“Thought-Tormented Music”: Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival

Abstract

Mother, one of three stories of public in Dubliners, draws richly from and reflects the situation of music in the Irish literrevival ry revival at the beginning of the last century.1 Joyce's entry into the musical and literary public life of Dublin followed closely on the post-Parnellite turn in Irish politics. This created a milieu in which, as Terry Eagleton writes, [c]ulture in Ireland may occasionally displace politics, but it is just as much its continuation by other means.2 When Joyce finished his formal education and began to explore his options in life, the political field was so oriented that the pursuit of the cultural practices of writing and performing music might be considered political careers. For many of the post-Parnellite generation, the slow work of improving, by re-nationalizing, artistic had supplanted the need for decisive campaigns in the political field, as one commentator wrote in 1900.3 Though this cultural moment of politics was short-lived,4 it was intensely productive. Its apex occurred in the, for Joyce, auspicious year of 1904. Though he had already begun to intervene in public literary and musical life in Dublin, 1904 was also the year following the death of his mother and decline of the Joyce household, of listless dissipation, of meeting and falling in love with Nora Barnacle, of flirtation with careers as a singer and as a literary critic, ending with the decision to leave Ireland for Trieste. The departure marked a significant transition in Joyce's engagement with the public performance of music, both as a performer and a storyteller. My argument is that, in fiction and in life, Joyce articulated a distinctive approach to musical performance that resonates with a positive notion of authenticity deriving from practices of traditional music, song, and dance that were themselves being developed in Ireland after the Famine.