ‘The Dead’. Other local ‘non-professional’Joyceans, such as Eileen Veale (secretary to the Lord Mayor of Dublin), her daughter, Vivien Igoe (an employee, then, of Eastern Regional Tourism), solicitor Gerard O’Flaherty, J B Lyons (neurologist and later Professor of the History of Medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons), and the Jesuit Brendan Duddy, collectively contributed to a striking Irish presence within the predominantly American...