LUKE GIBBONS
University of Chicago Press
$35
ISBN 9780226824475
Reviewed by Angus Mitchell
The confluence in 2022 of the centenaries of the founding of the Irish Free State and the publication of Ulysses allowed for a fascinating exchange in cultural diplomacy. Among the more ambitious projects to find support was the minting of a stamp in Brazil marking ‘One hundred years of Ulysses and Brazilian–Irish Relations’ and the commissioning of Brazilian artists to produce works that addressed different themes in Joyce’s literary masterpiece. These works were subsequently published in Ulysses 100 pelos olhos brasileiros (‘Ulysses 100 through Brazilian eyes’). Such an intersection highlights the influence of James Joyce on the international branding of Ireland. Inestimable numbers of visitors arrive in Dublin each year with preconceptions of the city based on their reading of Joyce. For the discerning traveller, Ulysses is the preferred guide to Dublin City.
Although historians are often slow to engage with literary criticism, this is a monograph they would find edifying on many levels. The 1916 Rising was an instance of shock treatment that reverberated to the very depths of empire. Similarly, Ulysses broke like a literary lightning bolt discharging a massive burst of latent cultural energy. From the outset of his study, Gibbons recognises that, as an event, 1916 is still undergoing a process of evaluation. Patrick Pearse said to Desmond Ryan during the siege of the GPO: ‘When we are wiped out, people will blame us for everything, condemn us … After a few years, they will see the meaning of what we tried to do.’ More recently, Declan Kiberd wrote of the Rising as ‘an act whose meaning would become clear only in retrospect when people learned to decode it’. Decoding 1916 still has some way to go, but the work produced about it, for better or for worse, is now integral to the event itself.
This study serves as a key to deciphering deeper insights into both 1916 and the work of James Joyce. Gibbons’s stated intention is to ‘show multiple points of intersection between the literary avant-garde and the Irish revolution … [and how] the Ireland that created the “conscience” of Joyce’s modernist sensibility was in many respects the same culture that produced the Easter Rising and the Irish revolution’. To that end, he redefines the Easter Rising as a modern event in contrast to traditional interpretations that reduce it to a futile gesture of Romantic Ireland. He examines in compelling detail how modernism underlies the intersection between revolutionary ferment and cultural experiment. In making his case, Gibbons guides the reader through a mindscape of granular detail framed around flashes of critical insight, building tantalising connections that illuminate how Joyce helped to shape a revolutionary consciousness of the imagination.
His introduction opens with a line from Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, set in Zurich in 1917, and to a scene where a character asks James Joyce what he contributed to the Great War, only to receive the caustic response: ‘I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?’ Joyce signed off Ulysses with ‘Trieste–Zurich–Paris, 1914–1921’. Published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922, it described a pre-1916 Dublin ‘on the borders of insurrection’. One early reader, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, described Ulysses ‘as the great novel of the future’, but other critics recognised that though Ulysses takes place on a single day—16 June 1904—it also bears witness to the time in which it was written.
A key theme of Gibbons’s analysis is to understand the Easter Rising in terms of time and space. Joyce had read Bergson and was fascinated by philosophical aspects of time. While the novel is steeped in both the contexts and ideologies of empire and Catholicism, it is integrated into worlds of merchandise and trade, new media technologies such as moving pictures and photographs, electrification, transport and the advanced bureaucracy of the colonial state.
Thanks to his Jesuit education, Joyce had remarkable powers of recollection and developed and maintained a relationship with his memory that was essential to the cultivation of his own literary vision. He was fascinated by the ordinary details of everyday life—the film of memory. Those who visited him in Paris partook in imaginary walks through Dublin, listening as Joyce named the shopfronts, pubs and other buildings of his native city. Gibbons’s retrieval of Joyce’s friendship with Thomas Pugh, a committed socialist who fought during 1916, uncovers a remarkable acquaintance between two men whose main point of interest was their recall and exchange of photographic memories, made more remarkable because Pugh by that stage of his life was blind.
Ulysses effectively reassembled Dublin from the ruins of the 1916 Rising, and not just in architectural terms but through a new self-fashioning and modern adaptation of myth. Joyce’s fascination with epic traditions and the role of myth in building the national being allows Gibbons to consider how Joyce’s adoption of the epic was as much an instrument of nation-making as of empire-breaking. In a chapter on ‘Ireland, war and literary modernism’, he demonstrates how several critical works that appeared in the aftermath of the war were informed by readings of Joyce. The three main examples provided are Frank Gallagher’s Days of fear; Kathleen Coyle’s A flock of birds (1930), a novel that influenced the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil; and the Belfast poet Joseph Campbell’s prison diary.
There is an extraordinary level of intellectual detail in making this argument, with references to a host of global intellectuals: H.G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa and Eileen MacCarvill, who under her maiden name of Eileen McGrane first read Ulysses in Kilmainham Gaol in 1922. There are individuals who might have been part of this study but are not. Joyce was close to Robert and Sylvia Lynd, who were intrinsic to the modernist literary scene in London and organisers of the Gaelic League’s London branch. Their house in Hampstead was a centre for literary coteries and was the location for the reception of Joyce and Nora Barnacle after their wedding.
Gibbons elucidates Joyce’s anti-colonial modernism with a chapter on Roger Casement and the politics of humanitarianism and an insightful critique of the tension between British imperialism and radical nationalism. In recent years, Joyce scholars have acknowledged the shadow of Casement as traceable in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; 1904 was the year in which Casement’s reports on the Congo appeared. In a lecture he gave in Trieste, Joyce wrote that ‘what England did in Ireland over the centuries is no different from what the Belgians are doing today in the Congo Free State’. In pursuit of this argument, Gibbons identifies the influence of the historian and humanitarian Alice Stopford Green. The histories that she published between 1908 and 1912 were held in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, a library used by Joyce, and Gibbons identifies her essay on ‘The Trade Routes of Ireland’ as a possible source for Joyce’s dismantling of the myth of Irish insularity.
In a particularly revealing moment of parody in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Ulysses, reference is made to the trade visit to Britain in June 1904 of the Nigerian ruler, the Alake of Abeokuta. Apart from the imperial state functions laid on to deepen trade links with south-western Nigeria, Stopford Green hosted a lunch for the Alake at her house on Grosvenor Road and invited several Liberal and Labour Party dignitaries, including Sir Edward Grey, Herbert Samuel and John Burns. Gibbons misses the fact that Stopford Green wrote a letter to the newspapers admonishing those in Ireland who scoffed at the Alake for wearing his ‘native dress, and speaking only his native language’. Furthermore, Gibbons significantly underestimates the role played by Stopford Green in changing the course of African affairs at this time. She was more than merely ‘a member’ of the Congo Reform Association; rather she had shaped the organisation from its very beginnings. There are some 200 letters held among the E.D. Morel papers in the London School of Economics attesting to her influence behind the scenes. The lunch that she hosted for the Alake was an example of Irish proto-diplomacy that Stopford Green developed in anticipation of independence.
After 1922, stimulating transnational connections informing Gibbons’s argument are mediated through the personality of IRA Volunteer and anti-Treaty intellectual Ernie O’Malley. During O’Malley’s three-year stay in California, New Mexico, Mexico and Peru (1929–32), he lectured on Joyce while mixing with a coterie of exiled and nomadic artists and writers. A recurring theme of his analysis was Joyce’s interest in the akasic (also akashic) record. In Theosophical belief this is an archive—a ‘Book of Life’ or ‘mystical encyclopaedia’—holding all the thoughts, deeds, words and emotions of every human life and living being past, present and future. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus thinks of ‘Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was’. Joyce’s knowledge of the akasic record doubtless came through his friendship with George Russell (referred to in Ulysses as A.E.I.O.U.), and O’Malley claimed the prophetic dimension in Ulysses as a literary insight into this esoteric dimension.
The final chapter interrogates Desmond Ryan and his experimental memoir Remembering Sion (1934), the title of which is borrowed from a passage in Ulysses. Ryan was profoundly influenced by Joyce’s stylistic innovations such as narrative fragmentation. Educated at St Enda’s school, Ryan grew close to Patrick Pearse, and they fought side by side in the GPO in 1916. After the revolution, he made a career as a chronicler of the revolutionary years and wrote a series of histories and biographies about key participants, including the legendary Fenians John Devoy and James Stephens. Remembering Sion, which includes a chapter on Joyce, draws on the revolutionary ether that fired radical creativity in the early twentieth century.
One criticism that might be levelled at this book is the use of the term ‘revolution’. What exactly is meant by an ‘Irish revolution’? At no point does Gibbons make explicit what he means by the term. Revolutions bring about radical change, and this was not the case in Ireland. It was land reform that changed the social system in Ireland and not the War of Independence leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a partitioned national being. The insurgency between 1916 and 1922 may have led to a politically conservative state, but it inspired a revolt of the imagination that could and would produce a work as innovative and enduring as Ulysses.
Beyond the originality behind his reframing of the Easter Rising as a modern event, Gibbons draws on complex knowledge systems and a breadth of sources that is the hallmark of his oeuvre throughout his eminent academic career. This is a study deserving of an audience far beyond the confines of Irish literary criticism. Underscoring the electrifying analysis is the hard evidence of patient scholarship and profound insight that makes this book one of the most original interventions to appear during the Decade of Centenaries. T.S. Eliot said that Ulysses was a work ‘from which none of us can escape’, and Gibbons confirms such a view for both historians and Brazilians.
Angus Mitchell is a 2023 recipient of a Royal Irish Academy Decade of Centenaries bursary.