Terry Eagleton · Starveling Rabblement: Joyce’s Politics

That James Joyce had a political life might seem surprising. The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for political independence.Frank Callanan, a distinguished barrister and historian who died in 2021 leaving this magnificently erudite book unfinished, devotes its many pages to demonstrating that the young Joyce, like his rumbustious father, was a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, and that he clung to this allegiance all his life. An extra-marital affair with Kitty O’Shea forced Parnell to retire as leader of the Irish nationalists in 1890, after which he was hounded by an unholy alliance of clerics and politicians, dying of pneumonia a year later. Joyce was only nine at the time, but Callanan argues persuasively that Parnell’s dramatic fall from grace was the primary scene that hurt him into politics. He wrote a precocious poem on Parnell’s death, which he later claimed had been printed and circulated in Dublin. The reviling of Parnell by the Catholic Church, which feared nationalism as a rival to its own sovereignty over the people, was an important source of his visceral anti-clericalism.If it’s easy to mistake this haughty young recusant for a critic of nationalism, it’s largely because, with the Parnellites plunged into division and disarray over the fate of their leader, Joyce was now politically homeless. Parnell’s brand of nationalism had been civic rather than ethnic, political rather than cultural, constitutional rather than revolutionary and inclusive rather than sectarian (he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant). Joyce championed all these views, but found none of them adequately represented by the nationalist currents on offer after Parnell’s death. If Joyce’s politics were hard to decipher, it was partly because he concealed his Parnellism behind something of the politician’s reserved and enigmatic demeanour.

There’s a touch of Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the youthful Joyce’s imperious, lip-curling, faintly demonic manner.Though much of the patriotic sentiment of the time was parochial, Irish nationalism had an internationalist dimension. Thomas Davis, leader of the 19th-century Young Ireland movement, wrote against British colonialism in India and Afghanistan, and some later activists campaigned against the Boer War or threw their weight behind the anti-colonial movement in Egypt. Joyce himself was deeply sympathetic to the cause of Greek independence. As Perry Anderson wrote, ‘few rhetorics have been more repetitively general in [the 20th] century than claims for the ethnically particular.’ Nationalism is by definition international: if you are entitled to self-determination as a people, the same must go for everyone else.Joyce despised the clericalism and chauvinism of some of his fellow nationalists, but that doesn’t mean that he had any love for the British. He grew up steeped in the nationalist culture of his country, during the first rumblings of the only political revolution the British Isles witnessed in the modern era. Ireland was Britain’s oldest colonial possession, as well as the first British colony to achieve (partial) independence in the 20th century. Joyce once wrote that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ suggesting a direct connection between his literary modernism and his anti-colonialist politics. Nobody who grew up in Dorking or Hastings could have written Finnegans Wake, with its insolent disfiguring of the language of the conqueror. It is a minor historical irony that Joyce spent some of his time in exile teaching English for a living.He was deeply sceptical of cultural nationalism, not least the doughty efforts of the Gaelic League to revive the Irish language, which had been dealt a severe blow by the Great Famine. Most of those who died or were forced to emigrate were the poor, and the poor constituted the majority of Irish speakers. Joyce had an exceptional flair for languages, and may have attended a course in Irish taught by Patrick Pearse, one of the slain heroes of the 1916 insurrection.

Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an enlightened, autonomous European nation-state, not as a land of saintly peasants (a few of them colourfully crazed) speaking what might seem gibberish. Ancient Ireland was in his view as dead as ancient Egypt, though he did not undervalue the achievements of its artists. In fact, his interest in ancient myths and legends was typical of both nationalism and modernism, which tend to be archaic and avant-garde at the same time. To imagine a future beyond modernity may mean dipping back into the pre-modern past. Irish nationalism certainly took an interest in the pre-modern: one 18th-century Irish scholar argued that Irish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. Yet nationalism is only about two and a half centuries old, and sees itself for the most part as a modern invention.In his distaste for cultural nationalism, Joyce was also ferociously dismissive of the Irish Literary Revival. A lower-middle-class Dubliner was unlikely to feel much affinity with upper-class Anglo-Irish Protestants like W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory. Joyce was urban through and through, author of one of the finest anatomies of a city ever written, whereas the revivalists looked to the rural West. Joyce called Yeats ‘a tiresome idiot’ and told him with customary hauteur that he was too old to be of any use to him. He objected to what he saw as the weaponisation of art in the cause of politics, of which the revival could be seen as a high-toned version. He seems to have taken little interest in James Connolly, the most intellectually fascinating of the Easter Rising’s leaders, perhaps because he saw Connolly’s Marxism as promoting a linear conception of history at odds with his own cyclical view. He tried to read Capital, but found its opening sentence absurd and failed to get beyond it. He did, however, put in a good word for the abortive Fenian uprising of 1867. He also felt a degree of sympathy with Sinn Féin, and while living abroad assiduously read its newspaper, the United Irishman, to keep abreast of Irish political affairs.

For a while he was in broad agreement with the programme of Sinn Féin’s leader, Arthur Griffith, although he accused the party of ‘educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred, whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly.’ By ‘racial hatred’ he meant a knee-jerk loathing of the British.That Joyce should mention the proletariat not long after his arrival in Trieste is significant. Far from dimming his political awareness, his flight from Ireland enriched it. He began to call himself a socialist, regularly read the left-wing newspaper Avanti! and wrote to his brother Stanislaus of his ‘detestation of the stupid, dishonest, tyrannical and cowardly burgher class’. The Italian people, he claimed, had some potential for political action, whereas he felt that political progress in Ireland was irreparably stalled. The Irish masses, he thought, colluded in their own oppression. He was quick to dismiss as sentimental drivel attempts to portray them as helpless victims, driven to the pub by the sway of the Sassenach. In Stephen Hero, the protagonist wanders in despair through ‘warrens full of swarming and cringing believers’ and curses ‘the farce of Irish Catholicism’, a disease spread by those ‘black lice’ known as Jesuits. Ireland was a nation ‘in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement’. These are not the words of a dégagé liberal.That Church and imperium were in cahoots was the source of Joyce’s political fury from start to finish. Yet most of the country freed itself from British rule not long after he gave the place up in frustration. Joyce was a product of European Christendom: if his sensibility was deeply shaped by Dante and Aquinas, it was because he came from Dublin rather than London or New York. He even attended Mass during Easter Week, though for aesthetic rather than religious reasons. He was, he observed, a Scholastic in everything but the premises – no doubt meaning such minor matters as the existence of God.