James Joyce and early 20th century Ireland
James Joyce's autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in the United States in December 1916, having previously been serialised in a literary magazine. It was a milestone in Joyce's life as a writer and, by the time of its publication, he was already writing his master work, Ulysses, which was published in 1922, just weeks after the establishment of the first independent Irish State.
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and was just 22 years of age when left Ireland on the 8th of October 1904 accompanied by Nora Barnacle on a journey that took them across Europe to Pula on the Adriatic, where Joyce secured a post as a language teacher. He would spend the rest of his life in Trieste, Rome, Paris and Zurich where he died in 1941.
During the decades of his exile from Ireland, Joyce only returned home on three occasions. As a writer, he had little time for the Yeats-inspired Irish literary revival, whose work he saw as backward looking and insular. As he wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
Michael Robartes (a reference to W.B. Yeats) remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.
Yet despite Joyce’s determination to break away from Ireland, his greatest work is firmly rooted in the country of his birth. Indeed, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are all set in Ireland in the years immediately prior to Joyce’s departure.
It seems as if Joyce, despite the 37 years he spent outside of Ireland, accumulated the inspiration for his great work during the 22 years he spent growing up in Dublin, and especially in the four years prior to his departure. The finest writing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man comes as Joyce prepares to leave Ireland. In the novel’s final chapter, Joyce debates those issues of nationality, language and religion that defined early 20th century Ireland. Joyce saw these elements of Irish life as ‘nets’ designed to trap him, but he was determined not to allow himself to be trapped.
As he put it:
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
The novel’s resounding final passage includes much powerful writing:
O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
In marking the centenary of A Portrait, we commemorate a book that emerged from the most eventful era in modern Irish history, the decade preceding the attainment of Irish independence.
Writing about his attitude to Ireland, Joyce explained that:
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.
His writings, however, offer a portrait of Ireland as it prepared for the great changes that took place between 1916 and 1922.
One of his Dubliners stories, 'Ivy Day at the Committee Room' captures the political tensions that swirled around early 20th century Dublin. The story is set in an office belonging to the Irish parliamentary party at election time.
The early 20th century was a time of political renewal in Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which had split into two rival factions in 1891, had been reunited in 1900. Its aim was to press for Home Rule for Ireland, rather than outright independence. More radical political movements were on the rise, threatening the predominance of the Irish Party.
In this story, a discussion takes place about the planned visit of King Edward the 7th (Royal visits to Ireland were invariably controversial at that time) and the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell looms over the gathering. Parnell was the paramount Irish politician of the late 19th century. For Joyce and his father, Parnell would always be Ireland's lost leader. Other political figures would inevitably pale in Joyce’s eyes compared with Parnell.
In Joyce’s finest short story, ‘The Dead’, the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is a teacher with literary ambitions. At one level, he appears to represent Joyce’s image of his own destiny had he remained in Ireland. Gabriel writes book reviews for The Dublin Daily Express, a newspaper hostile to nationalist politics (Joyce had also reviewed for the paper). He likes to spend his holidays in France, Belgium and Germany. In a dramatic passage, while dancing at his aunts’ New Year party, he is upbraided by Miss Ivors for his lack of enthusiasm for all things Irish including the revival of the Irish language. She accuses Gabriel of being ‘a West Briton’.
In the years before Joyce’s departure from Dublin, the Gaelic League, a body formed in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language, had gripped nationalist Ireland. Many of those who participated in the Easter Rising and the Irish war of independence were drawn into public life by their enthusiasm for the language revival. By the time Joyce left Ireland, the League had 600 branches and 50,000 members.
It was not only the language that was being revived in early 20th century Ireland. Native Irish games, Gaelic football and hurling, were also being popularised. Joyce had fleetingly taken Gaelic lessons, but then rejected the idea of an Irish Ireland, which he parodied in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses The butt of Joyce’s parody in Ulysses was ‘the Citizen’, based on Michael Cusack, the founder of the GAA.
Although Stephen Dedalus describes history as a nightmare, looking back we can see that Ulysses contains a compelling portrait of early 20th century Ireland. Especially in the Cyclops episode, the political life of early 20th century Ireland comes alive through a series of vivid exchanges between the characters in Barney Kiernan’s pub in the aptly named, Little Britain Street. Joyce pits Bloom, his cosmopolitan outsider, with his Hungarian-Jewish background, against the pub’s other customers with their more conventional nationalist attitudes. Joyce has some fun at the expense of Arthur Griffith, claiming that Bloom had given Griffith the idea of Ireland aspiring to emulate Hungary by acquiring effective independence as part of a dual monarchy.
What was it about early 20th century Dublin that made it such a productive source for Joyce’s work? It was a society in transition. A new, assertive Catholic middle class was emerging. Joyce was the first person from this community to become a major writer in the English language. His great Irish predecessors, Wilde, Shaw and Yeats, had all come from what would have been called Anglo-Irish backgrounds.
The ‘nets’ of language, nationality and religion, which Joyce left Ireland in order to escape, also made the Dublin of his youth a source of fascination for him. Great writing rarely emerges from settled, satisfied societies. Discontentment provides far more fertile ground for creative impulses.
By the time, Joyce published Ulysses in 1922 the land he left behind had been ‘changed utterly’ as W.B. Yeats famously put it. The ‘centre of paralysis’ Joyce had fled in 1904, went on to conduct a revolution that shook an Empire and provided an example for subsequent independence movements in Africa and Asia.
In this centenary year of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we remember James Joyce's literary genius and the cultural and political richness of the Ireland of his time.
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London