Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities 9781350177369, 9781350177390, 9781350177376

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Irish modernisms in the plural
Part One Contested canons: Testing the limits of Irish modernism
1 Explaining ourselves: (John Brannigan)
2 A forgotten Irish modernist: (Elke D’hoker)
3 Melancholy modernism: (Lucy Collins)
4 Death and the nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction (Maureen O’Connor)
5 The languages of Irish modernism: (Eoin Byrne)
Part Two Corporeal texts, discursive bodies: Biopolitical Irish modernisms
6 Irish skin: (Barry Sheils)
7 Irish modernism and Revivalism: (Seán Hewitt)
8 ‘Survival of the unfittest’: (Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston)
9 Rhetorics of sacrifice: (Katherine Ebury)
10 ‘The ranks of respectability’: (Laura Lovejoy)
11 James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: (Cleo Hanaway-Oakley)
Part Three Minor/major modes: Intermedial Irish modernisms
12 Letters and weak theory in Irish modernism (Maebh Long)
13 The machine in the (Holy) Ghost: (Jack Fennell)
14 Mechanical animals, flying men and educated monkeys: (Michael Connerty)
15 ‘The funeral of one’s past’: (Daniel Curran)
16 The full little jug: (Catherine Flynn)
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Irish Modernisms

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Irish Modernisms Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities Edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Paul Fagan, John Greaney, Tamara Radak and contributors, 2022 Paul Fagan, John Greaney, Tamara Radak and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors and Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Jade Barnett Cover image: ‘Early Fragment’ © Conor Tiernan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fagan, Paul, editor. | Greaney, John, editor. | Radak, Tamara, editor. Title: Irish modernisms : gaps, conjectures, possibilities / edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021018064 (print) | LCCN 2021018065 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350177369 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350177376 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350177383 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature)–Ireland. | English literature–Irish authors–History and criticism. | Modernism (Art)–Ireland. | Ireland–Intellectual life. Classification: LCC PR8755 .I745 2022 (print) | LCC PR8755 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/9415–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018064 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018065 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7736-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7737-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-7738-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix

Introduction: Irish modernisms in the plural Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak

1

Part One  Contested canons: Testing the limits of Irish modernism

9

1

Explaining ourselves: Hannah Berman, Jewish nationalism and Irish modernism John Brannigan

15

2

A forgotten Irish modernist: Ethel Colburn Mayne Elke D’hoker

29

3

Melancholy modernism: The loss of the Irish woman poet 1930–50 Lucy Collins

43

4

Death and the nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction Maureen O’Connor

57

5

The languages of Irish modernism: Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel Beckett 69 Eoin Byrne

Part Two  Corporeal texts, discursive bodies: Biopolitical Irish modernisms

81

6

Irish skin: The epidermiology of modernism Barry Sheils

87

7

Irish modernism and Revivalism: A queer history? Seán Hewitt

103

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‘Survival of the unfittest’: Synge, Yeats and the rhetoric of health Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

115

Contents

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10

11

Rhetorics of sacrifice: Sex, gender and the death penalty in James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the 1916 generation Katherine Ebury

129

‘The ranks of respectability’: Prostitution, citizenship and the Free State in the novels of Liam O’Flaherty Laura Lovejoy

141

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Blind bards in the age of silent cinema Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

153

Part Three  Minor/major modes: Intermedial Irish modernisms

167

12

Letters and weak theory in Irish modernism Maebh Long

173

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The machine in the (Holy) Ghost: Anti-scientific literature, genre fiction and Irish modernism, 1890–1940 Jack Fennell

185

Mechanical animals, flying men and educated monkeys: Technology and modernity in the comic strips of Jack B. Yeats Michael Connerty

197

‘The funeral of one’s past’: Thomas MacGreevy as Ireland’s modernist war poet Daniel Curran

209

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The full little jug: Flann O’Brien and the Irish public sphere Catherine Flynn

Bibliography Index

223

237 253

Contributors Prof. John Brannigan is Head of the School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing at University College Dublin. He is the author of Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (2015) and Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). Dr Eoin Byrne is a Postdoctoral Researcher affiliated with the Centre for Irish Studies at National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the author of various articles and essays, including a paper on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille and postcolonial modernisms in Irish Studies Review. Dr Lucy Collins is Associate Professor at the School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She is the author of Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (2015). Dr Michael Connerty is Co-Chair of the animation programme at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. He is the author of The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (2021). Dr Daniel Curran successfully defended his PhD thesis on atrocity and modern memory in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett under the supervision of Prof. Emer Nolan at the Department of English, Maynooth University. He is the author of various articles and essays on representations of death and burial in Irish modernist texts. Prof. Elke D’hoker is a Professor at the University of Leuven. She is the author of Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (2016). Dr Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (2014) and Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (2021). Dr Paul Fagan is a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University. He is the co-editor of a series of volumes on Flann O’Brien with Cork University Press and the author of a forthcoming monograph on Irish literary hoaxes. Dr Jack Fennell is Lecturer and Tutor in the School of English, Irish and Communication at the University of Limerick. He is the author of Irish Science Fiction (2014) and Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800–2000 (2019).

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Dr Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (2019). Dr John Greaney is a Fulbright-NUI Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation (2021). Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film (2017). Dr Seán Hewitt is Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Scholar at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (2021). Dr Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC-CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta. They are the author of various articles and essays on Irish modernism and discourses of sexual health. Dr Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Waikato, New Zealand/Aotearoa. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014) and, with Matthew Hayward, the editor of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2020). Dr Laura Lovejoy is an independent Scholar. From 2018–2019, she was a FulbrightNUI postdoctoral scholar at New York University. She is the author of various articles and essays on biopolitics, Irish modernism and sex work. Dr Maureen O’Connor is a Lecturer at University College Cork. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010) and the forthcoming Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction. Dr Tamara Radak is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna. She is the author of various articles and essays on the work of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien and is currently preparing a monograph on Closural Modernism. Dr Barry Sheils is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is the author of W. B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (2015).

Acknowledgements The editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the contributors for all their ingenuity, hard work and good-natured patience throughout the process. Special thanks are reserved for Conor Tiernan for graciously providing the collection’s original artwork as well as to Martina Crotty and Shane Crotty for photographing and editing the image, Theresa Stampfer for her assistance in preparing the script for production and Lucy Brown at Bloomsbury for her support and guidance in bringing this volume to fruition. Thanks are also due to the speakers and organizational assistants at the Irish Modernisms conference hosted by the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies and the University of Vienna’s Department of English and American Studies (29 September– 1 October 2016) at which some of the papers collected here were originally delivered – in particular, our appreciations are owed to Joseph Brooker, Patricia Coughlan, Ronan Crowley, HE Kevin Dowling (Acting Ambassador of Ireland to Austria), Dieter Fuchs, Johanna Mayer, Christina Schuster, Ulrike Zillinger and the late Werner Huber. We are grateful to the many colleagues in the Irish studies and modernist studies communities who pitched in with their help and time throughout the process of putting this book together, including Ruben Borg, James Alexander Fraser and Michelle Witen. The editors similarly extend their thanks to Robert Ryan and Clíona Uí Thuama from the Thomas MacGreevy estate, the Embassy of Ireland in Austria, the Fulbright Commission, the Irish Research Council, Salzburg University, University College Dublin, University of Pennsylvania and University of Vienna. February 2021

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Introduction: Irish modernisms in the plural Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak

In a 1915 article for the New Age titled ‘The Non-Existence of Ireland’, Ezra Pound situates J. M. Synge and James Joyce as modern writers of merit by severing their literary achievements from the island of their birth. ‘A man of genius cannot help where he is born,’ Pound writes, ‘and Ireland has no claim upon Synge.’ Joyce, for his part, ‘has fled to Trieste and into the modern world’, and it is only by thus ‘escaping’ the censorious traditionalism of his native land that he ‘writes as a European, not as a provincial’. In his formulation, Pound insists that ‘a nation’s claim to a man depends not upon the locality of his birth, but upon their ability to receive him’ – based on the Playboy riots, the Hugh Lane controversy and Ireland’s continued ignorance of Joyce, Pound summarizes that he ‘simply cannot accept the evidence that [the Irish] have any worth as a nation, or that they have any function in modern civilization’.1 Noting its resonances with the foundational manifestoes of Joyce’s ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, the mid-century literary critic may well have nodded in sage approval of Pound’s implication that there is a profoundly oxymoronic quality to the notion of an Irish modernism – or, indeed, of an Irish modernism. New criticism, which defined modernism in strictly formalist terms, cemented this critical commonplace throughout much of the twentieth century. Over the past three decades, however, the coordinates of modernist studies have been shifted dramatically away from such a delocalized understanding of modernism through a historicist critical drive that conceives of an almost deterministic relationship between literature and the nation state. In their 1995 collection, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis address the ‘insufficient exploration of the fate of modernism in Irish literature after the first modernist generation’ through a sustained focus on the 1930s ‘neo-modernist’ poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and George Reavey. The rationale for expanding the Irish modernist canon to include these figures remains somewhat Poundian in its coordinates, if not necessarily in its tone or spirit, as they are foregrounded as ‘anti-realist and internationalist’ experimenters expressing their ‘dissatisfaction with the narrow, anti-intellectual culture of the new Irish state’ and its ‘nationalist, ruralist and bigoted ideology’.2 Formalizing the Irish modernist critical tradition that had in many ways been initiated by the Lace

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Curtain’s republication of ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ in 1971,3 this reframing of ‘Ireland and modernism’ doubles down on the polemic division between ‘Antiquarians’ and ‘Others’ established in Beckett’s piece, arguing that these second-generation Irish modernists had been de-canonized in favour of the ‘more literalist and self-proclaimed Irishness’ of their contemporaries.4 In certain ways, Coughlan and Davis’s collection marks the culmination of this critical narrative about Irish modernism, as emergent new waves in Irish and modernist studies began to reshape the field. The postmodernist critical wave reclaimed the playfulness of Beckett and Flann O’Brien from what appeared to certain critics to be an elitist, exclusionary and self-serious modernism, and thus provided expanded terms for interrogating this critical concept.5 Emerging alongside the success of postcolonial studies and a renewed historicism, the 1990s saw the significant rise of Irish studies, which historicized and repatriated Joyce and Beckett’s experimental writing from what was seen, broadly speaking, as excessively deracinated paradigms. These studies laboured to overturn Pound’s assertion that Ireland did not ‘produce’ its modernists by establishing the shaping influence on these authors of their sustained, if often contentious, engagements with, and debts to, overlapping debates regarding Irish aesthetics, politics and identities.6 Increasingly, critics perceived modernist qualities in the Revival’s cosmopolitan rejections of realism, materialism and modernity;7 they heard national, even nationalist, notes in Joycean modernism;8 they recovered Beckett’s theatrical debts to the Abbey;9 and they overturned the image of an inward-looking Revival by foregrounding its points of encounter and exchange with European artistic movements. As a result, the mutually exclusive categorization of nationalist, revivalist and modernist thought was problematized, although not overturned. Explicitly or implicitly, this trend was driven by a broader postcolonial critical framework that, in Terry Eagleton’s formulation, drew a more or less direct ‘connection between colonial dissent and modernist achievement’.10 In perhaps the purest refinement of this historicizing and archival tradition, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (2009), Nicholas Allen resituates Joyce, Beckett and Yeats amidst a diversity of republican and Free State discourses, in the process redefining Irish modernism as ‘an improvising set of responses to the present’.11 The parameters of the field that were forged in these decades – historicist, postcolonial and focused predominantly on a narrow canon of ‘men of genius’ with a growing coterie of supporting characters – were significantly complicated and diversified with the advent of the new modernist studies at the turn of the century. With its taste for a ‘discrimination of modernisms’12 – bad modernisms, late modernisms, geomodernisms and so on – and concomitant push from the centre to the margins of the canon, the new modernist turn refocused the critical lens to look for modernist impulses and creative energies in previously neglected genres, forms and sites of publication or expression. In Irish studies, these vertical and horizontal expansions encouraged closer attention to the diversity of Irish modernist bodies, technologies and ecologies, with a particular critical focus on the modernist bona fides of previously marginalized Irish women writers and a metacritical focus on the reasons for their de-canonization in both critical and publishing contexts.13 Casting an eye across this transformed landscape in their field-shaping 2010 collection Irish Modernism: Origins,

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Contexts, Publics, Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe observe that if ‘the incompatibility of modernism and Ireland gradually became a critical staple, juxtaposing an enlightened internationalism with an insular and conservative nationalist culture’, the newmodernist ‘re-evaluation of local, regional and national modernisms’ had revealed ‘not only the importance of modernism to Ireland, but also of Ireland to modernism’.14 By conceptualizing a plurality of modernisms, both the cosmopolitan drives of modernist production and its irreducibly local qualities became palpable in a non-binary relation. We find ourselves in a moment of profound self-reflection in both modernist studies – as reflected in Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism and New Modernisms series – and Irish studies – as demonstrated in Cambridge University Press’s six-volume Irish Literature in Transition critical anthology (2020) and Paige Reynolds’s declaration of a ‘new Irish studies’.15 These developments have been crystallized in a series of major publications that both cement and reflect critically on Irish modernism as it has shifted from an emergent to a dominant branch of Irish studies. The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, edited by Joe Cleary in 2014, announces Irish modernism’s arrival as a canonical critical field even as it acknowledges the significant complications that arise from an undifferentiated and under-theorized definition in delimiting its subject: ‘what exactly would the term “Irish” encompass in an era during which Ireland underwent a radical and continuous process of political and cultural redefinition?’16 Even as this development of the rubric of Irish modernism encourages more fluid, expansive, nonessentialist definitions of Irishness and modernism, we note that this fluidity continues to be anchored to notions of the historical nation state. In an attempt to pull back from Irish modernism’s critical migration from linguistic and formalist analyses to strictly historicist readings, a 2015 special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature attempted to register a finer ‘balance between history and aesthetics’ by foregrounding Irish modernist criticism as still ‘a matter of hearing language with new inflections or seeing reality differently as much as refashioning history’ – albeit, as noted by guest-editor Jean-Michel Rabaté, as ‘represented by three of its most distinguished authors: Yeats, Joyce and Beckett’.17 In a 2018 special number of the Irish Studies Review dedicated to Remapping Irish Modernism, Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth encourage critics to maintain these coordinates as guiding lights but to expand the terrain beyond these three writers, with more capacious definitions of ‘Irishness’ and ‘modernism’ that make room for more diverse geographies, languages, genres and media.18 Two 2019 collections further redirected these new modernist drives to rehabilitate the rubric ‘Irish modernism’ under revisionist and expansive definitions: A History of Irish Modernism, edited by Gergory Castle and Patrick Bixby, addressed radio, art, architecture and ecologies through both new and more familiar coordinates and figures; while Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, further imbricated Revivalist and modernist movements through a focus on their overlapping engagements with media, machinery, body politics and scientific discourse. Taken as a whole, in the broad arc from Pound to these recent collections, the field of Irish modernism has advanced meaningful debates and developed significant methodologies intended to address the field’s critical blind spots and to overturn its own prejudices. The critical narrative of Irish modernism as it has emerged through the conversation between these pioneering works remains tied up

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with the politics, ideologies and ethics of canon formation and narrow definitions of ‘Irishness’ and ‘the nation’, as the debate oscillates between the poles of exclusion and inclusion, the global and the local, coterie taste and mass consumption. With the advent of these companions, histories and studies, then, Irish modernism has reached critical and cultural mass. Emerging from the shadow and success of Yeats studies, Joyce studies and Beckett studies, Irish modernism has become an umbrella term which connects these scholarly fields and prompts a network through which related and other Irish modernists and Irish artists in modernity can be brought into, and affect, modernist discussion. The intersection of Irish studies and the new modernist studies – with its expanded canon, geography and time, and its focus on cultural practice in modernity – remains influential to the articulation and development of the term. As a result, Irish modernism has gained traction as a historicist discourse, inspired by postcolonial criticism and overtly preoccupied with the material conditions of artistic practice. The history of the Irish state has thus become the main methodological tool through which Irish modernist practice is and has been interrogated. It operates both as an origin to Irish modernism – Ireland’s history of decolonization19 – and as a means for measuring its continuation in the present. The experimental literary practice of Eimear McBride and Mike McCormack, for example, has been connected to a longer history of modernist production related to Ireland through the rubric of Irish modernism, thus reinforcing the chronological time of the state as a medium through which the development of literary practice in and related to modernity in Ireland can be categorized and narrated. This expanded timeline, which extends from and reaches far beyond the limited but still operative Yeats-Joyce-Beckett genealogy, points to the critical ideologies of reception which have, broadly speaking, governed the structure of this field. Now that this mode of narrating Irish modernism has become dominant and evident, it also becomes a phenomenon worthy of critical scrutiny, particularly along the lines of canon construction and theoretical rubric. Indeed, we might be reminded of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s response to Fredric Jameson’s injunction to ‘Always historicize’: ‘What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb “always”?’20 Responding to the construction of the field by literary and cultural critics in the twenty-first century, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities asks the following: What is/was Irish modernism? When was Irish modernism? Where was Irish modernism? Whose modernism was it? To raise and interrogate these questions seriously means also to confront some problematic components of the field itself, beyond, and even potentially within, its welcome drives towards representative diversity. For instance, to what extent has ‘modernism’ become a critically colonizing term, that has come to absorb and occlude other fields and adjacent yet distinct aesthetic movements both temporally (expanding its reach ever further forward and backward in time) and culturally (extending its axioms to global cultures and diverse literatures)? Even as the ascription of ‘modernist’ can leverage critical interest in marginalized writers and texts, to what extent does it do so by occluding the non-modernist aspects and currents in such works? Indeed, given its current, seemingly limitless, capacity for extension and incorporation, what significance and critical value does the rubric of Irish modernism maintain beyond

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merely acting as a synonym for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish studies? To put the issue more directly: at what point, and under what circumstances and criteria, would we want to resist applying the term ‘modernism’ to any Irish text from this era? And if we are unsure of the answer, what does this tell us of the utility of modernism as an illuminating descriptive category rather than a signifier of cultural and critical capital in a crowded academic market? Is Irish modernism, then, a literary and cultural phenomenon, or a mode of critical narration? If it is the latter, what are the opportunities, as well as the obstacles, of the uncertainty of the canon and field and their capacity for redefinition? How might the rearticulation of Irish modernism profitably diverge from dominant trends in the new modernist studies, which by valorizing historical context in the study of modern cultural production have at times divested modernism of its aesthetic meaning? Moreover, if Irish modernism is a retroactive delineation in twenty-first-century critical discourse about modernism, how do we resist the idea that the artists who inspired the term were wont to consider themselves as Irish modernists? To address these questions, the essays gathered in the present collection ask how new theoretical frameworks and analytical tools can advance such conversations beyond the binaries of form and history. With a focus on lacunae in both its canon and scholarship, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities opens the field to necessary further reflection by redrawing its borders and diversifying its critical coordinates within the open-ended period of modernism. Our titular terms – gaps, conjectures, possibilities – cater for problematizing certain enduring suppositions in the field, as well as rethinking its boundaries and theoretical potential. Locating gaps in discourse on Irish modernism, the volume introduces authors, texts and intellectual movements to the debate that have been previously overlooked or sidelined – in particular, drawing attention to the too often marginalized importance of women’s writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, as well as exploring the fluid borders between Irish modernism, popular genre fiction, Irish-language and multilingual texts, and diverse transmedial interfaces between visual, literary, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media and platforms. Offering conjectures, it directly challenges the assumptions of national, aesthetic and temporal canon formation in the Irish modernist critical rubric by drawing attention both to what it foregrounds and to what it excludes. Even as they undertake interrelated close readings of marginalized and neglected Irish modernist figures and genres, the collected essays, in concert, reconsider the unspoken, exclusionary hierarchies and biases of this critical terrain and labour to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical grammar that breaks free of the reductive binaries that have long governed debate in this field: local/global, tradition/innovation, margin/ centre. Establishing new possibilities of critical inquiry, the volume rethinks Irish modernism and expands its purview by testing its responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies approaches. Diverse paradigms ranging from biopolitical modernism and posthumanism to weak theory, queer theory, gender and race studies enable the contributors to rethink Irish modernism’s organizing themes (nationalism, martyrdom, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning) through diverse conceptual perspectives.

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Rather than fixing or effacing the limits of Irish modernism, then, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities seeks to render the borders of Irish modernist discourse as multiple, diverse and permeable, as well as constructed and constantly shifting. Irish modernism is thus conceptualized here as a dynamic process, one constituted by exploration – the interrogation of cultural production which always renews the invitation to be thought in different terms – and theorization – the intellectual labour of interrupting and regenerating our conceptual categories to host new knowledge. Even as the conversation around Irish modernism threatens to delimit and categorize these fluid encounters, it also establishes the possibility for newly rethinking, testing and troubling these frames – such is the inspiration for the gaps, conjectures and possibilities proposed in this volume.

Notes 1. Ezra Pound, ‘The Non-Existence of Ireland’, New Age (25 February 1915): 452–3. 2. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, ‘Introduction’, in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 1. 3. Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Lace Curtain 4 (Summer 1971): 58–63. 4. Coughlan and Davis, ‘Introduction’, 7–8. 5. See, for instance, Andrew Kennedy, ‘Beckett and the Modern/Postmodern Debate’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 6 (1997): 255–66; Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995). 6. See, among other examples, John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995); Seán Kennedy, ed., Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 7. See, for example, John Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput, 1991); Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Margaret Kelleher, ‘Introduction’, Irish University Review 33, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2003): viii–ix; Claire Culleton and Maria McGarrity, eds, Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive (London: Palgrave, 2008); Rónán McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51–62. 8. See, for example, Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). 9. See Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 10. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 154. 11. Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. Frank Kermode, Continuities (London: Routledge, 1968), 1–10. 13. Anne Fogarty, ‘Women and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 147–60.

Irish Modernisms in the Plural 14. Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernism’, in Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics, ed. Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 1–2. 15. Paige Reynolds, ed., The New Irish Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 16. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 4. 17. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Irish Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 2 (Winter 2015): v–vi. 18. Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth, ‘Remapping Irish Modernism’, Irish Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2018): 297–303. 19. See, for example, Cleary, ‘Introduction’; and Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, ‘Introduction: From Emergence to Emergency’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 125.

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Part One

Contested canons: Testing the limits of Irish modernism By and large, the Yeats-Joyce-Beckett genealogy of Irish modernism was formed and congealed in mid-twentieth-century anglophone critical works which broadly pursued the Arnoldian imperative that ‘real criticism’ is the attempt to value and ‘to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics and everything of the kind’.1 Akin to the approach of field-shaping modernist critics such as F. R. Leavis, Richard Ellmann and Harold Bloom, Hugh Kenner’s A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers singles out Yeats for his ‘superior mastery’, foregrounds Flann O’Brien as ‘the greatest living virtuoso of the Irish fact’ and elevates Joyce as the English language’s ‘greatest master since Milton’.2 As one front in the broader literary ‘canon wars’, such evaluative determinations based on the criterion of aesthetic merit came under increased scrutiny in the 1980s and 1990s. Important questions thus resounded: who, exactly, gets to determine ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’ and on what terms, privileging whose aesthetic tastes and to what ends? Are the criteria for aesthetic merit ultimately ideological in nature, markers of class that function, in part, to privilege and maintain power hierarchies? Which voices, aesthetics, perspectives and experiences that do not reflect the values of the critical hegemonic taste are excluded from the Irish modernist canon? As the field shifted from evaluative to representative criteria in response to these and other questions concerning canonicity, a critical challenge was mounted to Irish modernism’s narrow focus on male, urban, English-language authors. From the drive ‘to shine a brighter light into the obscure corners of Irish cultural production in the modernist era’,3 the borders of the Irish modernist canon have recently been redrawn to reveal a wealth of artists and works which had previously been exiled to the critical hinterlands due to the underexamined ideological criteria of ‘aesthetic merit’. Clearly, as demonstrated by the Waking the Feminists, Sounding the Feminists and Fired! movements, and the debate over the ‘prosaic lack of women’ in the 2017 Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets,4 with its dispiriting implication that little had changed since the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing debacle in 1985, these questions surrounding canonicity and Irish literature remain to be adequately addressed and redressed. The opportunity exists to forge a more diverse canon across aesthetics, genres, genders, languages, sexualities, races,

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classes, ages and social milieux. The tasks of expanding, diversifying and reorganizing the canon are now vital driving forces for new research and scholarship in the field. Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities advances the horizontal expansion of the field by rethinking the canon of Irish modernism and pushing its boundaries beyond previous articulations. The collection initiates a focused reconsideration of the very question of canonicity relative to Irish modernism through a series of close readings of marginalized writers working in diverse genres, languages and intellectual movements. Across the volume, new critical and theoretical attention is drawn to revolutionary figures from Joseph Plunkett to Roger Casement, queer authors from Eva Gore-Booth to Kate O’Brien, women novelists from Jane Barlow to L. McManus, Ulster writers from Forrest Reid to Brian O’Nolan, illustrators from Harry Clarke to Pamela Colman Smith, popular writers from Seosamh Ó Torna to Liam O’Flaherty, and Irish-language authors from Pádraig Ó Séaghda to Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Working with this diverse range of variously under-analysed and neglected test cases allows contributors to examine with greater precision and metacritical rigour the points of encounter and divergence between the distinct genres, movements and cultural spheres that are increasingly grouped under the rubric of Irish modernism: from the New Woman writers to revivalism, from science fiction to Irish-language and diglossic modes. At the same time, rethinking Irish modernism through the diverse genres and movements of these liminal figures and movements compels us to reconsider the position of the ‘major (Irish) modernists’ – Synge, W. B. and Jack B. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, MacGreevy, Bowen – in this reconstituted canon. As they significantly advance the project of revising the Irish modernist canon and redrawing its borders, the essays gathered here concurrently break new ground by reflecting on the limits of this expansive impulse itself, particularly by theorizing its function and value beyond narrower questions of biography, history and national identity. As necessary as recent correctives have been to normative and exclusionary canonical formations, some feminist cultural historians and literary critics, such as Joanna Scutts and Katie da Cunha Lewin, have begun to ask also whether the rhetoric of the critical ‘rediscovery’ of marginalized writers, voices and views can itself be limiting, as well as liberating. At the metacritical level, a too strong critical narrative of past neglect and current liberation can erase the work of previous generations of scholars. Regarding the authors and texts themselves, Scutts registers her concerns that the current critical drive towards the ‘rediscovery’ of ‘neglected’ women writers might be ‘tethering women too forcefully to their biographies, at the risk of diminishing their artistic achievements’ while ‘limiting our recovery efforts to the women who fit a certain outlook, a certain style, a certain politics’, even potentially doubling down on ‘the power structures at work in the literary world’5 in the process. Lewin suggests that even as we continue to recover the very real and enduring ways in which de-canonized writers ‘living under heteropatriarchy were subject to misogyny, racism and homophobia’, we need to further theorize how, by ‘always relegating work by women to the forgotten zone, we risk only understanding them in this way’.6 At stake is not only the Sedgwickian debate between ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ modes of reading,7 or, indeed, the reductive dualism of ‘normative’ and ‘activist’ critical engagement, but the need for a theoretical grammar more finely attuned to significant, if challenging, ethical, methodological and

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theoretical questions about the core axioms and assumptions of Irish modernist canon expansion, as well as its continued unexamined biases. Part One pushes new ground on these debates by addressing gaps in previous formations through the test cases of Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton and Rhoda Coghill. Rather than raising the names of these marginalized, liminal figures only as signifiers of a narrative of critical neglect and rediscovery, the essays that open the collection undertake close, theoretically and metacritically reflective readings of the implications for these authors – and for the rubric of Irish modernism itself – regarding their incorporation into the canon, as well as the stakes of allowing them to maintain a liminal, partial, adjacent Irish modernist status. At the same time, the test cases of the more familiar names of Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and Máirtín Ó Cadhain allow the contributors to re-examine the theoretical limits of the canon in terms of recent developments in the fields of nonhuman studies and Irish-language modernism. The section’s re-evaluation of the porous and movable limits of the Irish modernist canon along a number of interrelated axes also draws attention to the peculiarities of Irish modernist temporalities. J. C. C. Mays, as Anne Fogarty notes, ‘has postulated that modernism in Ireland is a broken formation, at once proleptic and belated’: arriving prematurely amid the ‘social and political upheavals of post-Famine Ireland’ and making its ‘presence felt post hoc’ in the late modernist period from the 1930s to the 1970s.8 By exploring works at, and beyond, the standard temporal limits of modernism as ‘breaking points, points of nonsynchronism’9 in the broad critical narrative of Irish modernism, and by acknowledging the diverse sites of modernist production and their impact on the critical assimilation of this work, these five chapters mark the resituation of Irish modernist studies. John Brannigan, author of Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture,10 opens the collection by exploring the work of Hannah Berman as an Irish Jewish writer whose major publications coincided with the rise to prominence of James Joyce. Brannigan considers Berman’s work in the context of debates about ‘Ethnic modernism’, ‘Jewish modernism’ and recent investigations into Irish Jewish writing to foreground the still under-analysed constructions of ethnicity, race and cultural nationalism in the early twentieth century that worked to shape Irish modernism into culturally dominant forms. By asking ‘Is there a home for the work of Hannah Berman in Irish modernism?’, this chapter mounts a meaningful challenge to the spatio-temporal focus of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism and Remapping Irish Modernism, inquiring not only where and when Irish modernism occurred but also ‘whose modernism is it?’ Elke D’hoker, co-editor of the pioneering collection Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives and author of Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story,11 interrogates the test case of the now largely forgotten author Ethel Colburn Mayne within and against the canon of Irish modernism. As examples of the birth of the modernist short story in the variegated literary and aesthetic movements of the fin de siècle, Mayne’s collections offer complex and sensitive treatments of the gender norms that shape identity, individual creativity and social relations in the transition from New Woman to modernist paradigms. Concurrently, D’hoker argues, the difficulty of assimilating Mayne’s national, literary and temporal hybridity to a single

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literary tradition offers a productive challenge to the very conceptualization of Irish modernism. For even if the honorific of ‘Irish modernist’ can rescue Mayne from critical oblivion in the current academic market, we must be wary of reflexively subsuming the distinct strands of her art – aestheticism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, New Woman writing – into an undifferentiated and indiscriminately expanding Irish modernist canon. Lucy Collins intervenes into current debates about the place of the woman poet within received understandings of Irish modernism and the Irish literary tradition through a thematic focus on melancholy and mourning in Mary Devenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton and Rhoda Coghill. Building on her field-defining work in Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 and Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement,12 Collins here shows how these latemodernist Irish women poets of the 1930s–50s craft complementary and contrary poetic images of the relationship between the speaking subject and her environment. By these means, they show themselves to be aware of the fragility of their own literary status and of the aesthetic preconceptions that governed the reception of their work. Their lives and texts reveal the complex relationship between critical orthodoxy and singular creativity, and the impact of this relationship on the place of their work within Irish literary tradition. Maureen O’Connor’s chapter picks up the thread of Collins’s ecocritical reading to interrogate the limits of death, the human and ‘the metaphysics of finitude’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction. Drawing on nonhuman studies, new materialism and critical posthumanism – theoretical paradigms rarely applied to the field of Irish modernism – and her own pioneering work in The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing,13 O’Connor traces the interrelated significance of Bowen’s preoccupation with the trope of haunting and her animist attention to the life of things. Pressingly, O’Connor challenges us to consider the limitations of the anthropocentric focus of received accounts of Irish modernism – with their postcolonial focus on questions of uneven development structured by the metanarrative of the nation state – and the opportunities of rethinking Irish modernism beyond humanist discourses. Finally, Eoin Byrne’s chapter examines Irish modernism’s multilingual history as a fruitful site for probing the very contours and boundaries of literary modernism, particularly as we witness the ‘vertical expansion’ of the new modernist studies. Too often, perhaps, Irish modernism’s status as a multilingual phenomenon is underplayed: Wilde, Synge, Devlin and Beckett reading, composing and translating in English and French; Joyce writing in English, lecturing in Italian and collaborating on the French translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ (never mind the polyglot languages of Finnegans Wake); Liam O’Flaherty, Brendan Behan and Brian O’Nolan writing in English and Irish, with the latter’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns incorporating French, Latin, German, Japanese, among other languages. The power dynamics of major and minoritized literatures animate Irish modernist expression, Byrne contends, as modernism’s scepticism regarding the signifier is accentuated in the case of Ireland, with debates over suitable languages and forms stemming back to the foundation of a modern national literature. By reading Beckett’s French-language nouvelle ‘La Fin’ contrapuntally with Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language short story ‘Fuíoll Fuine’,

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Byrne identifies a distinctive brand of late modernist Irish literature, one that is as much in thrall to wider transnational paradigms as it is a cultural response to the early decades of independence in Ireland. In the conversation staged between these five chapters, the interrogation of canonicity serves not simply to relocate the borders of Irish modernism but rather to test, to complicate and to multiply the limits of the canon itself.

Notes 1. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1865), 17. 2. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 8, 10, 54 (citing T. S. Eliot). 3. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, ‘Introduction: Irish Modernism, from Emergence to Emergency’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1. 4. Mary O’Donnell, ‘A Prosaic Lack of Women in the Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets’, Irish Times (8 January 2018); see also Sinéad Gleeson, ‘A Profound Deafness to the Female Voice’, Irish Times (28 April 2018); and Christine Murray, ‘Tackling the Catastrophic Canonical Neglect of Irish Women Poets and Writers’, Irish Times (27 September 2019). 5. Joanna Scutts, ‘Joanna Scutts on How We Find – and Lose – Women Writers’, Literary Hub (13 May 2019). 6. Katie da Cunha Lewin, ‘The Politics of Rediscovery’, Los Angeles Review of Books (17 August 2020). 7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 144. 8. Anne Fogarty, ‘Women and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 148, citing J. C. C. Mays, ‘Introduction’, in James Joyce, Poems and Exiles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), xvii–xlvii. 9. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 173. 10. John Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 11. Elke D’hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien and Hedwig Schwall, eds, Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives, (Oxford: Lang, 2011); Elke D’hoker, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 12. Lucy Collins, ed., Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 13. Maureen O’Connor, The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).

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Explaining ourselves: Hannah Berman, Jewish nationalism and Irish modernism John Brannigan

Recent debates about Irish modernism have tended to focus on an enhanced spatial sense of what constitutes its expanding corpus. In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, a benchmark in itself of the institutionalization of a scholarly field, Joe Cleary favours ‘the more capacious conceptions’ of Irish modernism, as ‘it was from the outset a decidedly transnational phenomenon’.1 This was evidently true of the canonical triumvirate of Irish modernist studies – Yeats, Joyce and Beckett – but the Companion also stakes this claim on the basis that much of what had appeared insular about the Irish Revival was a vernacular rendering of modernism as a global cultural phenomenon. As Michael Valdez Moses argues in the collection’s final essay, ‘the divide between nativists and cosmopolitans in early-twentieth-century Ireland was often more rhetorical and symbolic than substantive’.2 Through the spatial lens of the new modernist studies, Moses shows that even D. P. Moran’s ‘Irish Ireland’ philosophy proves to have cosmopolitan bearings. The spatial turn is foregrounded more explicitly in a special issue of the Irish Studies Review devoted to ‘Remapping Irish Modernism’, in which Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth describe an Irish modernism still readable ‘in terms of size, scale, distance, terrain and perspective’ in relation to the ‘cardinal points’ of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, but which needs to be remapped to account for a more expansive cultural landscape: ‘The modernist note is sounded in Doolin as well as Dublin, Portlaoise as well as Paris; we should learn to listen to it.’3 Critical work to open out the terrain of Irish modernism has responded diligently to the new modernist question ‘where was modernism?’ – a successor to Raymond Williams’s equally productive question of ‘when was modernism?’ Yet, the where of Irish modernism perhaps too often evades an equally pertinent question posed more recently by Sara Blair, namely ‘whose modernism is it?’4 Blair asks this question of a complicated, entangled history of the almost invisible role of Yiddish culture in the formation of American modernism. To ask, ‘whose modernism?’ in the context of Irish modernism might seem already familiar. After all, the current discourse of Irish modernism has largely been sparked by an extensive critical process of reclaiming Yeats, Joyce and Beckett from their tacit assimilation into narratives of British, European or international modernism. In one sense, ‘Irish

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modernism’ is a proprietorial response to the question ‘whose modernism?’ However, the act of claiming the ‘Irish’ in Irish modernism raises difficult questions about the extent to which, in the process, other modernisms, or the modernisms of others, are occluded. Finding a home for occluded migrant authors in the expanding house of Irish modernism may be a magnanimous gesture, but it risks continuing a troubling legacy of appropriation. This is a particular danger in the case of Jewish artists and authors, for whom, as Hannah Arendt observes, exploitation or oblivion were the alternate fates of those recognized or unrecognized within a ‘host’ tradition.5 This essay examines the work of Hannah Berman as a distinctive exemplar of intersecting modernisms, as an Irish Jewish writer whose major publications coincided with the rise to prominence of Joyce and Irish modernism, but whose significance lies in her inventions of a Yiddish folk tradition in English. Berman was a prolific short story writer and translator and the author of three novels. Moreover, she was an influential cultural mediator between the Yiddish cultural movement and English-language modernism and between Jewish nationalism as a cultural and political movement and the Irish Revival. Yet, her achievements have largely been neglected due to the methodological limitations of scholarly disciplines attached too closely to metropolitan and nationalist models of cultural territoriality. As Natalie Wynn has argued, Irish Jews seem to be consistently overlooked in ‘the bigger tapestry of Jewish culture and history’, too small a community to be seen as culturally or politically significant.6 Berman’s fictions were almost exclusively about Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement’, and perhaps as a result, her work has not figured at all in histories of Irish cultural production of the early twentieth century.7 Unaccountably, however, her work has also not featured in the emergent field of Irish Jewish Studies: neither Abby Bender nor George Bornstein’s recent books on early-twentieth-century Irish-Jewish literary interrelations even reference Berman’s existence, for example.8 This fate is particularly unfortunate given that Berman strived to mediate between the intersecting cultures of Jew and Gentile, Yiddish and English, Jewish and Irish nationalism, migrant and host, tradition and modernity. Yet, it is her complex negotiation of a space for Yiddish cultural nationalism within the emergent forms of Irish, Jewish and AngloAmerican modernisms which this essay argues is deserving of contemporary critical attention when we address the question of ‘whose modernism is it?’

The life of an Irish Jewish writer Hannah Berman was born in Veckshni (Viekšniai) in Lithuania in 1885, the third child of Levi and Ethel Berman.9 The Bermans emigrated in the early 1890s, in common with many Lithuanian Jews, fleeing from poverty and persecution.10 Levi Berman came first to Dublin alone, but within eighteen months, after starting business as a pedlar of drapery and footwear in Limerick and Athlone, he was able to bring his wife and children from Lithuania to join him.11 Hannah Berman describes the route as served by a ‘filthy cattle-boat that sailed from Bremen with an ever-growing complement of emigrant Jews’.12 From Bremen, the boat sailed to Hull, and from there, the Bermans made their way to Dublin. In a typical case of chain migration, the Bermans chose

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Dublin as Ethel’s sister and brother-in-law had already moved there and had had some success in establishing a prosperous business.13 The extent of Berman’s education is unclear. She attended a national school in Dolphin’s Barn, and ‘after that she was self-taught’, according to anecdotal family history.14 Her father acquired very little English, and she recorded some of his ingenious ways of communicating the requirements of his business without it.15 However, by the age of fifteen, Berman was showing signs of her literary talent, winning the Hampstead Foundation Prize for an essay she wrote entitled ‘The Temple’.16 In the 1901 census, the Berman family was listed as resident in Dufferin Avenue, Dublin, a relatively comfortable middle-class street, and employing one domestic servant. Berman, aged sixteen, is described as a ‘scholar’. As a young woman, she began to participate in Zionist cultural and political organizations in Dublin, including the Jewish Ladies’ Society and the Daughters of Zion Association.17 She began to publish articles, stories and translations in international Jewish newspapers and magazines, including the Jewish Chronicle (London), The Sentinel (Chicago), the Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), the Jewish World (London), The Maccabaean (New York) and extensively in the Reform Advocate (Chicago). By 1911, Berman had secured sole rights to translate the work of leading Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) into English, and it is for her translations of Stempenyu (1913) and Jewish Children (1920) that she became most widely known.18 In the 1911 census, aged twenty-six, she still resided with her parents and younger siblings, although in a less prosperous address in Arnott Street, and with no domestic servant. The street was home to other Jewish families, including another Irish Jewish writer, Joseph Edelstein, author of The Moneylender, who also lived with his parents and siblings. Berman’s occupation is listed as ‘Journalist, Fiction’. Between May and November 1911, she published her first novel, The History of Joseph Sackenovitz, in serial form in the Reform Advocate.19 This was followed in 1913 by her novel Melutovna, published as a book in London by Chapman and Hall. Around this time, Berman began to engage more closely with the Irish literary Revival. She read two of her short stories, ‘My Guest’ and ‘Breneille’s Little Love Affairs’, at a meeting of the National Literary Society in February 1913, alongside Katharine Tynan and Rutherford Mayne.20 Berman published a short story in the Irish Review in 1912, and a translation from Aleichem the following year.21 Berman was already familiar to Jewish communities in England before she moved permanently to London in November 1914, perhaps in the expectation of developing her literary career.22 She had given lectures to Zionist association meetings in London, Manchester and Liverpool several years before. In London, she established herself among a group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists, including Joseph Leftwich, Lazarus Aaronson, Jacob Epstein and John Rodker, and was a founder member of the Jewish Association of Arts and Sciences (JAAS) in 1915. To many in this group, she is described as ‘a sort of mentor’, having established her reputation with Melutovna and her translations of Aleichem.23 Berman served in various administrative roles in the JAAS, as secretary and vice president, for example, but she also ran the literature section, which met on a weekly basis to criticize and nurture original works by the rising generation of Jewish writers.24 Her connections with Ireland did not end: she published

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three short stories in Seamus O’Sullivan’s Dublin Magazine in 1923–4. However, her work henceforth was mainly centred on London, where her stories and translations were published in two significant modernist magazines, the English Review (1918, 1919) and Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review (1924). She published her third and final novel, Ant Hills, with Faber and Gwyer in 1926. Berman visited Palestine in the late 1920s and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1934, specifically to see the Lithuanian lands of her childhood and her ancestors.25 The Soviet Union then supported Yiddish as a proletarian language, although this would end before the Second World War.26 Berman appears to have become less active as a writer thereafter, although she continued to give talks on Yiddish literature to Jewish women’s and workers’ groups throughout the 1930s, almost disappearing from view by the 1940s. Berman died on 20 February 1955, at her home in London. In his obituary, Joseph Leftwich remarks that Berman had for some years lived completely withdrawn due to illness.27 Her final publication appeared shortly after her death, an English translation of I. A. Lisky’s The Cockerel in the Basket. Berman’s ambition, Leftwich claimed, had been to create Yiddish folk-writing in English, an ambition which she clearly understood within a broader framework of Jewish nationalism.

From the shtetl to the city: The politics of cultural translation All three of Berman’s novels, most of her short stories and much of the work she translated into English are set in the same historical and mythological space of the Jewish shtetl in Lithuanian Russia. The significance of this setting is clear from the first page of The History of Joseph Sackenovitz: It rarely happened that anyone in the village of Trepofky, whether he was a free Jew or a Gentile bound for life, took the responsibility of the initiative upon himself. No one ever dreamt of defying the public opinion which held sway over everyone alike. One generation after another was perfectly satisfied that there was only one mode of living – the mode they followed, the mode that their forefathers had followed before them. Their habits, manners and ways of thinking had remained practically unchanged for hundreds of years. While the rest of Europe made haste to cover itself with the cloak of modernity, the villages within the Russian pale of settlement held onto the old fashions – the fashions which had been for the most part imposed on them by the great Catherine when she conceived the idea of cooping the Jews up in a tiny corner of her empire late in the eighteenth century.28

As Irving Howe argues, the shtetl occupied a key place in the literary imagination of Ashkenazi Jews.29 It was based upon the small towns into which the Jewish communities of Lithuanian Russia had been increasingly compelled to live in the nineteenth century, with their seemingly timeless conditions of poverty, precarity and persecution, but which were also heavily mythologized through Yiddish folk writing and culture as highly formalized, static and outside of history. For a novelist, the shtetl provided a

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knowable community rooted in a deep unchanging past, ripe territory for the stock-intrade conflicts between individual and society, tradition and modernity, which defined the novel as a genre. Yet, forby the formal suitability of the shtetl as a fictional setting, Berman’s work is invested in its ideological significance for the Ashkenazi migrant communities. For Jordan Finkin, the shtetl has a crucial place in twentieth-century Jewish political ideologies as ‘a central site of modern Jewish spatial thinking, the object of longing and loathing, revelry and revilement, revelation and renunciation’.30 The shtetl as an idea, as a myth, is invariably the product of the migrant imagination. The Yiddish pioneers of shtetl writing – Aleichem, Sholem Abramovitsh, Isaac Leib Peretz – had all migrated to cities and were influenced by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. Berman’s intervention in the shtetl genre could hardly have been more marked by its modernity. Written in Dublin in the English language, her first novel was serialized in a Chicago magazine, interspersed with advertisements for hosiery, insurance and stationery. While she begins by placing her reader in the very shtetl setting which embodies ‘a conscious sense of being at a distance from history’,31 she insists upon historicizing it, revealing the ‘old fashions’ which define the shtetl as themselves imposed historically. As Dan Miron argues, the realist conventions employed by shtetl writers led critics to read their fictions as direct, mimetic presentations of premodern Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, yet like the realist authors to whom they have been compared – Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens – their work is evidently a great deal more selective and artful than this naïve method of reading implies. As a pioneer of writing and translating shtetl works into English, it is important to recognize Berman as belonging to, if not inaugurating, the turn to what Jeffrey Shandler calls the ‘postvernacular’ phase of the Yiddish conceptualization of the shtetl, not as an idea corresponding to a lived reality but ‘as a subject of discourse and cultural creativity’.32 So too, as Thomas Ferraro has argued of realism in the work of American ‘ethnic’ writers of the early twentieth century, there is a compelling case for seeing such work as modernist not in its formal qualities but in its complex negotiation of ethnicity, dislocation and modernity.33 To read the shtetl in Berman’s work as a discursive phenomenon is to attend to its symbolic and metaphorical functions. Although often apparently rooted in folk narratives and historical realism, Berman’s writing frequently draws upon symbolism. This is particularly evident in her short stories, in which figures such as horses, butterflies, weeds and rust are used to explore shtetl ideologies and social structures.34 In Melutovna, the shtetl is the subject neither of nostalgia nor of historical realism but a symbolic setting for conflict between the modernizing merchant, Simson, and the conservative orthodoxy of Jeremiah, who risks exposing the town to Russian persecution rather than tolerating Simson to deviate from ‘the traditions their fathers had handed down to them’.35 The central protagonist, Zelda, Simson’s second wife, has come from a Jewish family who live in isolation deep in the woods and is subject to the whims and scant mercies of the Russian landlord. This background enables Zelda to fulfil a key narrative function of having the social and cultural patterns of the Jewish community in Melutovna explained to her. In common with Aleichem and Abramovitsh, Berman constructs the shtetl of Melutovna as an almost exclusively Jewish town, in which relations with non-Jews are few and almost always pose a threat

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to the community. This ‘Judaization’ of the shtetl (a more heterogeneous community in actuality) might be regarded, as Miron suggests, as an instance of ‘Jewish chauvinism’,36 but instead it indicates the ideological function of the shtetl in migrant communities in debates about the nature and politics of Jewish nationalism. The idea of the shtetl as a specifically Jewish community enables Berman to place her readers at the heart of a fictional exploration of the contested and ambivalent space of Jewish futurity. In the course of the narrative, Melutovna ranges across several possibilities: Jeremiah poses the vision of a hermetically sealed orthodoxy ruled strictly in accordance with the laws of the Talmud; Simson offers the secular prospect of obtaining through wealth the ability to raise up the Jewish community from their servitude and is heralded as ‘the promoter of new industries, and the benefactor of the whole district’;37 the novel also envisions the darker portent of pogroms and persecution of the Jews as a result of a cholera epidemic for which they are blamed by the Christian peasants. Along the way, Melutovna introduces characters whose symbolic function is to raise questions about memory and forgetting, devotion and secularization, fate and agency, exile and annihilation. For Berman, the shtetl scenes to which she constantly returns are likely to have been deeply ambivalent personally. Were those scenes from her childhood symbolic of a lost home, representing a unity and tradition difficult to recreate in the alien and relatively cosmopolitan environment of Dublin? Or were they instead a negated space, what Finkin describes as ‘a reality to be denied on the road to an ostensibly worthier homeland’?38 Berman was heavily committed to political and cultural organizations for promoting Jewish nationalism and Yiddish culture, and these questions are deeply political as well as personal. For Miron, the ‘classical literary image of the shtetl’ may be a deeply affective terrain, but it is importantly always a displaced, symbolic image of Jewish community: ‘a tiny exiled Jerusalem … the Jewish polity par excellence’.39 In Ant Hills, Berman shows this microcosmic Jewish polity and its internal struggles between religious conservatism and progressive materialism, orthodoxy and assimilation. The Bildungsroman begins with the protagonist, Kopel, being scolded by his father for enjoying the sounds of birdsong in the fields: ‘all of the pleasures of this world are made to ensnare the soul’.40 In his youth, however, Kopel’s imagination of a better world is inspired by the ‘modernists’ of the village, who believe that the Jewish people should embrace the search for wealth, knowledge of mathematics, geography and literature, as well as ‘modern’ languages such as Russian and German. To gain their admiration, he writes a ‘little song’, a simple Romantic expression of yearning for a symbolic spring when ‘on us poor Jews the pleasant sun/ Will shine in streams of light.’41 For writing this song, Kopel and his family are denounced as ‘epicureans’ by the village elders, and Kopel is ostracized. The novel concludes with a bitter scene in which Kopel, having moved to another village and married the granddaughter of a seemingly wise and benevolent elder, is again denounced as an ‘epicurean’ for daring to aspire to a better life and is forced to divorce his wife and leave the village. Set in the 1830s in the same Lithuanian Jewish setting as her previous novels, Ant Hills is nevertheless a fictional exploration of early-twentieth-century debates within Jewish nationalism about the future of the Jewish polity.

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As Shandler contends, ‘the shtetl is Zionism’s anti-home; in conjurings of Yiddishland, it is the Ur-home’.42 Berman’s writings capture exactly this ambivalence in shtetl discourse, which is itself the ambivalence within modernism, between the desire for the new which is at the same time a return to the past, a messianic new Jerusalem which differs not at all from the old Jerusalem as it has been preserved by the faithful through the ages. Kopel’s mother professes, ‘The whole life of the Jew is, alas, nothing but an anticipation of the to-morrow’,43 yet that tomorrow cannot deviate from the traditions which are fiercely protected by the community from the threat of change. Kopel’s final banishment comes after he has expressed his desire to live not for tomorrow but for today.44 Yet, Berman is not simply embracing this same modernity (by writing in English, in the novel genre) and critiquing the conservative ideologies of Ashkenazi communities. Rather, her fiction explores what Scott Spector calls the ‘antinomies’ at the heart of both Jewish modernism and Zionism: ‘the paradoxes of tradition and innovation, the destiny of essential character and the promise of a radical break from it, discomfort with a “present” modernity above all’.45 Berman historicizes these antinomies to understand them as products of the intensely precarious conditions under which the Lithuanian Jewish communities lived and from which they were increasingly forced to flee. In her work as a translator, Berman can be understood as caught within this paradox of Jewish modernism herself. She was Aleichem’s first English translator and chosen by him to be his ‘authorized’ translator across the English-speaking world. As such, she was a pioneer in bringing Yiddish literature and culture into the English language. Vernacular literature in Yiddish was itself relatively new, especially fictional writing, so Berman was translating a modern development in Yiddish, not a tradition or canon. Yet, the writers she translated were shtetl writers, and her translations served to connect those Jewish migrant communities who did not speak or read Yiddish with the idea of a tradition and culture from which they felt lamentably cut off. As Olga Litvak argues, ‘every new translation from the Yiddish opens Sholem Aleichem’s work to a new audience even as it registers the tragic diminution of Jewish culture’.46 Litvak makes this observation of post-war translations of Aleichem, but it is equally the case for the readers of Berman’s translations in the early twentieth century. There is a significant burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the translator when it comes to Aleichem and other shtetl writers, for one is not translating just the work of one author for readers in another language but attempting to transmit and renew what is perceived to be the inherited culture of a people from one generation to another, connecting the past, present and future of Jewish culture across a linguistic, historical and geographical divide. Creating a home for the Jewish people, Berman understood, was as much about finding a home in other languages as other places.

‘so many misapprehensions’: Translating Yiddish in Ireland Perhaps there is much to be made of Berman’s experiences as a writer and translator by way of analogy with Irish Revival writers, who were just as preoccupied with the

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transition from rural to urban social structures, the task of embodying folk traditions in modern literary forms and the politics of translating the distinctive idioms of a minor and endangered language into English. So, too, the global patterns of Berman’s publications, which followed the diasporic routes of the Ashkenazi peoples to the UK, the United States, South Africa and Australia, might be compared to the publication networks of the Irish diaspora. The analogy did not escape Berman’s attention. It is clear from an interview that she gave in 1914 to the Jewish Chronicle that she saw the Irish Revival as an analogous enterprise to her own endeavours to promote Yiddish literature and culture, and as an inspiration for what Yiddish may achieve translated into other European languages: Look at the great part which the Irish school of dramatists are playing in the dramatic world to-day. Yiddish drama and fiction have a wider soil to flourish in and have taken deeper roots than the English-Irish drama of to-day. Why, then, should I not expect still greater things from them?47

It is already implicit in this comment, however, that the grounds for comparison between Yiddish and Irish revivals are in no sense an indication of commonality or common cause. They have different roots and flourish in different soil. The horticultural metaphors hint at a racial understanding of cultural difference, even though Berman and the most prominent Irish Revivalists were working in the same language. When Berman published her short story ‘Nothing – and Nothing’ in the Irish Review in 1912, her accompanying note puts the relationship between Jewish and Irish cultures in equally estranged terms: I do not know if any Irish Magazine has ever printed a Jewish story by an Irish Jewish writer. We Jews have never yet explained ourselves to our hosts; and so many misapprehensions have arisen from time to time. If I can succeed in clearing away the least of them I shall feel more than satisfied.48

The text itself is perhaps an odd choice to explain Jewish culture to Irish readers. ‘Nothing – And Nothing’ is the story of an old woman in a Lithuanian village weary of the monotonous and empty existence she shares with her husband. It is implied that her repetitive pronouncement that her childlessness and loneliness are ‘really, nothing – and nothing’ conceals a more profound sense of emotional despair. Read as an attempt to ‘explain’ Jewish culture to ‘our hosts’, the story might be understood as an illustration of the stoical character of the Lithuanian Jewish people or as an insight into emotional repression. However, Berman’s comment has wider significance for how we might view her role as a writer, mediating between cultures and mitigating ‘misapprehensions’. In her own unpublished memoir of the Irish experiences of her family, ‘Berman Story’, Berman clearly took some delight in the stories she knew from her father of his arrival in Ireland and his attempts to earn a living as a pedlar in Irish towns and villages. It is a story replete with misapprehension. Levi Berman was frequently mistaken for an Irishman, as he had flaming red hair. If it became clear that he did

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not speak English and was a foreigner, he was sometimes understood to be Italian. On one occasion, Berman recalls, he was mistakenly arrested by the police when he was standing watching a hayrick which had been set ablaze by Land Leaguers. When the police questioned him and got no response – he did not understand a word they said – they assumed from his red hair that he was an Irishman and was being belligerent. When they eventually realized that he was a foreigner, he was released, and, Berman says, the police were always friendly to him in that area thereafter.49 This, she writes, was a surprise to him, as he was more familiar with the brutality and corruption of the Russian police in Lithuania. However, there is a story Berman does not tell of her father’s experiences with the police in Ireland. It is possible that she was unaware of it, although she may also have been eager to present a cordial account of Irish-Jewish relations. In March 1895, a police constable arrested Levi in Bessborough Avenue, Dublin, for using profane language.50 Levi believed that he was being arrested for pedlaring and objected as he had a licence.51 The constable then assaulted Levi and hauled him violently through the streets to the police station. At some point on the way, the constable brutally beat Levi over the head with his own walking stick, causing Levi to bleed profusely from the wound. On seeing the arrest, a bystander asked what the man’s occupation was, to which the constable answered that he was a Jew. Two Jewish men who tried to intervene on Levi’s behalf were also arrested. Levi was fined by the police for using profane language, but the case became newsworthy when he and the two other Jewish men took a cross-summons against the constable for assault and wrongful arrest. The constable was eventually found guilty of illegally arresting and assaulting Levi and fined for his conduct and for perjuring himself in court.52 The courts may have corrected the injustice done to Berman’s father, but the violent antisemitism he experienced at the hands of a Dublin policeman must have struck him as uncomfortably reminiscent of the Russian Pale. Was this then the kind of ‘misapprehension’ which Berman sought to clarify in her fictional writings and in her engagement with Irish readers and audiences? If she knew of this story, it is intriguing that in her memoir she chose to tell the story of how Levi was mistakenly arrested as a Land Leaguer and not of how he was beaten and arrested as a Jew. Berman’s writings in Irish magazines can be read productively as a critical intervention in early-twentieth-century literary and political debates about the analogies between Irish and Jewish experiences.53 It is significant in this regard that one of the stories in the Dublin Magazine in 1923, ‘The Charity Box’, is one of the few she published which focuses not on the intimacies of Yiddish folk culture but on the nature of antisemitism. In ‘The Charity Box’, Berman’s narrator is an antisemitic, misogynist refugee, fleeing from war aboard a train packed full of Jews who have been driven out of their villages. The conditions on board are unbearable: ‘The air was thick with the stench of hundreds of people lying on top of one another – sighing, groaning, wailing, cursing and praying.’54 It is an image which might be read as horribly prescient of the Holocaust, perhaps made more so by the accompanying illustration by Irish Jewish artist Harry Kernoff of emaciated, skeletal bodies packed together in the darkness of a goods wagon. This was not prescience on Berman’s part, but a fictional representation of the conditions of oppression and displacement in which the Russian Jews had lived

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for decades. The story centres on an old Jewish man who tells the narrator about having to leave his village after he had attempted to steal from a charity box to buy food for his starving wife and children. Yet rather than showing pity or compassion, the narrator turns in disgust from this ‘strange jew, who was, after all, only a tearful old woman’.55 The history of antisemitism in Russia was not unknown in Ireland in the early twentieth century, of course, and persecution of the Jews in the Russian Pale was frequently reported in Irish newspapers. It was the famous Land Leaguer himself, Michael Davitt, who wrote the most detailed English-language account of the persecution of the Jews in Russia in his 1903 book Within the Pale. Davitt advocated strongly for civic equality, freedom of movement and elementary education for the Jewish population – these were the only means by which he could see Russian Jews being assimilated.56 The Russian state’s solution, he observed, appeared to prefer extermination or emigration. He did not believe that equality, freedom and educational provision were likely to occur under the tsarist system. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his own nationalist convictions, Davitt emerged from his journeys through the ‘economic concentration camp’ in which Jews were confined in the Pale an ardent believer in Zionism.57 For Davitt, a fundamental and disturbing problem in the relations between Russia and its Jewish minority was the persistent superstition that Jewish people committed the ritual murder of Christian children. No amount of rational argument appeared to displace such myths, and Davitt called upon the Tsar, the Pope and the Austrian Emperor to publicly denounce what he called this ‘murdermaking legend’.58 In Melutovna, when the Jewish community is threatened with an angry mob of Christian peasants who blame the Jews for poisoning the wells and spreading sickness and death, Zelda seeks out the local Christian priest to persuade him to denounce this belief. He refuses, perversely deciding that her appeal for his help is proof of the guilt of the Jews, who harbour the dark secret of ritual murder: ‘You can hide nothing from us, though you talk in an accursed lingo that only the devil himself can understand.’59 If Berman’s villains sometimes veer towards the pantomimic, they nonetheless reveal that her fictions are engaged in deeply political questions about the nature of antisemitism and its historical and cultural consequences for the relationship between Jewish communities and their ‘hosts’.

Conclusion: Whose modernism? Finkin argues that ‘one of the pivotal ideological debates among Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth century involved how to formulate the connection between Jewish communities and the lands they inhabited’.60 An important corollary of this argument is that Jewish modernism, in common with other ‘ethnic modernisms’, cannot be isolated as taking place outside of, or autonomously from, the cultural discourses of the ‘lands they inhabited’.61 Irish modernism also emerged out of debates about the relationship between ethnicities, communities and the territories they inhabit. The degree to which Jewishness and Irishness could inhabit the same space was, of course, a key theme in Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as in John MacDonagh’s The Irish Jew.

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In the Jewish Chronicle interview, conducted in Dublin shortly after the publication of Melutovna, Berman’s Yiddish is described as being ‘as fluent and as free from bookishness as is the English which she knows how to use to good effect. But it sounded strange to hear Yiddish spoken with a soft Irish brogue.’62 Berman attributes the success of her fictions to the characters she got ‘direct from life’ and ‘drawn from local people’ in Dublin.63 Asked about her education, she replies that it was ‘acquired while tramping the country roads’, accompanying her father on his travels around Ireland as a drapery salesman.64 Of course, these statements should be understood in the context of a rare interview, published in the Jewish Chronicle, which was widely read by Jewish communities around Britain and Ireland; they are perhaps reflective of a strategy on the part of a young female Irish Jewish writer to deflect attention away from her own achievements and ingenuity as an author. However, they serve to remind us that Berman’s fictions, although invariably focused on the Jewish shtetl communities of West Russia, were intimately drawn from her experiences of living in Ireland and later in England. Is there a home for the work of Hannah Berman in Irish modernism? Is the work of Hannah Berman at home in Irish modernism? These are not just questions of how capacious we can make Irish modernism, or how transnational we can extend its scope (as if it were simply a question of the generosity of the host). Berman’s IrishLithuanian-Jewish-Yiddish-English modernist-realist-folk writing poses challenging questions about the capacity of any conception of culture based on territorial, ethnic or national formulations to explain or encapsulate the heterogeneity and ambivalence of her work. Perhaps, as Werner Sollors argues of ethnic writers in America, modernism provided a home where the host nation did not do so unambiguously.65 In any case, the intersecting modernisms at work in Berman’s writing raise the very question of what constitutes a home, whether it is in the imagined past of the shtetl, the alienated present of the migrant or the illusory tomorrow of religious and political discourses. This question has a bearing on the muted concepts of ethnicity and territoriality within Irish modernism, even if Berman’s work was never intended to find a home there, for, as Theodor W. Adorno argued of the exiled of modernity, ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’.66

Notes 1. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4. 2. Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Irish Modernist Imaginaries’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 209. 3. Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth, ‘Introduction: Remapping Irish Modernism’, Irish Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2018): 300. 4. Sara Blair, ‘Whose Modernism Is It? Abraham Cahan, Fictions of Yiddish and the Contest of Modernity’, Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 2 (2005): 258–84.

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5. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 69–90. 6. Natalie Wynn, ‘An Accidental Galut? A Critical Reappraisal of Irish Jewish Foundation Myths’, Jewish Culture and History 19, no. 2 (2018): 126. 7. Her biographical and autobiographical fragments (Zlotover Story and ‘Berman Story’) are used by historians of Jewish Ireland; however, not one draws upon her fictional writings and translations. See Louis Hyman, The Jews of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Year 1910 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972); Ray Rivlin, Shalom Ireland: A Social History of Jews in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003); Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998); and Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 8. Abby Bender, Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution and the Irish Revival (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015); and George Bornstein, The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews and Irish from 1845 to 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 9. The year of birth given for Berman varies according to sources; however, Irish census records from 1901 and 1911 show her as aged sixteen and twenty-six, respectively. I refer to Berman’s parents by the names given on official documents, Levi and Ethel, but they were known to family and friends as Lieb and Etta. 10. See Masha Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community, 1316–1945 (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1995). 11. Hannah Berman, ‘Berman Story’, MS-93, Robert L. and Jessie S. Bloom Papers, Box 13, Folder 3. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. I am grateful to Elisa Ho, Archivist and Special Projects Co-Ordinator, The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, for her assistance in locating and copying this manuscript. 12. Ibid. 13. For the migration patterns of Lithuanian Jews to Ireland, see Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, 12. Ó Gráda takes a revisionist approach to the migration narratives told by Irish Jews of their own circumstances in Lithuania, finding a number of instances where ‘the documentary record clashes with collective memory’ (27). This more benign interpretation of the economic and political conditions of the Jewish communities in Lithuania poses some challenges to their depiction in Berman’s fiction. 14. Melisande Zlotover and Hannah Berman, Zlotover Story: A Dublin Story with a Difference (Dublin: privately printed, 1966), 5–6. 15. Berman, ‘Berman Story’, n. pag. 16. Hannah Berman, ‘The Temple’, Jewish Chronicle (23 March 1900): 26. 17. ‘Jewish Ladies Society’, Jewish Chronicle (1 December 1905): 29; ‘Provinces’, Evening Herald (6 December 1909): 5. 18. ‘Foreign News’, Jewish Criterion 33, no. 19 (15 December 1911): 23. 19. The History of Joseph Sackenovitz appeared first on 6 May 1911, concluding on 11 November. Until 10 June, it was published as The History of Joseph Lackenovitz, with the surname spelt thus in the text, after which it appeared in the title and text as Sackenovitz. 20. ‘National Literary Society’, Freeman’s Journal (17 February 1913): 2.

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21. Hannah Berman, ‘Nothing – And Nothing’, Irish Review 2, no. 17 (July 1912): 235– 42; and Hannah Berman, ‘Little Abram: Translated from the Yiddish of “Shalom Aleichem” ’, Irish Review 2, no. 23 (January 1913): 605–7. 22. ‘Dublin’, Jewish Chronicle (27 November 1914): 20. 23. Joseph Leftwich, ‘On Translations from Yiddish’, Jewish Quarterly 22, nos 1–2 (spring/ summer 1974): 54. 24. ‘Jewish Talent’, Jewish Chronicle (25 August 1916): 10. 25. Berman, ‘Berman Story’, n. pag. 26. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 27. Joseph Leftwich, ‘Miss Hannah Berman’, Jewish Chronicle (22 April 1955): 10. 28. Hannah Berman, The History of Joseph Sackenovitz, Reform Advocate (6 May 1911): 499. 29. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983): 7–15. 30. Jordan Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2015), 47. 31. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 11. 32. Jeffrey Shandler, Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 8. 33. Thomas Ferraro, ‘Avant-Garde Ethnics’, in The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writing Between the Wars, ed. William Boelhower (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1990), 1–31. 34. See Hannah Berman, ‘Rust’, Reform Advocate (19 November 1910): 612–14; Hannah Berman, ‘Butterflies’, Reform Advocate (31 December 1910): 908–9; Hannah Berman, ‘Weeds’, Reform Advocate (25 March 1911): 200–2; ‘The Horse Thief ’, in Yisröel: The First Jewish Omnibus, ed. Joseph Leftwich (London: John Heritage, 1933), 152–6. 35. Hannah Berman, Melutovna (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), 167. 36. Dan Miron, ‘The Literary Image of the Shtetl’, Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 3 (spring 1995): 4, 10. 37. Berman, Melutovna, 36. 38. Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time, 32. 39. Miron, ‘The Literary Image of the Shtetl’, 30. 40. Hannah Berman, Ant Hills (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), 10–12. 41. Ibid., 100. 42. Jeffrey Shandler, ‘Mapping Yiddishland: Place, Time and Speech’, in Evidence of Yiddish Documented in European Societies, ed. Marvin Herzog, Ulrike Kiefer, Robert Neumann, Wolfgang Putschke, Andrew Sunshine (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2008), 293. 43. Berman, Ant Hills, 20. 44. Ibid., 317. 45. Scott Spector, ‘Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument’, Modernism/modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 623. 46. Olga Litvak, ‘Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal Yiddish Reader’, in Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and Art, ed. Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: MHRA/ Legenda, 2012), 7. 47. ‘Yiddish Fiction: Interview with Miss Hannah Berman’, Jewish Chronicle (29 May 1914): 18–19.

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4 8. Berman, ‘Nothing – And Nothing’, 242. 49. Berman, ‘Berman Story’, n. pag. 50. ‘Injured Israelites’, Evening Herald (12 March 1895): 3. 51. ‘The Charge against a Dublin Policeman’, Irish Daily Independent (27 March 1895): 6. 52. ‘The Recorder on the Police Code’, Irish Daily Independent (30 March 1895): 2; ‘The Thackaberry Case’, Freeman’s Journal (2 April 1895): 4. 53. See John Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 67. 54. Hannah Berman, ‘The Charity Box’, Dublin Magazine 1, no. 1 (August 1923): 32–8. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Michael Davitt, Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia (New York: Barnes, 1903), 33–6. 57. Ibid., 67, 86. 58. Ibid., 52–63. 59. Berman, Melutovna, 344. 60. Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time, 35. 61. Indeed, Spector warns that to invoke ‘Jewish modernism’ as a distinct phenomenon risks reproducing a potent figure of antisemitic discourses (‘Modernism without Jews’, 615–33). 62. ‘Yiddish Fiction’, 18. 63. Ibid., 19. 64. Ibid., 18. 65. Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13. 66. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1999), 39.

2

A forgotten Irish modernist: Ethel Colburn Mayne Elke D’hoker

In July 1920, the English Review published the first instalment of Ford Madox Ford’s Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences, an overview of English literature since the 1890s. In that essay, Ford praises the ‘Yellow Book School’, which ‘concerned itself with form, with the expression of fine shades, with continental models and exact language’.1 He refers to the ‘chef d’Ecole’ of the movement, ‘Henry Harland, another American of French training’, but then notes, ‘The real motive power of this very important movement came from Miss Ethel Colburn Mayne – another Irish writer of French training.’ Mayne is then singled out for special praise as a ‘great, or, at any rate, a consummate, artist’: To-day Miss Mayne stands alone as a portrayer of the fine shades of civilized contacts – as a portrayer, then, of life as it is lived by you and me … no one will deny that his life is really a matter of ‘affairs’; of minute hourly embarrassments; of sympathetic or unsympathetic personal contacts; of little-marked successes and failures, of queer jealousies, of muted terminations – a tenuous, fluttering and engrossing fabric. … And, now that Mr James is dead, there seems to be only Miss Mayne in England who has the perception and the great skill to be the historian of this our fugitive day.2

Though Ford may have exaggerated Mayne’s role in the Yellow Book,3 he was certainly not alone in praising her work. In reviews, Mayne’s short fiction was routinely – and favourably – compared to Henry James and Katherine Mansfield, while her translations and biographies met with great acclaim. Today, however, she is almost entirely forgotten. Tina O’Toole mentions Mayne as a New Woman writer with Irish roots, alongside such more familiar names as Sarah Grand, George Egerton and L. T. Meade but does not discuss her work.4 Given Mayne’s involvement with the Yellow Book as co-editor and contributor, she certainly deserves the epithet of New Woman writer. Yet, as she continued to publish fiction and non-fiction into the 1930s, she could also be classed as an Irish, or Anglo-Irish, modernist. Following the expansion of the new modernist studies ‘in temporal, spatial and vertical directions’,5 Irish modernism too has extended its remit in recent years to

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include the famous high modernists as well as their fin-de-siècle precursors, Irish émigré writers as well as Irish Revivalists, highbrow experimentalists as well as more middlebrow practitioners.6 This reconsideration of Irish modernism has opened up the traditional modernist canon to several marginalized writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of them women. Anne Fogarty discerns ‘two significant phases within the history of women and Irish modernism’:7 A first phase, extending from the 1880s to the 1930s, includes writers like Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, Lady Gregory and Dorothy Macardle, who ‘marry political activism, feminist advocacy and engagement in the public sphere with artistic experimentation’.8 A second generation, comprising Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Brennan and Kate O’Brien, is considered ‘less politically active than its predecessors’, even as it carries forward ‘the modernist quarrel with literary form while continuing  … to unpick the ideological stances that insist on the fixity of gender roles and of national and sexual identities’.9 In this essay, I make a case for Ethel Colburn Mayne to be added to the tradition of Irish modernism in this newly expanded scope. Born in 1865, the same year as W. B. Yeats, Mayne belongs to Fogarty’s early modernists, sharing with these writers a commitment to artistic experimentation and an openness to the literary movements of the time: aestheticism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism. Although Mayne is less outspokenly feminist and politically active than some of the other writers discussed by Fogarty, her fiction persistently explores the gendered norms that shape the female body, determine feminine behaviour and govern social interactions. Her characters struggle with the contradictory requirements of feminine coquetry, harmonious matrimony and self-effacing motherhood. They often self-consciously play up to these gendered expectations even as they worry about the implications for establishing meaningful relations, intellectual freedom and a true sense of self. While these themes clearly come out of Mayne’s engagement with fin-de-siècle New Woman debates, they are also part of the ‘feminist concerns’ that characterize the work of other female modernists, as they supplement or challenge ‘the views of sexuality and femininity put forward by male artists’.10 While Mayne’s feminocentric fiction shares some thematic concerns of both the early and the late modernists described by Fogarty, the narrative and stylistic features of her short fiction illustrate the continuation between the late-nineteenthcentury impressionist and naturalist movements and modernist innovation.11 Within an Irish framework, her writing provides a unique connection between the New Woman stories of Egerton and Grand and the late modernist short fiction of Bowen, Brennan and Norah Hoult. Mayne’s first two short story collections, The Clearer Vision (1898) and Things That No One Tells (1910), offer many illuminating examples of the birth of the modernist short story in the variegated literary movements of the 1890s, while also revealing a highly complex and sensitive treatment of questions of identity, gender and social relations that anticipate the short fiction of Bowen and Brennan. Before turning to the stories, however, I will first give a brief overview of Mayne’s life and work.12

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A literary life in Cork and London Ethelind Colburn Mayne was born in Johnstown, County Kilkenny in a Protestant, Anglo-Irish family. When her father became Resident Magistrate in Cork, the family settled in Blackrock. A voracious reader, Mayne kept abreast of new literary developments in London, and in 1894 she sent the story ‘A Pen-and-Ink Effect’ to the Yellow Book, which had been launched with much publicity earlier in the year. Its editor, Henry Harland, not only accepted the story but even, as Mayne later put it, ‘prais[ed] it in words which even now it thrills me to recall’.13 The story was published in the July 1895 issue, alongside stories by James and Egerton, who was also living in Cork at the time.14 Mayne kept up the correspondence with Harland and in December 1895, he invited her to London to work as a subeditor at the Yellow Book. There, Mayne met other writers associated with the magazine, including James, Hubert Crackanthorpe and Kenneth Grahame15 and was inspired by Harland’s call for a ‘clearer vision’: ‘a perception that penetrated beyond the surface of things and people, a shaft sunk in our common consciousness, a theme that reached farther than the experience it transcribed’.16 Although Mayne’s experience at the Yellow Book was short-lived, it gave her the confidence – and the contacts – to set out on a writing career. Back in Cork, she continued writing stories and started work on Jessie Vandeleur, a coming-of-age novel of a girl in Ireland, which was published by George Allen in 1902. Following her father’s retirement, the family relocated to London in 1905. With the help of her literary agent, C. F. Cazenove, Mayne’s writing career branched out in several directions: she wrote highly acclaimed biographies of Byron, the kings of Monaco, Lady Bessborough and a series of ‘famous women’; she edited the letters of Lady Byron and wrote a critical study of Browning’s heroines; and she made a name for herself as an excellent translator of French and German texts (including some of Freud’s essays for the 1924 Hogarth edition of his collected papers). Between 1908 and 1916, Mayne wrote three novels that explore the restrictions and challenges faced by clever young women as they negotiate gendered expectations and the marriage market. The Fourth Ship (1908) and One of Our Grandmothers (1916) stage Anglo-Irish characters; Gold Lace (1913) has an English heroine who moves to an Irish garrison town. Although the novels were moderately successful, Mayne considered herself primarily a short-story writer. She had continued to contribute stories to periodicals such as Chapman’s, Pall Mall and Vanity Fair, and, after the publication of One of Her Grandmothers, she devoted herself exclusively to the short form. Four collections followed in quick succession: Come In (1917), Blindman (1919), Nine of Hearts (1923) and Inner Circle (1925). They were well received, and Mayne was hailed as ‘the only short-story writer capable of succeeding Katherine Mansfield’.17 In this period, Mayne’s stories also appeared in such modernist ‘little magazines’ as the Nation, the Golden Hind and the Transatlantic Review and were reprinted in prominent anthologies, including Bowen’s 1936 Faber Book of Modern Short Stories.18 Mayne was struggling financially, however, especially after the death of her father and the loss of his pension in 1927. She submitted manuscripts for a novel and short story collection to Macmillan

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in early 1940, but these were never published.19 In September of that year, her house was bombed in the London blitz, and Mayne never fully recovered from her injuries. She died in the spring of 1941.

Following fin-de-siècle fashions Ford’s epithet for Mayne – ‘another Irish writer of French training’ – echoes his earlier description of George Moore as ‘an Irishman trained by the French’.20 In the case of Moore, this label probably refers to the French naturalism he embraced early in his career. Mayne’s The Clearer Vision, too, contains traces of naturalism, or new realism, as it was called in England. As the title of the collection suggests, the stories aim to see more clearly, to study life dispassionately and to transcribe it accurately. Two of the seven stories announce themselves as ‘studies’ – ‘Herb of Grace: The Study of an Emotion’ and ‘On the Programme: Three Ball-Room Studies’ – and several of them carry an epigraph borrowed from contemporary French novelists, including Anatole France and Alphonse Daudet. ‘Herb of Grace’ echoes French naturalism in its dispassionate description of the heroine and her parents’ middlebrow tastes as the ‘result’ of the ‘resistless, unrealized effect’ of their ‘less cultured environment’.21 In ‘Lucille’, the narrator laments the inescapability of biological laws: ‘that poking, freakish finger that heredity sticks in our eyes’.22 In the rest of the collection, however, the naturalist impulse towards a frank scrutiny of life is turned inwards, towards the inner world of perceptions and emotions. Naturalism gives way to an impressionist aesthetics, which becomes the main mode of Mayne’s short fiction in the 1910s and 1920s, as evidenced by the titles of Things That No One Tells, Come In and Inner Circle. Although naturalism, symbolism, aestheticism and impressionism have traditionally been understood as discrete aesthetic movements, recent critics have drawn attention to the synergy that existed between them in the fin de siècle. As Sally Ledger and Winnie Chan show, the Yellow Book embraced contradictory literary trends which nevertheless shared the desire to depict previously unrecorded realities through new literary strategies.23 Simon Joyce identifies the fusion of these movements in the work of Yeats, Moore and Egerton, arguing for their centrality in the trajectory of Irish modernism,24 while Emer Nolan highlights the importance of naturalism in the development of the Irish modernist novel.25 Next to its naturalist elements and overall impressionist aesthetics, Mayne’s first collection also carries echoes of the aestheticist movement’s celebration of art, beauty and stylistic refinement. The collection makes frequent references to other art forms, and ‘On the Programme’ is structured around the different dances at a ball: ‘I. Pas-de-quatre’, ‘II. Kitchen Lancers’, ‘III. Valse’. Artists figure in several stories, from the frustrated woman writer who is the protagonist of ‘Herb of Grace’ to the Jamesian writer-observer figures in ‘Lucille’, ‘Blue Muslin’ and ‘The Red Umbrella’. In staging these male artist figures, Mayne also registers a critique of the male gaze and male prerogatives that speak from much aestheticist writing. An illuminating story in this respect is ‘Lucille’, which satirizes the pretensions of a male aesthete through the ironic double structure of unreliable narration. The male narrator of the story

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puzzles over a beautiful girl who has published a wonderful collection of poetry, ‘L. S. of A Trial of Flight, that exquisite little sheaf of poems which, like fairy-arrows, had stirred the wings of many a shy emotion in our critical hearts – we of The Appreciator, most modern of modernities, most connaissant of connoisseurs!’26 He hails her as an aestheticist and symbolist ‘genius’, ‘a dreamer of dreams, a seer of visions, a hearer of the music of the spheres’, yet is then dismayed to discover that she is engaged to an entirely ‘common’ young sportsman.27 The hyperboles and aestheticist clichés in his praise of Lucille clearly mark him as an unreliable narrator and poke fun at his pretensions. His confident assertions of the truth of his reading of Lucille as a sensitive poetic genius (‘I hardly looked at her – but I saw her, more clearly than I saw any of the others’)28 are undermined as it becomes clear that he has made the girl into something she is not. In its use of an unreliable male narrator to satirize male aestheticist pretensions, ‘Lucille’ is reminiscent of Egerton’s ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, which was published in the first issue of the Yellow Book and also ‘lampoons the narcissistic self-absorption of the male aesthete’.29 In short, like the stories of Egerton and Grand, Mayne’s early work is steeped in the aesthetic movements of the late nineteenth century. Yet, her affinity with French naturalism also puts her on a par with more canonical exponents of Irish modernism, such as Moore and Joyce.

Towards the modernist short story The unreliable narration which exposes the warped perceptions and misguided preconceptions of the male aesthete in ‘Lucille’ is but one of many experimental techniques Mayne deploys with dexterity in her fiction. Elsewhere, the impressionist ambition to shed light on the inner recesses of a character’s mind is realized through an extended use of figural narration and free indirect discourse. Several stories consist in large part of interior monologue, that favoured mode of the modernist short story. In ‘Points of View’, Mayne records the confusing vortex of emotions a young girl experiences as she recollects an incident at a ball the previous evening, which she finds simultaneously shameful, thrilling and repulsive: What was she to do? How to get some denial of this sickening suspicion. Tell her sister, ask her what she thought? Ah, no, no; now she could never tell … and, in the glass, it seemed to her that her eyes looked bold and glittering. […] Her ball-gown! She tore it from the box where it lay in its fragrant mistiness … it was disgraceful, it was immodest almost, she would never wear it again, never dance again, never see that man again.30

In ‘The End of It’, an extended version of the Yellow Book’s ‘A Pen-and-Ink Effect’, Mayne juxtaposes two distinct interior monologues to give the views of a man and a woman on the end of their affair. The man smugly thinks the girl will ‘mind horribly’, as ‘she had betrayed herself so helplessly, had cared so much …. Poor little dear! Well, his letter would be some comfort …. Yes! All was admirably conveyed, the regret, the remembrance.’31 Yet, the girl, when she receives the letter, is horrified by its tone: ‘In her

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room at last. He wrote that? That? … To think that I could ever have loved him!’ She immediately calls out to her siblings for a game of tennis, for ‘one must do something to work off this mad joyous thrill of freedom, liberty’.32 This juxtaposition of a male and female point of view is a recurrent technique in Mayne’s early collections, foregrounding the way in which subjective consciousness shapes and frequently distorts one’s perceptions. This emphasis on the subjective view ties in with the shift from telling to showing, from diegesis to mimesis, which began in late-nineteenth-century impressionist writing and was further perfected in modernist literature. In The Clearer Vision and Things That No One Tells, the opposing perspectives are typically rendered as discrete parts of a single story, but in her stories from the 1920s and 1930s, Mayne uses either the sustained single perspective or the multiple shifting focalization common to modernist short fiction. Following the aestheticist emphasis on the moment and the impressionist preference for intensely observed scenes, Mayne’s stories tend to reject a unified plot in favour of a series of discrete scenes, often typographically separated by numbers and/ or subtitles. ‘Herb of Grace’ and ‘On the Programme’ depict the maturation of a young girl through three separate scenes, while ‘Ritournelle’ and ‘Embassies Delayed’ do the same for the different stages of a relationship. The fragmentation that characterizes The Clearer Vision is heightened by the open endings of most stories and their frequent use of ellipsis. These lacunae give Mayne’s early stories a ‘cryptic’ air, to the annoyance of one contemporary reviewer who complains about the ‘affectations’ and ‘half-hints’ and argues that ‘the “plain, common, ignorant man” will not know which way up to read the various stories’.33 Yet, as later reviewers would come to appreciate, Mayne’s reliance on ‘half-hints’, juxtapositions and gaps to suggest rather than state meaning, as well as her complete eschewal of the belligerence that mars some of the stories of Grand and Egerton, can be understood as part of the modern short story’s movement away from plotted Victorian tales with their intrusive narrators to the indirect aesthetics of modernist writers.34

Performing and challenging feminine identities The minds Mayne chooses to record in her early short fiction are most often those of young women. Even stories with a male narrator or focalizer, such as ‘The Red Umbrella’, ‘Madeline Annesley’ and ‘Blue Muslin’, revolve around a young woman whom these men try, but often fail, to make sense of. Throughout her stories, Mayne has her daughters struggle with the gendered expectations that confine them. As the motto to The Clearer Vision puts it, they dream of a life different from that of their mothers but do not quite know how to realize this ambition: ‘C’était une dame … pas très heureuse. Je rêvais une destinée tout autre que la sienne. Pourquoi?’35 With marriage the single aim of a woman’s life, beauty is considered the chief asset and being clever is only frowned upon. As one character puts it, ‘people were beginning vaguely to speak of Adela as clever, and for a young lady’s “cleverness” Mrs Richards felt the sanctioned contempt. It was not as if Miss Adela were so bad-looking, either … She was “queer” – thus Mrs Richards always characterized her.’36 Mayne’s protagonists are highly aware of the fact

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that any behaviour that strays from conventional gender norms is censured, with people having ‘the old-fashioned dislike … for anything feminine that was unusual’, which they consider ‘undisputably the unnatural’.37 Still, the prospect of marriage and domesticity fills many of Mayne’s protagonists with dismay, even as their lives are governed by the intricate rules of courtship and heterosexual relations. In ‘The Lost Leader’, which borrows its title from a Browning poem, a New Woman figure anxiously re-examines her own priorities when she learns that the most rebellious of her school friends is now happily married to a dull clergyman and has four children. Like many of Mayne’s young women, she is divided as to whether the absence of marriage and motherhood suggests freedom or failure, whether it is a glorious opportunity or a haunting lack. ‘Herb of Grace’ also finds the protagonist torn between a literary career and the prospects of motherhood. The first two scenes show that Adela has no maternal instinct: as a child, she refuses to play with dolls and children are not drawn to her as they are to her sister. Adela is convinced that she does not have ‘the fetish’, as she ironically calls the hallowed maternal instinct, and expounds to her sister her theory ‘of opposed types’, of ‘the “mother” [and] the “wife” in womanhood’. The first, she argues, are women who ‘merely love and respond, endure, suffer’, yet their ‘baby-raptures’ are but a pale reflection of ‘the glory of a great absorbing passion’ experienced by women ‘who love and demand’ in an ideal love relationship.38 Instead, Adela devotes herself to writing, which she believes to be her realization of the maternal instinct: I’ve often thought that my only means of ever even guessing at it – the fetish! – will be my stories. Yes, I shall wear my rue with a difference. If I can do nothing right with a child, at least I can with them. I can dress them beautifully, caress them, and I can make each one more charming, more satisfying than the last.39

Adela refers to her stories as her ‘story-children’, thus invoking the opposition between creation and procreation that haunts many New Woman stories.40 The third scene sees her fall in love with a man who considers ‘lady novelist[s]‌a mistake’.41 Accepting his offer of marriage, Adela burns her stories, sacrificing her art to the ‘absorbing passion’ she had been waiting for: ‘So the altar of her sacrifice was impregnable. She must stand there, helplessly to watch them die – her story-children.’42 Yet the fourth and final scene finds her disappointed in marriage: she realizes that in forsaking her writing, she has in fact given up on her only true passion, as married love seems more like the self-less maternal love she has always spurned. In a neat reversal of the opening scenes, then, Adela ironically concedes that she has ‘the instinct’ after all, but ‘with a difference’, for ‘the tender and delicate’ maternal feeling she harbours is directed towards her self-centred and demanding husband.43 Part of the wider scrutiny of womanhood and motherhood in the 1890s, ‘Herb of Grace’ launches a subtle but powerful attack on the conceptions of maternal instinct and natural womanhood that were part of the Victorian feminine ideal. Unlike Grand and Egerton, whose stories tend to celebrate ‘natural’ maternal instincts for feminist ends, Mayne is critical of any idea of essential femininity. Instead, she shows these stereotypes to be but social constructions, which nevertheless exert a real power over the lives of young women.

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In The Clearer Vision, Mayne examines the cliché of women’s deceitful artificiality. ‘Mais, elles sont d’affreuses menteuses’ is the motto of ‘Ritournelle’, in which a man, convinced of woman’s essential duplicity, seeks to test the truth of his girlfriend’s love by feigning coldness.44 Although the woman understands the part she is required to play, she refuses to comply: ‘I have been weighed in the balance; and now that I am not found wanting, I mean to belong – to myself.’45 The plot thus ironically reverses the familiar ‘maxim’ of women’s fickleness and artificiality, ‘that no one can trust a woman, that she can’t be sincere’ by showing the man’s changeability and deceit.46 Yet, the story also contains a much more serious scrutiny of the roles women and men are required to assume in social interactions. In a confrontation with her suitor, the woman performs the expected social roles ‘absolutely involuntar[il]y’ yet wonders which is the more ‘real’: ‘the girl who had greeted him with that assured graciousness or the woman whose soul had fainted’.47 ‘On the Programme’ and ‘The End of It’ draw specific attention to the performance of femininity that is required in male-female interactions as part of the courtship rituals: the flirting, affected coyness and ‘gay pretence’.48 The girls’ attitude to this gendered performance, however, is ambivalent. They are often shown to enjoy the playacting: ‘She would laugh and pretend that she thought it rather impertinent … and then she would dress in a simulated “hurry” …. It was such fun, all this pretending, – these airs and graces, these sudden, premeditated fits of absence of mind, these deprecations, these humilities.’49 Yet, they also long to abandon ‘the pageant’, as it is called in ‘Blue Muslin’, and to ‘talk square’, but the rules of the ‘drawing-room’ rarely allow such frankness: ‘The joins mustn’t be seen; there must be no more sobs …. The pageant went on.’50 Mayne also repeatedly shows men to be performing the gendered roles expected of them. In ‘Desertsurges’, an older, married man pretends to be in love with a young girl and convinces her to run away with him: ‘he found the part ready, and he played it well, telling himself that it bored him – but it did not bore him’.51 Similarly, in ‘The Red Umbrella’, the male narrator is conscious of the roles he is expected to play: ‘a tradition of common sense to keep up’ as a man, a ‘display’ of ‘the denseness … expected of the army’, and a performance of typical ‘English bluntness’.52 The very pervasiveness of this socially sanctioned and gender-coded performativity raises the serious question of how to correctly read the other person. As we have seen, Mayne’s use of an unreliable first-person narrator in ‘Lucille’ and ‘The Lost Leader’ holds up to scrutiny the possibility of ‘truly’ understanding another person, while ‘On the Programme’, ‘The End of It’ and ‘The Red Umbrella’ revolve around miscommunications between men and women. In both sets of stories, the protagonists, male and female, are given to a perplexed scrutiny of words or deeds so as to gauge the real feeling behind them. In spite of their amused scepticism at gendered conventions and courtship rituals, moreover, many of Mayne’s protagonists continue to long romantically for true understanding in love and marriage. In ‘One by One’, however, the very desirability of this ideal is questioned, as the unreliable first-person narrator tries to fathom the mystery of another – not, this time, a woman, but a married couple.53 The story has a fascinating, onion-like structure that stages a chain of readers who claim to understand another person without wanting to be comprehended themselves. The husband claims to know his mistress – ‘she’s stupid’54 – but dislikes being understood by his wife. The

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wife purports to understand her husband’s innermost thoughts, desires and feelings, yet shudders at the ‘horror’ of being thus known herself: ‘Imagine the feeling that every little sensation, emotion, even every tiny puzzlement of your mind, every irritation, impulse, restraint, desire – imagine it all lying bare to the eyes.’55 The rather pompous narrator, finally, claims to have achieved ‘a clear[er] vision of ’ this doomed marriage’s ‘purgatorial pains’, through his perceptive ‘espionage upon souls’, even as he proudly pronounces himself to be inscrutable: ‘I know myself cosily opaque.’56 In an almost postmodern metafictional gesture, finally, the reader too is drawn into this sequence of reading acts by being invited to take up the position of the silent interlocutor, to read the narrator and to judge his reading of the marriage. In this way, the story unsettles all claims to a perfect understanding of another person and exposes the false sense of mastery this entails. Mayne’s narrator feels smug in his ‘Paradise of Perception’ but fails to comfort his friends in their distress: ‘I turned hastily, and left her.’57 As in ‘Lucille’, the narrator’s self-centred arrogance is exposed indirectly, through the ironic structure of unreliable narration, while a further layer of irony also directs a challenge to the reader.

Changing reception With their complex narrative structure, sustained introspection, fragmentation and irony, the stories in The Clearer Vision do not make for an easy read. Moreover, their focus on what Egerton called ‘the terra incognita’ of woman, ‘as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her’, was still considered problematic by contemporary readers.58 An 1898 review in the Athenaeum complained, All these [stories] deal with women who are disappointed in love, devoid of the feeling of maternity, or thrown away in marriage  … the women are so terribly clever, elusive, and, to ordinary persons, ‘cosily opaque’. The writer has real talent and should apply it to something else than her morbidly introspective heroines. When she has learnt to give up the extensive use of French scraps and disjointed fragments of phrase, she may do something really good.59

Although Mayne’s style would become less fragmentary and elliptical in later stories, suggestion, self-consciousness and quiet irony would remain the hallmarks of her writing. By the late 1910s, these techniques had become accepted ingredients of the modernist short story and were judged more positively by reviewers. Although Frank Swinnerton notes in the Bookman that Mayne’s stories still place considerable ‘demand  … upon one’s attention and visualising power’, they are not merely ‘speculative’ but ‘finely and surely seen, and rendered with such deliberateness, that the mind, grasping at psychological difficulties, imagines the truth that lies behind’.60 He concludes, ‘Miss Mayne saves herself from the charge of indiscretion in “telling” what one feels she has discovered by her own sympathy and divination; she dexterously and wonderfully makes us see the things that happened and come to our own conclusions. That is her quite special talent, that there is not a sentence but has its implication and reverberation.’61

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Throughout her short fiction, Mayne would remain faithful to her impressionist ambition of depicting subjective consciousness from the inside out. As Ford noted, her stories do not record great passions or grand adventures. They tell of everyday lives, ‘of minute hourly embarrassments; of sympathetic or unsympathetic personal contacts; of little-marked successes and failures, of queer jealousies, of muted terminations’.62 No longer considering this impressionist introspection ‘morbid’ or an ‘affectation’, by the 1920s critics begin to praise Mayne for giv[ing] with delicate authenticity that running commentary of unspoken thought which is universal and so continuous in all human life …. In her hands the quick soul has even more importance than the persona; the drama is seen behind the retina of the spectator, and becomes, therefore, immeasurably complex, a complexity, however that this remarkable writer has the power of presenting as a broadly lit whole.63

As a reviewer for the Spectator notes, by the 1910s it had become ‘the obvious thing for reviewers to talk of Miss Mayne in connexion with Katherine Mansfield’.64 The reviewer grants both writers ‘a deep insight into the minds of women and children’, yet attributes to Mayne a more deliberate sense of ‘scheme’ and structure: she works ‘threads into the warp and weft with cunning hands; and the result is stories of exquisite and perfect design’.65 He concludes, ‘Her style has been brought to its state of perfection by the limpid and disciplined spirit of pity which is the moving power behind her work.’66 As these reviews suggest, by the time her second story collection was published, Mayne’s psychological realism and impressionism, her use of suggestion and ironic reversal, as well as her use of ellipsis, open endings and fragmentation had become celebrated features of the modernist short story and were widely used by writers like Mansfield, Woolf and Joyce. Still, these characteristics had all emerged in the context of the 1890s literary movements which briefly converged in the Yellow Book, in which Irish writers played an important role. Mayne’s sustained interest in exploring women’s inner lives arose in the context of late-nineteenth-century debates about marriage, motherhood and femininity, as is also reflected in the work of many other New Woman writers, while her subtle and sympathetic exploration of the performance of gendered identity and the pressure of social norms on private lives also shares in the gendered critique and feminist concerns of the women modernists. Within an Irish context, one can consider Mayne an intermediary, in thematic as well as in formal terms, between the two generations of female Irish modernists identified by Fogarty. Yet, Mayne is more than an intermediary; she is an accomplished writer in her own right. That her highly innovative fiction has been forgotten for so long is probably the result of a combination of factors. First, of course, she is a victim of the overall marginalization of women writers within the traditional modernist canon. Second, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant writer who made a career for herself in London, she falls outside nationalist definitions of the Irish canon, especially since her relocation to England in the early twentieth century made her a bystander to precisely those political and cultural events that so strongly shaped that canon. Her fate, in that respect, resembles that of Norah Hoult, whose work is now being recovered as part of the Irish

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literary tradition. Mayne’s modesty and ‘disdain for self-promotion’67 probably did not help either, as Waterman suggests on the basis of Hoult’s fictionalized portrait of Mayne in There Were No Windows.68 Further, the versatility of her career as a biographer, translator, novelist, critic and short-story writer may have made her less visible as a uniquely literary author, as did the fact that her talents really lay with the short form, a genre that often ranks lower in literary hierarchies. Finally, her inconvenient straddling of literary movements (New Woman writing and modernism) as well as national traditions (English and Irish) may well have led to her being relegated to obscurity in these different canons. Yet, precisely this national, literary and temporal hybridity makes Mayne’s work so fascinating, as she incorporates different perspectives into a unique, personal vision. Moreover, the difficulty of assimilating her to a single literary tradition offers a productive challenge to the very conceptualization of Irish modernism. As Mayne’s case suggests, it is clearly unhelpful to erect rigid barriers between literary movements and national traditions. Still, we should also be wary of subsuming these different strands all too indiscriminately in a newly expanded Irish modernism. In short, if the honorific of ‘Irish modernist’ can rescue Mayne from oblivion, it is only on the condition that the manifold influences and allegiances of her work are not forgotten in turn.

Notes 1. Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], ‘Thus to Revisit …’, English Review (July 1920): 10. 2. Ibid., 10–11. 3. In a letter to the editor, Mayne protested that she was only ‘the lowest of angels’ at the Yellow Book. Ethel Colburn Mayne, ‘Another Criticism’, English Review (August 1920): 179. 4. Tina O’Toole, The Irish New Woman (London: Palgrave, 2013), 4. 5. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 737. 6. See Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe, eds, Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Joe Cleary, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, eds, A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, eds, Science, Technology and Irish Modernism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019). 7. Anne Fogarty, ‘Women and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 148. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. For a discussion of how the literary experimentation of late-nineteenth-century New Woman writers prepared the way for the modernist short story, see Elke D’hoker and Stephanie Eggermont, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers and the Modern Short Story’, English Literature in Transition 58, no. 3 (2015): 291–312.

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12. For a fuller biographical and bibliographical account, see Susan Winslow Waterman, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’, in Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists: Second Series, ed. George M. Johnson (Detroit: Gale, 1999), 187–201; and Elke D’hoker, ed., Ethel Colburn Mayne: Selected Stories (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2021). 13. Mark Samuels Lasner, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’s “Reminiscences of Henry Harland” ’, in Bound for the 1890s: Essays on Writing and Publishing in Honor of James G. Nelson, ed. Jonathan Allison (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2006), 18. 14. Mayne published her two Yellow Book stories under the pseudonym Frances E. Huntley, a choice she would come to regret. Frances E. Huntley, ‘A Pen-And-Ink Effect’, Yellow Book, no. 6 (July 1895): 286–91. 15. For Mayne’s recollections of her Yellow Book experience, see Lasner, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’s “Reminiscences of Henry Harland” ’; and Ethel Colburn Mayne, ‘Henry James – as Seen from The Yellow Book’, Little Review 5, no. 4 (August 1914): 1–4. 16. Lasner, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’s “Reminiscences of Henry Harland” ’, 22. 17. ‘Advertisements by Harcourt Publishers’, Daily Mail (29 September 1923): 4. 18. For an exhaustive list of Mayne’s short stories published in magazines and anthologies, see D’hoker, ed., Ethel Colburn Mayne. 19. Waterman, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’, 199. 20. Ford, ‘Thus to Revisit …’, 8. 21. Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Clearer Vision (London: Fischer Unwin, 1898), 2. 22. Ibid., 68. 23. Sally Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book: The Sexual Politics of Aestheticism and Decadence’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 50, no. 1 (2007): 5–26; Winnie Chan, The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s (New York: Routledge, 2007). 24. Simon Joyce, ‘Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism: Trajectories of AngloIrish Fiction at the Fin de Siècle’, Modernism/modernity 21, no. 3 (September 2014): 787–803. 25. Emer Nolan, ‘James Joyce and the Mutations of the Irish Modernist Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 95. 26. Mayne, Vision, 74. 27. Ibid., 70–1. 28. Ibid., 74. 29. Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book’, 18. 30. Mayne, Vision, 140–1. 31. Ibid., 97–8. 32. Ibid., 105–6. 33. ‘Fiction Review’, Saturday Review (22 October 1898): 544–5. 34. Among the narrative and stylistic innovations of the modernist short story, Sabine Buchholz notes the emergence of ‘plotless sketches’, ‘slice-of-life stories’ and ‘elliptic stories’ as well as the use of ‘figural narration’, ‘interior monologue’ and ‘dramatic monologue’. All of these can also be found in Mayne’s early story collections. Sabine Buchholz, Narrative Innovationen in der modernistischen britischen Short Story (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003), 1–2. 35. The motto is taken from Anatole France’s Le Lys Rouge (1894), a symbolist novel about art and love. 36. Mayne, Vision, 15. 37. Ibid., 208, 37. 38. Ibid., 18–19. 39. Ibid., 34.

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40. See Elke D’hoker, ‘Artist Stories of the 1890s: Life, Art and Sacrifice’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier (London: Routledge, 2017), 92–106. 41. Mayne, Vision, 38. 42. Ibid., 58. 43. Ibid., 64–5. 44. Mayne, Vision, 198. I have not been able to trace the source of this French line, yet its critique of women’s artificiality and duplicity was very much in the air at the time. It is also a central tenet of Nietzsche, whom Mayne quotes in ‘The End of It’, and it is questioned in Egerton’s short story ‘The Regeneration of Two’. See Elke D’hoker, ‘ “Half-Man” or “Half-Doll”: George Egerton’s Response to Friedrich Nietzsche’, Women’s Writing 18, no. 4 (2011): 524–46. 45. Mayne, Vision, 204. 46. Ibid., 193. 47. Ibid., 197. 48. Ibid., 130. 49. Ethel Colburn Mayne, Things That No One Tells (London: Chapman and Hall, 1910), 207; and Mayne, Vision 83. 50. Mayne, Things That No One Tells, 205–7. 51. Ibid., 48–9. 52. Ibid., 8, 11, 15. 53. The title is again taken from a poem by Browning, ‘By the Fire-Side’, which laments the fact that two people can never be completely at one with each other: ‘If two lives join, there is oft a scar / They are one and one, with a shadowy third / One near one is too far.’ Bowen would also draw on this poem for the title of her story ‘The Shadowy Third’. 54. Mayne, Vision, 187. 55. Ibid., 182. 56. Ibid., 178. 57. Ibid., 181, 183, 189. 58. George Egerton, ‘A Keynote to Keynotes’, in Ten Contemporaries: Notes toward Their Definitive Bibliography, ed. John Gawsworth (London: Ernest Benn, 1932), 58. 59. Anon., ‘Short Stories’, Athenaeum (29 October 1898): 606. 60. Frank Swinnerton, ‘Three Woman Novelists’, Bookman 53, no. 317 (February 1918): 158–9. 61. Ibid. 62. Ford, ‘Thus to Revisit …’, 10–11. 63. Ernest Remnant, ‘Inner Circle’, English Review (May 1925): 685. 64. ‘Nine of Hearts, by Ethel Colburn Mayne’, Spectator (7 April 1923): 22. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Waterman, ‘Ethel Colburn Mayne’, 201. 68. Norah Hoult’s rather satirical novel depicts the final years of Mayne’s close friend, the writer Violet Hunt. Mayne’s alter ego in the novel, Edith Barlow, is said to have ‘made little money during a lifetime waged in the service of literature as biographer and short story writer’ and to have been little noticed by men, ‘and it had been her own instinct to shun their attention’. Norah Hoult, There Were No Windows (London: Persephone Books, 2016), 92.

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Melancholy modernism: The loss of the Irish woman poet 1930–50 Lucy Collins

The Irish woman poet has, until now, occupied an especially precarious position within the critical cultures of modernism. Excluded from the European grouping that featured Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, as well as from the later Dublin generation associated with the New Writers Press,1 these women are not only excised from received modernist lineages but also remain marginal to the wider history of modern Irish poetry.2 The challenges that women poets faced in finding a space within the literary cultures of the Irish Free State are well documented. Anne Fogarty and Susan Schreibman’s engagement with a generation of neglected women poets signalled the critical omissions which, even twenty years ago, continued to impair understanding of the Irish poetic tradition.3 More than a decade later, Anne Mulhall’s analysis of the periodical culture of mid-century Ireland exposed the undeclared assumptions that underpinned publishing opportunities during the period and inhibited women from participating fully in the literary culture of the new state.4 The isolation these women experienced gave rise to a poetics of loss, which expressed the grief and anxiety that inflected their personal and creative lives. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their estrangement from the structures of literary production, these women adopted progressive approaches to subject matter and form and sought to combine affective and intellectual responses to the culture of their time. This essay explores the work of four women poets writing in Ireland between 1930 and 1950: Mary Devenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton and Rhoda Coghill. All four poets combine elements of formal regularity with glimpses of the fragmented subjectivity that we associate with modernism. All interrogate aspects of history and tradition, either within or beyond the Irish context. All examine interior states, modes of thinking and feeling that shed light on the challenges of their cultural moment. Despite these shared characteristics, the four women had distinct artistic careers and their relationships to the networks of writing and publishing were also divergent. Devenport O’Neill wrote both drama and poetry. As the wife of poet and senior civil servant Joseph O’Neill, she moved in literary circles and knew both W. B. Yeats and Æ. Originally trained as a painter, she was an acutely observant poet and her output, though slight, marked a decisive turn towards modern diction. Unlike Devenport O’Neill, Wingfield was a lifelong poet, though the shifts in her publishing

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career marked the specific challenges of the time, as well as her personal circumstances. She had a privileged upbringing in England, but her marriage to the heir to the Powerscourt Estate strengthened her links with Ireland. Like Wingfield, Laughton was born in England, but she spent much of her adult life in Northern Ireland, as well as a period living in Dublin. These women exemplify the question of national affiliation that underpins the category of Irish modernism, which includes writers born elsewhere but associated with Ireland through their subject matter or publishing choices, as well as those who were born in Ireland but who lived, and wrote, abroad. Laughton’s writing attracted critical attention in Ireland even before her poetry had appeared in book form, and though her work appeared regularly in literary journals – especially The Bell – during the 1940s, she published just one collection, A Transitory House (1945). In spite of her perceived innovation, and the inclusion of her work in anthologies during the mid-century years, Laughton has been almost entirely forgotten by subsequent generations of poets and critics across the British Isles, perhaps because she was at once too Irish – her literary associations were entirely formed there – and not Irish enough, as Austin Clarke judged when reviewing her work.5 Coghill, the only one of these poets to publish exclusively in Ireland, was the most closely linked with Irish landscapes and subject matter. Yet her handling of sound patterns in poetry was distinctive. Better known as a composer and musician than as a poet, she was another woman of great creative originality whose work was soon forgotten. Though all these women were successful in having their poetry published and reviewed, none became an established figure within the Irish literary scene, and all disappeared from critical view within their own lifetime. Despite their distinct lives and careers, all these women were conscious of the capacity for poetry to interrogate the relationship between reason and emotion and to extend our understanding of the individual human subject in important ways. Their work draws attention to the particularity of experience by emphasizing embodied subjects, though a combination of intimate and impersonal styles demonstrates conscious control of the expressive process. If affect ‘arises in the midst of in-betweenness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’,6 then these women explore this phenomenon as a means to understand their agency as citizens and artists.

Melancholy modernisms Mourning and melancholia have played an important and critically diverse role in modernist studies. The debts to Sigmund Freud, and later to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, are paramount. In particular, Freud’s identification of the state of melancholia as derived from the failure to sever libidinal ties with the deceased speaks to Irish women poets’ continued engagement with inherited literary tradition.7 The emphasis on shared history that underpins the formation of a national literature has commonalities with melancholic experience, where ‘the insistence on the past entails the loss of the future’.8 Yet even within this constraint, women sought to extend their writing practice in ways more fitted to their individual imaginative needs, using modernist techniques to explore particular affiliations. For Anne Enderwitz,

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the linguistic indeterminacy of modernism facilitates its exploration of intense experience: ‘The fascination of modernist melancholia stems from its synthetic character, its refusal to keep within the bounds of dichotomy: it concerns cognition and affect, language and desire, mind and body.’9 The women poets explored here are intrigued by these enmeshed states and by the challenges to representation that they pose. In the Irish context, however, these ambiguities made assimilation into existing literary groupings difficult and heightened the troubled relationship between the woman poet and her introjected literary precursor. Recognizing the necessity of turning to new forms, these women engaged in kinds of creative innovation that involved them in mourning for a lost past; through this process, each came to understand the role that such mourning plays in the creation of an individual artistic identity. Melancholy reflection, as well as being an outlet for suppressed feeling, became a way of authenticating emotion as productive of lasting creative expression. The capacity of the state of melancholy to at once trouble and inspire the sufferer has a long history and has been especially productive in the modernist context. Modernism’s complex relationship with the past marks a radical change not only in how narrative histories may be understood but also in how private memories act on the lives of individuals. Living in the shadow of death intensifies human feelings of estrangement and insignificance – revolutionary violence and the First World War reinforced the need for literary form to accommodate both changing external realities and inner states. For Irish writers, a close relationship between national identity and violent trauma cast these aesthetic choices into stark relief. Robert Buch’s argument that the witness’s response to violence and suffering is not only horror and awe but also ‘transcendence and revelation’ is applicable to this generation of Irish poets.10 Apart from Yeats, few poets wrote extensively about the experience of Civil War, yet the work that emerged in the decades that followed independence was often concerned with the effects of political and social transition and with the increasing cultural isolation of the Free State. Melancholia is significant in linking the emotional life of the individual to these larger social forces, permitting singular and collective positions to coexist. Though melancholia might be marked, in Freud’s terms, by ‘a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance’,11 it conversely offers a means for the poet to scrutinize this withdrawal and to direct the attention of others towards it. As Jonathan Flatley has noted, the emotional retreat that typically characterizes the melancholic had often been judged to facilitate creative contemplation.12 In emptying the world of significance, the melancholic state of mind, ‘even as it dwells on ruins and losses, is at the same time liberated to imagine how the world might be transformed, how things might be entirely different from the way they are’.13 If the world that emerges for the modernist melancholic is one that is ‘alien, inaccessible, unassimilable and external’,14 it is yet capable of throwing the inner life into sharp relief. For Benjamin, self-estrangement plays an active role in the negotiation of melancholic states,15 and this alienation has significance for the function of work – in this case creativity – in the production of a meaningful relationship between individual and society. The experience of marginalization prevented women’s integration into the

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writing community and gave rise, in turn, to forms of poetic expression that made such assimilation still less likely. In this way, recognition of women’s exclusion from the Irish tradition necessitates rethinking the aesthetic and political definitions of modernism itself. By defamiliarizing the personal, these poets reveal its broader historical significance and thus facilitate its recuperation into a larger body of Irish modernist poetry. The intersection between gender and melancholia is a significant one. It was first understood as a masculine emotion; as late as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft felt obliged to refute the notion that ‘ “durable”, steady and valuable passions, like melancholy, are masculine traits’.16 Within a century, though, melancholia had come to be associated with the feminine – a transition that altered its perceived relationship to the production of significant creative work. From this point onwards, the process of solitary reflection that marks melancholic states yields only silence: both Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler have linked this estrangement from language to a breakdown in subjectivity and consequent loss of political and creative authority.17 Here, the experience of loss relates neither to a desired person nor object but to a capacity for self-expression and, with it, valid public speech.

Silenced voices The silencing of the mid-century Irish woman poet is twice enforced: once by the creation of conditions of estrangement by her male literary contemporaries and again by her exclusion from later recuperative projects, which were often overdetermined by postcolonial frameworks and insufficiently attentive to aesthetic diversity. While The Field Day Anthology (1985) is the most notorious example, the tendency persists: The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (2014) delineates ‘Women and Modernism’ as one of three separate ‘constituencies’ and includes women writers and artists sparingly in its main chapters. The challenges that Irish women poets faced are intricately connected to the cultural conditions that prevailed in the first decades after the foundation of the Free State. These years were marked by political, economic and cultural isolationism; this situation, together with a reduced emphasis on the importance of cultural production to national formation, contributed to the persistent view that the mid-century period in Ireland was one of little lasting artistic value. Heralded by the passing of the Censorship of Publications Act in 1929, this decade saw a contraction in the kinds of cultural production that had marked the Revival period. Emigration remained high and Ireland’s economy was affected by trade disputes with Britain. Though socialism and feminism had grown in importance in the period before the Easter Rising, the national interest and party-political concerns dominated the early years of the new state.18 The limited expectations for Irish women were crystallized in the 1937 Constitution, which directly expressed the aim that they eschew public life in favour of their duties in the home; in this, the constitution reflected not only de Valera’s social conservatism but also the views of most Irish citizens at the time.19 Women poets of the 1930s were

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thus marginalized not only by state institutions but also by popular opinion, and their effective exclusion from public discourse was matched by a reduction both in their participation in cultural debate and in the volume and range of their literary output. For Irish women poets of the thirties and forties, the need to negotiate between traditional and experimental forms determines the temporalities of the female subject and the access of women writers to a reading public. In the early phase of modernism, until around 1915, considerable attention was given to representations by, and of, women, yet by mid-century this work was obscured by the masculine identification of modernist criticism.20 As Cristanne Miller has observed, much early feminist criticism on female poets argued for the consideration of a separate women’s tradition of poetry, constructed either in parallel or in opposition to men’s. Later forms of this argument refer to women’s counter-strains, or oppositional discourse, within a single poetic tradition.21

In Ireland, the situation was much more problematic for women writers, since the high point of modernism occurred at a time when women were becoming increasingly marginalized within Irish literary culture, eliminating the power of choice in the formation of a separate tradition. Though women poets had made a significant contribution to Revivalist poetics, they did not flourish artistically in postindependence Ireland, where aesthetic debates tended to be polarized around whether the future of Irish literature lay in native or experimental expression. In the words of Laura O’Connor, Women poets published during the 1930s and 1940s  … enjoyed neither their precursors’ optimism that the coeval suffragist and cultural-nationalist movements would bring about social change, nor their successors’ access to second-wave feminist critique and transnational civil rights movements.22

This outline highlights the apparent isolation of these women from the larger political currents that might have provided implicit support for their work. Though their male peers experienced similar challenges, they were able to create spaces of publishing and performance that shaped their contemporary reception and later critical legacy. Such networks often operated to exclude women writers, as Fogarty has acknowledged; she further argues that ‘the lost work of Irish women poets cannot simply be salvaged and added victoriously to the imaginary, capacious and all-embracing museum of national literary tradition’.23 The erasure of women poets writing in Ireland before 1960 from popular consciousness, as well as from the critical canon, needs renewed consideration, especially in the context of expanding definitions of Irish modernism. The lengthening timeline – and extended geographical reach – of new modernist studies requires sustained recuperative work on women authors across the twentieth century. The modernist demand, articulated by David Sherman, ‘to be alive to the dead bodies in one’s midst’ marks melancholia as an important stage in exploring the repressed past.24

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Reflective withdrawals The four poets examined here all engage in processes of reflective withdrawal that acknowledge the marginalized position of the woman writer. Mary Devenport O’Neill frequently adopts the perspective of the solitary speaker, and her poems show nature to be revelatory of human emotion. As well as being one of the first Irish poets to adopt a pared back reflective style, Devenport O’Neill also demonstrates in her work the productive hybridity of moving between Revivalist and modernist modes, exemplifying in her own career the porous nature of those categories. Hers is a poetry of heightened senses: she is ‘for ever listening’ (‘The Bell’) or ‘crave[s]‌to watch eternally’ (‘A Mood’s Extremity’) yet without resolution. Her vigilant poetics is intricately linked to the meditative perspective of the melancholic, for whom the act of looking raises existential questions, as Enderwitz argues: Melancholia is a perspective, a whole way of seeing. It constitutes its very own realm of experience in which the act of seeing itself becomes a problem because the melancholic questions the truth and the limits of the visible.25

Devenport O’Neill often dwells on the profound impact that even fleeting observation can have on the reflective self. This sensitivity expresses the close links between the feeling subject and her environment, in ways that invoke the Heideggerian understanding of mood as both inside and outside the self. In this way, the Irish woman poet at once internalizes the challenges of her era and expresses the uncertainties of her personal perspective. In Devenport O’Neill’s case, these shifting moods are aptly expressed in the newly supple character of modernist poetry: her work captures the joy of the sensual world while acknowledging the existential anxieties that endure in the melancholic temperament. ‘Expectation’ is exemplary in its exploration of the contradictory feelings of hope and disappointment. The speaker declares in the opening line that she wishes for nothing, yet the arc of the text contradicts this assertion, as it records the ‘strain’ of watching an unchanging grey sky, the ‘dragged-out delay’ of gratification. This subtle treatment of desire and loss is reflected in the texture of the poem: half-rhymes and repeated words (‘to-day’, ‘grey’, ‘sky’, ‘nothing’) create a loose progression that continually turns back on itself, ultimately suggesting stasis. Likewise, short lines intermittently rein in the energy of longer, more optimistic ones that express a hope for change that is ultimately unfulfilled: I know there is nothing, But still I use Knowledge and reason only as a cloak To muffle my preposterous hope – A ruse To hoodwink some all-cunning eye.26

Here, the speaker disguises her irrational hopes by way of reason, making explicit the gendered hierarchies of thought and feeling that have led to the depreciation of women’s

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creative work. Knowledge also serves to deflect the divine (male) gaze – declaring it to be ‘nothing’ yet failing to dispel it entirely. From this tension, finely made poems emerge, demonstrating that direct contemplation of loss and exclusion can yield work of significant philosophical and aesthetic interest. This negotiation between intellect and emotion occurs repeatedly in Devenport O’Neill’s work and often connects feeling with artistic creation, as a way in which her autonomy can be preserved in an inhospitable world. ‘Wishes’ uses natural imagery as raw material for existential reflection. Recording a blackbird’s flight through the gathering dusk, the speaker confirms the ways in which the mutable world suggests her changing inner states, a romantic trope that the poet converts into an eerie twilight world of a green field whitened by the passing light. The poem exists on the cusp between Revivalist inheritance and an abstract representation that departs from direct reproduction of the visible world. In keeping with the creative impulse of melancholia, the act of making is central to the poem: the speaker will ‘take’ and ‘catch’ these fleeting impressions, crafting her wishes out of them, so that if I please I can dissolve them soon – In time to save them from reality.27

This process works on two levels: the first affirms her power to conceal her own desires from the constraints of lived experience, the second describes the determination of the visual artist to resist the lure of the figurative. The poet’s encounter with nature in ‘A Mood’s Extremity’ also asserts artistic control. A sublime landscape sustains the first half of the text as the speaker walks alone in romantic communion with nature. Yet suddenly, and ‘with crude perversity’, the poet shuts this scene out, turning instead to the uneven patch of road where she can trace a rutted cart track.28 This rejection of transcendence for what is commonplace marks both her attachment to, and her distrust of, the visible world. Her state of melancholy ruptures her sensory enjoyment of nature by returning her attention to feelings of loss that cannot be assuaged. Sheila Wingfield’s first collection, Poems (1938), published nine years after Devenport O’Neill’s volume, shares its simplicity of diction and depth of feeling. ‘Odysseus Dying’, which Wingfield identifies as the first poem she ever wrote, reveals her capacity to invoke intense emotion in subtle ways. Drawing inspiration from the early death of the poet’s brother, the text’s use of classical materials indicates the close connections in Wingfield’s work between intellectual and emotional processes. The opening lines – ‘I think Odysseus, as he dies, forgets / Which was Calypso, which Penelope’ – highlight the role of the speaker as mediator while indicating the radical uncertainty that attends any form of poetic utterance.29 The two women become interchangeable for the Greek hero, whose final imaginative act returns him to images of childhood and to a simplicity of experience that precedes his legendary journey. Whether the woman is an enchantress or a faithful wife is ultimately forgotten in a distillation of the myth that also shaped the most famous of Irish modernist novels. The fugitive character of the speaker in Wingfield’s poem is characteristic of the process of self-erasure that attends much of her work. Her awareness of mental and physical frailty shapes the preoccupation with death in

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her poetry, which is expressed through an engagement with dissolution and loss for individuals and civilizations. The first phase of Wingfield’s career demonstrates the versatility of her craft: her use of both fixed forms, such as the sonnet, and free verse suggests a preference for traditional modes, rather than the radical linguistic shifts of high modernism. Her second publication marks a distinct departure from her earliest poems, however. At the time of its publication, Herbert Read called Beat Drum, Beat Heart (1946) ‘the most sustained meditation on war that has been written in our time’,30 but it exceeds this categorization, engaging, as the title suggests, with the dynamics of public and private experience and their effects on gender relations. The poem is divided into four parts: ‘Men in War’, ‘Men at Peace’, ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Women at Peace’. This segmentation of experience emphasizes the power of war to effect a fundamental separation between the lives of men and women while also engaging directly with modes of collective expression. The energies attending the departure of soldiers for war at the poem’s opening are set immediately against what is being left behind – the slowmoving intimacies of the village community. Just as melancholia demonstrates ‘the impossibility of synthesizing an objective order of time with individually experienced time’,31 so this poem explores the relationship between personal loss and the more profound changes that accompany major periods of transition: ‘All this is gone, a lost age. / Gust-torn like a picture page’.32 Amid the confusion of war, the boundaries between self and other are obliterated; so too are the distinctions between soldiers in different places and times. Whether the man is fighting in the Spanish Civil War or on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, the physical hardship and emotional trauma alter a soldier’s sense of individual identity and challenge lyric assumptions concerning the creation of a singular coherent subject. This impression is intensified in the second part of Beat Drum, Beat Heart. Though this section is set in peacetime, the relationship between individual and wider world remains a challenging one, as demonstrated by the shifts in voice and register, as well as by motifs of thwarted quest: For now our thoughts are caught in thicket growth Which slowly strangles them with age; they feel Mute as the woollen horns, fixed as the chase In darkened forests of some tapestry Which has been stared at for no purpose for Too long; being as stale and as exhausted As the parlour walls, and yellow air, And ticking clock of all dead afternoons.33

By giving thoughts corporeal form and figuring them as creatures trapped in an outmoded decorative work, Wingfield at once explores the stranglehold of tradition on intellectual and creative life and the strange juxtaposition of ‘darkened forest’ and stale domestic space that express the contested territories of the melancholy woman poet. The slow passage of time is expressive of the gradual descent into war at the close of the 1930s, as well as the untimeliness of the woman poet, seeking to come to terms with the vast patterns of history.

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In contrast to the shifting energies of the masculine sections, the second half of Beat Drum, Beat Heart – that voiced by women – meditates on power and self-knowledge. Likening the act of falling in love to the sudden summons to war at the opening of the poem, Wingfield contemplates energies that are at once liberating and destructive: This storm that shakes our inmost being, Cracks foundations, and discovers … That what was old is fresh and strange.34

The battlefields of intimacy are country houses or parks, ‘fond hope and insufficiency’ the counterparts to men’s hardship. The speaker declares herself crazy as she enters the landscape of feeling, reflecting her heightened engagement with the world: Mad as harlot water Feeling, always moving, among Palaces whose stone has Stepped its weight into my arms.35

Yet this derangement yields inspiration, and this increased alertness also informs the peaceful creative process of the final section. Divergent voices and forms transmit Wingfield’s reflections on the grief and loss that conflict brings and its lasting effects on human communities.

Emotive environments Marked both by sensuousness of language and frankness of representation, Freda Laughton’s poetry combines the feelings of intimacy and alienation so characteristic of work by women at this time. Her poems often explore the boundaries between spaces and states – land and sea, sleeping and waking, joy and despair – and suggest the difficulties inherent in expressing instability of mood and situation in language. In problematizing coherent subjectivity, Laughton addresses larger emotional currents, recording psychic disturbances that mirror the turbulence of the contemporary world. Most of the poems in A Transitory House were written during the Second World War; though few dealt directly with the conflict, they capture the political uncertainties of the time as well as the concern with subjectivity that shapes the work of many women poets of the period. The solitude that is typical of poetry by women at the time is in direct contrast to perceptions of women as connective figures, at the centre of family relationships and larger social groups. Uniquely of these four poets, Laughton presents a poetics of association, in which sexual intimacy and motherhood become central to an understanding of the self. Yet despite the importance of these fundamental relationships, existential questioning fills the work and, as for the other women poets, this process gives rise to scrutiny of both shared and unique experience. Like Devenport O’Neill, Laughton places feeling at the centre of her work and at times directly explores the relationship between thought and emotion, especially

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through mediation with another figure. ‘Tombed in Spring’ demonstrates the role of intimacy in shaping perceptions of self and world. The poem begins in dialogue, with its speaker contemplating her companion’s observation that ‘the whole of life was figured in a nought’.36 This image, signifying the void yet implicitly acknowledging the potential for wholeness, expresses a key tension in Laughton’s work – that between the weight of rational thought and the enlivening, yet fragile, potential of the imagination. It is a tension present in Devenport O’Neill’s work, too, but here it is reversed: the human subjects remain trapped in gloom despite nature’s beauty and energy. The life force of nature flows through the poem, carried in enjambed lines, in rhymed couplets and their subsequent echoes across the poem’s thirty lines. The repeated use of ‘And’ emphasizes the tightly woven character of animate and inanimate experience and the intensity of emotional response. Inherent in the poem’s title is the irony of burial in an earth beginning to flourish. Though nature is sustained by the forces of rebirth – the ‘rains of light’ and ‘wells / Of living energy’ that nourish growth37 – the human figures are rooted in stone and unable to thrive:          Withered at their rims Our leaves began to fail us and their stems Loosed them, and yours fell fast, before their hour Seeking the earth. The sap withdrawn condemns. And I was left in the live wood alone Certain your certainty had robbed your flower, And vowed that I would learn to loose the sap Locked in my roots beneath the mind’s stout stone.38

Just as the spring in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land brings memory and desire to challenge the forgetfulness of winter,39 here that season places the dynamics of reason and emotion in opposition. Thought holds these human subjects in a condition of emotional paralysis and ultimately results in the breaking of bonds, yet the speaker’s abandonment, though painful, affirms her desire for creative renewal. The contesting energies of instinctive and rational behaviour exert a powerful force on Laughton’s creative process. Sensuality is at the centre of her representation of female subjectivity and addresses the relationship between the speaking subject and her environment as central to her meditative process. Yet this environment also creates a space of enclosure: imagery of shell and nest appear repeatedly in her work, invoking the space of the poem as one of protected intimacy. Unlike Devenport O’Neill’s tropes of solitary concealment, these contexts of Laughton’s poems indicate how present joy and physical pleasure can coexist with feelings of anxiety. The darkness of water or of night air suggests forces only just kept at bay: Lying encircled in the expectant shell, That moon-seed echo of the lovely sun That sometimes lays its face upon the river, Cheek against cheek, the bright upon the darkness.40

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The final image here characterizes the proximity of rapture and fear in Laughton’s work and her conviction that they can only be understood together. In her investigation of these moods, she rethinks the false dichotomy of thought and feeling and in doing so challenges a binary that has limited the reception of Irish women’s poetry. As addressed by Julie Taylor’s 2015 collection Modernism and Affect,41 the intellectual emphasis of modernist studies has long made critics less responsive to the affective power of modernist writing. Women writers continued to defy expectations, however. The sensuality of Laughton’s work is a testament to her poetry’s resistance to the norms of female representation during the mid-century years and is evidence of her writing’s untapped potential as a liberating model for later generations of poets. As the 1940s progressed, the willingness of women poets to engage reflectively with their environment became more marked. In Rhoda Coghill’s work, affect is linked to landscape in ways that resist an instrumental approach to its representation. Coming to poetry from an established career as a musician and composer, Coghill is closely attuned to the relationship of sound and mood but is attentive also to the precision of language and its capacity to represent the specifics of feeling and experience. ‘Burren, Co. Clare’ meditates on the passage of time, geological and personal; it envisages the larger cycles of history within which the individual takes her place. This break with the linear progressive time of modernity allows us to place Ireland’s development outside these constraints – much as Yeats attempted in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ – yet ultimately, it frees the speaker from the sense of simultaneity that, in Benedict Anderson’s view, was instrumental in the formation of nationalism.42 Human control and volition is limited from the start: the speaker has ‘drifted on a quiet wave / Of happening’.43 The long durée of this natural environment exceeds the memory of particular experience, permitting the speaker to enter a strange imaginative realm where intense sensory experience is expressed synaesthetically: Its waters, lapping still About me in imagination, have Confused my sense: so birds like fishes Swim in the liquid air, and lichened bushes Have turned to branching coral: sheep on the mountain-side To flecks of foam left by an ebbing tide.44

Earth and air – all nature is shaped by a tidal flow, which expresses the movements of history but also the experience of solitary observation – evidence of a romantic legacy that can be traced in the work of a number of these women poets. For Laughton, the loss of volition marks a depressive stasis – a ‘standstill of becoming’45 – yet for Coghill the effects are more positive, affording an opportunity to reflect on the passage of time and its manifestation in the material world. Urban spaces also provide Coghill with an occasion for meditation. ‘In the City’ features the River Liffey as a central unifying image that enables the poet to reflect on both the past and future of the city, as well as on the relationship between the urban space and its larger hinterland. She realizes her love of the place in strongly visual terms:

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Like Laughton, Coghill finds inspiration in memory, in the power of the obscured space to trigger remembered scenes. Here the poet captures the intensity of her feeling for the river and its natural life, as well as for its central position in Dublin’s real and imagined identity. Like Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Dublin’, Coghill’s text combines a dreamlike treatment of the city space with a restrained sense of the bleakness of its history. This is a poem of twilight, and its monochrome quality brings a sense of mystery to the scene – gone are the brightly coloured boats and the hurrying shoppers, instead there is ‘faint illumination on the darkest water’ where seabirds float, waiting for dawn.47 The mood of this moment is hard to gauge. The poet observes how life endures, even when hidden from observing eyes; yet these creatures wait in darkness and the poet does not offer a redemptive reading of their presence. Rather, she reminds us of the importance of patience and persistence as an integral part of lived experience and its representation. The dissolution of subjectivity is an enduring preoccupation for these modernist Irish women poets and embraces both imaginative power and imaginative failure. All four poets had truncated writing lives: three published just one full-length collection, and though Wingfield’s writing practice was continuous, her output dwindled from the 1960s onwards. All contemplate the struggle to write and the fear of creative diminishment. Within their poems, the role of prolonged introspection in the contemplation of alienation, grief and loss is clear; these yield an awareness of self-division that is at once painful to express and essential for our understanding of the terms in which Irish modernism has been – and continues to be – cast. These women examine the significance of interior lives for our larger understanding of history, and in doing so interrogate the relationship between emotion and intellect in the shaping of their own creativity. The melancholic temperament expresses the isolation that these and other women artists experienced, yet it also offers a means to understand more fully the relationship between the singular artistic vision and the shared critical perspective.

Notes 1. Laura O’Connor draws attention to these specific groupings in her essay ‘W. B. Yeats and Modernist Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 77–94. 2. Gerald Dawe, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) includes just four essays on women poets out of a total of thirty; all are living poets, demonstrating the lasting effects of marginalization. 3. The inadequate representation of women writers in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (3 vols, 1985) was a catalyst both for two additional volumes in the series (2003) and for further evaluation of a lost generation of mid-century Irish women

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poets, including Anne Fogarty, ‘Outside the Mainstream: Irish Women Poets of the 1930s’, Suitéar Na n-Aingeal 17 (1999): 87–92; and Susan Schreibman, ‘Irish Women Poets 1929–1959: Some Foremothers’, Colby Quarterly 37, no. 4 (December 2001): 309–26. 4. Anne Mulhall, ‘ “The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track”: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Irish University Review 42, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 32–52. 5. While acknowledging that her work could be ‘both delicate and subtle’, Austin Clarke was critical of Laughton’s lack of engagement with Irish material in ‘Recent Verse’, Irish Times (19 January 1946). 6. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 50. 7. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 204–5. 8. Martin Middeke and Christina Wald, ‘Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction’, in The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, ed. Martin Middeke and Christina Wald (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4. 9. Anne Enderwitz, Modernist Melancholia: Freud, Conrad and Ford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. 10. Robert Buch, The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 18. 11. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 204. 12. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 26–9. 13. Ibid., 525. 14. Enderwitz, Modernist Melancholia, 3. 15. See Flatley, Affective Mapping, 95. 16. Qtd in Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 538. 17. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 33–68; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1997), 170–86. 18. For further discussion of changing political priorities in Ireland following the 1916 Rising, see Rosemary Cullen Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland 1870–1970 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005); and Myrtle Hill, Women in Ireland: A Century of Change (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003). 19. See Olivier Coquelin, ‘Politics in the Irish Free State: The Legacy of a Conservative Revolution’, European Legacy 10, no. 1 (2006): 29–39. 20. Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘Introduction’, in The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 2. 21. Cristanne Miller, ‘Gender, Sexuality and the Modernist Poem’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76. 22. O’Connor, ‘W. B. Yeats and Modernist Poetry’, 88. 23. Anne Fogarty, ‘Gender, Irish Modernism and the Poetry of Denis Devlin’, in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 210.

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24. David Sherman, In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5. 25. Enderwitz, Modernist Melancholia, 6. 26. Lucy Collins, ed., Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 202. 27. Ibid., 203. 28. Ibid., 204. 29. Sheila Wingfield, Collected Poems 1938–1983 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 15. 30. Qtd by G. S. Fraser, preface to Wingfield, Collected Poems 1938–1983, xiii. 31. Anne Enderwitz, ‘Modernist Melancholia and Time: The Synchronicity of the NonSynchronic in Freud, Tylor and Conrad’, in The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, ed. Middeke and Wald, 174. 32. Wingfield, Collected Poems 1938–1983, 20. 33. Ibid., 41. 34. Ibid., 46. 35. Ibid., 50. 36. Collins, ed., Poetry by Women in Ireland, 245. 37. Ibid., 246. 38. Ibid. 39. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), 63. 40. Freda Laughton, ‘While to the Sun the Swan’, in Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970, ed. Collins, 242. 41. Julie Taylor, ed., Modernism and Affect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 24. 43. Rhoda Coghill, The Bright Hillside (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1948), 3. 44. Ibid., 6. 45. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. Erling Eng (New York: Basic, 1966), 293. 46. Coghill, The Bright Hillside, 6. 47. Ibid.

4

Death and the nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction Maureen O’Connor

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment, revolutions in ‘Western’ thought, asserted the superiority of humanist, rationalist modes of engaging with and understanding the phenomenal world over traditional technologies of knowledge. Beginning in the early modern era, emerging models of scientific inquiry seemed to demonstrate the independence of the human mind from its physical environment, in contrast to older, ‘primitive’ systems of organizing phenomena and relationships between them that understood every element of the environment, including the animate, the numinous and the inanimate, as parts of an enmeshed whole. One of the promises held out by Enlightenment thought, then, was the possibility of transcending the body, associated with the mortal limitations of our animal materiality, ‘the living link between an artificially idealized humanity and “nature” ’.1 The artistic avantgarde of the early twentieth century reacted against Enlightenment imperatives to progress and civilization in its preoccupation with ‘primitive’ forms, from the aesthetic to the spiritual, and challenged prevailing Cartesian divisions between human and nonhuman animals, between people and things. As Bill Brown observes, ‘modernism, when struggling to integrate the animate and the inanimate, humans and things, always knew that we have never been modern’,2 a potentially destabilising knowledge, promising both existential terror and artistic inspiration. The ‘spectre’ of the nonhuman, according to Carrie Rohman, ‘profoundly threatens the sovereignty of the Western subject of consciousness in modernist literature’. Surrealist and other ‘modernist texts variously retrench, unsettle and even invert a humanist relation to this nonhuman other’.3 Modernist Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen was, like modernism itself, both implicated in and sceptical of the imperialist project that brought non-Western art to the attention of European artists. A recent biography suggests that the groundwork was laid for Bowen’s mature interest in surrealism by her childhood consumption of a local version of the native ‘primitive’, Irish fairy and folklore in which the landscape is inhabited by spirits, and animals act as emissaries of the gods, a nonmodern body of narrative wielding significant influence on ‘her own inspiriting of objects in her writing’.4 What Elizabeth C. Inglesby identifies as Bowen’s ‘animist sensibilities’ have been noted by a number of critics,5 including Maud Ellmann, who describes the author as ‘aware

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of the primal impulses battering at the bastions of modernity’ and who observes of her fiction that ‘every object has a psyche; in fact, her objects even have neuroses’.6 Stones can indeed be mad in Bowen. The ‘psychic instability’ that emerges from the exchange of qualities between the animate and inanimate in Bowen’s fiction, a kind of ‘defamiliarization’ that withholds ‘a fundamental support of mimesis’,7 situates her work firmly within the modernist canon. Bowen’s consistent blurring of distinctions between subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, has implications for human subjectivity in her fiction. Bowen shares with new materialists an interest in destabilizing conventional notions of subjectivity, in challenging the idea of independent entities, in order to understand ourselves and everything around us, seen and unseen, as phenomena in an ongoing process of ‘becoming’ through relationships and interactions with other phenomena. The work of feminist new materialists and critical posthumanists, including Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, provide insights into the significance of the ‘queer’ attractions that Dana Luciano and Mel Chen call ‘transmaterial affections’, when they occur in Bowen’s fiction, and her preoccupation with the trope of haunting.8 The varieties of haunting in Bowen suggest that the material human body, not just consciousness, memory or emotion, can be haunted, specifically by itself, by its own otherness. Such readings make clear the sexist and heterosexist implications of dominant constructions of the ‘nonhuman’ other, when the ‘human’ is predicated on white, straight, able-bodied masculinity. For Bowen’s characters, the ‘sheer otherness’ of embodiment, according to Ellmann, renders love and death equivalent in their demands, a kind of impersonality of drive and attraction that moves beyond heterosexist, reproductive imperatives.9 Bowen’s representation of death exceeds what Rosi Braidotti has criticized as ‘the metaphysics of finitude’, with its ‘overemphasis on mortality and perishability’, an emphasis that necessarily invests significantly in logics of lineage and reproduction.10 Textual moments that reveal the body as object and as abject create liminal spaces and times of possibility, open identity to its multiplicity, release it from individualized, anthropocentric significance. If a continuity is assumed between the human and the nonhuman, between subjects and objects, then the meaning attached to death is transformed, an ironic fulfilment of humanist belief in the endurance of ‘life’ beyond the material limitations of embodiment. ‘Death is overrated’, Braidotti argues, ‘The ultimate subtraction is after all only another phase in a generative process.’11 In Bowen’s fiction, things and objects, the nonhuman and the human, regularly transgress the supposedly ‘organic’ temporality that determines the difference between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ and generate radical, exhilarating possibilities not only for our relationship to death but also for our understanding of Irish modernism, often limited by a masculinist, anthropocentric emphasis on the ‘human’. Positioning the political within a more inclusive frame would allow for a productive critical re-evaluation of Irish modernist praxis.12 Bowen’s experiences of the world wars, especially her time in London during the Blitz of the Second World War, feature prominently in critical discussions of her treatment of death. Dozens of her short stories and the 1949 novel, The Heat of the Day, are set during the Second World War, a time described by the narrator of that novel as when ‘the wall between the living and dead thinned’.13 However, Bowen’s intimacy

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with death predates her wartime experiences. Even before the trauma of losing her adored mother when Bowen was only thirteen, she was profoundly influenced by the haunted, backwards-looking culture of fin-de-siècle Anglo-Ireland, where the past pressed urgently on the present, as it does for the characters of her 1929 novel, The Last September, whose ancestors’ lives seem more vivid than their own. The Last September takes place in Danielstown, a house based on Bowen’s own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, the inspiration for her book by the same name about the history of the place and the generations who had lived there since the eighteenth century. Her description demonstrates a long-established, indeed, inherited familiarity with the porous membrane between the living and the dead: What runs on most through a family living in one place is a continuous, semiphysical dream. … With the end of each generation, the lives that submerged here were absorbed again. With each death, the air of the place had thickened; it had been added to. The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms – as I said, we had no ghosts in that house – because they already permeated them.14

Much of Bowen’s fiction is categorized as gothic, though the dead in her work are so integrated into the everyday, as they are in Bowen’s Court, they rarely frighten however much they fascinate and disturb. In The Heat of the Day, largely set in London, it is the intimate Irish departed who wield the most lasting power. Recently dead victims of war are barely distinguishable from the traumatized Londoners among whom they wander: ‘Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as all that.’15 In the meantime, Mount Morris, a family home in Ireland, distant and shielded from the war and from modernity, as if in ‘another time rather than another country’,16 offers a potentially restorative post-war future for Roderick, the son of Stella, the novel’s protagonist. Roderick can only imagine that future as realizable as an act of honouring ‘the genuine dead’ of his father’s family.17 Just as Lois in The Last September feels dominated by her late mother Laura, whose memory is more present to those around her than is Lois herself, so Bowen describes her own family heritage as being ruled by an invisible continuity. As many critics have noted, Bowen is preoccupied with the unseen, the mysterious. According to Thomas Laqueur, ‘the presence of the dead enchants our purportedly unenchanted world’, providing modern secular society with a more ‘democratic’ form of enchantment, ‘a protean magic that we believe despite ourselves’.18 Brown ascribes a similar quality to objects, which manifest ‘a sensuous presence or … a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols and totems’.19 In Bowen’s fiction, the numinous quality of the enchanting dead is shared with things and objects, as in To the North (1932), where escaping to a country cottage restores to everyday objects ‘their full circle of charm and mystery.20 Much of the time these charming objects are occupying an ‘unseen world’, described by Inglesby as ‘another plane of existence’ where things, objects and landscapes ‘possess an esoteric form of dignity and energy’. They are inhabitants of ‘another dimension of reality not dependent on humanity to

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lend it significance’.21 The independence of the nonhuman is a central tenet of new materialism, along with an acknowledgement of human dependence. As Jane Bennett has noted, ‘there was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity’.22 The vitality of the nonhuman in Bowen’s fiction, especially putatively ‘inanimate’ or inorganic objects, has often been discussed in connection with her surrealism of form. Her ‘unnerving syntax’, as Ellmann characterizes it, which ‘constantly ambushes our ontological security’, is an element of her idiosyncratic prose in which ‘everything conspires to efface the human subject’.23 Eluned Summers-Bremner similarly understands Bowen’s ‘disconcerting syntax’ as a response to the ‘repetitious encounter with an object that refuses to yield its meaning’. According to Summers-Bremner, ‘the unnerving life force shown by things’ is a humbling ‘process that returns us to our object status’.24 In this way, Bowen suggests that the human partakes of the kind of ‘non-human, yet affirmative life force’ that Braidotti would come to call ‘zoe’, a ‘type of vitality, unconcerned by clear-cut distinctions between living and dying’.25 The effects of this transference between human characters and the buildings, landscapes and objects that surround them range from a deadening of affect to the discovery of reserves of receptivity and sympathy. In the final scene of To the North, Emmeline becomes fused with the terrible, exhilarating speed and mass of the car she is driving with the intention of killing herself and her passenger, Markie. She has become ‘lost to her own identity, a confining husk’.26 Deaf to Markie’s cries of alarm, ‘she looked into his eyes without consciousness, as though at the windows of an empty house.  … Little more than his memory ruled her still animate body, so peacefully empty as not even to be haunted.’27 Houses can be especially unsettling in their human qualities, haunting without necessarily being haunted. In the 1946 story ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, a house is undergoing a ‘process of strangulation’ by ivy ‘that must be feeding on something inside the house’. Because of the house’s apparent self-satisfaction, the narrator suggests that it was ‘perhaps just, or not unfitting that it should have been singled out for this gothic fate’.28 The Last September’s Danielstown stares coldly, ‘piles itself up’ over its inhabitants and generally projects a sense of menace, until the narrative reveals the house to be a vulnerable, doomed structure, destined to be burned down by the rebels fighting for Irish Independence in a war the house’s inhabitants have refused to acknowledge. In The House in Paris (1935), a young girl, Henrietta, in transit between homes, spends a day in the singularly unwelcoming, eponymous house: ‘It was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.’29 Despite this unpromising introduction, Henrietta will achieve a healing connection to another child, also waiting in the house, the deeply damaged, abandoned Leopold, a connection that will be enabled by the ‘thing-ness’ of both children. A latent openness to this kind of transference is suggested from the novel’s first few pages by Henrietta’s untroubled acceptance of her plush toy monkey’s oscillation between subject and object. As happens in many of Bowen texts, in this novel the othering effect of identifying as nonhuman is a movement at once inward and outward, what Barad calls ‘the surprise, the interruption of the stranger (within) re-turning unannounced’.30 Andrew Bennett

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and Nicholas Royle discuss the ethical dimension of this kind of ‘asocial otherness’, the paradoxical foundation of love, ‘an otherness which precedes, haunts, solicits the very possibility of self-identity and individuality, memory and the present, the social and the human’.31 Henrietta has felt little sympathy for stiff, awkward Leopold, whom she considers both ‘supernatural’ and ‘an unconscious little tree’,32 until the end of the novel, when he breaks down with a sorrowing despair that voids Henrietta’s subjectivity, making her ‘no more than the walls or table’. This erasure ‘disembodied her, so she fearlessly crossed the parquet to stand beside him’ and lovingly embraced the grieving child, joining him in his tree-ness: Finally, she leant her body against his, pressing her ribs to his elbow so that his sobs began to go through her too. … After a moment like this, his elbow undoubled itself against her and his left arm went round her with unfeeling tightness, as though he were gripping the bole of a tree. … Reposing between two friends, the mantelpiece and her body.33

It is Henrietta’s body, as comforting as a mantelpiece, the ‘unhuman’ materiality that renders her ‘no more than’ any other object in the room. Henrietta’s body provides a conduit, via its suddenly undeniable otherness, an estrangement from herself, for the social and human connection Bennett and Royle describe. In stepping outside of her ‘self ’, Henrietta is ‘summon[ed] to sheer exteriority’, like other Bowen characters, of whom Ellmann observes that they ‘are called to love as they are called to death, and the call comes not from the heart but from sheer “otherness” ’.34 In The House in Paris, strange houses can bring to uncomfortable awareness the ultimate self-estrangement, one’s own mortality, ‘what life is. To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious, dead: you see the world without yourself.’35 The essence of life, that is, the nearness of violence and death, first becomes vivid in The Last September, not in the threatened Big House, Danielstown, where the reality of conflict is kept at a distance, but in an unoccupied structure, an abandoned mill. Its description inverts the usual formula of anthropomorphism, not by investing an ‘inanimate’ object with the qualities of the living but by figuring it as a corpse, the abjected subject: ‘The mill stared at them all, lighteyed, ghoulish. … These dead mills – the country was full of them, never quite stripped and whitened to a skeleton’s decency: like corpses at their most horrible.’36 The mill evokes human ‘futility and sadness’, taking on ‘all of a past to which it had given nothing’.37 The mill’s decay situates it in two historic timelines, the deep past, and, in its portention, the contemporary epoch-defining events of revolutionary war. Lois and the slightly older, unconventional Marda, whom Lois intensely admires, venture into the rickety structure and surprise a sleeping rebel who has retreated to the unhospitable shelter. Startled, his gun goes off, accidently inflicting a minor injury on Marda’s hand. This shocking encounter with the messiness and meaninglessness of individual death strengthens Marda’s desire to flee the stultifying paralysis of Danielstown. Death in Bowen often forces a confrontation beyond the conventional apprehension of personal mortality to question the vitality of what we think of as our own ‘lives’. Patrick Moran identifies Bowen’s ‘fear that extreme social propriety and class expectations could transform individuals into lifeless, puppetlike figures’.38 Life seems suspended in Danielstown, trembling on the

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lip of an unsustainable illusion of harmony and order. The house is haunted by its own redundancy, reflected in the corpse of the mill. Another young person of the novel, Laurence, entertains visions of the house in flames, its future past. He also imagines ‘a small resurrection day’ for lost objects,39 an alternative eschatology, a secular version of the biblical judgement day at the end of human time, in which, rather than the body and the soul being reunited, the human/nonhuman assemblage is comically heightened, yet also recognized and sanctified. R. F. Foster considers Bowen’s ‘sense of history’ as not just crucial to understanding her work but as constitutive of ‘nearly all her best fiction’.40 Foster’s own sense of history, however, is narrower than Bowen’s. The nonhuman object and the dehumanizing power of death that transforms subject to object are implicated in the specific historic sense crucial to Bowen’s praxis, as both phenomena point to a timeline beyond that of a single individual. Confronting loss of self and identity through death enables ethical insights into the constitutive patterns and connections amongst all phenomena, insights that decentre the human subject, including the conventional androcentric understanding of space and time. In her discussion of the character of Stella in The Heat of the Day, renée c. hoogland argues that the ‘operations of time and narrative history on the individual subject’s sense of reality’ force Stella ‘to reconsider her experience of self as well as the moral order in relation to which she has thus far defined this self ’, a reassessment brought about by the war, one of ‘the forces of destabilization in the material “timespace” in which the story unfolds’.41 A similarly destabilized ‘timespace’ operates for Lois in The Last September, when she entertains the ‘thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps … having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into Time than [her older relations] could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination’.42 In a discussion of Sheridan Le Fanu, Bowen indicates a source for her handling of time other than the asynchronicities typical of modernist praxis when she argues that the ‘time lag’ of Ireland’s amodern temporality ‘separates Ireland from England more effectually than any sea’.43 Specific places in Bowen often act as nodes of recognition of what Barad calls the ‘spacetimemattering’ through which the ‘material entanglements’ of phenomena are ‘enfolded and threaded’.44 For Lois, it is the liminal step at the front door of Danielstown; for Geraldine, one of Bowen’s orphaned, lonely children, in ‘The Little Girl’s Room’ (1934), that space is her bedroom in her step-grandmother’s house: She was alone in her room, that … seemed to be enclosed by more than material walls, by volutions of delicacy and sweet living shadows … . If stone sustained it, the very stone was kind. Here was the secret form of her little-girlhood, tenderly animate by the spirit. Here, round the smiling gold clock, time was captive, and only fluttered with little moth-wings; here, coming in, you distilled the whole sweetness of youth from a happy consciousness of mortality: the narrow bed was innocent as an early grave. By falling asleep here, the little girl gave herself back to the centuries, … like a little girl in an epitaph.45

In another of Bowen’s perversions of the scene of anthropomorphism, stone and shadow infuse Geraldine with their animating spirit. Time does not move in a teleological

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arrow, but flutters stochastically, looking forward to Geraldine’s death at the same time as it reaches back through the centuries. In Barad’s words, time is ‘out of joint; it is diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity. “Now” is not an infinitesimal slice, but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime.’46 Life and death are ‘enfolded’ and reconfigured in this room where youth is savoured in imagining its extinction. This example of the way things in Bowen – here the room itself, walls, shadows, stones, clock, bed – suggest ‘alternate durations or planes of existence beyond the human present’, as Laci Mattison has argued about the treatment of time by Bowen and her contemporaries (including Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson): ‘Such a vision of time is a particularly nonhuman one in the sense that  … we do not store memories: rather, time contains us.’47 Geraldine is a comically secret rebel, ostensibly well behaved but seething with resentment, constantly examined by her step-grandmother for signs of genius, signs she fails to manifest. It is suggested, however, that her hidden genius may reside in her imagination. In her room she stages bloody nightly battles with ‘The Enemies’, or ‘Imaginary Furious People’, that is, the tutors, trainers and instructresses engaged to draw out her artistic and intellectual abilities. Geraldine’s considerable powers to conjure detailed and convincing appearances and performances from these spectres both contrast with and rely on her insecure sense of self: she ‘seemed to exist with difficulty. Every time her reflection flitted out of the looking glass the whole of Geraldine seemed to be mislaid.’48 Geraldine’s creative abilities are linked to what Summers-Bremner refers to as an ‘event of non-coinciding with ourselves’ in Bowen’s fiction, a disorienting but productive occasion of ‘felt frustration [that] eventually reveals itself as the only thing, if there is anything, that it might be possible to share with others. … And it is on this non-coincidence with ourselves, as well, that our historical belonging is also seen to rest.’49 The unexpected consolation and comfort Geraldine seems to take from seeing herself ‘like a little girl in an epitaph’, an anonymous figure in an indifferent future, appears also to enable her creative abilities. Mattison considers Bowen’s ‘sense of time beyond human mechanization’ as necessary to connecting ‘with durations other than our own, both human and nonhuman’, which allows us ‘not only to “transcend ourselves” but to become otherwise’.50 After a typical ‘nightly session of the red passions’, Geraldine ‘glanced around the room as though it had been another child’s nursery’, the ghost of herself. Having successfully ‘transcended’ that other child, she is ready to sigh ‘acquiescence into her frilly pillow’.51 Geraldine abdicates her ‘self ’ in the act of animating the bogeys of her young life, to act as puppet master to hated authority figures whom she defeats nightly. Moran’s analysis of toys in Bowen’s fiction quotes an unfinished essay of the author’s in which she likens ‘characters to marionettes’ and compares ‘writing to economies of play’.52 Geraldine’s paradoxical occupation of the positions of both puppet and puppet master comments obliquely on illusions of mastery, authority and hierarchy, those structures that new materialism also critiques. Moran argues that for Bowen, ‘the modern novelist is like the child in that he or she is always playing with collapsing distinctions – or hermeneutical ambiguities – which recall our first encounters with the phenomenal world’.53 Bennet and Royle also discuss the recurring figures of toys and puppets,

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those most evocative of ‘inanimate’ objects in Bowen’s work, which render ‘the body not only as a fiction of death, but also – even before that in a fictional body’.54 The body is always a simulacrum of the body, they argue, shaped and activated by others’ thoughts, including the thoughts of the dead, as noted above in the cases of Lois in The Last September and Roderick in The Heat of the Day, themselves constructs granted eternal, ever-renewing ‘life’ by Bowen herself. Death is a life force, not simply in the negative sense of contrast or even an ‘organic’ process of regeneration but through a more dynamic interplay of indeterminacies, including the reconfigured temporalities that lend Bowen’s texts their hallucinatory atmosphere, what Susan Osborn calls her ‘bizarre images’ that are ‘fashioned for something other than a reality effect’.55 Bowen shares with her contemporary surrealists a ‘conscious effort to achieve greater intimacy with things and to exert a different determination for them’, in the words of Brown, in order to register ‘their refusal to occupy the world as it was’.56 The collapse of distinctions between reality and the construction of imaginary worlds, whether through child’s play or the work of the mature artist, is not a nullification. As Donna Haraway argues, ‘ “reality” is not compromised by the pervasiveness of narrative; one gives up nothing but the illusion of epistemological transcendence by attending closely to stories’; stories, according to Haraway, inhabit us as much as we inhabit them, and ‘such inhabiting is finally what constitutes the “we” amongst whom communication is possible’.57 These are ‘the regions where the lively subject becomes the undead thing’,58 the liminal space where it is possible to rethink our received ideas of identity and difference. Patricia Laurence characterizes Bowen’s aesthetic as one in which ‘life or death is heightened by art’.59 Osborn makes a parallel observation but reverses the hierarchical trajectory implicit in Laurence’s reference to art’s ability to exalt its subject. Indeed, Osborn argues for a ‘degrading’ dynamic in Bowen’s resistance to ‘presenting the mundane as real,  … creating instead unions that are grotesque, anomalous and excrescent’. In her rejection of a frictionless aesthetic of similarity and wholeness, ‘the deformed images destabilize the ontological status of “copy” by at times eliminating or compromising the known world and its differentiations’.60 The world can only be known to the observing human consciousness in fragmented, partial encounters, like Janet in Friends and Relations (1931), who compares her younger self to a growing plant that ‘pushes things, even paving stones out of the way, and grows past them’. What she comes to realize she did not see, however, is that stones, quite apart from human observation or comprehension, ‘had a life of their own and made growth too’.61 In that early novel, hedges are ‘eager’ for attention, and unlike some ‘human’ characters, a room can be ‘mortally disconcerted’: ‘A room does not easily re-compose itself, laugh, remark some inconsequence, remember a tune.’62 Portia, another of Bowen’s abandoned children, in The Death of the Heart (1938), is also sensitive to the feelings of the objects: ‘nothing seems inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rock, seem not only to exist but to dream’. Portia is one of the ‘very young people’, who ‘are tuned to the earth’,63 and her relation to things ‘begins to become love’.64 In one of Bowen’s last novels, A World of Love (1955), objects act as the catalyst for love when an emotional connection to a dead man, experienced through the act of

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reading, propels a young woman into future possibilities of passion. Jane finds a cache of letters written years earlier by Guy, someone she has never heard anyone speak of. The letters have no clear addressee, and Guy becomes as real a loving presence to Jane as any living person she encounters. Bennett and Royle coined the phrase ‘thermo-writing’ to describe the heat generated by Guy’s letters,65 which ignite and illuminate several planes of relation between characters in the text, some of whom knew Guy before he was killed in the war, so that he undergoes a kind of resurrection. The ‘liveliness’ of this transformative relationship challenges logics of temporality and presence. Jacques Derrida says of text in general that it is ‘a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it’.66 Reading and writing are acts of refusing to accept death as final, commitments to the nonhuman, acts of love generated by what Haraway calls the ‘irreducible trickster quality that resists categories and projects of all kinds’, a quality shared by people and things: ‘Yearning is fed from the gaps in categories and the quirky liveliness of signs.’67 Bowen is a novelist of yearning, of quirkiness, of gaps and unsettling, boundarydissolving figurative language, such as a doorway that ‘yearn[s]‌up the path like an eye-socket’ or a piece of paper that creeps ‘on the floor like a living handkerchief ’.68 Her fiction represents ‘a world where things and people, like the living and the dead, are constantly encroaching on each other’s territory’,69 an echo of new materialism’s relational ontology and epistemology in which ‘all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity – its iterative inter-activity’.70 A version of the transcendence sought by classic European art and philosophy is suggested in the fiction, but it is a movement of dispersion and dissolution, downward and inward as well as outward, extending beyond our bounded ‘selves’. Braidotti addresses the desire for transcendence when she argues that death is the inhuman inside us: ‘Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. … The proximity to death suspends life, not into transcendence, but rather into the radical immanence of “just a life”, here and now, for as long as we can take.’71 For Bowen, to write is to be haunted, just as to live is ‘to address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts’, as Barad insists is our duty to those who came before us and who will follow: [It] is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that ‘we’ are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come.72

‘What is to-come’ is always death, a past and future prospect of indeterminacy to be encountered with receptivity and courage. In ‘The Pink Biscuit’ (1928), Sibela is asked to run to the shops, something the little girl has never done before. She enjoys being on her own, peeping ‘at life this way and

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that, down all the queer perspectives’.73 Entranced, she is tempted into naughtiness by the glamour of the shops and the heady responsibility. Glittering, vibrant, urgent things seem to present themselves as ‘triumphant’, and ‘there was something of triumph too in the repose of that whole side of a split pig, reclined voluptuously on a bank of moss’, a pig later referred to as ‘swooning’.74 ‘The fancy biscuits’ are described as ‘occupying a table like an altar, vomited opulently out onto plates from a cornucopia.’75 Death (achieved by violence, as the butchers’ ‘whirring great steel knives’ imply), sex, disgust, excess, desire, humour and religion mingle promiscuously in this scene of original sin when Sibela responds to the call of a pink biscuit that detaches itself from its fellows to ‘quiver to stillness at the very edge of the table’.76 Visions of skulls and a ‘pit of darkness’ torment Sibela as she contemplates the end of her ‘spiritual life’, having ‘perplexed’ God by slipping that irresistible biscuit into her pocket.77 Demonstrating an aching sensitivity to the liveliness of biscuits, oranges, ginger and pig carcases, Sibela has begun to learn that living is inseparable from sin, death, darkness and risk-taking, an embrace of ‘all the queer perspectives’. Bowen’s own ‘queer perspectives’ continue to elude stable critical taxonomies. While her once-denied place in Irish modernism has been secured, new materialist analysis of the work undermines received critical narratives of Irish modernism itself, long reliant on anthropocentric historiography. An old blessing in Irish wishes its beneficiary that very good thing, death in Ireland. Accounts of Irish modernism may also benefit by finding meaning beyond ‘life’ as defined by the limits of the human.

Notes 1. Ariel Salleh and Meira Hanson, ‘On Production and Reproduction: Identity and Nonidentity in Ecofeminist Theory’, Organization and Environment 12, no. 2 (1999): 213. 2. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 12. 3. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 12. 4. Patricia Laurence, Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 32. 5. Elizabeth C. Inglesby, ‘ “Expressive Objects”: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes’, Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 2 (2007): 307. 6. Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 5, 6. 7. renée c. hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 56. 8. Dana Luciano and Mel Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos 2–3 (2015): 186. 9. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 190. 10. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 333. 11. Ibid. 12. An example of such a reading is provided by Liam Young, ‘ “Do You Dance, Minnaloushe?” Yeats’s Animal Questions’, in Animals in Irish Literature and Culture,

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ed. Borbála Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 149–64. 13. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 87. 14. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (Cork: Collins Press, 1988), 451. 15. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 86. 16. Ibid., 156. 17. Ibid. 18. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 14, 27. 19. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 5. 20. Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (New York: Penguin, 1986), 199. 21. Inglesby, ‘Expressive Objects’, 310–13. 22. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 31. 23. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 7, 67. 24. Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Paris and Death of the Heart’, in Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Susan Osborn (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), 64. 25. Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 340. 26. Bowen, To the North, 244. 27. Ibid. 28. Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Gripped the Steps (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946), 139. 29. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 11. 30. Karen Barad, ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’, Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 178. 31. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 71. 32. Bowen, The House in Paris, 56. 33. Ibid., 218–19, 220. 34. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 190. 35. Bowen, The House in Paris, 78. 36. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 178. 37. Ibid., 179. 38. Patrick Moran, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Toys and the Imperatives of Play’, Éire-Ireland 46, nos 1–2 (2011): 160. 39. Bowen, The Last September, 55–6. 40. R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993), 103. 41. hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen, 108. 42. Bowen, The Last September, 36. 43. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Preface to Uncle Silas’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 101. 44. Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 261. 45. Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories (Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1981), 430. 46. Barad, ‘Diffracting Diffraction’, 169. 47. Laci Mattison, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Things: Modernism and the Threat of Extinction in The Little Girls’, Twentieth Century Literature 61, no. 3 (2015): 400.

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4 8. Bowen, The Collected Stories, 431. 49. Summers-Bremner, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things’, 63, 64. 50. Mattison, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Things’, 398, 399. 51. Bowen, The Collected Stories, 135, 136. 52. Moran, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Toys and the Imperatives of Play’, 158. 53. Ibid. 54. Bennet and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, 4. 55. Susan Osborn, ‘ “How to Measure This Unaccountable Darkness between the Trees”: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in The Last September’, in Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Susan Osborn (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), 55. 56. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 11. 57. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997), 64. 58. Ibid., 133. 59. Laurence, Elizabeth Bowen, 7. 60. Osborn, ‘How to Measure This Unaccountable Darkness between the Trees’, 56. 61. Elizabeth Bowen, Friends and Relations (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 107. 62. Ibid., 50. 63. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 158. 64. Ibid., 179. 65. Bennet and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, 105. 66. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 131. 67. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets Onco-Mouse™, 128. 68. Bowen, The Last September, 123, 203. 69. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 141–2. 70. Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, Kvinder Køn og Forskning 1, no. 2 (2012): 32. 71. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 132. 72. Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements’, 264. 73. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Pink Biscuit’, in The Bazaar and Other Stories, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 55. 74. Ibid., 57, 59. 75. Ibid., 59. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 62.

5

The languages of Irish modernism: Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel Beckett Eoin Byrne

Irish cultural criticism remains predominantly anglophonic in its scope and remit. The reluctance to engage with Irish-language material in particular has been variously categorized as one of the last ‘modes of licensed ignorance’ permitted within Irish academia;1 a form of ‘palimpsestization’ or ‘peasantization’ by which the Irish language as a ‘living vernacular and particularly as a language of intellectual or creative enquiry’ is disregarded;2 and as a situation in which Irish is conceptualized merely as a lost language, giving buttress to the rebuilding of idiomatic expression in English.3 While certain critics have persisted in taking Irish writers out of quarantine, such scholarly works remain firmly in the minority. The failure to adequately canonize Irish-language writing within Irish studies has impeded critical attempts to develop more integrated and nuanced understandings of Irish cultural production at specific historical moments. In the preface to his groundbreaking Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), Thomas MacDonagh writes that these ‘Studies in Irish and AngloIrish Literature are frankly experimental. In them I have tried to clear away certain misconceptions, to fix certain standards, to define certain terms.’4 It seems necessary that the current reappraisal of Irish literary modernism would employ a similar multilingual approach. In line with the present volume’s objective to interrogate and diversify the limits of Irish literary modernism in all of its manifestations, in this chapter I demonstrate the need to complicate the critical tendency towards an anglocentric canon of Irish literary modernism by reading Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s short story ‘Fuíoll Fuine’ alongside Samuel Beckett’s ‘La Fin’. While the reception histories of Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (1949) in the original and in translation facilitate a reflection on the critical and cultural capital of the Irish language, Beckett’s self-enforced literary bilingualism – his turns between English and French and his relentless formal experimentation across both languages – provides an intriguing avenue to approach central questions surrounding style, idiom and language use in Irish literary modernism. As Beckett’s oeuvre demonstrates, Irish literary modernism is a fundamentally multilingual body of work and should be approached as such. By drawing attention to the linguistic specifics of each author’s late modernist style, this chapter’s contrapuntal pairing of Irish- and French-language texts not only dispels persistent misconceptions that Irish modernist literature was

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written solely in majority languages but also challenges preconceptions about the distinctiveness of Irish modernist style and literary experimentation more broadly. Indeed, the chapter suggests that it is in the anomalous grey areas of overlap between the various languages of Irish literary modernism that some of the most fruitful insights regarding broader cultural machinations may be found.

Translations in/of Irish modernism The recent English-language translations of Cré na Cille5 – generally regarded as the most important Irish-language novel of the twentieth century – have led to a renewed critical awareness of the various linguistic strands and traditions which constitute Irish literary modernism: elements which have been marginalized or even ignored in past critical assessments. Just as the ‘vertical expansion’6 of the new modernist studies has led to a re-evaluation of what constitutes literary modernist production more generally, the project also offers a timely opportunity to critics of Irish literature to reconceptualize Irish literary modernism in particular as an intrinsically multilingual phenomenon. Indeed, some of the more sustained attempts to draw the various languages of Irish literary modernism into dialogue with one another have come from Irish-language critics themselves, with several scholars having commented on the similarities between the literary works of Joyce, Beckett and Ó Cadhain.7 It is unsurprising that such critical commentary has been largely one-way: Irish-language scholars are more likely to have an intimate knowledge of Joyce, Beckett, Bowen and Yeats than their English-language contemporaries would have of Ó Cadhain, Ó Conaire, Mhac an tSaoi or Ó Ríordáin. While this situation points to the sociolinguistic reality facing Irish-language writers and their textual output, it is also telling of the general challenges facing writers of minority and minoritized languages in relation to issues of reception and circulation. As the Danish critic Georg Brandes wrote in 1899, those who write in Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, Greek and so on are in the universal struggle for world renown clearly positioned most disadvantageously. In the contest for world renown these authors lack their weapon, their language, and for writers that about says it all.8

This predicament of minority and minoritized languages ‘locking out’ writers from international audiences is doubled in the case of Irish-language writers, with the lasting legacy of colonization leading to the paradoxical situation where they are often overlooked by large audiences at home. A certain allochrony endures within literary space when it comes to the relationship between majority and minority/minoritized languages. Just as in the power dynamic between the centre and the periphery, majority languages are often perceived as being representative of the modern and contemporary, while textual production in minority/ minoritized languages is viewed (primarily by the metropole) as relating solely to the archaic past. This temporal disparity translates into a disparity in cultural capital between languages which, while clearly a consequence of imperialist and colonial legacies, also owes much to the translations of certain texts and their subsequent

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receptions in different contexts. The fanfare surrounding the recent translations of Cré na Cille provides a good example of how translations are crucial in this construction of literary reception, and of how, despite textual evidence of the contrary, certain aesthetic and formal assumptions linger around texts in minority and minoritized languages. There is a certain irony that, despite his preeminent position within Irishlanguage letters, the most famous work of a writer like Ó Cadhain has arguably gained more Irish readers since its translation into English. Though Ó Cadhain himself noted that recognition is important for a writer – ‘Is mór an rud ag scríbhneoir aitheantas’9 – the question of translation remains a charged affair for minoritized-language writers. This sense of translation as a form of elision has led contemporary poets such as Biddy Jenkinson to largely refuse to have their work translated into English,10 while Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, the most widely translated Irish-language poet writing today, has insisted upon a ‘caveat lector’ to remind readers of her work that the poetry exists first and foremost in Irish.11 While a translation may allow access to the original text, something is inevitably lost in the process. Indeed, the glibness of some review and article headlines relating to translations of Cré na Cille into English – ‘The Irish Novel That’s So Good People Were Scared to Translate It’12 – can be perceived as an oddly inverted form of cultural fetishization, whereby the capacity of the translated text to subvert essentialized expectations of the wider literature or tradition is privileged over the actual aesthetic merit of the original text. In the case of Ó Cadhain’s novel, this may be due, in part, to the continued popularity of the translations of the major Gaeltacht autobiographies from the 1920s and 1930s. While an English translation of Cré na Cille remained unavailable for several decades after its initial publication, texts such as Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach (1929), Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s Fiche Bliain ag Fás (1933) and Peig Sayers’s Peig (1936) were translated into English in relatively quick succession (1934, 1933 and 1974, respectively). While these works mark an important milestone in Irishlanguage literature, particularly in terms of a move from oral to written forms of selfrepresentation for Gaeltacht writers,13 their enduring legacy through translation has arguably been to construct an image of Irish-language literature as being concerned exclusively with storytelling, the native speaker and the rural. This is especially plausible when considering how other distinctively modernist Irish-language works, such as Breandán Ó Doibhlin’s Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche (1964) or Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin’s An Uain Bheo (1968), remain untranslated. With the autobiographies acting for many English readers as their only access point to Irish-language prose, the iconoclasm and formal experimentalism of Ó Cadhain’s text comes as a sharp surprise to readers expecting an Irish-language text based on ‘an teach beag in ascaill an ghleanna’ (the little house in the corner of the glen) and of the ‘sexless Nábla and the gormless Tadhg’.14

Major and minor language modernisms These English-language translations of Cré na Cille expose Ó Cadhain’s work to a much larger audience and may encourage readers to seek out the original text. They also prove significant in stoking more critical awareness about the multilingual nature of

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Irish literary modernism. Yet, there is a need for a certain caveat censor. Though the newly extended circulation of Ó Cadhain’s work into the wider critical canon of literary modernism allows for the situation of his work and other Irish-language authors in more global and comparative contexts – for which critics such as Máirín Nic Eoin have strongly advocated15 – it is essential that the specific cultural and linguistic origins of his work remain at the forefront of such critical discourse. While reading Irishlanguage modernists like Ó Cadhain in comparison with their Irish and European contemporaries undoubtedly increases awareness and comprehension of modernist literary production in its various guises and forms, as with all minority/minoritized language writers, there is the risk of a certain form of textual elision whereby the critical and aesthetic standards of majority languages are unduly applied to them. For example, there are intriguing surface similarities between the narrative structures and conceits of Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves and Cré na Cille, particularly in their use of monologues, soliloquies and interludes. Though an initial comparison may suggest that they are avowedly modernist in their technique and approach, it reduces the specificity of Ó Cadhain’s status as an Irish-language writer and the particular aesthetic challenges which that entails. Ó Cadhain’s work is moulded by modernist influences as much as it is by the vibrancy of Gaeltacht oral culture, and though this may seem a small distinction, it is incredibly significant in comprehensively assessing the aesthetic merit of the text as a whole. As Barry McCrea has argued, the increasingly precarious position of minority languages in the early twentieth century and their subsequent literatures should be read as a unique and distinctive form of literary modernism.16 The crisis of the signifier which typically characterizes literary modernism is expedited in the case of minority-language literary production, with self-reflexivity and liminality being at the foundations of each text. Ó Cadhain’s declaration that it is hard to do your best in a language that might be dead before you17 has remarkable overlap with Beckett’s concerns of having ‘nothing with which to express’.18 But both positions are subtly distinct due to the languages which these writers used – majority languages in the case of Beckett and a minoritized language for Ó Cadhain – and this difference is important in assessing the extent to which these texts adhere to current understandings of modernist literary production. To read them contrapuntally is to see more clearly where the modernist crisis of the signifier begins and ends across the full spectrum of language, in both the major and the minor. This comparative approach more clearly illuminates modernist literary production in its multeity, while also allowing for a reappraisal of orthodoxies and preconceptions which remain dominant in contemporary criticism. Perhaps the greatest advantage of reading Irish literary modernism as a multilingual phenomenon, then, is the emphasis it places on the specificity of the signifier. The various aesthetic and cultural discourses surrounding a minoritized language such as Irish provide a whetstone against which to test assumptions surrounding Irish modernist idiom and style in English: as Jacques Derrida notes, one should never ‘pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised’.19 From the beginning of the twentieth century, debates surrounding language, idiom and expression in Irish-language literature were marked by a decidedly modernist inflection. Pádraig Mac Piarais’s declaration that ‘no literature can take root in the twentieth century

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which is not of the twentieth century’20 is not dissimilar from Ezra Pound’s mantra to ‘Make It New’. Disputes between ‘nativists’ and ‘progressivists’ over issues of tradition, innovation, form and language spanned the early decades of the twentieth century, with Mac Piarais’s rejection of Risteard De Hindeberg’s radical traditionalism in the early 1900s21 being mirrored in exchanges between Pádraig de Brún and Daniel Corkery in the 1930s over the contentious issue of a ‘stíl oifeageamhail’ (official/native style).22 What becomes clear is that the self-awareness regarding the Irish language within Irish cultural discourse during the early decades of the twentieth century led to a growing sense of the arbitrariness of the signifier – whether in English or in Irish – more broadly within Irish society and culture.23 The inherently modernist self-awareness of language, which marks the work of all periods of Irish modernism, can be traced back to Ireland’s fractured linguistic landscape and, as such, attempts to understand the distinctiveness of this literary idiom should be contextualized through this lens. While recent critical attempts to read Irish literary modernism in its colonial and postcolonial contexts have led to a helpful recalibration of what establishes the distinctiveness of such textual production in comparison to other European modernisms,24 such readings still focus predominantly on English-language writers. Writing on the perceived asynchronicity and cultural precocity characteristic of postcolonial cultures, Homi Bhabha argues, The encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within ‘colonial’ textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices, have anticipated, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in contemporary theory – aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to ‘totalizing’ concepts.25

There is a distinct set of pressure points at the periphery, and the cracks exposed there, as Bhabha suggests, may point to emergent or anticipatory aesthetic and formal innovations. The colonial history and multilingual nature of Irish literary production therefore makes it a fruitful site for probing these paradigmatic limits of literary modernism more generally. The crisis of the signifier – itself a consequence of the alienation of modernity, of the increasing distance between the signifier and signified in the modern world – is further emphasized in the Irish context at this historical conjuncture, with the divide between Irish and English impacting Irish cultural discourse to its foundations. To read texts which are concerned with this search for ‘semantic succour’26 – to recall Beckett’s phrase from Watt – across both major and minor languages is an attempt to document more comprehensively the limit points of modernist literary production on the whole. This is particularly pertinent for the work of Irish late modernists like Beckett and Ó Cadhain. On closer inspection, it becomes abundantly clear that the skullscapes of Beckett’s oeuvre have far more in common with Ó Cadhain’s subterranean portrait of Conamara than literary criticism has traditionally allowed for, and it is arguably the crisis of language which marks Irish literary space that is fundamental to the late modernist aesthetic employed by these writers.

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Crisis or jouissance?: Language and form in Beckett and Ó Cadhain’s short prose Despite the different languages in which they wrote, there are at times remarkable similarities in both Beckett and Ó Cadhain’s aesthetic projects. Just as Beckett’s prose works veered towards increasingly minimalistic and fragmentary forms as his career progressed, Ó Cadhain – despite Cré na Cille’s acclaim – was primarily a short story writer. Both writers’ aesthetic trajectories display a certain uneasiness and antagonism with form and a capacity for wordplay which situates their texts somewhere between a healthy scepticism regarding language and a more deconstructive and potentially nihilistic aesthetic. The two defining features which link both writers are increasingly fragmented prose narrative forms and, closely aligned to this, a sense of linguistic uncertainty that threatens to destabilize the overarching narrative. And yet, despite these similarities, the languages in which these works are written complicate received understandings about Irish-modernist idioms and aesthetics. When read side by side in French and Irish, the crisis of expression which characteristically marks late modernism also appears to represent a jouissance of sorts for these writers, whereby an uneasy grappling with language allows for heightened lyrical expression. If contextualized within Ireland’s contested linguistic landscape, the style and form employed by both Beckett and Ó Cadhain attains a new perspective when both writers are placed into dialogue with one another, therefore testing critical assumptions about modernist aesthetics not only in their works but also as they relate to majority and minoritized languages more generally. This is particularly true in the case of the stories ‘La Fin’ and ‘Fuíoll Fuine’. Both stories revolve around the misadventures of impotent men, bound by ignorance, alienation and dislocation. ‘La Fin’ introduces the quintessential Beckettian character: a middle-aged or elderly man, most often a cross between a tramp and poet. The story follows this nameless character as he appears to be thrown out of an asylum, is conned by his landlady, stays in a cave with a kindly fisherman, then only to build himself a kind of coffin-boat in order to commit suicide. Impotency, ignorance and an inability to adequately express are inscribed in the text from the opening passage: Ils me vêtirent et me donnèrent de l’argent. Je savais à quoi l’argent devait servir, il devait server à me faire démarrer. Quand je l’aurais dépensé je devrais m’en procurer d’autre, si je voulais continuer. Même chose pour les chaussures, quand elles seraient usées je devrais les faire réparer, ou m’en procurer d’autres, ou continuer pieds nus, si je voulais continuer.27 [They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on. The same for the shoes, when they were worn out I would have to get them mended, or get myself another pair, or go on barefoot, if I wanted to go on.]28

With the use of the third-person plural in the first sentence – ‘Ils me vêtirent et me donnèrent de l’argent’ – the first-person singular is rendered passive within the main

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narrative structure. Furthermore, the constant repetition of ‘si je voulais continuer’ accentuates the apparent lack of agency of the unnamed protagonist. This sense of impotency and stasis is also reflected at the beginning of Ó Cadhain’s story ‘Fuíoll Fuine’. While Ó Cadhain’s early stories focused largely on the material and spiritual hardships of female characters in the Gaeltacht, his later stories centre on broken, almost grotesque male characters in urban areas. ‘Fuíoll Fuine’ follows one such character, a civil servant simply named ‘N.’, as he floats around Dublin in a hazy stupor, attempting to make funeral arrangements for his recently deceased wife. Like the nameless narrator of ‘La Fin’, N. appears in an extreme state of isolation, and his possible suicide is hinted at the end of this elliptical, oneiric text. Themes of alienation and dislocation are firmly established at the beginning of the story: Glór francaithe ba ea é ón gceann eile den teileafón, glór a deirfire ón a theach: ‘Níl náire ar bith ort a bheith amuigh agus do bhean básaithe.’ ‘Tá sí básaithe’, adúirt N. Ba é an t-aon rud é a chuimhnigh sé ar a rá.29 [It was a ratty voice on the other end of the telephone, her sister calling from his house: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself gallivanting around, and your wife just dead.’ ‘She is dead’, N. said. ‘Yes’. It was as much as he could think of saying.]30

The displaced voice of the sister on the phone jolts N. back to his present circumstances, and the poignant, repetitive response – ‘Tá sí básaithe’ – adds to the acute sense of psychological isolation and turmoil which mark his interior state as the narration unfolds. Both stories follow these hapless characters as they lurch from one scenario to the next, lacking any sense of efficacy and often being relegated to mute or passive states in their own narratives. While both texts highlight the failure of language to adequately express the thoughts or emotions of the protagonists for a darkly humorous effect, that is not to say the language used in each story is itself impotent or lacking. Somewhat coincidentally, both texts end with scenes suggesting the death of the main characters. Despite language failing the very basic needs of these characters until this point in the narratives, both endings climax in a deeply lyrical and poetic crescendo of language: Rassis maintenant à l’arrière, les jambes allongées et le dos bien calé contre le sac rembourré d’herbe qui me servait de coussin, j’avalai mon calmant. La mer, le ciel, la montagne, les îles, vinrent m’écraser dans une systole immense, puis s’écartèrent jusqu’aux limites de l’espace. Je songeai faiblement et sans regret au récit que j’avais failli faire, récit à l’image de ma vie, je veux dire sans le courage de finir ni la force de continuer.31 [Back now in the stern-sheets, my legs stretched out, my back well propped against the sack stuffed with grass I used as a cushion, I swallowed my calmative. The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.]32

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The jilted and stiff nature of the syntax at the end of ‘La Fin’, along with the strange combination of certain nouns – ‘systole’, the archaic use of ‘calmative’ in the English – lend an odd poetry to this scene. The juxtaposition of the beauty of the scenery with the act at hand again suggests that while language has been a tenuous issue throughout the story, portrayed as something often ungraspable for the protagonist, it retains some capacity for intense, exacting description and expression. This is equally true at the climax of ‘Fuíoll Fuine’, where N., having failed in his duties as a husband to organize his wife’s funeral, stands before the sea, drunk and despairing at what life now has in store for him. In contrast to the dire situation presented, and in contrast to N.’s total failure to express his own emotions and needs throughout the preceding narrative, the language at the story’s close is poetic and lyrical, suggesting once again a possibility that language can indeed be melded into affecting forms: Lig N. an buidéal falamh le fána san uisce, síos sa bhfarraige dhiamhair, sa bhfarraige cheilteach. Bheadh sin in a chomharthaíocht ar a raibh thart agus ar an eachtra do-thargairithe, má b’fhuascailteach féin, a bhí roimhe. D’ardaigh a shúile siar ar an spéir, san áit a raibh an breacachan óir, an fuíoll fuine.33 [N. let the bottle slide down down into the water, down into the wondrous sea, the hidden sea. He wanted it to be a sign of his past life, and also of the unforeseen life, maybe the liberated life, that was before him. He raised his eyes towards the west, gazed out at that tiny dapple of golden sunlight on the horizon, on the dregs of the day done down.]34

Once more, the juxtaposition of beauty – ‘an breacachan óir, an fuíoll fuine’ – with the violent act of self-harm suggested in the text points back to a paradox which marks both stories: the inability of each protagonist to effectively wield language leads to the dark, absurd circumstances in which they find themselves, and yet the linguistic and existential crises they face can be at times rendered with deep lyricism and poetic intensity. While the pervading sense of gallows humour and self-reflexive doubt as to language and art’s capacity for expression align these works with late modernism’s concern for a ‘world in free fall’,35 new light may be shed on the distinctive style and idiom used by both writers when they are read in relation to Ireland’s linguistic landscape. Though Ó Cadhain moved away from the social realism and rural settings of his earlier work to the more experimental and darker urban landscapes of his final collections, his steadfast belief in the capacity of the Irish language to be a fitting vehicle to express modern life is continuous throughout. As a native speaker, once the subject of intense romanticization during the Revival period, only to then have his very existence simultaneously valorized by the State and threatened by its policies, Ó Cadhain’s anxiety for the language’s future is rarely reflected in any ambiguity as to the capacity of the language itself and in his refusal to submit to the dominant presence of English. While ‘Fuíoll Fuine’ ends in N.’s death, there is a sense that his despair has at least been voiced, confirming a deeply modernist conviction in Ó Cadhain’s work as to the transformative capacity of literature to record the experiences of the marginal

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and liminal. This is also manifested in his continued use of third-person narrative in his stories, with the rejection of the potential solipsism of the first-person perspective (as seen in so much of Beckett’s work) leading to an almost utopian hope for narrative form to potentially transcend the sociolinguistic reality of its compositional language. The marginalized status of the Irish language, far from succumbing to a total crisis of expression, alternatively allows for the reimagining of potential futures. Beckett’s relationship with his compositional languages is not as straightforward as Ó Cadhain’s, but there is much to be gained in reading Beckett in relation to his Irish-language contemporaries. His self-imposed bilingualism is a crucial hallmark of his aesthetic project, with his existence between two languages highlighting the fallibility of all language for adequate expression. But rather than reading this in solely negative terms, as, for example, a pessimistic response to the cataclysm of the Second World War or of his own exile from Ireland in the wake of independence, the example of Irish-language writers like Ó Cadhain suggests that the liminal status of language is as much a spur to linguistic experimentation as it is an insurmountable obstacle at times. The themes of alienation and dislocation in Beckett’s early prose works in English are more comprehensively expressed in his French works: a form of linguistic submersion to find more suitable linguistic and narrative modes for these themes of deterritorialization. This is exemplified in the linguistic intensity of the first-person monologues in his early French nouvelles, such as ‘La Fin’, which in turn led to the achievement of Molloy, Malone Meurt and L’Innommable, by which stage language, character and form are increasingly contorted and manipulated. It is notable how Beckett’s late prose works, like Company and Worstward Ho, often situate spectres of Protestant Ireland as central in their structures and see a return to English as a compositional language. There remains in Beckett’s work a commitment to giving voice to the marginal, the exilic and the submerged. Just as Ó Cadhain utilized the Irish language to give expression to marginal elements of Irish culture, Beckett’s turns between English and French demonstrate how supposed linguistic liminality can in fact lead to a distillation of poetic intensities.

Conclusion As the brief examples above suggest, the anomaly of Beckett’s turn to French and the latent political elements of his work can be contextualized with more nuance when read in relation to postcolonial Ireland and contemporary Irish-language authors, just as Ó Cadhain’s engagement with modernist aesthetics and the subtlety of his narrative experimentation are further clarified when read through a major transnational figure like Beckett. Furthermore, Ó Cadhain’s steadfast belief in the capacity of the Irish language, as opposed to Beckett’s deep scepticism surrounding all language, confirms him as a decidedly modernist writer, while also upsetting suppositions that the work of minoritized language writers is primarily concerned with linguistic fragility or weakness. By reading both authors through one another and examining the particularities of the linguistic traditions in which they wrote, past assumptions

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surrounding style and idiom in their work can be interrogated, while also allowing for new readings of their work to emerge. Such a multilingual approach to Irish literature in general – and Irish modernism in particular – represents a fruitful avenue for the future of Irish literary studies. Instead of viewing Irish literature as several competing and isolated traditions, it is necessary, particularly in the study of twentieth-century literature, to conceive of diverse Irish canons as mutable, fluid and inherently multilingual. Being caught between languages is not a uniquely Irish situation, but it is one which certainly goes some distance in accounting for the tendency towards self-reflexivity and verbal dexterity which characterizes so much of modern Irish literary production. The limits between languages in the Irish canon may be constantly shifting and overlapping, but far from viewing this as an innate crisis, or as a cause of anxiety, it could equally be seen as a form of jouissance, an impetus for the formal and linguistic experimentation that has traditionally characterized much of Irish-modernist literature.

Notes 1. Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007), 4. 2. Gearóid Denvir, ‘Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland’, New Hibernia Review 1, no. 1 (1997): 51. 3. Máirín Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005), 30. 4. Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916), vii. 5. Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille, trans. Alan Titley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Graveyard Clay – Cré na Cille: A Narrative in Ten Interludes, trans. Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 6. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 738. 7. See, for example, Declan Kiberd, ‘Cré na Cille – Ó Cadhain agus Beckett’, in Idir Dhá Chultúr (Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 2002); Cathal Ó Háinle, ‘Ó Cadhain, An Rí Séamas II, Joyce agus Molly Bloom’, in Saothar Mháirtín Uí Chadhain: Léachtaí Cholm Cille XXXVII, ed. Máire Ní Annracháin (Maigh Nuad: An Sagart, 2007); Seán Ó Tuama, ‘Samuel Beckett, Éireannach’, Scríobh 3, ed. Seán Ó Mórdha (Baile Átha Cliath: Clóchomhar, 1978). 8. Georg Brandes, ‘World Literature’, in World Literature: A Reader, ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (London: Routledge, 2013), 25. 9. Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca (Baile Átha Cliath: Clóchomhar, 1969), 13. 10. Biddy Jenkinson, ‘A Letter to an Editor’, Irish University Review 21, no. 1 (1991): 27–34. 11. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Traductio Ad Absurdum’, in Krino 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, ed. Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996), 110–11.

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12. William Brennan, ‘The Irish Novel That’s So Good People Were Scared To Translate It’, New Yorker (17 March 2016). 13. Louis de Paor, ‘Irish Language Modernisms’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 165. 14. Breandán Ó hEithir, ‘Cré na Cille: Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970)’, in The Pleasures of Gaelic Literature, ed. John Jordan (Dublin: Mercier, 1977), 72. 15. Máirín Nic Eoin, ‘Litríocht Mhionlaigh Agus/Nó Litríocht Dhomhanda?’, Comhar 75, no. 1 (2015): 18–22. 16. Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 17. 17. Ó Cadhain, Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca, 40. 18. Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 139. 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 166. 20. Pádraig Mac Piarais, ‘About Literature’, An Claidheamh Soluis (26 May 1906). 21. Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 19–90. 22. Pádraig de Brún, ‘An Sean-Rud Séidte’, Humanitas 1, no. 3 (1930): 7. 23. Barry McCrea, ‘Style and Idiom’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 63–4. 24. See, for example, Cóilín Parsons, Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Mark Quigley, Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 25. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 173. 26. Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 69. 27. Samuel Beckett, ‘La Fin’, in Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958), 71. 28. Samuel Beckett, ‘The End’, in The Expelled, the Calmative, the End with First Love (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 37. 29. Máirtín Ó Cadhain, ‘Fuíoll Fuine’, in Máirtín Ó Cadhain: Rogha Scéalta, ed. Louis de Paor (Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2014), 366. 30. Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Dregs of the Day (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 3. 31. Beckett, ‘La Fin’, 112. 32. Beckett, ‘The End’, 56–7. 33. Ó Cadhain, ‘Fuíoll Fuine’, 466. 34. Ó Cadhain, The Dregs of the Day, 127. 35. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19.

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Part Two

Corporeal texts, discursive bodies: Biopolitical Irish modernisms The diversification and proliferation of the new modernist studies has engendered a series of new materialist approaches to the entwined meanings of bodies, desires, discourses, knowledges and power in modernism. From biopolitical modernism1 and prosthetic modernism2 to queer modernism3 and cruising modernism,4 from ecological modernism5 and posthuman modernism6 to haptic modernism7 and affective modernism,8 the diverse relationships between material functions, sensory experiences, embodied environments and discursive constructions of the body (sexology, degeneracy, eugenics, ethnonationalism) have provoked a distinctly political turn in modernist studies. This refocused attention on embodiment, materiality and affect in modernist studies is, however, not synonymous with the new modernist turn; indeed, some of the most trenchant challenges to the new modernist studies have been mounted from this vantage.9 Consider Max Brzezinski’s polemical 2011 argument that, by homologizing art movements and political movements, the new modernist studies reinforce a dematerialized and broadly neoliberal critical dualism of oppressive state powers and personal freedoms that fails to ‘transcend liberal quietism or conservative nostalgia’.10 Elsewhere, in the same year, Paul Morrison challenges Mao and Walkowitz’s identification of the new modernism with ‘Politics as Itself ’,11 as, he perceives, ‘what is resoundingly absent from Mao and Walkowitz’s survey of the new modernist studies is what may well define our modernity: the unprecedented explanatory power attributed to sexuality in general and sexual deviance in particular’. To the extent that, in Morrison’s terms, ‘modernism has become sexy again by forgetting about sex’,12 we are compelled to reflect whether the potential for true innovation in Irish modernist studies lies less with reframing and refining perennial questions of the nation state and the individual – as significant as these are in their own terms and as drivers of the wider debate – than with a concern for the productive tension between the corporeal text and the discursive body that distinguishes modernist attention to the political dimensions of material processes, embodied emotions, bodily functions. In an Irish-modernist context, we find these concerns hidden in plain sight: in the queer aesthetics of Wilde, the sexualized bodies of Joyce, the prostheticized corporality of Beckett and the proto-posthuman hybridity of certain Flann O’Brien figures,

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as well as in these writers’ own critical reflections on their cultural and political moment. Joyce, for instance, claimed that ‘modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul. The sensory power of his body has developed enormously.’13 Indeed, recent years have seen a marked growth of embodied and biopolitical readings of Joyce,14 Beckett15 and O’Brien,16 which have brought a wide range of theoretical vantages on the intertwining of politics and life through the state’s jurisdiction over the body – from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to Judith Butler and Donna Haraway – to bear on debates about the definition, theorization and analysis of Irish modernism. Elsewhere, the significance of material environments on Irish-modernist bodies have been explored in both urban17 and ecocritical18 contexts. Evidencing its increased centrality to the field, the 2019 collection Science, Technology and Irish Modernism dedicates a full section to the rubric of ‘Body Trouble’. These chapters ‘situate medical, eugenic and evolutionary discourses of the body within the Irish modernist landscape’ to explore ‘Irish modernism’s troubled relationship with the body as a locus of control as well as creativity’.19 As welcome as this focus is, and as productive as the individual readings are, the chapters continue the field’s narrower focus on Joyce, Synge, Yeats and Beckett, and thus the need to expand and diversify the canon of Irish modernist bodies remains to be addressed. Among prominent examples of queer theory and biopolitical readings in recent years,20 Patrick R. Mullen’s The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor and Postcolonial History is both influential and representative of how the specifics of the Irish modernist field have incorporated this focus into its already existing structures of thought, in so far as it draws our attention towards ‘the queer sexual discourses of Irish modernism’. Notwithstanding, it maintains a clear focus on the postcolonial framework announced in its title, arguing that Wilde, Synge, Casement and Joyce ‘deployed queer aesthetic sensibilities to organize anticolonial discourses that read against the grain of British imperial hegemony’.21 The present section of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities addresses the question of bodies and biopolitics in Irish modernism by drawing together an intersectional approach to medical, sexual, political and nationalist discourses beyond the purely historical and postcolonial and pushing beyond the main figures of the field to overlooked authors and texts. The test cases of Emily Lawless, Eva Gore-Booth, Pamela Colman Smith, Edward Martyn, Forrest Reid, Pádraig Pearse, Roger Casement, Joseph Plunkett and Liam O’Flaherty provide gaps for interrogation in this instance and allow contributors to reframe anew the representation of the body in more canonical texts by Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, Joyce, Bowen, MacGreevy and Beckett. These essays challenge now orthodox assumptions about Irish modernism by posing targeted conjectures; particularly, they question some of the ways in which the positivist nature of Irish-modernist discourse can overwrite actual embodied, material experience of the human and nonhuman body alike, or sideline the complex ways in which biopower works in the early Irish State by reducing it to a reductive colonial binary. Moreover, they introduce new theoretical coordinates – queer theory, Derridean deconstruction, prostitution and sex work studies, the ideological and libidinal aesthetics of violence – to raise new definitional possibilities for Irish modernism. Barry Sheils opens and frames this debate by contending provocatively that the question of whether Irish modernism designates a specific historical period (suggestive

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of a homology between literature and the nation) or a transhistorical symptom (an intermittent tendency towards non-representational art) can be broached through the figure of skin. As the limit of our bodies, skin is the organ that must contend with the outside world. And yet, if, through a process of imaginary identification, skin comes to mark the integrity of the self to itself and permits correspondence between bodies, it is also enduringly capable of betraying the message of selfhood and sovereignty it is supposed to be carrying. Such psychoanalysis of the skin, Sheils observes, has seldom entered the disciplinary field of Irish modernism, despite the major canonical texts’ recurrent interest in the epidermis as a figure of deformation of character and the dissolution of plot. By insisting in this chapter on the importance of skin through the specific trouble with blushing, Sheils builds on his previous work on Shame and Modern Writing22 to draw attention to the fleshy, non-abstract nature of Irish modernism, while noting that the ‘Irishness’ in question sits beyond any neat homology between the nation and the artist. This focus attempts to resist certain reading practices prescribed by the positivization of Irish modernist discourse, especially those converging upon the constructive sense-making of historical narratives, thereby underplaying the negative, destructive power of unassimilated material. Seán Hewitt, author of J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism,23 offers a queer reading of the development of Irish modernism, charting its development in relation to earlier Irish Revivalism. Hewitt explores the Revival’s perception of masculinity, the abject body and its idealization of heteronormative domestic standards as catalysts for the later subversions of modernist writing on the island. The chapter constitutes a unique intervention into recent debates about the relation of modernism to Revivalism by bringing into focus the contribution of queer artists and writers to the progression between these movements. Thus, it offers a twofold critical reassessment, both widening the archive of Irish queer writers during the period and offering a metacritical analysis of Irish modernism, bringing to light the possibilities inherent in understanding Irish modernism as a queer phenomenon. Picking up this thread, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston re-examines how accounts of Irish culture in the first decades of the twentieth century have traditionally been staked upon a range of restrictive binaries, opposing a retrograde Ireland to a forwardlooking Europe, a sexually conservative nationalism to a progressive avant-garde, and an occult revival to a scientifically engaged modernism. Drawing on a range of recent theorizations of Irish modernism, Houston complicates this picture by exploring the ways in which medical and scientific discourses of sexual hygiene are deployed in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and the controversy it sparked. Calling into question traditional accounts of the Playboy riots, which pit a sexually progressive Abbey Theatre against a rebarbative nationalist rabble, the chapter examines how far both sides of the dispute were in fact united in their use of a ‘rhetoric of health’: an overdetermined discursive gestalt in which the lexicons of evolution, comparative science, eugenics and degeneration are combined for political ends. Katherine Ebury builds upon her significant study of Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–195024 to explore a specific historical context of Irish modernist discourse surrounding sex, gender and the death penalty. Ebury examines the ways in which both canonical writings by Joyce and Yeats and more minor literature generated

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by the 1916 revolutionaries Roger Casement, Pádraig Pearse and Joseph Plunkett converge around the Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran myth. Given the circulation of the Black Diaries to discourage campaigns for his reprieve based on his supposed ‘sexual degeneracy’, Casement’s 1916 execution for treason has been viewed primarily through the lens of queer theory. Here, however, Ebury expands upon this previous work on capital punishment and sexuality in an Irish context by contending that the masochistic drives inherent to the death penalty, as theorized by Freud and Derrida, bring death and sex into close contact in connection even with executions that have no such taint of scandal. Laura Lovejoy considers how Liam O’Flaherty creatively deployed literary depictions of Dublin’s red-light spaces to interrogate intertwined questions of citizenship and sexual morality in post-independence Ireland. Harry Clarke’s stained-glass window depicting a scene from O’Flaherty’s Mr Gilhooley, in which a nude woman performs an erotic dance (deemed unsuitable by the Irish government after its commission), encapsulates O’Flaherty’s instrumentalization of prostitution and its symbolism as part of a web of anti-authoritarian fiction. Lovejoy contends that O’Flaherty’s prostitution narratives are crucial to understanding the wider sexual and cultural politics of both the early twentieth-century Irish moral landscape and the Irish literary modernism that responded to it and finds that the author of popular thrillers O’Flaherty is, in important ways, more progressive than the high modernists Joyce and Beckett in his depiction of sex work. Closing this section on Irish modernist bodies, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley draws together three central strands of the present collection to posit a connection between Irish modernist literature, bardic tradition and silent cinema through the cloudy lens of impaired eyesight. Expanding on her notable study of James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film,25 Hanaway-Oakley here demonstrates the utility of this triangulation of Irish narrative traditions, global modern technologies and the often politicized, aestheticized and metaphorized fleshy bodies of individual authors for elucidating the modernisms of Joyce and Beckett. Both are known for their bodily writing, yet critics have shied away from considering the impact of the authors’ own bodily experiences alongside wider contextual issues of culture and politics. Each of these critical arenas – tradition, technology, bodily phenomenology – have been explored independently, but they rarely productively overlap within studies of Irish modernism. By taking this tripartite approach and widening our focus to include a greater variety of perspectives, Hanaway-Oakley shows how we might gain a more nuanced understanding of the work of Joyce and Beckett and an expanded conception of Irish modernism.

Notes 1. See, for instance, the conference ‘Biopolitical Modernism’, organized by Alison Garden and Laura Lovejoy, hosted at University College Cork, 27 April 2018. 2. See Tim Armstrong, ‘Prosthetic Modernism’, in Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77–105.

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3. See Benjamin Kahan, ‘Queer Modernism’, in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 347–62; and the three ‘Queer Modernism(s)’ conferences hosted at Nottingham Trent University (2017) and the University of Oxford (2018, 2019). 4. See Michael Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 5. Alison Lacivita, The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015), 228. 6. See Ruben Borg, Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (Leiden and Boston: Brill | Rodopi, 2019). 7. See Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 8. See Julie Taylor, ed., Modernism and Affect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall and Robin Hackett, eds, Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019). 9. We might think, in this context, of and twenty-first-century modernist criticism that takes up Donna Haraway’s feminist challenge to identity politics in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (London: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 10. Max Brzezinski, ‘The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?’, Minnesota Review 76 (2011): 111, 118, 122. For Martin Pucher’s response, see ‘The New Modernist Studies: A Response’, Minnesota Review 79 (2012): 91–6. 11. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 745. 12. Paul Morrison, ‘Queer Modernism’, in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, vol. 2, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 790–4. 13. James Joyce, ‘The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance’, in James Joyce in Padua, ed. Louis Berrone (New York: Random House, 1977), 21. 14. See Richard Brown, ed., Joyce, ‘Penelope’ and the Body, European Joyce Studies 17 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). 15. See, for instance, Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. See Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan, eds, Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humours (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020). 17. See, for example, Liam Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); or Maria Beville and Deirdre Flynn, eds, Irish Urban Fictions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 18. See, for example, Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin, eds, Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). 19. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, ‘Introduction’, in Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019), 11. 20. For a more detailed overview of key critical works on Irish modernist sexualities, see Seán Hewitt’s chapter in the present collection. For a recent study in the broader realm of modernism, see Celia Marshik and Allison Pease, Modernism, Sex and Gender (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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21. Patrick R. Mullen, The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor and Postcolonial History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4. 22. Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh, eds, Shame and Modern Writing (New York: Routledge, 2018). 23. Seán Hewitt, J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 24. Katherine Ebury, Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 25. Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

6

Irish skin: The epidermiology of modernism Barry Sheils

‘He also goes to with I’ll walk you back. No, no, you stay put and Irish myself from what I most want.’1 Eily, the protagonist of Eimear McBride’s second novel The Lesser Bohemians, uses the word ‘Irish’ as a verb. To ‘Irish’ is to block, refuse, reject, to turn away from a narrative possibility out of shame; it also registers, with peculiar sensitivity, the awkward fact of bodies coming into contact with one another. Arguably, McBride Irishes the contemporary novel. She is also often called a ‘modernist’ writer and seems open to claiming this designation as a twenty-first-century inheritance.2 Fragmentation, aphasia, the pronoun switcheroo to convey entanglement and vulnerability, all suggest of her language that, like Joyce’s and Beckett’s, it is somehow after style. And yet her obvious historical (and gendered) remove from the canon of Irish modernist works provokes a disciplinary reflection. On the one hand, ‘Irish modernism’ is clearly a historicist discourse, inflected by postcolonial critique and profoundly concerned with the conditions of textual production. On the other hand, it points to an institutional culture of reception. It seems especially significant, in this regard, that as a disciplinary formation it has emerged from beneath the shelter of ‘Yeats’, ‘Joyce’ and ‘Beckett’ studies into a period when historicism and ideology critique have seemed to be on the wane.3 In this chapter I would like to acknowledge this formative discrepancy, arguing that Irish modernism now operates transhistorically as a materially inflected hermeneutic mode. Queer and neo-phenomenological approaches to literature have recently focused our attention on the reproductive ethics which lie at the heart of scholarship. How are discourses perpetuated, histories repeated, originality and influence distributed – and how should receptivity be cultivated: by digging beneath one ‘original’ work to replace it with another, or by remaining on the surface, recognizing the diversity of textual effects and acknowledging their multidirectional force? Within these reflections, figures of surface and skin – the ‘membrane of feeling’, which connects reading to touch and the materialism of actually being moved in the world – have increasingly been privileged over diagnostic critique.4 For example, discussions of skin by Sara Ahmed, Jackie Stacy and Steven Connor have focused on its hermeneutical as well as

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phenomenological precariousness, arguing that, even when it bears the exclusionary marks of stigma, skin never simply refers.5 For Anne Anlin Cheng, skin connects modernist preoccupations with race to questions of style, surface and affect: ‘[it] is a medium of transition and doubleness’ which challenges us ‘to reread how we read’ all historical phenomena.6 Rereadings of Joyce have shown likewise how Joycean skin, though subject to various disciplinary gazes (medical, racial, criminological), remains capable of resisting the deep determinations of the concept.7 Skin is always more than a cover, yet it remains less than an object: it is medial, thrilling and – to paraphrase Nietzsche – profoundly superficial! In this chapter a focus on skin (specifically blushing) within a range of canonical texts will unfold onto a consideration of the text as skin – hence, an epidermiology. If the contingencies of modernist writing have often been secured through genetic scholarship and historical archives, then the returns of this chapter seek to reopen assumptions about when, where and for whom an Irish modernism continues to take place. Instead of asking what the ‘Irish’ in Irish modernism describes (a homology between the time of artistic production and the time of the nation), I will ask instead what it does. What might it mean to Irish modernism today? I will reread a series of scriptural moments in the construction of a discipline: Yeats’s acceptance of the Nobel prize; the opening pages of Ulysses; and Beckett’s farewell to Irish letters in one of his first French-language texts, ‘Premier Amour’. It is my wager that we can refind in each, through the figure of skin, that awkward place where the critical procedures of reading historically meet the enduringly contemporary, though often disavowed, trouble with being read.

Between humility and the Nobel Prize On 9 August 1886, at a time when he was contemplating writing the next, and most obscene, volume of his memoirs (in French), August Strindberg wrote the following in a letter to his publisher: It disgusts me to be nothing but an artist. My intelligence has evolved from daydreaming to thinking. The deliberate summoning up of hallucinations at the writing desk seems like masturbation to me. The novel and the theatre are about right for the ladies; let them take charge of these entertainments. It is this battle against my calling that is undermining my health. I have seen through the shams of fiction writing, and I have no illusions about it. That’s why I cannot work in that vein anymore.8

The result of this provocative self-reflection, Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, was first published in an unauthorized German translation in 1893, translated into English by Ellie Schleussner in 1912 as Confessions of a Fool (a more recent translation is titled A Madman’s Defence) and not published in the author’s native Swedish until 1914, after his death. The book recounts in detail Strindberg’s illicit affair with Siri von Essen, a minor Finnish aristocrat, Siri’s subsequent divorce, the author’s marriage to Siri,

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their travels around Europe together and the disintegration of their relationship on the grounds of Siri’s multiple infidelities, penchant for cross-dressing and bisexuality. It remains a strange work to read, beginning with the immortal line: ‘This is a terrible book. I admit that without any reservations, and I bitterly regret having written it.’ And it ends with the address, presumably to Siri, who at the time of composition is estranged from Strindberg: ‘That’s the end of my story, my Adored One. I have got my revenge. Now we’re quits.’9 This is a book that disavows its own artfulness in the name of honesty, engaging a tradition of confessional writing which reflects on the shame of its own compositional circumstance. Confessional writing often marks an acute self-consciousness with respect to the institutionalization of text: as with Rousseau, with Strindberg too there is an avowed setting straight of an official record, which at a textual level turns out to be a setting awry, as paranoid fantasy and polemical excess (especially against emancipated women) wrestle with historical truth. It remains ironically unclear throughout whether Strindberg is a fantasist, or his wife the sexual adventurist he so delights in depicting her as. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou’s relevance to Irish modernism arrives with Yeats’s passing mention of it in his account of going to Sweden to pick up the Nobel Prize. In his essay ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, which Yeats published in 1924 alongside his Nobel lecture on the Irish Dramatic Movement, he performs his modesty in the face of institutional recognition. Though occasionally distempered by a dose of pomposity or sycophancy towards the Swedish Royal Court, he is, by and large, successful at employing a version of the humility topos, a containing gesture of embarrassment meant to submit individual ambition to established traditions. The essay begins with a who, me? deference. ‘Why not Thomas Mann?’, Yeats asks. Then, lacking for champagne, the poet and his wife famously celebrate his award by eating some humble sausages. As they travel in self-deprecatory convoy to Sweden – they have just arrived at Stockholm station – Yeats meets a scholar called Carl Gustaf Uddgren, with whom he talks about Strindberg. The description of the encounter is elliptical, although it is clear in this case that both men agree that Strindberg, when alive, had been unfairly overlooked by the Royal Academy, and that this was largely on account of his scandalous memoir. Uddgren had written a scholarly defence of Strindberg, translated into English as Strindberg: The Man in 1920, critiqued by its English-language translator Axel Johan Uppvall as ‘not quite availing as it might have done of the new interpretative methodologies of psychoanalysis’ – in other words, it is a largely descriptive biography.10 The book includes, however, a further defence of the indefensible memoir Defence of a Madman in a chapter entitled ‘The Poet and the Wolves’, a chapter which Uddgren gives Yeats to read. Yeats offers a pithy summary of Uddgren’s argument in the following single line: ‘That outrageous, powerful book about his first wife [Siri Essen] is excused on the grounds that it was not written for publication and was published by an accident.’11 Perhaps disappointingly, Uddgren does not defend the book’s aesthetic value so much as seek to excuse it from consideration as art. He places accident where the author was. After this summary, Yeats goes on to recall meeting Strindberg himself in Paris, over thirty years before, slyly adding of the Swedish playwright that he was ‘dressed up according to the taste of one or other of his wives’.12

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This mediated encounter between Yeats and Strindberg stages a revealing conflict: as Yeats proceeds towards his own literary ennoblement at Court, he registers the spectre of Strindberg travelling in the other direction. Strindberg appears as his equal and opposite. Yeats is about to be recognized as a world poet; furthermore, his ‘Ireland after Parnell’ narrative and insistence on celebrating a collective of theatre practitioners rather than his own individual lyric poetry signposts an institutional direction. He is designating a sovereign identity for the modern Irish nation and, more specifically, entering its literature into competition with other national literatures. Accordingly, in the framing essay, Yeats decides to deal with the question of national sovereignty upfront by insisting there now must be ‘a voluntary Federation of Free nations’ within the British Empire. And although he claims repeatedly that he does not want political opinion to arrest style, he accounts for his progress to Stockholm via a series of national transferences – the Irish case is like the Danish case, someone tells him, and then the Finnish and the Swedish.13 This concatenation presents a fairly up-to-date interwar cosmopolitanism of European small-nation nationalisms and also alerts us to the strategy of containment employed by a poet venturing forth to accept the Nobel Prize on behalf of a modern national movement. The art is underwritten by the nation’s sovereign claim, one made in essentially rivalrous terms with other comparable nations. It is in this context that Yeats’s brief identification with Strindberg seems significant, for not only has Strindberg written outside the confines of a national style – in French – but his subject matter is obscene and the historical authority of his genius contested by the artlessness of anecdote and the accidental. It is as if Strindberg functions as a device within Yeats’s self-representation, suggesting alternative possibilities for organizing the body of Irish literature from that sanctified in the court of the Swedish Royal Family. This suggestion is amplified through certain striking moments of ambivalence in the same essay, as in this next passage, where Yeats refers to the provenance of his own art: When I begin to write I have no object but to find for them [the men I imagine myself to be] some natural speech, rhythm and syntax, and to set out in some pattern, so seeming old that it may seem all men’s speech, and though the labour is very great, I seem to have used no faculty peculiar to myself, certainly no special gift. I print the poem and never hear about it again, until I find the book years after with a page dog-eared by some young man, or marked by some young girl with a violet, and when I have seen that, I am a little ashamed, as though somebody were to attribute to me a delicacy of feeling I should but do not possess.14

This passage is initially intriguing for how much Yeats’s explanation of the provenance of the artwork maps on to that offered by T. S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), probably the single most influential text in anglophone modernist studies. Yeats recounts how his personality extinguishes itself through emulation: the words he speaks are marked by their appropriateness to an emotional circumstance not his own, and their patterns are such that they may seem ‘all men’s speech’. The sense of a naturalized order marks the extent to which the poet who has attained tradition has to be both exceptional and anonymous at the same time, to simultaneously modify

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and re-conform the tradition through a development of the ‘historical sense’. Though Yeats’s tradition is clearly more folkloric and Eliot’s more bibliographic, we can see that they share the same promise of depersonalization through emulation. In Eliot, we recall that the mature artist (over twenty-five) must develop his historical sense (emulation of Shakespeare is exemplary) in order to become a more perfectly tuned medium for feelings which are not his own. The cardinal error, says Eliot, is to search for ‘the new’ in personal emotion itself rather than in the complex mediations of the historical – it is an error which leads directly to ‘the perverse’.15 This counsel has striking resonance today: Eliot’s tradition, and the historical sense with which he defends his institution of modern literature, is a bulwark against what is perverse and personal. Yeats’s view, certainly in 1924, seems to be heading in the same direction, until we reach the ambiguous final lines of this account, where, by persisting into the afterlife of the artwork, beyond the story of its production and accomplishment, we witness the attainment of institutionality rebound. Yeats returns us from Eliot’s aged poets to youthful readers. As well as a feeling of trespass, finding a flower in a book of his own poems left there by a young girl, there is a peeling back of the covers of historical time and institutional logic to reveal a brief and awkward scene of personal dispossession. It is important to be precise here about why exactly the author might feel ashamed. It is not simply because he cannot live up to words he once wrote – after all, neither the young man nor the young girl is aware of him personally (they read in his absence); rather, it seems, the shame emerges from the fact that he is not being asked to live up to his words. What is shameful is that his persisting interest in being associated with his work means that he has not depersonalized sufficiently, in accordance with his prestige, and the prestige of the tradition of which his name is already a part. This persisting interest in youth, in those who come after him, leaves the poet standing in awkward proximity, as a writer to his readers, suffering a re-personalization which has none of the elevation and assurance of posterity but which returns him rather to the contingencies of writing and reading before they have been institutionally combined as ‘tradition’. In this glitch of shame, the poet is shown in a loitering state of un-belonging, feeling himself to have become the embarrassing waste product of his own art, a collateral effect which Eliot in his essay does not deem it necessary to countenance. Nor does Eliot consider the shameful paradox which Yeats’s predicament infers: namely, that in order to avoid becoming the excremental remainder of his written accomplishments, the author must own that he has written execrably. We can follow this embarrassment from the framing essay into the Nobel lecture itself, where Yeats describes the origins of the Irish dramatic movement in the 1890s. One recollection is especially interesting, less for the point it makes about the plausibility of a modern folk theatre than for the contingencies adduced in favour of such a theatre. The poet recollects his response to the question of where he would get his actors: I had said, ‘I will go into some crowded room, put the name of everybody in it on a different piece of paper, put all those pieces of paper into a hat and draw the first twelve’. I have often wondered at that prophecy, for though it was spoken probably to confound and confuse a questioner it was very nearly fulfilled. Our two best

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I have written elsewhere of the intersection of the folkloric and chance in this passage, as well as the factor of race which underlies Yeats’s apostolic fantasy: the reductio ad absurdum of realist convention is revealed through the image of a black actor, R. B. Lewis, applying black make-up to play a black man on stage.17 In order to look appropriate Lewis has to paint his face, overwriting the non-exchangeable facticity of his actual skin with the legible symbol of his race. To bear witness to this artifice, the confection of a realist economy of representation, is not only to challenge it aesthetically, as Yeats intended, but also to register its intrinsic aspect of personal humiliation. Indeed, what this offstage glimpse of Lewis’s face-painting shares with the mention of Strindberg’s disgraceful memoir, and the poet’s own failure at impersonality when confronted with his readers, is how it catches the artistic self off guard. Consciously or not, Yeats registers, in each case through self-reflexive acts of reading, his resistance to the institutional cover-up, punctuating the narrative of his accomplishment with a series of uncomfortable gestures towards the shameful and obscene.

Irish blushing It is an irony closely wedded to the shame affect that linguistic incapacity should be inscribed so frequently within literary language. Blushing, flushing, feverous cheeks, indignant rouge, a reddening or a colouring of the face: these are all familiar literary signs.18 Minimally, the literary blush is a sign of aphasia, of interruption in the midst of speech. It shows up as the expression of an unuttered word and yet remains exceptionally productive of linguistic interpretation. The literary blush also implies a relation between individual faces, a companionable masquerade in which an improper thought is being made proper. By designating both a seductive promise and an appropriate containment, the blush points to a conclusion (a romantic union or tragic apotheosis) that is bound to give it symbolic significance. In this way, it instigates the seductions of narrative art. And yet, the very same moment of affective intensity marked on the skin remains potentially resistant to interpretation. This is because even having the ability to show one’s face, to face off against another face, depends always upon a precognition of individual sovereignty, a minimal narrative guarantee of visible identity (as troublingly exemplified by the case of R. B. Lewis, mentioned above).19 In this light, it is significant that the Irish body as represented throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though nearly always temperamentally marked, was often de-facialized. L. P. Curtis opens his now-classic account of this history with a series of appropriately face-related questions – though he neglects to consider the volatility of blushing.20 The famous oscillation between ‘Ape and Angel’ captures the systematic contradiction of racist designation but de-emphasizes the

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erotic charge of its phenomenology: the way that the excessive objectification of the creaturely other will also necessarily reveal a perverse identification. Whereas we might be inclined to think of the caricatured Irish person’s face as constitutionally incapable of blushing, a vulgar excluded from polite society, in the very same manifestation it offers up a fantasy space of self-obliteration (they are, after all, only fantasy). It is not simply that they cannot blush, lacking modesty (lacking an individual face); it is also that they are always blushing, for shame. By continually and contagiously bearing witness to the institutional lines that have been drawn around them, they are at once contained as an object of knowledge and forced into the freedom of boundless impropriety. To consider how this line between polite modesty and faceless shame continued to inform the terms of literary reception throughout the twentieth century (in the wake of modernism and its institutionalization as a critical discipline), we can turn to Christopher Ricks’s influential 1974 study Keats and Embarrassment, where the author argues against Eliot’s position on poetic maturity in favour of the Keatsian value of embarrassed youth. Tellingly, however, Ricks prefaces his study with an account of ‘English’ moral sentiment: Is embarrassment not only a nineteenth-century sentiment but a narrowly English one? There is indeed something very English about the great importance accorded to embarrassment, and this is part of that deep Englishness of Keats in which he delighted and which is so vital and honourable. … It has always been part of the Englishman’s objection to foreigners that they are ‘brazen-faced’, unembarrassable, and therefore untrustworthy. Especially the French.21

Here two sovereign nations, England and France, face off against each other, antagonistic in their likeness as political entities: one feels exceptionally English, an embarrassed conjugation of pale complexion and moral sensibility, when encountering the brazen French face. The French have no word for embarrassment, says Ricks, and the French verb ‘rougir’ does not carry the moral significance of the English ‘to blush’. In constructing this geopolitical scene, however, Ricks gives little thought to the ‘Celtic’ nations, devolved others of the North-Atlantic archipelago, and the question where they might stand, and how they might move, in relation to the embarrassed face of Englishness. And yet when he consults the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for the first usage of the word ‘embarrassment’, the first truly embarrassed name he finds is Edmund Burke’s.22 Burke’s use of ‘embarrassment’ gave it novel emphasis. Whereas older usages suggested financial difficulty or the presence of an external obstacle preventing the completion of a task, for Burke, to be embarrassed was to interrupt oneself in the midst of speech: Intense emotional or social discomfort caused by an awkward situation or by an awareness that one’s own or another’s words or actions are inappropriate or compromising, or that they reveal inadequacy or foolishness; awkwardness, selfconsciousness. (Now the usual sense.) …

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Irish Modernisms 1777 E. Burke Speech Electors Bristol in Polit. Tracts 347. If my real, unaffected embarrassment prevents me from expressing my gratitude to you as I ought.23

There is an established critical tradition associating Irish modernism with the corruption of the tradition of English moral sentiment.24 Furthermore, Burke’s doubleness, as both originator of English traditionalism and deviantly, contagiously Irish, is by now a well-established problematic.25 We can add to this perspective a further remark: not only is Burke’s exemplary linguistic incapacity here a suggestive keynote to the by turns loquacious and aphasic character of Irish modernism, but its auto-affective performativity establishes in the linguistic register the question of a bodily limit. Effectively, Burke is saying, I am interrupting myself here in front of you because of an involuntary excess of feeling. His use of the word embarrassment is a means of communicating a missing articulation of self. His real feeling is at once obscene and visible according to the sheen of a non-referential language act (we are left in the dark about how he ought to express himself). It remains unacknowledged by Ricks, but Burke’s introduction of a new sense to the word ‘embarrassment’ has a metafictional quality: the author performing in character before the Bristol electors in 1777 becomes himself a character in the discourse of English sentiment, at once fathering traditional codes of modesty and aesthetic sensibility and introducing contagious unlikeness into the cultural discourse. For Sally Munt, Burke’s paradox inaugurates ‘the discursively connected histories of queerness, sodomy, shame and Irishness’ which runs to the most famous case of Oscar Wilde but extends also, I would suggest, to the queer Joycean paralysis of Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus’s decomposing faces in the opening pages of Ulysses.26 Suggestively, during the course of this famous exchange, both characters’ faces change complexion: ‘a flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan’s cheek’, and then a page later: ‘Stephen felt the fever [not his fever] in his cheek’. We might further remind ourselves that Stephen and Buck are playing out between them a meta-institutional scene, aping forms of modern Irish theatricality as might have appeared on the London stage, with readable nods to Oscar Wilde and a direct allusion to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777). This is a coded and decodable scene, the homosociality of which is recognizably structured according to the terms of mimetic desire: a wit-economy established between two clever young men that attains its levity through innuendo, inversion and the production of clever double meanings. But clearly there is some heavy surplus added to the backand-forth movement of their conversation, something made explicit which should have remained in the background, interposing a real sense of awkwardness into the management of sly, civilized hypocrisy, which is what Buck and Stephen are supposed to be performing. Their red faces advertise this awkwardness, as well as the fact that it is their status as characters inside a plot which is fundamentally at stake: whether they have anywhere to go that day, anything significant to do. Although we know already that the dramatic reason for this awkwardness is Stephen’s supine mother, its affective occasion coincides with Stephen’s recitation of Buck’s gratuitous term, ‘beastly dead’. In the late nineteenth century, ‘beastly’ was a largely theatrical utterance, meaning ‘exceedingly’, which, in the context of Wilde’s dramaturgy, also recalled the socially

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excluded act of sodomy (bêtise: the folly of the body). As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out, because The Importance of Being Earnest places its emphasis upon implied sexual acts rather than modern sexual identities (the homo-hetero classification), it is capable of doing more than simply inverting orthodoxy. It sketches, rather, a looser and more playful form of kinship than that enshrined by modern social structure, an ‘avunculate’ of aunties and uncles which, though pre-modern in character, might yet exist to rechannel the repressive forces of the modern holy family.27 ‘Beastly’ arrives in the wake of Algernon’s defence of ‘Bunburying’: the act and art of meeting with non-existent sick friends in order to avoid awkward social engagements. Jack announces his intention to give up such duplicity in the name of his forthcoming marriage, and Algernon chastizes him: without Bunbury, he says, ‘man has no real company’. At this point, and in response to Jack’s accusation of cynicism, Algernon continues, ‘It isn’t easy to be anything nowadays. There’s such lot of beastly competition about.’28 Here the jousting, sociable wit points towards its own negation: a real act, which is both obscenely personal and perversely self-obliterating. It is this paradox, deliberately throwaway in Wilde, which in Joyce lands emphatically – literally, we might say – upon the fact of Stephen’s mother’s corpse. As much as the transferential blush between the young men is sexual, indicating a degree of feverous contagion, it also calls into question the perilous terms of their individuation (‘It isn’t easy to be anything’). The horror of incest brought home by the maternal corpse signals Stephen’s entrapment in a mode of sexual classification riven and determined by the taboos of Oedipal desire (until the introduction of Leopold Bloom he is bereft of an avunculate). Accordingly, Buck’s and Stephen’s reddening in the face of one another indicates, beyond the wit economy of adversarial egotism, the potential dissolution of their entire theatre. They are swallowed by the ground. Indeed, by the end of the first chapter of Ulysses, Joyce has projected the transferential complexities of the two institutionally self-aware young readers – indignant, embarrassed, grief-stricken, ashamed – beyond the authority of language. As Stephen walks away, he looks back, edging the figuration of his swimming adversary into the figure of an animal: ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.’ ‘Sleek’ carries the insinuation of larval hairlessness, ‘round’ insinuates effacement. An intact body (and given Buck’s earlier parody, we can hardly avoid the holy implication of Corpus Christi) is returning to the obscure, amphibious provenance of skin.

Knowing shame Almost certainly there is crossover, and indeed confusion, between a literary text’s procedures of historical representation and those which operate within the field of its critical reception. But we might also discern, extrapolating from Ulysses’ own intertextuality, methods of citation that lead to larger questions concerning discrepant cultural practice. For instance, the exigency of knowledge production within a modern university system means that even characteristically shy, affectively hypersensitive writers and works will be subject to the procedures of archival scholarship. We know, for example, that in the midst of failing his examination to qualify as an English instructor

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at the University of Padua, Joyce came up with the brilliant apothegm, ‘modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul’.29 While it might have served well as the epigram to this chapter, putting such a dainty to work in the service of the ‘Joycean’ world view is unavoidably committing a personal act of trespass. Indeed, we may productively wonder in an age of scholarly fervour for new knowledge claims – a modern culture ‘avid for details’ as Joyce puts it in the same exam – to what extent we can still allow for material that simply refuses our interest and returns us to a productive, meta-archival reflection upon the value of being left in the dark? Joyce’s letters to Nora provide another test case for the same thought, as does the almost-certain knowledge that Yeats and Maud Gonne had sex for the first and only time in December 1908.30 This is ‘awkward’ scholarship. The poem series in which Yeats came closest to publicizing his own erotic history is ‘A Man Young and Old’, which appeared in revised form in his 1928 volume The Tower. Part of this work was originally published in 1926 in The London Mercury as ‘Four Songs from the Young Countryman’, suggesting an initial attempt on Yeats’s behalf to put some distance between the biographical and the poetic. But later, the series was extended from four to eleven, and the persona of the countryman entirely discarded. The first poem of the series is called ‘First Love’: Though nurtured like the sailing moon In beauty’s murderous brood, She walked awhile and blushed awhile And on my pathway stood Until I thought her body bore A heart of flesh and blood. But since I laid a hand thereon And found a heart of stone I have attempted many things And not a thing is done, For every hand is lunatic That travels on the moon. She smiled and that transfigured me And left me but a lout, Maundering here, and maundering there, Emptier of thought Than the heavenly circuit of its stars When the moon sails out.31

The correspondence between art and life becomes more explicit as the poem series progresses. The speaker’s touch is replayed through the various sections, with the woman presented in section VI as Helen of Troy – which is, of course, Yeatsian code for Maud Gonne. This first section thus provides a kind of template for the memorial repetitions of the same single act through a man’s whole lifetime. But what is of particular interest is how that initial vivifying signal of the blush seems to authenticate, in the face of a terrifying lunatic reputation, the woman’s humanity

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(the moon, we imagine, is the figuration of her face): ‘she walked awhile and blushed awhile’ and therefore she was presumed to have ‘a heart of flesh and blood’. The blush contributes to the imaginary organization of the woman’s body, celestial bodies as well, and in this way, it reassures the speaker’s amorous optimism. But of course, it is this same red face of narrative seduction, encouraging the poet to ‘lay his hand thereon’, that turns him ‘lunatic’. He has touched, we imagine, her breast, and finds beneath it a heart of stone, and a lover’s promise of union is transformed into contagious lunacy: ‘every hand is lunatic / that travels on the moon’. The blush as a signal of courtly composure ends up responsible for dismantling what has been composed, as, Medusa-like, the blushing woman symbolically castrates her suitor and renders him passive: ‘I have attempted many things and not a thing is done.’ The poem ends with the moon ‘sailing out’, the obfuscation of the face which had blushed, and the heavenly disorder which ensues: the poet is empty of thought, ‘maundering’ – which is to say prattling on without containment or point of destination. He is dispossessed. As well as affirming its biographical resonance – that Yeats did in fact have a nervous breakdown in January 1909 – and further noting how the stanzas serve to hold and hold off the de-subjectifying ‘mad’ language the poem infers, this short poem also provides a scripture for a certain version of Irish modernism. The woman who blushes is Maud Gonne, the nation itself in allegorical form, the actor who famously played Cathleen ni Houlihan. Yet by the end of the poem, the terms of the allegory have vanished: instead of the idealized woman-as-nation, there is emptiness and madness, and as the series progresses, the desperate search for material substitutions or fetishes to take the place of the idealized image which has gone. The speaker ends up nursing a stone, a piece of moon rock, in the place of a child. As has been pointed out by several other critics, Samuel Beckett seems to have been a careful reader of Yeats’s work, and especially adept at dramatizing the point at which national historiography, censor of the personal and the perverse, becomes itself a kind of mad perversion. In his short fiction of the same name, ‘Premier Amour’ (written in French in 1946 and published in 1970; published in 1974 in his own translated English as ‘First Love’), the faces of patriarchal mimicry adjoin linguistically and materially to faeces, thus collapsing the hygienic distance which defines polite society: What constitutes the charm of our country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without help of the meanest contraceptive is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces … wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire.32

Earlier we saw Yeats become the waste product of his own artistic accomplishment, left behind by works he could not retain possession of; here, on the contrary, the historians’ mania for information – turning waste into history – plays out as a disavowal of selfdisgust. By identifying historical scholarship with shameless scavenging, Beckett provides a meta-commentary on a tradition of reading, which, presumably, he knows will eventually apply itself to his own texts.

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Writing in 1988, David Lloyd was clear that this ‘excremental vision’ of Beckett’s is a form of embodied dissent from the national narrative; since the postcolonial subject is irremediably split, accident and incoherence must continually remerge from the cover-up of national meaning. In the specific case of Beckett’s ‘First Love’, the father’s metaphoricity is exposed paradoxically through a surfeit of material: an excessive signification of the body and its discontents refuses to budge itself into allegory.33 Yet it remains unclear in Lloyd’s work, and in other works of the same period, how this estranging excess at the point of utterance, the remainder left behind unredeemed by the muscular will of historical reason – the skin of discourse – transfers from the terms of literary production to those of reception, thus informing our disciplinary practice. Indeed, what is so striking from our perspective as readers today is both the methodological confidence of the postcolonial moment and its reliance on the authority of certain male writers; this authority is often reconfirmed through the archive in spite of the fact that much archival work revives the Irish antiquarianism which Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, albeit in different ways, were attempting to surpass. The curt action of Beckett’s fiction concerns a narrator meeting a woman on a bench. She is called Lulu: twice read, we might say, but also, noting the cross-lingual pun, already red. She is overdetermined for sure, since she soon becomes Anna. Lulu/ Anna is a prostitute with whom our narrator moves in, has sodomitical relations with, before leaving her again, having been told that she is pregnant: The more naked she was the more cross-eyed. Look, she said, stooping over her breasts, the haloes are darkening already. I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort, and they’ll blush like new.34

This is a blush (presumably cited, or erased, from Yeats’s poem) which is also, significantly, not a blush: not in the original French (‘ne foncera plus’),35 but not even in English, where it is only a prospective or hypothetical blush, and one projected onto a woman’s breasts, instead of a man’s face. If, as suggested above, a literary blush is conventionally proleptic in character, creating a sense of narrative anticipation, then Beckett’s hypothetical, non-existent and misplaced blush works in a contrary fashion to stymie narrative: it is hypothesized before or outside of the space of narrative seduction and therefore describes a social situation at which the characters might never arrive. The question of reproductive ethics are clearly bound up with this discontinuous future through its rhetorical resistance to heterosexual futurity and the sterile masculinity of the male voice trying to reassert the narrative destiny of a female body.36 Indeed, the quotation is a good example of Beckett’s late – Irish? – modernist irony around the notion of making new; here ‘the new’ is wilfully inscribed on a pregnant woman’s body, which is seen to have grossly betrayed the aesthetic tradition of virginity and intactness. The non-blush, standing aggressively counter to the normative blushing body, makes conspicuous a timeline of desire which does not converge upon modes of social incorporation. Excepting himself in this way from the libidinal narratives of polite society, but also withholding the contrary consolations of political history, Beckett’s bachelor narrator comes to exemplify the madness of a discourse without referent.

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Plenty has been written on Beckett’s ‘schizoid’ writing, from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus to Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism, much of it connected to the various autotelic, narcissistic and epidermal praxes of Beckett’s narrators whose ‘hyperreflexivity’, self-defeating categorizations, lists and obsessional tics, inventing and collapsing distinctions, express a fundamental ontological insecurity. While Beckett’s mad language dramatizes psychological incontinence – a failure to render objectively the distinction between the self and the world – in the very same gesture it issues a reflexive challenge to the complacent intactness of literary works: a mad fiction which is dangerously real contaminates the exemplary realism of a literary fiction. Once this paradox is acknowledged and taken seriously it must have consequences for how we read. Most generally, it directs us away from searching out literary examples as a means of substantiating already charted concepts and plots, towards scrutinizing moments of affective contamination when the boundary between ‘real’ life and fiction becomes uncertain. More specifically, related to the characterization of the writer as an ‘Irish modernist’, it suggests that any such gesture of categorical containment is punctured in advance by acts of self-reading and metafictional reflection upon the shame of being read. The word ‘Irish’ in ‘Irish modernism’ might be considered as more than simply descriptive but may also designate a self-referential enactment that moves to collapse historical discourse into the material and affective realities of the present.

Notes 1. Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), 196. 2. Eimear McBride, ‘My Hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce’, The Guardian, 6 June 2014, last accessed 20 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/06/ my-hero-eimear-mcbride-james-joyce. 3. On the rise of ‘Irish Modernism’, see Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe, eds, Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Joe Cleary, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, eds, A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). On the waning of ideology critique, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108 (2009): 1–21; and Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 4. Sarah Nuttall, ‘Surface, Depth and the Autobiographical Act: Texts and Images’, Life Writing 11, no. 2 (2014): 161–75. 5. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds, Thinking Through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001); Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 6. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 28, 13. 7. Maud Ellmann, ‘Skinscapes in “Lotus Eaters” ’, in Ulysses–En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 51–66; Ariela Freedman, ‘Skindeep Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly 46, nos 3–4 (2009): 455–68; Abbie

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Garrington, ‘James Joyce’s Epidermic Adventures’, in Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 73–114. 8. August Strindberg, quoted in ‘Introduction’ to A Madman’s Defence, trans. based on Ellie Schleussner’s version, The Confession of a Fool, rev. and ed. Evert Sprinchorn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 9. 9. Ibid., 27, 298. 10. Carl Gustaf Uddgren, Strindberg the Man, trans. A. J. Uppvall (Boston: Four Seas, 1920), 5. 11. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, in Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1993), 396. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 395. 14. Ibid., 392. 15. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 10. 16. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement, in Autobiographies, ed. O’Donnell, 412–13. 17. There was an established tradition of all-black ‘authentic’ minstrel shows in America throughout the nineteenth century. See Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 18. Ray Crozier, ‘The Blush: Literary and Psychological Perspectives’, Theory of Social Behaviour 46, no. 4 (2016): 502–16; Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh, ‘Introduction: Shame and Modern Writing’, in Shame and Modern Writing, ed. Sheils and Walsh, 1–32. 19. Conceived within the European continental philosophical tradition, the face designates, variously, the basis for an ethics of hospitality and openness and the essential racism of European man. See, for example, the difference between Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy of the face and the critical perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 261; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004), 196. 20. ‘What’s in a face? What’s in a caricature of a face? How were the physical features of a man especially those of a face supposed to reveal both character and temperament?’ L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), xxxi. 21. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 18. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. ‘Embarrassment’ n.3a, Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edn, December 2013), accessed 26 October 2020. 24. For example, Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 25. The full complexities of Burke’s position on sodomy and contamination are set out by Sally Munt in Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (New York: Routledge, 2008), 20.

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2 6. Ibid., 28. 27. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Earnest’, in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 64. For a further, differently inflected investigation of the same theme see Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘On Joycean and Wildean Sodomy’, James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1994): 159–66. 28. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Leonard Smithers, 1899), 18–19. 29. Louis Berone, ed., James Joyce in Padua (New York: Random House, 1977), 21. 30. See A. Norman Jeffares, ‘Introduction’, in Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893–1938: Always Your Friend, ed. Anna MacBride White (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 17–48. 31. W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and R. K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 451. 32. Samuel Beckett, ‘First Love’, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 33. 33. David Lloyd, ‘Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject’, Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 1 (1989): 83. 34. Beckett, ‘First Love’, 44. 35. The quotation bears out to some degree Ricks’s notion that the French do not share the English sentimental association of blushing with modesty. 36. Beckett may have had a take on such matters: see ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ in which he speaks of ‘sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter’. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (New York: Grove Press, 1997). See also Seán Kennedy, ‘First Love: Abortion and Infanticide in Beckett and Yeats’, Samuel Beckett Today /Aujourd’hui 22 (2010): 79–91.

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Irish modernism and Revivalism: A queer history? Seán Hewitt

In recent years, Irish queer studies has proliferated. Alongside more explicit interventions, such as Seán Kennedy’s special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Anne Mulhall’s special issue of Irish University Review and Kathryn Conrad’s work on homosexuality and Irish national identity, pioneering studies of Irish masculinity, sexuality and gender have afforded new historical and theoretical paradigms for the study of modern Irish literature.1 As Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby have recently noted, between 1995 (when the first published scholarly uses ‘Irish modernism’ were logged) and 2010, there were no more than two instances of the phrase per year. By 2015, however, its usage factor had significantly increased, peaking at eighteen per year.2 Despite this rise in critical interest, Bixby and Castle’s A History of Irish Modernism, which is slated as ‘the first wide-ranging and in-depth account of an artistic and cultural phenomenon – modernism in Ireland’, offers little attention to explicitly queer readings.3 If we are seeking the possibilities of ‘Irish modernism’ as a field, attention to its queerness is both vital and timely. Studies of ‘queer modernism’, and attempts to account for the conjunction of queerness and modernism, have examined a number of literary and extraliterary contexts for this emergent critical field which are particularly pertinent in the Irish context. The development of sexology in the late nineteenth century, the French Decadent movement and public scandals centring on homosexuality have been suggested as prominent factors in modernism’s queerness. As this chapter will show, these historicist frameworks – commonly invoked to examine the queerness of international modernism – are particularly pertinent to the Irish case. In the instance of Irish modernism, however, the dialectical relationship it shares with Irish Revivalism – an apparently Romantic and atavistic movement – must be addressed in order to trace the impact of these central ‘queer’ influences. It is now a commonplace of criticism of Irish Revivalism to see the movement as an ‘incubatory moment’ of modernism.4 As Paige Reynolds has shown, there are numerous ‘conceptual and practical overlaps’ between the two.5 Studies of its engagement with scientific development, manifestomaking, regeneration, new technologies, little magazines and other preoccupations associated with modernism have shown it to be less ‘the diametric antithesis of modernism than as its discursive sibling’.6

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As a working definition for ‘queer modernism’, Benjamin Kahan suggests that the term ‘delineates the sexually transgressive and gender deviant energies that help fuel modernism’s desire to thwart normative aesthetics, knowledge, geographies and temporalities’.7 Needless to say, any attempt to apply this theoretical framework exhaustively or even summarily to the Irish context will require significant future scholarly work and will simultaneously develop our understanding of canonical Irish modernists and bring to light the innovations of lesser known figures. As part of this volume’s project of attuning our analyses to the finer distinctions of the shifting fault lines of Irish modernist cultural production, I will suggest how the development of Revivalism, and the competition it often stages between modernity and Romanticism, has as a queering function, and how this queering function eventually pushes Irish literary production towards a more recognizable and iconoclastic modernism. Exploring works by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Eva Gore-Booth and others, I will suggest that the ‘incubatory’ nature of Revivalism might be in part associated not only with its pressures of conservatism and progressive politics, or its Romanticism and modernism, but also with its adoption, adaption and rejection of gendering and heteronormativity. As with any movement, this is by no means a comprehensive reading of Revivalism; rather, it is a suggestion of how the movement pulled in different directions, and how queerness might be part of what forced it in the direction of the more outright modernism of later decades.

Queering Irish modernism Though the opportunities raised by queer studies have been harnessed by scholars of contemporary Irish culture, and though feminist work on Irish Revivalism and modernism has been vibrant and ongoing, there remains little explicitly queer work on Irish modernism. What work has been done has tended to be limited to those canonical modernists whose works typically garner attention from critics working in international rather than national modernist contexts. In the programmes of the recent Queer Modernism(s) conferences held at the University of Oxford, for example, the names of Joyce, Wilde and Beckett occur with some frequency, though attention to other Irish writers is more limited. Thus, we are more familiar with queer readings of these major international writers than we are with queer readings of, for example, the Revivalists. On the flip side, those writers (such as Kate O’Brien, Brendan Behan and Elizabeth Bowen) who are more easily assimilated biographically under the term ‘queer’ have not until recently been assimilated under the term ‘modernist’. Not only this, but those Irish modernists or proto-modernists whose work has found favour with critics involved in queer studies (Joyce and Beckett, again, but also Oscar Wilde) are those whose internationalism – their expatriate status and their use of languages other than English and Irish – seems to suggest that queerness is antagonistic to the prevailing vision of Irish traditionalism and conservative nationalism. The new modernist studies, in both expanding the canon and focusing on new theoretical concerns including affect and the body, allows us to reassess such distinctions.

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There remains, then, both the question of how to define Irish modernism and how to define an Irish queer studies. What Noreen Giffney has dubbed ‘quare theory’ is ‘amorphous’.8 In Mulhall’s summary of Giffney’s thought, ‘quare theory’ is ‘not so much an achieved field of study as a ghostly indistinct flickering around the margins of the larger fields that it attempts to manifest to (Irish studies, queer studies) and to which it is attached despite having been repudiated by these if only through the abjecting force of non-recognition.’9 Though not writing in the context of queer studies, Seamus Deane has suggested that Ireland is, in a sense, a queer nation: ‘The country remains strange in its failure to be normal; the normal remains strange in its failure to be defined as anything other than the negative of strange. Normality is an economic condition; strangeness a cultural one.’10 In focusing on the Revival’s reaction to uneven temporalities in the following section, I examine just one of the ways in which a ‘queer’ modernism in the Irish context might be understood or theorized. Joseph Valente, in ‘Self-Queering Ireland’, develops modernist studies’ attentiveness to uneven temporalities towards a more explicit notion of queerness. Here, Valente suggests that Ireland’s postcolonial situation is fundamental to any critical focus on the development of an Irish queer studies. In fact, he argues that Ireland is ‘self-queering’, that there is ‘a certain historically contingent yet logically organic kinship of Irishness and queerness’.11 Thus, for Valente, queer studies in the Irish context is necessarily expansive in its understanding of the term ‘queer’, and takes its place not only as an analysis of sexual identity and regulation in Ireland, but as an analysis of Ireland itself – where an ethnic/national heritage of metrocolonial ambivalence, what we might call the unique geo-political difference of Ireland, has been forced to pass under the sign of colonial subordination on one side and European entitlement on the other, opposed identity formations or categories of the ‘same’.12

It is in this expansive mode that we find a multifaceted mission for queer studies of Irish modernism. Not only must we be concerned with widening the archive of queer writers, and paying critical attention to their work not only for its queerness but also for its literary value, but we might also further consider the general thrust of Irish cultural modernism from the Revival through to high and late modernism in queer terms. The writers and cultural figures of the period who we can identify as nonheterosexual are not always clearly modernist thinkers, though many of them are. Thus, Emily Lawless, Eva Gore-Booth, Pamela Colman Smith and Elizabeth Bowen might all have lived as queer women, born in roughly the same time period, but their definitions of Irish modernism must be shifted and adapted in multiple ways if each of these writers is to be deemed ‘modernist’. The same goes for Edward Martyn, Forrest Reid, Pádraig Pearse and Thomas MacGreevy. Historical figures who are not primarily known for their literary productions (particularly Hugh Lane and Roger Casement) figure throughout modernist works, often productively ‘queering’

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them as ghosts or spectres, though they were not engaged in literary modernism themselves.13 Nevertheless, it is fundamental to our understanding of the modernist literature in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century to name, consider and pay attention to the contributions of queer figures. This work must be done alongside critical investigations of ‘modernist’ Irish writers if we are to fully understand both the queer cultures of modernity and the queerness of modernist texts.

Queer histories Although Brian Lacey has written an accessible and wide-ranging historical account of queer figures in Irish history, there remains an absence of a detailed, authoritative work on the subject. The subject of lesbian relationships is doubly murky, suffering from not only the erasure of queer history but also an erasure within this history. Lacey’s Terrible Queer Creatures: Homosexuality in Irish History contains only a single, short chapter on ‘Irishwomen who loved women’: the ‘limited nature of the history of lesbianism in Ireland is not’, Lacey contends, ‘just because of the usual kind of patriarchal historiography’. Due to the more extensive archive of court records and journalistic material relating to male homosexual relationships and scandals, and to a simultaneous reluctance to legislate against lesbian relationships, ‘the same documentation that exists for men is just not available for women’.14 However, as Sonja Tiernan has demonstrated, this historiographical erasure is not always innocuous but is rather an iteration of compulsory heterosexuality. For example, Tiernan suggests that ‘homophobic embarrassment’ has led to the reluctance to name Gore-Booth’s relationship with Esther Roper as a lesbian relationship.15 Furthermore, the onerous task of ‘proving’ sexual activity or proclivity in historical figures or in their relationships is, as Sheila Jeffreys suggests, unfairly skewed in favour of queer erasure. In her article ‘Does It Matter If They Did It?’, quoted by Tiernan, Jeffreys notes that ‘women who have lived in the same house and slept in the same bed for thirty years have had their lesbianism strongly denied by historians. But men and women who simply take walks together are assumed to be involved in some sort of heterosexual relationship.’16 Thus, the historiography of queer Ireland is still marked with numerous qualifications and often performed uncertainties. There is also the question, in the writing of a queer account of Irish modernism, of the function of ‘queer’ as a critical term and its distinction from ‘lesbian and gay studies’. Robyn Wiegman discusses the possibilities of ‘queer’ – or what Mulhall refers to as the ‘capaciousness of queer studies’ – writing that the queer of Queer Studies can name a subject position, a category of identity, a historical experience, a subjectivity, an identification, a critical analytic, a gender discourse, a practice of embodiment, a sexual formation, an ethics, a politics, a theoretic, a mode of interpretation, a practice of reading a knowledge project, and an agenda for social change.17

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In his authoritative introduction to the pioneering 1997 volume Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing, Éibhear Walshe argues for the inclusion within Irish queer studies of writers whose biographies might not include LGBTQ+ identities but whose literary works nevertheless deploy the homoerotic, or ‘alternate sexual identities’, in order to ‘dissent’ from the dominant discourses of Irish culture.18 Patrick Mullen, in one of the most prominent recent works on the subject, adopts ‘queer’ as a ‘capacious index’, as a term designating both ‘a series of non-normative desires, sexualities, people, politics and cultural expressions and as a term that maintains specific relations, at times contradictory and elusive, with the homosexual and the homoerotic.’19 In general, this double focus has taken prominence, and is what would seem most useful in a study of Irish modernism, which (even if we still have little historical work on its queer figures) often functions in a ‘queer’ mode of dissent.

Reading queer modernism through the Revival The ‘creation of alternative male identities’ by key figures in the Irish Revival was noted early by Adrian Frazier, whose chapter ‘Queering the Irish Renaissance’ was an early foray into studies of queer sexualities and Irish modernist writing. The movement, he observes, was often deemed effeminate in character.20 In fact, Revivalism was an ambivalent counter to the regulation of gender roles in both Catholic nationalism and constructive unionism. Its stagings of family and domestic scenes, its interrogation of nationalist masculinities and its embrace of Celtic ‘effeminacy’ were all indispensable to the formation of a strand of Irish modernism that was politically and aesthetically queer. Furthermore, the deployment of queer temporalities, in response to a perceived uneven development, is prominent in Revivalist texts and signals the ways in which we might understand this ‘incubatory’ moment of modernism as enacting a queering function. Drawing on aestheticism, Decadence and symbolism, the early ‘Celtic Twilight’ leant into the demarcation of the Irish as spiritual, feminine and irrational. This national and racial stereotyping, set in place during the nineteenth century by key figures such as Renan and Arnold, was difficult to negotiate.21 In one sense, it allowed the Irish to oppose and correct what was seen as an English tendency towards rationalism, commercialism and modernization; on the other hand, it involved buying into an image of the ‘Celt’ as irrational, effeminate and often lost in a dream. The ‘queerness’ of the Celtic Twilight, in Frazier’s terms, is based in this embrace of effeminacy, taking on some of the aesthetic concerns of the Decadence, as the foundation of a revived culture. In Ireland, as elsewhere, occultism, new mysticisms and other modes of thought which countered the dominant positivism of post-Enlightenment Western culture were harnessed for their contrarian power. As John Bramble notes, ‘to be able to know the world differently … was an asset for modernism’s quarrel with … uniformity, bourgeois master-narratives, materialist progress and the Westernization of the earth’.22 What makes the Irish case different are the ways in which cultural nationalism made use of primitivism in its attempts to posit the Irish as a race equipped to oppose anglicization.

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Thus, the quarrel was not only with uniformity and bourgeois thought but also with imperialism and colonial rule. We can see this most clearly in the engagement with occultism and theosophy in writers engaged in the Celtic Twilight, notably W. B. Yeats and Æ, but also Pamela Colman Smith. The latter became known for designing the iconic Smith-Waite tarot deck, collaborated with Jack B. Yeats on the little magazine the Green Sheaf and also designed ‘twilight’-style scenery for some Abbey productions. Occurring simultaneously to this embrace of a ‘feminine’ spirituality, however, were developments in comparative philology, anthropology and mythology which revealed a more brutal element to the world of Irish myth that the Revival sought to revive. These developments coincided with attempts in primitivist Irish nationalist and Celticist discourse to ‘inscribe an altogether more romantic – and more exclusivist – vision’ of early Irish literature and society.23 Thus, though many nineteenth-century literary attempts to depict (or translate) the Ireland of the ancient manuscripts rendered it ‘a sanitized Ireland, a proper Ireland, an Ireland you would be happy to bring home to your mother’, this image was gradually unsettled, principally through the work of French and German scholars.24 In positing two forms of primitivism at work during the Revival, Sinéad Garrigan Mattar sheds light on the ways in which Romanticism and modernism vied in the movement, in some sense characterizing it. Through comparative science, and an engagement with the burgeoning study of Celtology, writers such as Synge and Yeats were confronted with, and occasionally harnessed, a vision of the ‘primitive’ Irish which ran counter to nationalist projections of the rural, pious, ‘noble savage’. Thus, as Garrigan Mattar defines, there were two forms of primitivism at work in the Ireland of the period. In the Romantic version, ‘the object of idealization is idealized precisely to the extent that it reflects the highest values of civilization in a context that is ostensibly more innocent, more pure and more “natural” ’. In modernist primitivism, however, ‘the object of idealization is idealized because it is seemingly other to civilization. What is idealized is not what is most pure, noble and innately mannered, but what is most brutal, sexual and contrary.’25 Locating modernist primitivism’s centrality to the development of Revivalism allows us to chart its contrariness, its sexuality, its queerness, as an influencing factor on non- or anti-Revivalist modernisms. As a result of uneven development across Ireland, and the linguistic situation which split the Irish-speaking rural populations from the English-speaking middle-classes, the notion of uneven temporalities was also fundamental to the Revival’s invocation of the timeless west of the country in opposition to the encroaching urbanization of the cities and particularly the capital. As Culleton and McGarrity suggest, ‘the access to the primitive that seems to uniquely characterize Irish modernism serves as a means to differentiate this national form from other early twentieth-century patterns of primitive encounters. The Irish need not escape the self nor travel abroad to encounter the primitive.’26 Though some of these modes of ‘encountering’ the primitive, and harnessing its power into a new Irishness, followed Garrigan Mattar’s ‘romantic’ mode, many were in fact modernist, foregrounding difference and contrariness. These modernist aspects often arose through engagement with uneven temporalities and an increased awareness of uneven development. However, as Elin Ap Hywel has noted, a form of queering often also occurred at the site of translation and manifested

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most palpably in the work of those writers who placed their versions of the ancient manuscripts most closely to the originals had the most subversive potential. The mythical and historical figures of the Irish manuscripts could thus be harnessed in subtle (and occasionally less subtle) ways in order to counter the idealized gender roles of conservative cultural nationalisms. In Yeats’s version of Deirdre, for example, the play begins with the return of Deirdre and her lover Naoise to the court, rather than with the birth of Deirdre. This results in a shifted focus. ‘The order of events’, as Ap Hywel shows, ‘suggests that it is not Deirdre’s wilful sexuality which has transgressed against the stability of a patriarchal order (as represented by Conchubar), but rather the rigid structures of Conchubar’s understanding of the relationship between sexuality and community which have transgressed against Deirdre and Naoise’s love.’27 The idealized mythical women presented in Romantically inflected, Celticist versions of the ancient manuscripts (such as those of Renan) were replaced by an alternative and contrary version in which sexuality was pervasive and unruly. As Anatole Le Braz writes in his 1905 study Le Théâtre celtique, instead of a race that is gentle, timid, isolated in its dream and disdainful of all effort, there emerges, on the contrary, vehement natures, passionate, almost brutal, hungry for action, drunk with movement and noise. … One looks in vain in these rude epics for the ideal cult of woman, so cherished by Renan. … Such are these impetuous and wholly primitive natures.28

The disruptive, ‘primitive’ sexuality of these manuscripts would be harnessed by the more daring Revivalists and modernists in Ireland (such as Synge) in order to align Irishness not with an ‘ideal cult of woman’ but with an unruly, vital corrective to the sterility of modern life. In modernism’s dream of merging with the primitive, of channelling its energy as a corrective to modern sterility, the reclamation of non-normative sexualities was fundamental. Though this did not always involve same-sex relations, it did foreground a critique of gender roles constructed under patriarchy and of heteronormative institutions. In Ireland, this was charged with an iconoclasm that set itself against the conservative rigours of nationalist orthodoxy surrounding the family, gender roles and sexuality. This was the source of significant controversy during the Revival, when stagings of ‘queer’ sexualities were violently contested. Degenerationist thought, which proliferated during the late nineteenth century and was prevalent in nationalist discourse, coupled with colonial sensitivity to misrepresentation, meant that strict sexual mores were instituted both culturally and economically.29 Constructive unionism, or what Irish chief secretary Gerald Balfour controversially dubbed ‘killing home rule with kindness’, is the name given to the Irish policy of successive Conservative governments over the 1890s and early 1900s. Constructive unionism was a policy of pacifying agrarian unrest ‘by a combination of coercive and conciliatory measures’,30 designed to make a relatively underdeveloped country more capable of laissez-faire and to ‘present an attractive capitalist alternative to socialistic solutions and ultimately to strengthen individual enterprise and responsibility and the interests of property and the empire’.31 Hence, though it led to some far-reaching

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change in rural Ireland, its ends were nevertheless deeply conservative. A series of land acts and amelioration schemes were implemented across Ireland, and areas of the West which had high rates of dependency on small-holdings were designated as ‘congested’ and subject to the development schemes of the Congested Districts Board for Ireland, established in 1891 by Arthur Balfour. The Board carried out a number of baseline surveys of ‘congested’ localities in order to gather information on social and economic activities, natural resources and detailed budgets of ‘average families’. The geographer and historian Frederick Aalen has suggested that these surveys were most probably influenced by the work of the French sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882), who developed techniques for systematic research on the family. Le Play’s work had appeal for radical conservatives, as it emphasized ‘social reconstruction in order to achieve social peace and stability’.32 As Aalen notes, Le Play maintained that disruptive social forces … could be controlled by encouraging cohesive elements in society, by reinforcing paternal authority, introducing cottage crafts for women, and encouraging stable families in improved secure homes and manufacturing with its roots in local tradition.33

In fact, many of the programmes for industry worked to emphasize domesticity and the importance of the home as a site of both economic and social stability, using order, cleanliness and male authority as a stipulation for ‘improvements’. The Brockagh baseline report for 1891 illustrates that, in the textiles industry, the cleanliness of the employee’s home was a prerequisite for employment.34 In the development of Revivalism and modernism in Ireland, an engagement with the modernization of rural areas was fundamental, revealing as it did the temporal pressures between the ‘traditional’ and the modern. As Lionel Pilkington has shown, the funds for a new ‘Celtic Theatre’ were supported by a number of patrons who also worked with the Congested Districts Board, suggesting that cultural and economic modernization were seen as part of a larger movement towards Irish self-sufficiency.35 This is reflected in audience expectations and the policing of gender norms by theatre critics. Notably, Arthur Griffith (editor of the United Irishman and later founder, in 1905, of Sinn Féin) repeatedly led attacks on the depiction of women on the Abbey stage. Griffith’s conservative agenda during this period included, as Geraldine Higgins suggests, the policing of gender and nationalist-cultural politics: ‘His creed of “home and hearth nationalism” combined protective chauvinism and protectionist economics.’36 Katherine Conrad has productively elaborated Foucault’s concept of the ‘family cell’ in order to analyse Irish national and sexual identity, claiming that ‘the centrality of the family cell to social, economic and political organization defines and limits not only acceptable sexuality but also the contours of the private sphere, the public sphere and the nation itself ’.37 This is nowhere more clear than in the stagings of the Irish Literary Revival, where the family unit, and the cottage interior, frequently became symbolic representations of the nation itself. In nationalist agendas, abetted by Catholicism, the family unit was central both to indoctrinating Irish children to the cause of nationalism and to defying the perceived immorality of anglicization. The development in cultural nationalism of an idealized

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femininity, a mythical mother figure to represent the nation, and a call to ‘manliness’ and service enforced heteronormative roles. Due to what Valente terms a ‘stigma of racial feminization’, propounded most significantly in the Victorian period through British imperialist discourse, Irish masculinity was asserted as a countering move, particularly during the Revival and the first decades of the twentieth century.38 In modernism’s ‘ironic rendering’ of these traditions, its dialectic with Irish identity, and its queering of prescribed gender norms, was in part formed.39 In all of this, however, we must also leave space to acknowledge the multiplicity of modernism’s engagements with gender and note its often violent and authoritarian tendencies alongside its forms of progressive dissent. Revivalism’s strain of conservatism, its backward-looking attempt to ‘revive’ the old, to oppose the modern, manifested in an alliance with home-and-hearth nationalism. Many of its literary productions, not least its drama, restaged the biopolitical imperatives of both nationalism and constructive unionism. In the one-act peasant dramas prominent in the literary Revival – Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (1901), Lady Gregory’s Twenty-Five (1903), amongst others – the cottage interior was allegorized as the nation or the idealized space wherein ideal Irish cultural values could be discussed and propagated. By 1911, as Christopher Morash notes, the Abbey company had reused more or less the same set sixteen times, and the trope of the ‘stranger in the house’ had become attached to the spatial restrictions of the stage.40 The biopolitical contexts of both nationalist and unionist politics in the period are thus fundamental to understanding the thrust of Irish literary productions through Revivalism and into the fully fledged modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, involved as they were with questions of nation and dissent. As Mullen suggests, the ‘affective excess’ of Irish modernists, and the experimental aesthetic forms of Irish modernism, can and should be framed in part as a ‘critical response to the strictures of a British imperialist imaginary’.41 I would add here that they must also be framed in the contexts of a conservative nationalist imaginary. Though it is not a united or singular movement, it is possible to trace the Irish Revival’s queerness to a dissent from, and questioning of, both of these pressures and orthodoxies. Hence, to take, as an example, the case of Synge, when Nora Burke leaves her cottage to go off with a tramp in The Shadow of the Glen (1903), or when Pegeen Mike falls for a father-killer in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), it is both the nation and an idealized concept of normative sexuality and womanhood that is offended. We can trace the movement into modernism in the disruption of the cottage interior, the focus on what Synge called the ‘sex-element’, and the harnessing of the disruptive force of the primitive to unsettle the perceived sterility of conservative nationalism and Catholic orthodoxy.42 Later, when O’Casey has a bullet shatter the window of the tenement in The Plough and the Stars (1926), killing his Nora, the scene gains a high degree of its horror and controversy through its breaking of the domestic interior and its signalling of the disruptiveness of the Easter Rising and its attendant mythologizing. The influence of Ibsen on Irish drama in this period is deeply felt. Not only does Synge’s Nora go by the same name as the controversial heroine of A Doll’s House, but her leaving of the house, her breaking of the domestic interior, is crucial to her role. The influence of Ibsen ‘on the demise of conventions governing morality, especially in

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regard to sexual relations and gendered identities’ is prominent in modernist writings.43 What Robert L. Caserio terms ‘queer modernism’s attack on marriage’ is felt early on in the Irish context through Synge, Shaw and the celebration of same-sex female love in the pioneering little magazine Urania (which ran from 1916 to 1940), founded and edited by Gore-Booth, Roper and others, which not only celebrated same-sex love but also rejected gender binarism and called for the abolition of gender itself.44 Thus, by examining the biopolitical contexts of Revivalism, its often contrary acceptance and rejection of gender roles and some of the ways in which it channelled alternative visions of sexuality in order to disrupt social conservatism, we can see how queerness might be seen as central to the movement towards the later, more explicit and subversive modernism of, for example, Joyce. In questioning heteronormative domesticity, and the ideal cult of womanhood, the Revival’s more controversial literary productions harnessed a more disruptive vision of sexuality that resulted in more experimental aesthetic forms. A queer framework allows us to complicate reductive critical binaries that attribute to the Revival conservative, reactionary views on gender and sexuality, and attribute to modernism a liberation of a sexually repressed Victorianism and Revivalism. Queerness, in other words, might be posited as a central feature in the development of Irish literary modernism.

Notes 1. Seán Kennedy, ed., special issue, ‘Queering Ireland’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010); Anne Mulhall, ed., ‘Queering the Issue’, special issue, Irish University Review 43, no. 1 (2013); Kathryn Conrad, ‘Queer Treasons: Homosexuality and Irish National Identity’, Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 124–37; Noreen Giffney and Margrit Shildrick, eds, Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011); and Éibhear Walshe, ed., Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). 2. See Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, eds, ‘Introduction’, A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–24. The first two scholarly uses of the phrase ‘Irish modernism’ are logged in two essays in Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995). 3. Castle and Bixby, eds, A History of Irish Modernism, 1. 4. Rónán McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51. 5. Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. 6. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 12. 7. Benjamin Kahan, ‘Queer Modernism’, in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. JeanMichel Rabaté (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 348. 8. Noreen Giffney, ‘Quare Theory’, in Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference, ed. Noreen Giffney and Margrit Shildrick (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 241–57.

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9. Anne Mulhall, ‘Introduction: Queering the Issue’, special issue, Irish University Review 43, no. 1 (2013): 4. 10. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 16. 11. Joseph Valente, ‘Self-Queering Ireland?’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 25. 12. Ibid., 26. 13. See, for example, the work of Lucy McDiarmid, particularly, ‘The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement’, in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 127–58; and Alison Garden, particularly, ‘ “Leaving Hardly a Sign – and No Memories”: Roger Casement and the Metamodernist Archive’, Modernism/modernity Print Plus 2, no. 4 (2017). 14. Brian Lacey, Terrible Queer Creatures: Homosexuality in Irish History (Dublin: Wordwell, 2008), 181. 15. Sonja Tiernan, ‘Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study’, Historical Reflections 37, no. 2 (2011): 59. 16. Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Does It Matter If They Did It?’, in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbian History, 1840–1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 22. 17. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 332. 18. Éibhear Walshe, ‘Introduction’, in Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing, ed. Walshe, 1. 19. Patrick R. Mullen, The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor and Postcolonial History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 20. Adrian Frazier, ‘Queering the Irish Renaissance: The Masculinities of Moore, Martyn and Yeats’, in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. Bradley and Valiulis, 8–38. 21. See Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays, trans. William G. Hutchinson (London: Walter Scott, 1896); and Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays, with an introduction by Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976). 22. John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. 23. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 9. 24. Mattar, Primitivism, 15. 25. Ibid., 3–4. 26. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton, ‘Introduction’, in Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive, ed. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. 27. Elin Ap Hywel, ‘Elise and the Great Queens of Ireland: “Femininity” as constructed by Sinn Féin and the Abbey Theatre, 1901–1907’, in Gender in Irish Writing, ed. Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 32. 28. Anatole Le Braz, Le Théâtre celtique (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 1981), 5, 7, 8. 29. See Scott Ashley, ‘Primitivism, Celticism and Morbidity in the Atlantic fin de siècle’, in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 175–93. 30. Ciara Breathnach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 11. 31. Frederick H. A. Aalen, ‘Constructive Unionism and the Shaping of Rural Ireland, c. 1880–1921’, Rural History 4, no. 2 (October 2008): 138.

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3 2. Ibid., 149–52. 33. Ibid. 34. Quoted in Breathnach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923, 61. 35. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001), 9. 36. Higgins, Heroic Revivals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 78–9. 37. Katherine Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 4. 38. Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness, 98. 39. See Diane Stubbings, Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 8. 40. Christopher Morash, A History of the Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 121; see also Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36–8. 41. Mullen, The Poor Bugger’s Tool, 16. 42. Letter from J. M. Synge to Stephen MacKenna, 28 January 1904, The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. I, 1871–1907, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 74–5. 43. Robert L. Caserio, ‘Queer Modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 203. 44. Caserio, ‘Queer Modernism’, 204. For more on Urania, see Sonja Tiernan, ‘ “No Measures of Emancipation or Equality Will Suffice”: Eva Gore-Booth’s Radical Feminism in the Journal Urania’, in Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century Ireland: Dissenting Voices?, ed. Sarah O’Connor and Christopher C. Shepard (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 166–82.

8

‘Survival of the unfittest’: Synge, Yeats and the rhetoric of health Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

Of all the responses to the controversies surrounding the first run of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, perhaps the most caustic came from the playwright himself. In a journal entry following Synge’s death in March 1909, W. B. Yeats quotes a piece of verse Synge had dedicated ‘To a Sister of an Enemy of the Author’s, who disapproved of The Playboy’: Lord confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung and liver, In her guts a galling give her. Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgment swiftly bring, And I’m your servant, – J. M. Synge.

Synge’s alliterative catalogue of physical ailments apparently had the desired effect, for in the same journal entry Yeats records how Synge had explained ‘with mirthful eyes’ that since he had written the poem, its subject’s husband had ‘got drunk, gone with a harlot, got syphilis and given it to his wife’.1 Synge’s poem expresses a desire to number those ostensibly scandalized audience members who vocally disrupted his play in the name of national purity among the ‘seedy sinners’ whose degenerate condition it was intended to diagnose and critique. ‘The Curse’ (as the poem came to be titled) represents a prominent example of what may be termed the ‘rhetoric of health’: an overdetermined pseudo-medical discourse in which the lexicons of evolutionary theory, eugenics and degeneration are combined for political ends. The appeal of this rhetoric for figures across the turn-of-the-century Irish political spectrum was its capacity to naturalize a wide range of ideological positions through the explanatory mechanism of biology. The contradictions to which such discursive strategies gave rise inscribe themselves in Synge’s invocation of venereal disease as a form of divine retribution against those who criticized his work for its perceived blasphemy and degenerate sexuality, a rhetorical manoeuvre which,

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ironically, replicates the basic assumptions of the very value system it is intended to repudiate. At first blush, this image of an enraged and politically engaged Synge denouncing his critics in medicalized doggerel seems alien to the conventional picture of the Revival offered both by its exponents and by mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American criticism. Such accounts have traditionally rested, to varying degrees, upon a range of restrictive binaries, opposing a retrograde Ireland to a forward-looking Europe, a conservative nationalism to a liberal avant-garde, an arcane Revival to a scientifically engaged modernism. Richard Ellmann’s monumental James Joyce draws a clear distinction between the cosmopolitan modernism of its subject and what it presents as the stymieing nativism of the Irish political and cultural milieu he left behind. Hugh Kenner was likewise keen to position ‘masterpieces of International Modernism’ such as Ulysses, At Swim-Two-Birds and Waiting for Godot far from ‘the literature of [their authors’] native country’.2 Such well-worn divisions had their roots in the selffashioning of the canon of Irish literary modernism. In ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Samuel Beckett infamously opposed the provincial and antiquarian ‘dried Ossianic goods’ of Yeats and Synge to figures such as Thomas MacGreevy, who had thrown off the ‘altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael’ to grapple with the ‘rupture of the line of communication’ under modernity.3 Yet, Beckett was participating in a wellestablished Irish modernist tradition of anti-Revivalist disaffiliation stretching back to Joyce’s ‘Day of the Rabblement’. In such accounts and the critical tradition they inaugurated, Yeats’s occultism and Synge’s fetishization of peasant life in the West are taken as evidence of a primitivist aversion to the homogenizing and alienating effects of socio-economic modernity and its political and cultural correlatives (democratic factionalism, technical specialization, mass media) that aligns them against the cosmopolitan and experimental currents of modernism. The consolidation of Irish modernism as an object of critical scrutiny has seen these binaries subjected to pressure by a range of scholarship increasingly alive not only to ‘the importance of modernism to Ireland, but of Ireland to modernism’.4 Recent surveys by Carol Taaffe, Joe Cleary, Lauren Arrington, Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby have stressed the ideological, intellectual and stylistic heterogeneity and inherently transnational character of Ireland’s diasporic modernism.5 At the same time, P. J. Mathews, Emer Nolan and Paige Reynolds have problematized the perceived opposition between Revivalism and modernism in Ireland, tracing the complex social, institutional and cultural ties that bound many of the key representatives of both movements.6 In the context of Yeats and Synge, such scholarship has largely taken two forms. On the one hand, Elizabeth Cullingford, Marjorie Howes and Nicholas Grene have sought to unpack the Irish political debates in which both authors were embroiled and situate their works within a specifically Irish frame of cultural and historical reference.7 Another, related, strand of criticism has sought to emphasize the role that medical, social and evolutionary science played in the developing modernism of both authors and to highlight the continuities a sensitivity to such discourses can reveal between Irish modernism and the Revival. Both Castle and Sinéad Garrigan Mattar have suggested that critical commonplaces about a univocal Revivalist primitivism occlude

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the debts that Yeats and Synge owe to cutting-edge developments in the emergent fields of anthropology and ethnography.8 Rónán McDonald has identified ‘Darwinian traces’ in Yeats, arguing that much of what is strikingly ‘modernist’ in his poetry and lifewriting emerges from a fraught encounter with evolutionary theory and the scientific method upon which it rested.9 Likewise, David Bradshaw and Donald J. Childs have traced the intellectual origins of Yeats’s 1930s turn to eugenicism back even to the early collections The Green Helmet and Responsibilities.10 And yet, relatively little critical work has been undertaken to establish a dialectic between these two lines of inquiry, or to explicate the ways in which the medical and scientific discourses which composed the rhetoric of health were being utilized to justify often irreconcilable political and cultural positions in ongoing debates over the nature of Irish national identity. In this essay, I address this lacuna by illustrating the political and aesthetic ends to which the rhetoric of health is deployed in The Playboy of the Western World and the controversy it provoked. Calling into question traditional accounts of the Playboy riots, which pit a sexually frank Abbey Theatre against a rebarbative nationalist rabble, I demonstrate that both sides of the dispute were in fact united in their use of the rhetoric of health to sponsor, admittedly divergent, models of Irish national identity. In contrast to readings of the riots which present the nationalist response as essentially moral in character and pietistic in register, I illustrate how Sinn Féin and Irish Ireland employed the rhetoric of health to characterize the Abbey’s work as an assault on Gaelic purity and virility. I proceed to explore Synge’s response to this bourgeois Catholic nationalism, highlighting his use of degeneration theory to critique what he perceived to be the pathological insularity of Irish Ireland’s model of cultural and economic autarchy. Finally, I interrogate Yeats’s hyper-sexualized defence of Synge in poems, memoirs and essays which present him as a hypermasculine Nietzschean superman and his detractors as syphilitic ‘Eunuchs’.11 Through this analysis, I demonstrate the inseparability of questions of sexual health and national identity in turn-of-the-century Ireland and emphasize the ways in which a sensitivity to the social history of medicine and science in Ireland can facilitate a reconsideration of the relationship between Irish modernism and cultural nationalism.

Degeneration theory and the philosophy of Irish Ireland One of the most consistent and prominent practitioners of the rhetoric of health in the first decades of the twentieth century was D. P. Moran, the chief exponent of what he dubbed the ‘philosophy of Irish Ireland’. The Irish Ireland movement was inspired by what Douglas Hyde influentially dubbed ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’.12 Its programme of cultural and economic revival was summarized by Arthur Clery in the image of ‘the star of Irish Ireland’ whose five points were ‘language, industries, music, dancing and games’.13 The followers of Irish Ireland were urged to learn Irish, to read Irish literature, to buy Irish goods, to wear Irish clothing, to sing Irish songs, to dance Irish steps, to play Irish sports and – as Gabriel Conroy discovers to his embarrassment in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ – to holiday in their beloved homeland. However,

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this push to revive a culturally and economically Irish Ireland was constantly at risk of lapsing into a xenophobic drive to establish an ethnically Irish Ireland. The rhetorical underpinning of Moran’s programme was a lexicon of quasimetaphoric terminology drawn from contemporary science, which owed its most prominent debts to discourses of degeneration. The concept of ‘degeneration’ brought together a range of nineteenth-century psychopathological theories of biological and social decline and was articulated most influentially in the work of the French psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the Hungarian social critic Max Nordau.14 Morel’s concept of dégénéresence utilized a neo-Lamarckian theory of use-inheritance to construct a model of ‘heredity’ in which environmentally acquired physiological deficiencies became transmissible from generation to generation. In such a model, the sins of the father, be they alcoholism, criminality or syphilis, were the inevitable inheritance of the child, resulting in an accumulation of hereditary defects which could entirely extinguish a family within a matter of generations. By Nordau’s time, Morel’s theory had been extended to offer an account of social and cultural decline as a whole, in which the ‘social organism’ became as susceptible to contamination and decay as the individual. The utility of these theories for an advocate of cultural de-anglicization was clear, enabling Moran to contrast the ‘degenerate’ present with the physical and cultural ‘purity’ of a precolonial past.15 Moran’s deployment of a degeneration-inflected rhetoric of health is evident in the essays that comprise The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, first published serially in the New Irish Review between 1898 and 1900. The title of the collection’s first essay sets the tone: ‘Is the Irish Nation Dying?’ Moran’s answer is staked upon the belief that the most distinctive and distinguishing of the ‘several collections of human energies’ that compose a nation is its language. On this basis, Moran presents Ireland with a damning diagnosis, noting with dismay that both ‘the language [the Irish] speak and the literature [they] read, are borrowed from another country’.16 For Moran, thanks to this linguistic dispossession, the most distinctive racial traits of the Irish ‘characterize her torpor and decay rather than her development’.17 The fatal moment of cultural contamination was the 1782 establishment of Grattan’s Parliament, which Moran figures as a dangerous hybridization of Irish identity in which ‘the Gael’ was replaced with ‘an English-speaking, English-imitating mongrel’.18 Moran’s language echoes the logic of degeneration in its metaphorical alignment of cultural and racial purity, through which he seeks to figure Anglo-Irish culture as a dysgenic threat to Irish bodily well-being. Moran thus appropriates the fundamental tenet of Morelian theory, which defines dégénéresence as ‘une déviation maladive d’un type primitif’ [a morbid deviation from an original type], to support his sectarian repudiation of the ecumenical nationalism of Young Ireland.19 This rhetoric recurs in Moran’s vehement rejection of the cultural influence of the Young Ireland movement, whose greatest crime was to bring ‘into life a mongrel thing which they called Irish literature, in the English language’.20 Unsurprisingly, Moran anathemizes Yeats as the epitome of this unhealthy cultural miscegenation.21 In the logic of Irish Ireland, the necessary corollary of such degeneration was the feminization of the once virile and masculine ‘Gael’ into the feeble and hysterical ‘Celt’. Quoting Henri Martin, Matthew Arnold influentially theorized the Celt as ‘sentimental’

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and argued that the rational, masculine Anglo-Saxon had failed his feminized neighbour in neglecting to cultivate a ‘vital union’ between the two races and cultures.22 In the age of Charcot and Freud, such accusations of irrational femininity took on both the appearance of scientific legitimacy and a pointed pathological bite, with the ‘hysterical woman’ (and her even more troubling male counterpart) serving as a locus of medical and social concern throughout the fin de siècle.23 The mutually reinforcing operation of the gendered logics of Arnoldian Celticism and hysteria in an Irish context are reflected in Moran’s review of a 1905 revival of Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which he aligns Yeats’s play and its protagonist with the kinds of pathologically feminized Celticism which his hypermasculine vision of Irish Ireland was intended to counter: ‘The “poor old woman” symbol for Ireland is too greenly sentimental for us. Vigorous Ireland has told the old weeping, wailing creature to move out of its way.’24 Moran extends the senescent hysteria with which he characterizes the Sean-Bhean bhocht to the effete femininity of the ‘scented drawing-rooms’ in which the Anglo-Irish literati take their ‘coffee and gossip’, all of which is to be shouldered aside by the robust and dynamic figure of ‘Vigorous Ireland’.25 Moran presents this femininity as a contagious threat to audiences who ‘simper and sigh’ over Yeats’s Cathleen, urging Irish Irelanders to demand instead ‘a modern man with a heart and a head and a strong hand’.26 As Susan Cannon Harris and Joseph Valente have noted, this model of virile masculinity was constructed by Irish Ireland in response to an imperial discourse in which Celtic femininity necessitated and legitimized British rule in Ireland.27 Thus, argued Irish Ireland, if the Celt is an archetype of pathologized femininity (hysterical, weak, a locus of infection), then the Gael must be a paradigm of masculine strength, virility and robust health. This rhetoric of hypermasculinity features prominently in both the phallically titled organ of the Gaelic League, An Claidheamh Soluis [the sword of light], and in Arthur Griffith’s assertion that the 1899 Oireachtas, a League-organized cultural festival, offers ‘visible and palpable proof ’ of the Gael’s ‘sudden reaccession to manhood’.28 For both Griffith and Moran, the basis for this resurgent masculinity was a return to the ‘protoplasm’ of Irish-language culture, as sponsored by the Gaelic League and organizations such as Michael Cusack’s Gaelic Athletic Association, which, Cusack claimed, had been founded in response to a childhood fascination with the Tailteann Games and a desire to realize the linked dreams of national independence, Gaelic Revival and masculine self-actualization: ‘Having a mind to make up, I made it up. I resolved to be a Fenian. To be a Fenian I should be a hurler. I became a hurler and a Fenian. This was the beginning of my manhood.’29 Underpinning Cusack’s syllogistic model of personal and national Bildung, and facilitating its performative assertion of blunt masculine self-assurance, was a conviction that ‘nature’ and ‘heredity’ had vouchsafed to the Irish all the ‘workable elements, necessary and sufficient to resist and resent the insolent claims of a hostile gang to rule Ireland’.30 As Cusack’s remarks suggest, Irish Ireland consistently deployed a gendered rhetoric of health, rooted in degeneration theory, to sponsor a conscious withdrawal from a modern ‘mongrel’ state of physical and cultural heterogeneity to a former state of ‘wholesome’ unity. It was Synge’s opposition to this kind of middle-class Catholic cultural isolationism and his appropriation of the rhetoric of health through which it was articulated that were to animate both the Playboy and the controversy it inspired.

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The degeneration of the Western world More than any other dramatic work by Synge, the Playboy embraces a degenerationist rhetoric of health as the vehicle through which to confront the autarchic nationalist programmes of Irish Ireland and Sinn Féin in their own terms. The play consistently presents insularity as the predominant feature of contemporary Irish political life, ascribing to it a range of regressive physiological effects. This tendency finds its most emphatic expressions in the engagement of cousins Shawn Keogh and Pegeen Mike. Synge positions the proposed union as an example of a threefold form of insularity, in which ecclesiastically endorsed incest is to be undertaken to consolidate the family’s property and livestock holdings: SHAWN: Aren’t we after making a good bargain, the way we’re only waiting these days on Father Reilly’s dispensation from the bishops or the Court of Rome?31

Synge’s framing of their engagement as ‘a good bargain’ offers the first of many indications that the marriage is being dictated by economic imperatives, rather than a concern for the health and vitality of the offspring it may yield. In the aftermath of the famine, the disappearance of the subsistence farming system resulted in an increasing unwillingness on the part of Irish men and women to marry unless both parties possessed sufficient holdings of farmland.32 Griffith regularly offered graphic accounts of the famine as part of a British ‘plan for the extermination of the Nationalist population’ of Ireland.33 One of the primary motives for Sinn Féin’s vocal advocacy for economic autarchy (exemplified in a range of ‘Buy Irish’ campaigns) was to insulate Ireland against this perceived genocidal threat. Thus, for Synge to suggest that Irish reproductive behaviour remained contingent upon a socio-economic crisis orchestrated by Britain was a pointed assault on the claims to autonomy that were fundamental to both Sinn Féin and Irish Ireland. Even the hapless Keogh’s soubriquet, ‘Shaneen’, seems intended to underscore this uncomfortable British influence, homophonically evoking Moran’s favoured epithet for Anglophile toadies, ‘Shoneen’. For Synge, the intrusion of contemporary economic reality into the sexual practices of the Mayoites contributes directly to the degenerate stock Pegeen lists when questioning the interest of the Pope in Ireland: PEGEEN: If I was him, I wouldn’t bother with this place where you’ll meet none but Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame in his heel, or the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits.34

This catalogue of the stymied, the lame and the deranged is composed almost exclusively of men, who, like Shawn, offer an obvious contrast with the vitality of the play’s female cast. Synge’s appropriation of Moran’s rhetoric of degeneration is doubly subversive of the radically autonomous and hypermasculine image of ‘Vigorous Ireland’ presented in the pages of The Leader, in that it implies that Irish Ireland’s phallocentric isolationism renders its supporters complicit in the weakening of the already debilitated ‘Gael’. The eugenicist underpinnings of this critique are clearly coded in Pegeen’s reference

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to the ‘mad Mulrannies’, whose return from Californian émigré life stems not from Irish patriotic fervour but from an American drive to return to degenerate Erin her damaged goods. Synge further emphasizes this tendency when Pegeen presents the Widow Quin as a locus of insularity so intense as to allow the passage of her breast milk to be traced through the mouth of a sheep to the stomach of a visiting bishop: PEGEEN: Doesn’t the world know you reared a black lamb at your own breast, so that the Lord Bishop of Connaught felt the elements of a Christian, and he eating it after in a kidney stew?35

Pegeen presents the Widow as the apotheosis of a community so close-knit as to be engaged in a pseudo-eroticized form of cannibalism, positioning the Bishop of Connaught in alarming proximity to the Widow’s breast. This attempt by Pegeen to render the Widow unappealing to Christy comes laden with an unpleasant irony of its own, serving as a reminder of the clergy’s role in abetting her own incestuous engagement to Shawn. This irony is further emphasized a few lines later, when the Widow warns Christy of the dangers of wooing Pegeen, who is ‘waiting only … on a sheepskin parchment to wed with Shawn Keogh of Killakeen’.36 Synge suggests that the permission for Pegeen’s incestuous marriage will be given on a document written on the skin of an animal that has been eaten by a local bishop and suckled at the teat of the Widow Quin herself. Through this disquieting image, Synge deploys Irish Ireland’s preferred rhetoric of health to position the Catholic Church – the religious underpinning of Moran’s sectarian philosophy – as an institutional sanction for the ongoing degeneration of the Irish population. As much as any other feature of Synge’s play, it was this characterization of the Irish that was to incense the portions of its first audience most closely aligned with this philosophy and which was to inflect the infamous riots it precipitated.

Shifting the blame: Reconsidering the Playboy riots The incident which apparently sparked the Playboy riots has become a cliché of Irish literary historiography, neatly encapsulated in Lady Gregory’s opening-night telegram to the absent Yeats: ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift’.37 In the popular myth to which Gregory’s vignette gave rise, a prudish coterie of nativists, incensed by the scandalously frank sexual lexicon of Synge’s play, erupt in violent opposition to a perceived slander on Irish femininity. However, a closer examination of contemporary press coverage and eyewitness testimony suggests that behind the disturbances which beset the play’s premiere lurked the airing of a very different kind of dirty laundry. More than a suggestion of sexual impurity on the part of Ireland’s women, it is the degenerate state of the nation’s male population and the parricidal pseudo-poet whom Synge sponsors as their eugenic antithesis which appear to have most animated the play’s earliest audiences. The Freeman’s Journal, the Abbey’s most persistent and bitter critic throughout the Playboy’s initial run, emphasized the opposition between Shawn Keogh,

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who ‘is making sheep’s eyes at Margaret’ (Pegeen), and ‘the tramp’ (Christy), compared to whom ‘the worst specimen of stage Irishman’ is a ‘refined, acceptable fellow’.38 Intentionally or otherwise, the review’s account of Shawn’s ovine lovemaking links his meek sexual demeanour (his ‘sheep’s eyes’) to the intensely insular network of sexual and social bonds within which the Widow Quin’s black lamb circulates. Concurrently, the review condemns Christy by positioning him as the malign apotheosis of the ‘stage Irishman’, a loquacious and unscrupulous mainstay of British theatre since at least the seventeenth century. As far as the Freeman was concerned, Synge had maligned the present condition of Irish masculinity as pathologically compromised, only to sponsor a ‘hideous caricature’ culled from an alien and Hibernophobic cultural tradition in its stead.39 Sensitivity to the play’s caustic rendering of the degenerate condition of Irish manhood was not confined to its opponents. Praising the play in the Irish Times for its unsettling realism and ‘moral courage’, Patrick Kenny discusses the relationship between the ‘half idiot’ Shawn and the vivacious Pegeen in explicitly Darwinian terms: Why is ‘Pegeen’ prepared to marry him? ‘God made him; therefore, let him pass for a man’, and in all his unfitness, he is the fittest available! Why? Because the fit ones have fled. He remains because of his cowardice and his idiocy in a region where fear is the first of the virtues, and where the survival of the unfittest is the established law of life.40

For Kenny, Synge’s message was clear: Ireland’s insistently dysgenic breeding patterns – in which the ‘human specimens most calculated to bring the race lower’ were ‘select[ed] for continuance’ while the most able were left to emigrate – were tantamount to self-inflicted genocide.41 Synge endorsed Kenny’s reading in an Irish Times piece the following day, praising it as a rare moment of critical clear-sightedness.42 Yeats was so taken with Kenny’s review that, when strategizing to mitigate the risks the riots posed to the reception of a mooted American staging of the play in February 1907, he suggested that ‘Pat’ be invited to provide an introduction.43 At least as much as its fidelity to peasant life in the West, it was the play’s evolutionist interrogation of the operation of natural and artificial selection in Ireland that the Abbey and its allies were most keen to foreground in their defence of the Playboy. Nor were Darwinian readings of the play solely the preserve of the Protestant intelligentsia. During the debate Yeats organized to capitalize on the play’s notoriety, Mr D. Sheehan, who identified himself as ‘a peasant who knew peasants’ and a ‘medical student’, claimed he ‘had never seen the doctrine of the survival of the fittest treated with such living force’ as in the Playboy.44 For Sheehan, the true object of Synge’s satire was the ‘form of marriage law’ which underwrote the pathological union of a ‘fine woman like Pegeen Mike’ and ‘a tubercule Koch’s disease man like Shaun [sic] Keogh’. Like Kenny, Sheehan saw in Synge’s play an image of the Irish West not as the untainted well-spring of Gaelic culture but as an anti-Darwinian incubator for a pathologically compromised masculine population, doomed to a state of terminal atrophy akin to the muscular wastage of tuberculosis. In a breeding pool so shallow and contaminated, Sheehan argued, it should come as no surprise that, ‘when the artist appears in Ireland

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who was not afraid of life’ and ‘his nature’, the ‘women of Ireland would receive him’. In a telling echo of the infamous riots themselves, the remainder of Sheehan’s comments were rendered inaudible by the ‘disorder’ of the audience, many of whom left the auditorium in ‘astonishment’ and disgust.45 As in the case of the play itself, the resistance of Irish Ireland had been provoked not so much by a reference to the undergarments of Irish women as by the suggestion that the degenerate state of Irish manhood would leave such women disinclined to remove their undergarments at all.

Disinfecting Dom Juan: Yeats’s construction of Synge The image of Synge as a virile and dynamic revivifying cultural force that Yeats curated and propagated in the aftermath of the playwright’s death in 1909 hinges upon the pseudo-scientific model of biological fitness upon which these arguments were staked. Yeats’s construction of Synge as his ‘anti-self ’ or as a sort of ‘Übermensch of the Western World’ has been well documented.46 However, the pervasive role medical discourses, and particularly discourses of sexual health, played in that construction – and, by extension, the importance of Synge to Yeats’s eugenic thinking – have received relatively scant critical attention. In the 1905 ‘Preface’ to The Well of the Saints, Yeats emphasizes the paucity and pathological character of the ‘one or two poems and impressionistic essays’ the younger writer had shown him, identifying in them a ‘morbidity’ that derives from an excess of literary influence and meta-literary introspection.47 The ‘morbidity’ Yeats diagnoses constitutes an aesthetic sterility born of the sort of cultural inbreeding and intellectual incest which Synge would later excoriate in Irish Ireland. In establishing the myth of Synge’s aesthetic origins, Yeats emphasizes that he was determined not to allow Synge to suffer a similar fate, deploying a gendered rhetoric of health to present his as the crucial transformative influence in the impressionable young author’s development. Read in this light, the infamous exhortation to ‘Give up Paris’ for the Aran Islands to ‘express a life that has never found expression’ is inflected with a concern for health and purity that is only partially metaphorical and which resonates strongly, albeit unintentionally, with the rhetoric of health through which Irish Ireland and Sinn Féin fashioned their models of independent Irish identity.48 Underpinning this push to purge Synge’s oeuvre of all that was ‘morbid’ and ‘decadent’ was a desire to position the playwright as the antithesis of what Yeats perceived as the degenerate state of contemporary nationalist politics. At times, this critique was close to Synge’s own in both its tone and execution. Describing a disrupted performance of the Playboy in Synge and the Ireland of His Time, Yeats follows the younger playwright in presenting the play’s opponents as a pack of syphilitic hypocrites: As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood beside me, and said, ‘A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.’49

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More common, however, than these explicitly medicalized salvoes, were comments rooted in a rhetoric of health whose origins were decidedly Nietzschean. In a journal entry written in the weeks before Synge’s death, Yeats describes the exponents of Irish Ireland as having ‘suffered through the cultivation of hatred as the one energy of their movement a deprivation which is the intellectual equivalent of the removal of the genitals’.50 In Yeats’s view, Moranite agon constituted a mode of untermenschlich naysaying that, because of its parasitic dependence upon the positions which it sought to oppose, was necessarily incapable of producing original thought. Early issues of Samhain, the journal of the Irish Literary Theatre, consistently pitted ‘drama’ against ‘those enemies of life, the chimera of the Pulpit and the Press’.51 As the journal entry implies, for Yeats the sexual correlate of this ressentiment was castration. However, such imputations of impotence were not merely metaphorical. In a later journal entry, Yeats revisits and extends this Nietzschean premise, explicitly linking the intellectual sterility of contemporary nationalism to what he presents as the endemic celibacy of the Irish population: Hatred as a basis of imagination  … helps to dry up the nature and makes the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland, possible. This abstinence reacts in turn on the imagination, so that we get at last that strange eunuch-like tone and temper.52

Much like Kenny, who had seen in the Playboy an indictment of Ireland’s dysgenic marriage patterns, Yeats detects in Griffithite opposition to the play both the result and root of the emasculation which its rhetoric of Cuchulainoid machismo had been intended to remedy. The strategy of sexually pathologized othering which underpinned these private reflections found public expression in the poem ‘On Those that Hated The Playboy of the Western World, 1907’, in which Griffith and his supporters are figured as ‘Eunuchs’ running through Hell to ‘stare / Upon great Juan riding by’ and ‘rail and sweat’ while ‘Staring upon his sinewy thigh’.53 In contrast to the shrill, hysterical and emasculated followers of Sinn Féin and Irish Ireland, Yeats presents an intimidatingly sexual and hypermasculine image of Synge, virtually identical to Moran’s ‘Vigorous Ireland’ and all the more strikingly paradoxical for being applied to a figure whose fragile constitution he had praised as vouchsafing his art. A sensitivity to the rhetoric of health not only emphasizes the prominent role which contemporary medical thought played in shaping the foundational mythology of the Revival but also reveals striking parallels between the ways in which the Revival’s exponents and contemporary advanced nationalists harnessed the explanatory mechanisms of biology to naturalize their visions of Irish identity. While such rhetorical similarities should not be taken to suggest the political investments of Irish Ireland or the Abbey were proximate, or even similar, they do indicate the permeable nature of the apparently clear boundary between a sexually conservative nationalism and a sexually frank modernism which the Playboy riots have traditionally been held to reflect. They likewise emphasize how reading Irish modernist texts in the light of the history of medicine and science makes it possible to appreciate the complex and

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constantly evolving nature of the relationship between Irish authors and nationalists in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Papermac, 1988), 202. 2. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 29. 3. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 70. 4. Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernism’, in Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics, ed. Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 1. 5. Carol Taaffe, ‘Irish Modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Deborah Longworth, Andrzej Gasiorek and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 782–96; Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–18; Lauren Arrington, ‘Irish Modernism and Its Legacies’, in The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 236–52; and Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, ‘Introduction: Irish Modernism, from Emergence to Emergency’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–22. 6. P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-Operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004); Emer Nolan, ‘Modernism and the Irish Revival’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157–72; Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7. Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981); Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene, eds, Synge and Edwardian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 8. Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. Rónán McDonald, ‘ “Accidental Variations”: Darwinian Traces in Yeats’s Poetry’, in Science and Modern Poetry: New Approaches, ed. John Holmes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 152–67; Rónán McDonald, ‘The “Fascination of What I Loathed”: Science and Self in W. B. Yeats’s Autobiographies’, in Modernism and Autobiography, ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18–30. 10. David Bradshaw, ‘The Eugenics Movement in the 1930s and the Emergence of On the Boiler’, Yeats Annual 9 (1992): 189–215; Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 11. Yeats, Memoirs, 176; W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 2000).

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12. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, in The Revival of Irish Literature, ed. Charles Gavan Duffy (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 117–61. 13. Arthur Clery, Dublin Essays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), 131. 14. See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 15. See Alan Graham, ‘Sassenachs and Their Syphilization: The Irish Revival, Deanglicization and Eugenics’, in Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019), 203–14. 16. D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, ed. Patrick Maume (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006), 1. 17. Ibid., 2. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. Bénédict Augustin Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1857), 5; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–43. 20. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, 43. 21. Ibid., 104. 22. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder, 1867), 102, xii. 23. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, ed. David Cooper, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2007), chap. 5. 24. The Leader (17 January 1905): 330. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 31–2; Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 28. ‘The Third Oireachtas’, An Claidheamh Soluis (10 June 1899): 200. 29. United Irishman (20 May 1899): 1; ‘Míceál’ (Michael Cusack), ‘The Gaelic Athletic Association – What Does It Mean?’, United Irishman (18 March 1899): 3. 30. ‘Míceál’, ‘The Gaelic Athletic Association’, United Irishman (25 March 1899): 3. 31. J. M. Synge, Collected Works, 4: Plays, Book 2, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), 59. 32. Robert E. Kennedy, The Irish: Emigration, Marriage and Fertility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 142–55. 33. Arthur Griffith, ‘The Economics of the Irish Famine’, United Irishman (6 December 1902): 5. 34. Synge, Collected Works, 4, 59. 35. Ibid., 89. 36. Ibid., 91. 37. Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 112. 38. James Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dublin: Doleman Press, 1971), 7, 9. 39. Ibid., 9. 40. Ibid., 38. 41. Ibid.

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4 2. Ibid., 41. 43. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 44. Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots, 86. 45. Ibid. 46. David Dwan, The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 178. 47. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper (New York: Scribner, 2007), 216. 48. Ibid., 216–17. 49. Ibid., 227. 50. Yeats, Memoirs, 176. 51. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works, Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 36. 52. Yeats, Memoirs, 176–7. 53. Yeats, The Poems, 162.

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Rhetorics of sacrifice: Sex, gender and the death penalty in James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the 1916 generation Katherine Ebury

This chapter will examine how writings by James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and 1916 revolutionaries converge around the Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran myth. Given his sexuality and the way the Black Diaries were circulated to discourage campaigns for his reprieve, Roger Casement’s 1916 execution for treason has necessarily been viewed through the lens of queer theory. In my intervention, I will contend that the masochistic drives inherent to the death penalty as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida bring death and sex into close contact with all the Easter Rising executions.1 In this sense, I am not seeking to demonstrate the ‘influence’ of the Easter Rising on more canonical literature, rather to facilitate a dialogue about gender, sexuality and the death penalty between canonical writings produced by Joyce, Yeats and more minor literature generated by the 1916 generation. In this model of relationship, I am able to rethink the concept of Irish modernism via a biopolitical approach that encompasses a much wider range of texts and forms of discourse, including letters and testimony alongside poetry and fiction. Through Derrida’s late work on the death penalty, I examine the psychic and sexual effects of colonialism and rebellion in ways that enhance both historicist and postcolonial readings of the Easter Rising and complicate previous classifications of major and minor works of Irish modernist literature and of support for or critique of the 1916 rebels. Susan de Sola Rodstein has written that the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses is ‘dense with allusions to the Easter Rising’ and has noted how Joyce renders it obliquely through a parallel with 1798 and 1803;2 similarly, Tracey Schwartze has suggested that Emmet ‘serves Joyce not only as himself but also as a Casement surrogate’.3 However, Irish modernist criticism has not so far addressed that this connection comes, in part, from the lives and texts of the Easter rebels themselves, while Casement has been treated as an exceptional case. As R. F. Foster argues, these twentieth-century rebels had consciously chosen to model their rebellion on the urban risings of 1798 and 1803, rather than the less successful rural risings of 1848 and 1867;4 they had also, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to model it upon romantic, sexualized discourses of sacrifice and waste, betrayal and fidelity, that came directly from the Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran myth.

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Claire Connolly has highlighted how Irish revolutionary movements after 1798 would frequently use discourses of love and marriage to express revolutionary impulses.5 In Dion Boucicault’s Robert Emmet (1884), the Emmet play which the 1916 generation would perhaps have known best, Emmet is captured at the house of the priest where he has gone to marry Curran. In the final scene, Emmet regards the eve of his execution as ‘the eve of [his] wedding night’.6 As Maureen Hawkins reminds us in her survey of the tradition of Emmet plays, Emmet ‘is not treated as a self-conscious martyr until Boucicault’s [play], in which he rejects a pardon’.7 It is therefore significant that this version of Emmet, a deliberate martyr who embraces the death penalty, is likely the one with which Joyce, Yeats and the 1916 generation were most familiar. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud defines masochism as ‘a union between destructiveness directed inwards and sexuality’, mixing the Eros and Thanatos drives which had been central to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).8 Freud argues that the destructive impulse associated with the death drive, whether in sadism or masochism, goes alongside ‘an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment’ caused by the apparent fulfilment of fantasies of omnipotence.9 Freud’s idea of the perverse temporality of masochism in a reactivated Oedipus complex in which, as Amber Musser aptly puts it, ‘the subject seeks to produce a future in the image of the past’ reflects the way that masochism underpins the whirlpool of temporalities at work in the texts under examination here.10 Indeed, building on Freud, Derrida argues of capital punishment that the death penalty can seduce … There are those who desire it … There are those who may love it. And not only in life, but in the afterlife, those who want to remain, who will beyond the grave, a feeling that accompanies men beyond the grave. This is very powerful. So, this is the risk that the death penalty encourages, that there are those who may cultivate this, who may not only let themselves be fascinated, but do everything necessary to take maximum pleasure from [jouir de] the death penalty in the present and in the future. Not in the future of what may happen to them when they are killed, but after death. So, one must not give them the bonus of immortality, of afterlife.11

Derrida’s emphasis is not merely upon the erotic potential of the death penalty, in language such as ‘seduce’, ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’, but also the more ambiguous ‘love’ in circumstances where punishment is felt to connect subjects to power and immortality. Derrida’s multiplicity of language allows us to conceptualize this positive affect around capital punishment in several ways, including as a form of masochism, in relation to the death drive. In his landmark study States of Ireland, Conor Cruise O’Brien argues that Pádraig Pearse fused Catholicism and nationalism to develop the concept of ‘blood sacrifice’.12 The very choice of the Easter weekend as the symbolic time of sacrifice and rebirth via Christ’s experience of the death penalty also overshadowed the rebellion. Indeed, before and beyond 1916, through what David Doyle refers to as Irish political ‘martyrology’, the Irish public practised an eroticized hero worship of condemned men such as Robert Emmet, Michael Larkin,

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Kevin Barry and Roger Casement as a central way of thinking about not only the death penalty but also Irish gender roles.13 The desire to inhabit such clichés of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions was shared across the twentieth-century revolutionary generation and was often unconnected to, or loosely connected to, biographical experiences of gender and sexuality. Sentimental nostalgia for ‘Romantic Ireland’, especially the archetypes of the brave, eloquent condemned man and the fainting heroine, often obscured the reality of the lives of the men and women of 1916, who were often non-conforming in various ways (suffragettes, trade unionists, LGBT+). Casement’s internalization of sexualized fantasies of the United Irishmen’s movement, despite the lack of a natural fit between his own story and more standard nationalist fantasies of marriage with Cathleen ni Houlihan, is reflected in his choice to model his own ‘Speech from the Dock’ upon Emmet’s as a precedent, saying ‘My lord, I have done’ in a deliberate reference to Emmet’s famous conclusion. Casement adds a concept of national loyalty as a form of love which is also inspired by Emmet’s biography: Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not on restraint. The government of Ireland by England rests on restraint, and not on law; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty.14

He adds towards the conclusion of the speech that this love is not merely a metaphor for national allegiance but is instead like other kinds of love, including both agape and eros, as well as a love of nature: Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us, or withheld from us, by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind.15

Casement’s assertion of love and the right to self-government in the context of a right to life is, of course, especially highly charged and potentially even ironic in a speech that explains his actions and implicitly pleads for reprieve. As Derrida reminds us, the death penalty requires that ‘the one condemned to death is deprived of life or of the right to life’ and that even within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), ‘the right to life, liberty and security of the person’ allowed the death penalty to sit alongside it.16 And poor Casement’s emphasis on love becomes likewise more ironic, more shot through with bravado, given his awareness of rumours about his sexuality then being deliberately circulated by the British government among powerful establishment figures tempted to intercede for him. Beyond the trial, Casement’s anxiety about whether he could live up to Emmet’s standard of masculinity in facing the reality of his execution is writ large in his last letters: he writes to his cousins that ‘if it be said I shed tears – remember tears come not from cowardice, but from sorrow’.17 As with Eily O’Reilly, Casement’s last letter to his sister Nina engages in a kind of role play, addressing her quite romantically – perhaps we might even say more like a lover. Near his execution, he assumes Emmet’s rhetorical

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style in the last letter to Sarah Curran, just as his speech from the dock was linked to Emmet’s: Emmet to Curran For God’s sake, write to me by the bearer one line to tell me how you are in spirits. I have no anxiety, no care, about myself; but I am terribly oppressed about you. My dearest love, I would with joy lay down my life, but ought I to do more?18 Casement to Nina Now dearest do you know what I feel for you? My eyes are blinded with tears and I can scarcely write. All my selfishness has passed away, and I see you plain and clear – your face – your eyes – your heart, and I can only sob and say that you are more to me than all else on earth.19

The rhetoric of last letters is overdetermined, leading necessarily to a loss of identity and to unconscious or conscious role play, as I will show at the close of this chapter. Both Casement’s public and private testimony in the forms of his ‘Speech from the Dock’ and his private, intimate letters draw on Emmet’s example in its rhetorical and emotional patterning. While a queer reading of Casement’s language of ‘love of kind’ is undoubtedly appropriate, Joyce’s deployment of concepts of sexuality to explore the death penalty reflects his awareness of a longer history of perversity and masochism within heterosexual desire and within an Irish tradition of male political martyrdom.20 In Ulysses, the lovers Emmet and Curran, their mixing of love and loyalty, enter ‘Cyclops’ immediately after the famous, more scandalous, passage about execution and erection: – God’s truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. – Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said. – That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the … … So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninety-eight and Joe with him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for the cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that and the other. … And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and she’s far from the land.21

Thus, as The Citizen and Bloom’s conversation implies, if Sarah Curran had not existed, Irish culture would have had to invent her as a focal point for Emmet’s desire and for his legacy: the passage moves rhetorically from the troublesome ‘ruling passion’ of the unexplained erection of the generic hanged man to the national and romantic

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identifications that ought to be its proper target. Joyce recognizes that a Sarah Curran figure, faithful or unfaithful, would always be necessary to provide a slippage between love interest and Cathleen ni Houlihan figure, between sex and death, between marriage and execution. Foster notes that as part of a process of rejecting Casement’s Black Diaries as forgeries, his comrades ‘posthumously enlist[ed] Casement’s older friend Ada Macneill as a potential wife’, as also happened for Pádraig Pearse, where there was less urgent need for such a story.22 Using very similar language to Derrida about the seductive potential of the death penalty in an Irish context, Yeats wrote to his sister Lolly in the aftermath of the Rising, before the execution of the leaders, describing Pearse as ‘a man made dangerous by the Vertigo of Self-Sacrifice. He has moulded himself upon Emmet.’23 Pound also summarized Yeats’s view of Pearse as a man obsessed by both Emmet and the death penalty simultaneously in a letter to John Quinn: Yeats had ‘said for years that Pearse was half-cracked and that he wouldn’t be happy until he was hanged. He seemed to think Pearse had Emmet mania, same as some other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God.’24 Yeats’s phrase ‘the Vertigo of Self-Sacrifice’ is often quoted but little examined, as is its origin in Pearse’s supposed ‘Emmet mania’: it therefore seems important to point out that Yeats is not thinking of the clinical meaning of vertigo here. He is referring to something more double-edged than ‘dizziness’ or ‘disorientation’ or ‘fear of heights’. Rather, I would suggest that Yeats is likely thinking of a meaning more like the French ‘vertige’, which can include more positive, pleasurable usages such as ‘intoxication’, ‘exaltation’ and even ‘pleasure’. Indeed, Yeats used the concept of ‘vertigo’ in relation to the death penalty in his letter to Asquith of 14 July 1916 asking for a reprieve for Casement. Arguing for the negative effect of Casement’s execution on Irish public opinion, he suggested that ‘young people … are less likely to be restrained by fear than excited by sympathy. There is such a thing as the vertigo of self-sacrifice.’25 Given the relationship of sexuality and the death penalty that I am tracing in this chapter, it is worth noting that this letter was written in Calvados during the period of Yeats’s notorious double proposal to Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult. Further, the letter was discredited by Ernley Blackwell, legal adviser to cabinet and circulator of the Black Diaries, on the basis that it was not in Yeats’s handwriting apart from the signature.26 Ethel Mannin, a later love interest of Yeats’s, would go on to claim that he only signed the appeal, that Gonne had written it for him and ‘he only gave his signature to the appeal … to please Maud Gonne, who nagged him into it’: and yet, his phrase about the death penalty and the ‘vertigo of self-sacrifice’ is clearly his own.27 It is thus likely that Casement’s reprieve letter was collaborative, inscribed equally in the context of Yeats’s past romance with Maud and his hopes for a future one with Iseult. Indeed, the Yeats circle’s initial response to the Rising was determined by discourses of gender and sexuality as shaped by its impact on Maud Gonne, because of her separation from her husband John MacBride. Gregory writes of MacBride’s execution as ‘the best event that cd. come to him, giving him dignity – And what a release for her!’ while Lily Yeats puts it more starkly, ‘Maud Gonne is at last a widow, made so by an English bullet.’28 And of course, MacBride primarily remains Yeats’s hated love rival in the stanza of ‘Easter 1916’ devoted to him, although the Rising and his death sentence just about transfigures him: ‘A drunken, vain-glorious lout’ who ‘has resigned his part / In the

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casual comedy; / He, too, has been changed in his turn.’29 Gonne famously rejected this portrayal of MacBride: ‘As for my husband he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all.’30 But she also objects more widely to the lines that reflect on the desiring hearts of those executed in the Rising, such as ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart’.31 In a November 1916 letter she writes, No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject – Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history know quite well that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many … you could never say that MacDonagh & Pearse & Conally [sic] were sterile fixed minds, each served Ireland … with varied faculties and vivid energy! Those three were men of genius, with large comprehensive & speculative & active brains.32

Gonne’s letter is intriguing, especially in the context of my earlier discussion of Derrida on ‘love’ of the death penalty, as she challenges Yeats about feeling and the heart, but moves rapidly to the ‘minds’ and the ‘brains’ of the executed men, apparently to show how their sacrifice had been consciously and rationally calculated. Gonne’s daughter Iseult sums up the dispute more succinctly, in an astute reading of what is at stake in the poem: ‘Your poem on the Easter week has been the cause of great argument in our household as to the nature and value of sacrifice. [Mother] who cannot accept art for art’s sake would willingly admit sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake, and I have come to admit neither exactly.’33 Yeats’s phrase about the ‘vertigo of self-sacrifice’ is certainly appropriate to Joseph Plunkett’s sonnet, ‘The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last’, written on the last night of his life, which was also the night of his marriage to his fiancée Grace Gifford. The poem’s atmosphere is one of eroticized martyrdom and Plunkett places it in dialogue with the song ‘Róisín Dubh’. Plunkett dedicates his last poem to Cathleen ni Houlihan, although the beloved is clearly specifically imagined as Grace: Because we share our sorrows and our joys And all your dear and intimate thoughts are mine We shall not fear the trumpets and the noise Of battle, for we know our dreams divine, And when my heart is pillowed on your heart And ebb and flowing of their passionate flood Shall beat in concord love through every part Of brain and body – when at last the blood O’erleaps the final barrier to find Only one source wherein to spend its strength And we two lovers, long but one in mind And soul, are made one only flesh at length; Praise God if this my blood fulfils the doom

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When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom.34

The frank eroticism of this poem, alongside its nationalist and catholic iconography, queers marriage and heterosexual desire by bringing together the act of marriage and the act of the death penalty. This poem is a culmination of Plunkett’s explicit politicization of the eroticized Rosicrucianism of Yeats’s 1890s period (thinking of poems such as ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, ‘The Secret Rose’, ‘The Rose of Peace’ and ‘The Rose of Battle’) and includes a similar run of poems published posthumously in 1916, including ‘The Little Black Rose’, ‘I See His Blood upon the Rose’ and ‘The Claim That Has the Canker on the Rose’. The poem’s future tense defers and makes virtual both future sexual satisfaction and the blood sacrifice of execution, implying through the deictic ‘this my blood’, which is the only implied present, that only execution is really necessary, or that execution and marriage are both the same thing. In 1916 alone, Plunkett’s poems appeared in several editions with three presses, one English (Unwin), one Irish (Talbot Press) and one American (Frederick A. Stokes Company). While Plunkett’s poetry is rarely subject to close critical analysis, we can see his direct influence on Yeats’s ‘The Rose Tree’ – written in April 1917, the year after Plunkett’s poems were published – which concludes, ‘There’s nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree.’35 Finally, I want to explore what happens when these ideas of masculinity and blood sacrifice come into contact with expectations for female fidelity in the context of the Emmet/Curran myth. Nationalist biographies of Emmet have always had trouble with the part of Curran’s story that deals with her marriage to another man, Major Robert Sturgeon, two years after Emmet’s execution. While the love felt by Emmet and Plunkett is central to the way they are commemorated, Gifford’s sexuality was the subject of similar historical anxiety to Curran’s, as it was felt by the wider revolutionary circle that their wedding would not have been permitted by the authorities had she not been ‘in trouble’. As Lucy McDiarmid highlights, Plunkett’s sister wrote in her memoirs that she had witnessed Gifford experience a miscarriage after the Rising, though she did not believe that her brother was the father of the lost child.36 In Joyce’s ‘Cyclops’, the subtle misogyny of the historical and literary representation of Curran lingers, as ‘Sheila’ (Curran) and an unnamed Englishman who stands for Major Sturgeon become engaged before the execution of the Emmet figure even begins: ‘a handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree solicited the hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot’.37 This moment of betrayal harmonizes implicitly with The Citizen’s judgement that sexuality, marriage, betrayal and fidelity are at the heart of Irish colonial and revolutionary history, as he asserts, alluding to Dervorgilla/Derbforgaill: ‘The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here’ and ‘a dishonoured wife … that’s what’s the cause of all our misfortunes’.38 Diarmait Mac Murchada would subsequently ask for English help from Henry II of England in a dispute over his strayed wife Dervorgilla, as ‘Helen of Ireland’. Indeed, anxiety about women’s fidelity would be a cultural feature of the aftermath of the Easter Rising.39 Yeats began working on his verse play The Dreaming of the Bones

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in summer 1917, and it was first performed in 1919. This play features a young Easter Rising gunman haunted during his escape from Dublin by the ghosts of Dermot and of Dervorgilla, those very figures cursed by The Citizen in ‘Cyclops’. In Yeats’s play, these transgressive lovers plead forgiveness, but the young man repeatedly calls their love a ‘crime’ and several times utters as a refrain, ‘Oh, never, never / Will Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.’40 Claire Nally writes that the young man’s refusal of sympathy ‘is also a theoretical suppression of the genesis of the nationalist ideology in Ireland, a disavowal of nationalism’s emulative and aggressively masculinist creed which emerged from English imperialism’.41 This critical judgement connects with Yeats’s earlier anxiety in ‘Easter, 1916’ that ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart’, as he implies that a fixation on heroism via the self-sacrifice of the death penalty could lead to a similarly masochistic focus on betrayal, especially sexual betrayal. If, as I have suggested in this chapter, Irish male revolutionary sexuality was often fired by masochistic drives in relation to the death penalty, the Irish modernist texts I have been considering reflect very real anxieties about the place of female sexuality beyond the death sentence. Within this economy of betrayal, fidelity and the death penalty, we must then consider the last letters that executed rebels sent to their wives in this context of Curran’s story. While McDiarmid has recently focused on the emotional control shown by women of the Rising as they visited death cells in Kilmainham, their stories and behaviour were circumscribed to an extent by the Curran myth, which insisted on dignified emotion before the capital sentence and fidelity of memory afterwards.42 Joyce satirizes both of these tendencies in his ‘Cyclops’ scene; his female figure is both hysterical and unfaithful, her affect in relation to the death sentence both too much and not enough. In particular, the engagement scene reflects not only the way that Leopold Bloom’s anxiety about his broken marriage vows shape the form of the novel but also dramatizes very real anxieties about the place of women and female sexuality beyond the Rising executions. The 1916 rebels inscribe these anxieties about fidelity and futurity into texts of their own, whether in letters or in poems such as Plunkett’s ‘The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last’. Thomas MacDonagh’s last letter begins as a public impersonal statement, ‘I, Thomas MacDonagh, having now heard the sentence of the Court Martial held on me today, declare…’, discussing his wife and children in the third person, ‘Never was there a better, truer, purer woman than my wife Muriel, or more adorable children than Don and Barbara.’43 But the final two paragraphs pivot towards direct address to his wife and children, ‘Good bye my love, till we meet again in Heaven. I have a sure faith of our union there’, and the letter is signed as though it were only addressed to Muriel, without the impersonal or historical national audience conjured in the opening of the letter, ‘Your loving husband Thomas MacDonagh’.44 In this letter, the sense of pleasure in self-sacrifice highlighted throughout this chapter is at least qualified: MacDonagh writes to Muriel, ‘But for your suffering, this would be all joy and glory.’45 This admission highlights some subtleties about the concept of blood sacrifice, which depends precisely upon the loss of life of productive or generative young men and which might render courtship and sexual congress between revolutionaries transgressive: they might not live to be married, might not have children, might not live to provide for any children in a nuclear family structure. Love is much more scandalous, in fact, than Joyce’s Citizen or Yeats’s Young

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Man in their emphasis on fidelity and infidelity might suspect. The last letters of the revolutionary generation before their execution are shot through with these anxieties and suggest that a deferred tying up of loose ends is only possible in a future sovereign Ireland or in heaven. To give a final, albeit extreme, example of how discourses of necessary sacrifice and pointless waste conflict with each other within a single text, we should consider Michael Mallin’s last letter to his wife Agnes. Written almost in stream of consciousness style, with very little punctuation and replete with direct contradictions, Mallin uses this letter to say goodbye, to justify his actions, but to also ask Agnes not to remarry after his execution: But Ireland always came first I would ask a special favour of you wife of my heart, but I leave you absolutely free in the matter dont give your love to any other man you are only a girl yet and perhaps it is selfish of me to ask it of you but my darling this past forghnight [sic] has taught me that you are my only love my only hope. I have sinned against you many times in the fulness [sic] of your pure holy love for me you will forgive me my many transgressions against you.46

The letter is simultaneously a public and private document. Though it is full of personal detail, including an apparent admission of Mallin’s own infidelity, it also seems intended for a wider audience, reflecting more broadly on a sense of posthumous patriotism: ‘I do not believe our Blood has been shed in vain.’47 Indeed, passages were published in the Catholic Bulletin in the months after the Rising, where a wider public might well have seen them.48 A sense of vacillation is created by the lack of punctuation, ‘I would ask a special favour’ / ‘I leave you absolutely free’, in particular affirming both his continuing desire for her and a sense of the waste of her life which is demanded, ‘you are only a girl yet’.49 Mallin’s expression of a wish for Agnes to remain faithful to him is ambiguous within the wider economy of sexuality created by the letter, which asks his children to become nuns and priests when they grow up; is his Catholicism speaking, or his sexual love for his wife? Perhaps the strangest thing about the address to the family in this context is the official signature; it is not ‘Michael’ asking Agnes to remain faithful, nor is it ‘Father’ asking his children to join the church, rather the signature is the impersonal, ‘Michael Mallin Commandant Stephens Green Command’.50 It is a signatory of the Proclamation who is asking these things. A sense of the awkwardness of this request is reflected in the removal of much of the personal content of this letter in Piarais MacLochlainn’s Last Words, a 1970s book of letters from those executed during the Rising. Even today, while many 1916 last letters are available digitally, it cannot be a coincidence that Mallin’s is not amongst them because of its uncomfortable content.51 Examining the idea of masochism underlying concepts of political martyrdom is particularly fitting in thinking about the death penalty and masculinity in Irish modernist culture. Unlike earlier historians of 1798 and 1803, and unlike several generations of historians of 1916, Joyce in particular refuses to exclude direct representations of sexuality from his versions of Irish martyrology: in this respect he is more like recent revisionist historians such as McDiarmid and Foster but, importantly, we should also highlight the way he reflects self-conscious performances of gender and sexuality in the writings

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of the Easter Rising participants themselves, reflecting the diversity and complexity of Irish modernist writing about the Rising. The use of Emmet and Curran by Irish modernists thus extends the temporality of both the terms central to this book, ‘Irish’ and ‘modernist’, to a very long nineteenth century. The writers considered in this chapter look back nostalgically at 1798 and 1803 and seek to reactivate that cultural moment but also leap forward to their own deaths as well as a hazier projected afterlife within a postcolonial Ireland. These writings that I have examined diagnose in others (for Joyce and Yeats) and in themselves (in Plunkett, Mallin and others) a masochism at the heart of Irish modernism, in which authors ‘do everything necessary to take maximum pleasure from [jouir de] the death penalty in the present and in the future’, as ‘the subject seeks to produce a future in the image of the past’.52

Notes 1. For a recent biography of Casement that addresses the Black Diaries, see W. J. McCormack, Roger Casement in Death: Or, Haunting the Free State (Dublin: University College Dublin, 2002). For a broad understanding of Casement’s legacy within and beyond modernism, see Kathryn Conrad, ‘Queer Treasons: Homosexuality and Irish National Identity’, Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 124–37; Lucy McDiarmid, ‘The Afterlife of Roger Casement: Memory, Folklore, Ghosts, 1916–’, in The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Alison Garden, The Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). 2. Susan de Sola Rodstein, ‘Back to 1904: Joyce, Ireland and Nationalism’, in Joyce: Feminism / Post / Colonialism, ed. Ellen Carol Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 148. 3. Tracey Schwartze, ‘ “Fabled by the Daughters of Memory”: Roger Casement, James Joyce and the Irish Nationalist Hero’, in Memory Ireland Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, ed. Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 92. 4. R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (London: Penguin, 2015), iv. 5. Claire Connolly, ‘Love and Marriage’, in A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790– 1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85. 6. Dion Boucicault, ‘Robert Emmet’ (1884), in Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, ed. Colin Smythe (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 387–8. 7. Maureen Hawkins, ‘The Dramatic Treatment of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran’, in Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature, ed. S. F. Gallagher (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), 128. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents ([1929] 1930), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XXI (1927–1931) (London: Hogarth/Vintage, 2001), 119. 9. Ibid., 121. 10. Amber Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 103. 11. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume II, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 94.

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12. Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: HarperCollins, 1974), 247. For a broader summary of the historiography of Irish political violence in the twentieth century, see Ian McBride, ‘The Shadow of the Gunman: Irish Historians and the IRA’, Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011): 686–710. 13. David Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939–1990’, Journal of British Studies 54 (2015): 704. 14. Roger Casement, ‘Statement by the Prisoner’, in The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, ed. George H. Knott (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1917), 198. 15. Casement, ‘The Prisoner’s Speech’, in The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, ed. Knott, 204. 16. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 81. 17. Herbert O. Mackey, The Life and Times of Roger Casement (Dublin: CJ Fallon, 1954), 134. 18. Robert Emmett, ‘Letter to Sarah Curran’, quoted in Women of ‘Ninety-Eight, ed. Helena Walsh Concannon (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1919), 273. 19. Roger Casement, ‘Letter from Roger Casement to Nina Casement, 25 July 1916’ in Letters of 1916, ed. Susan Schreibman (Maynooth: Maynooth University, 2016), last accessed 20 June 2018, http://letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/explore/letters/1092. 20. See this exemplary one by Patrick Mullen, ‘Ruling Passion: James Joyce, Roger Casement and the Drama of Universal Love’, in The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor and Postcolonial History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94–116. 21. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head, 1993), 12.454–501. 22. Foster, Vivid Faces, 136. 23. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46. 24. Ibid. 25. Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War (London: Routledge, 2005), 578. 26. Ibid. 27. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, note 28, 683. 28. Ibid., 47, 49. 29. W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 183. 30. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 63. 31. Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, 184. 32. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 63. 33. Ibid. 34. Joseph Plunkett, The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett, ed. Geraldine Plunkett Dillon (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916), 59. 35. Yeats, The Poems, 185. 36. Lucy McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2015) 127–9. 37. Joyce, Ulysses, 12. 38. Ibid. 39. For a broader focus on Joyce’s specific investments in betrayal, see James Fraser, Joyce and Betrayal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). For a recent response

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to the Blooms’ marriage plot, see Peter Kuch, Irish Divorce/Joyce’s Ulysses (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017). 40. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays (New York: Scribner, 2001), 314. 41. Claire Nally, Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010), 209. 42. Lucy McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution. 43. Thomas MacDonagh, ‘Typescript of Last Letter and Will of Thomas MacDonagh, 2 May 1916’, in Letters of 1916, ed. Susan Schreibman, last accessed 20 July 2018, http:// letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/explore/letters/158. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Michael Mallin, ‘Appendix 1: Michael Mallin’s Last Letter to His Wife Agnes, Kilmainham Gaol, 7 May 1916’, in Michael Mallin: 16 Lives, ed. Brian Hughes (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2013), n. pag. 47. Ibid. 48. The Catholic Bulletin 6, no. 7 (July 1916): 399. 49. Mallin, ‘Appendix 1’, n. pag. 50. Ibid. 51. Piaras F. Mac Lochlainn, Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed after the Rising at Easter 1916 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1990). 52. Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume II, 94.

10

‘The ranks of respectability’: Prostitution, citizenship and the Free State in the novels of Liam O’Flaherty Laura Lovejoy

As the prostitute became an object of renewed social control in Free-State Ireland,1 prostitute characters and red-light spaces populated Irish modernist fiction, thematizing the subversive appeal of formally experimental texts such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. The prostitute became a focal point in the social hygiene discourse and in the campaigns of Catholic organizations such as The Legion of Mary, whose ‘rescue’ initiative effectively closed down the Monto brothel area of Dublin by 1925. As Maria Luddy and other historians have illustrated, there was renewed concern about moral ‘degeneracy’ in Free-State Ireland, culminating in the Carrigan Committee Report of 1932, which found that unmarried mothers, venereal disease and prostitution were among the key culprits in the country’s apparent moral decline.2 In the period of post-independence nation-building, the moral purity of Ireland was of utmost importance to policymakers and Catholic representatives who were intimately involved in the sanitization of Ireland’s public image. The Carrigan Committee Report encapsulated growing public and governmental fears that Ireland was undergoing a moral decline since the period of revolutionary violence and marked an attempt to repatriate its tarnished image. Viewed as moral experts, The Legion of Mary and members of the clergy were consulted by the government on initiatives to improve public morality in the areas of leisure and sexual behaviour. Amid the period’s intensified scrutiny on alcohol consumption, unmarried mothers, venereal disease and sexual violence, prostitutes became a central concern, as the character of those who participated in monetized sexual exchange was construed as a moral threat to both men and women in the Free State. Given the intensification of the public association of prostitution with moral menace in the Free State, any cultural representation which diverged from the government’s characterization of the prostitute as a moral danger held subversive potential. The presence of prostitutes as characters and countercultural symbols in Irish fiction of the period attests to a radicalism in the cultural and sexual politics of not only high and late modernist works but also more popular and ‘accessible’ forms such as the urban thrillers of Liam O’Flaherty. O’Flaherty was one of the most prolific writers of the Irish

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Free State, publishing fourteen novels between 1923 and 1950. With his 1929 novel The House of Gold, O’Flaherty earned the notable accolade of being the first author banned under the Censorship of Publications Act (1929). Focusing on O’Flaherty’s portrayal of prostitutes and prostitution as an example of a sophisticated critique of Free-State sexual politics, this chapter argues that he should be seen as part of the constellation of texts we now know as Irish modernism. One of the defining features of a ‘late’ Irish modernism, as Mark Quigley has argued, is its cotemporality with Irish independence. The monolithic fictional works of Irish late modernism such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s Murphy and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds were all written in the context of a post-1922 Ireland, and each contends in some way with the invasive sexual and cultural politics of a recently established socially conservative nationalist government. Like Joyce and Beckett’s FreeState-era novels, O’Flaherty’s writing anticipates and even courts censorship, deploying prostitution as a subject which both shocked the sensibilities of an increasingly Catholicized post-independence political establishment and piqued the interest of a reading public hungry for lurid details.3 Writing in more popular forms such as the political thriller and the naturalist novel, however, O’Flaherty is generically distant from the formal experimentation of writers more readily associated with Irish literary modernism such as Joyce, Beckett and O’Brien. Yet if, in a continuation of the new modernist studies, we allow for a more expansive understanding of modernism which encompasses works which deviate from the traditional characteristics of ‘high modernism’, then O’Flaherty may be seen in a new light. His novels can be viewed as ‘less evidently experimental texts’ by a ‘less wellknown’ artist which, through their subject matter, bear out the association between modernism and ‘badness’ identified in Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms.4 For O’Flaherty, however, the ‘bad manners’ that characterize his shocking portrayals of commercialized sex do not constitute a ‘marketing strategy’ but are part of his sincere critique of the puritanical bent of the social politics of the Free State. O’Flaherty’s representation of the prostitute as a realistic, developed character is not a shock tactic to raise the subversive profile of the work for reasons of publicity or notoriety; it is an attempt to humanize this publicly maligned figure of unacceptable womanhood while calling into question the motives and morality of those who sought to ‘rescue’ her. Blatantly anti-establishment, this representational choice confirms what Mao and Walkowitz identify as the ‘badness’ of modernism, but O’Flaherty’s representation of the prostitute goes a step further than those of Beckett, Joyce or O’Brien, because its shock value is not titillating but morally oriented. O’Flaherty’s innovations undoubtedly do not lie in form; his narratives do not constitute a break with novelistic conventions. If anything, O’Flaherty’s novels represent a continuation of the popular form of the naturalist novel of the nineteenth century, using social commentary to bring a critique of contemporary Irish politics to a wide readership. The subject matter, political energy and specifically the humanizing attitude towards the prostitute, however, are strikingly modern. While the prostitute had long held a place in literary fiction, O’Flaherty’s portrayal of her as a worker exploited under capitalism, rather than as a moral deviant, was unprecedented and unmatched both in the mainstream political discourses of Free-State Ireland and among the subversive

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literary texts which were censored by the Irish government because of their apparently dangerous portrayal of sexuality. O’Flaherty’s portrayal of the prostitute affords her more agency than those of Joyce and Beckett. The character Celia in Beckett’s Murphy, for example, is described in provocative, objectifying terms. While a critique of the regulation of sexuality in the Free State is clear,5 Beckett is nonetheless complicit in directing an objectifying gaze towards the character. Although we can argue for a degree of agency in Joyce’s prostitute characters, they are still mired in the contemporary voyeuristic gaze that Joyce borrows from the semiotics of the early-twentieth-century sex industry.6 Thus his inclusion of prostitute characters is daring given the social context of early-twentiethcentury Ireland, but does little to renegotiate the social position of the prostitute or to recast her as an economic agent. O’Flaherty takes his sexual politics to a more radical point than Joyce or Beckett; for him, they are inseparable from the socialism which was so important to all his social commentary. He achieves a moral, radical and ultimately modernist portrayal of monetized sexual exchanges primarily by presenting readers with deeply flawed, alienating protagonists who, in their brutality towards women involved in sexual trade, represent the worst of Free-State attitudes towards the exaggerated social menace of the prostitute. One of the most enduring and socially radical facets of O’Flaherty’s writing, rarely considered within Irish literary studies to be as transgressive as the writing of modernist contemporaries such as Joyce or Beckett, is its revelation of the social mechanisms by which the prostitute is rendered invisible. Yet prostitution, as a highly contested practice which highlighted intertwined anxieties about gender, desire, commerce and modernity in the newly independent state, also became an effective weapon in O’Flaherty’s critique of the failures of political authority in post-independence Ireland. In Mr Gilhooley (1926), which rivalled Ulysses in its notoriety in Ireland, the prostitute is introduced as a referent both of economic desperation and of modern urban leisure and entertainment. The titular character’s excitement at the scene of ‘courtesans, swaying their full haunches’ on Grafton street provokes their comparison to ‘peasants who have come to the fair to sell something’ but also sparks an anonymous erotic encounter with a woman in the modern space of the cinema, causing ‘a violent shock which sent a shiver down his spine’.7 The novel, however, extends beyond the literary trope of the prostitute as signifier for unbridled desire, a representative of modern moral decay or an example of the limitless power of money under capitalism. One of the most developed characters in the novel, Nelly, is a woman who exchanges sex for economic security, complicating the social boundaries between wife and prostitute. O’Flaherty counters any excitement a contemporary reader might feel at the availability of the prostitute by emphasizing the economic necessity which motivates her choices and by suggesting that her pursuit of economic security through association with a more resourced man is not dissimilar from the path a woman must take in becoming a wife; the difference, he suggests, lies in the social concept of respectability. The early-twentieth-century literary production now categorized as Irish modernism coincided with a moment when, across the British Empire and former colonial territories, an emergent discourse began to construct the prostitute as a victim: of economic circumstance, male perversion or her own moral weakness.8

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Often at the centre of public health investigations and reports, the prostitute’s body was repeatedly construed as a threat to national progress in political, religious and public health discourses of the Irish Free State. O’Flaherty wrote about urban prostitution prolifically and graphically at a time when Irish sexual politics were shaped increasingly by regulatory impulses. His insistence on depicting not only sex but the murky interrelated territories of sex, poverty and commerce coincided with the growth, in number and influence, of the Free State’s social reform societies and these organizations’ navigation of emerging tensions between narratives of deviance and victimhood in anti-prostitution discourse. Among the most explicit artistic engagements with Irish class relations and the politics of male desire in this period, O’Flaherty’s fiction is noteworthy in the way it addresses Irish and international developments in the conceptualization, public framing and approach to prostitution as a social problem. O’Flaherty largely resists the dichotomous construction of the prostitute as either victim or predator, disturbing the boundaries between ‘respectable’ woman and prostitute. In this way, he arguably intervenes more urgently and more politically into the complex web of images and ideologies surrounding the practice of prostitution than other Irish modernists who drew the scorn of censors in this period.

O’Flaherty’s women of ‘ill fame’9 Jarringly for the increasingly vocal social reformers who pitted themselves against indecent literature in the Free-State period, O’Flaherty’s novels display an obsessive interest in Dublin’s sexual and commercial underworlds, returning to the figure of the prostitute and presenting sympathetic in addition to erotic renderings of this particular social outcast. Mr Gilhooley is a thriller which tells the story of a restless, ageing bachelor who attempts to gain acceptance into the social world of middle-class Dublin by mimicking the trappings of traditional domesticity. A forced early retiree, forty-nine-year-old Larry Gilhooley endures a psychologically unmoored existence of ‘absolute idleness’ in Dublin after years working in South America.10 A ‘bored man’ easily distracted by the modern entertainments the ‘gloomy’ city offers,11 Mr Gilhooley ultimately longs for a more settled life and enters into a faux-marital domestic arrangement with his companion Nelly, much to the indignation of his middle-class would-be peers. The relationship between Nelly and Gilhooley, characterized by a discrepancy in both age and financial security, echoes in some ways the relationship between Katie Fox and Gypo Nolan in O’Flaherty’s The Informer. Nelly’s relationship to Mr Gilhooley is ambivalent; she is ‘undoubtedly not his wife and in the same manner she could not be called his mistress’.12 A Galway woman twenty years his junior, Nelly is not a professional prostitute. Rather, she is, like Mr Gilhooley, abandoned by the brutality and anonymity of the modern capitalist city. Yet she is opportunistic and cunning in her realization that she can monetize men’s sexual interest in her. In contrast to the street-hardened appearance of the prostitutes in The Informer, when Mr Gilhooley first meets Nelly, homeless on the streets of Dublin, she is ‘young and slim, her features not yet hardened by age nor by the

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vice which might expected (and which Mr Gilhooley did expect)’.13 Their relationship is sexual and transactional in nature. Nelly, who refers to Mr Gilhooley as ‘uncle’, not only offers sexual services in exchange for a home and a weekly allowance but also manages Mr Gilhooley’s domestic life, soon becoming a ‘necessity’ to him.14 Eventually, the social mistrust and sexual attention aroused by Nelly’s ambiguous status proves an insurmountable obstacle to the respectability he both shuns and desires, leading Mr Gilhooley to murder her in a possessive rage. Although the novels Mr Gilhooley and The Puritan might at first appear to rely on the shock value of the trope of the murdered prostitute, Mr Gilhooley represents a development in O’Flaherty’s framing of the prostitute; by disturbing dominant social hygiene distinctions between a prostitute class and ‘respectable’ women, it succeeds in using a fictional space to complicate popular Free-State characterizations of both the prostitute and the virtuous Irish woman. It is the ambiguity of their relationship and the manner in which Nelly appeals to both a paternalistic instinct and an erotic impulse in Mr Gilhooley which troubles neat FreeState distinctions between the ‘fallen’ and the ‘respectable’ woman. Via Larry Gilhooley’s mental unravelling and ultimate descent into criminality, O’Flaherty exposes the damaging effects of slavish devotion to the pursuit of respectability in post-independence Ireland. Capturing the moments at which morally upright citizens clash with Dublin’s social and sexual underworld (in the street, the cinema and the brothel), the novel is deeply critical of what O’Flaherty viewed as the hypocritical aspects of bourgeois Irish society. A particularly redolent image is artist Harry Clarke’s 1934 stained-glass window which depicts a scene from Mr Gilhooley.15 In the scene which captured Clarke’s imagination, Mr Gilhooley is transfixed by an erotic dance performed by Nelly. At the midpoint of the novel, having been acrimoniously ejected from his lodging house on suspicion of hiring a ‘tart’, Mr Gilhooley moves with Nelly into what his estate agent refers to as ‘a man’s flat, a respectable man’s flat’16 and is thrilled by the fantasy that they are man and wife. In the passage inscribed on the Clarke window, O’Flaherty describes how Mr Gilhooley sits mesmerized as Nelly ‘came towards him dancing, moving the folds of the veil, so that they unfolded slowly, as she danced’.17 In this scene, considered too offensive for inclusion in the Department of Commerce’s stained-glass window, Nelly is a composite of the most exalted and demonized features of Irish womanhood. She is both chaste and sexually precocious, enticing her spectator with partial nudity while simultaneously suggesting the purity of the Virgin Mary as she moves barefoot, ‘clad in white, like a nun’.18 What perhaps disturbed W. T. Cosgrave most about this scene is its juxtaposition of images of degraded and idealized Free-State femininity; Nelly is a tainted version of the Virgin Mother not only in her eroticism but also in her commercialized sexuality. Through the character of Nelly, simultaneously evocative of purity, maternity and sexual and economic shrewdness, O’Flaherty disrupts the ‘traditional value judgement which perpetuates the division of the female body into the two traditional female bodies, the wife and the prostitute’.19 By writing a prostitute character who is simultaneously maternal, virginal and acutely aware of her manipulation of sexual dynamics for economic gain, O’Flaherty degrades the culturally resonant image of the Virgin Mother, ‘a changeless icon of feminine purity’.20

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Largely interpreted as a protest against the Censorship of Publications Act,21 The Puritan is conceptually similar to Mr Gilhooley in that both novels suggest that the obsessive pursuit of respectability and the fetishization of social ‘cleanliness’ in postindependence Ireland comes at the expense of true compassion for the impoverished and is ultimately correlated with the criminality of men and the death of women. Furthermore, the texts explore definitions of respectability, citizenship and criminality through the topic of prostitution. The murders of prostitutes by socially marginalized men, each obsessed in their own ways with respectability, are pivotal events in both texts. Indeed, the plot trajectory of The Puritan mirrors that of Mr Gilhooley, which opens with the urban isolation of the titular character and ends with his strangling of his mistress/concubine/wife Nelly in bed. The Puritan opens with Dublin journalist and religious fanatic Francis Ferriter’s psychologically detached stabbing of a prostitute, Teresa Burke, in her rented room at a lodging house and ends with his unhinged confession of the murder to a prostitute in a Dublin brothel following a night of debauched immersion in the immoral Dublin underworld he sought to purify with the ‘blood sacrifice’ of the murder. The novel’s plot suggests that puritanism actually conceals salaciousness and ultimately brutality, reflecting poorly on the puritans who shut down Dublin’s red-light district and who would censor O’Flaherty’s writing. Rather than being simply a protest against the Censorship of Publications Act, the novel works as an exposé of the disingenuousness and harm of social purity culture.

Through the keyhole In Mr Gilhooley, O’Flaherty dramatizes a specific fear held by Free-State social reformers and legislators – that the boundary between the respectable woman and the prostitute was permeable. As Michael Cronin notes in his analysis of the numerous articles published on sexual danger and young women in Free-State publications such as the Irish Ecclesiastical Review, fears of slippage between the categories of respectable and deviant womanhood repeatedly creep through in social hygiene discourse from the period. Cronin argues that ‘there is a pervasive sense among these writers that the boundary between the “respectable” unmarried mother and the prostitute cannot be securely drawn; the first is always liable to descend to the status of the latter’.22 Surveillance was a tactic used to ‘discover’ the respectability (or lack thereof) of women suspected of being prostitutes in the Free State and is one of the primary modes through which viewers and readers come to ‘know’ prostitutes in much of the media concerning commercial sex throughout the twentieth century. Some of the Free State’s most active prostitution abolitionists, including police commissioner William Murphy, often included descriptions of pimp violence against prostitutes in their reports and testimonies to the government. In a 1925 report, Murphy notes that ‘in some cases these women are stripped naked and flogged by their managers on suspicion of not giving all their money’.23 Such an ostensibly concerned, factual description betrays a voyeuristic interest in salacious detail, a veiled erotic fascination appearing under the guise of concern. This is a tension present in Free-State social reform discourse which O’Flaherty draws out to subversive effect in The Puritan. As

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Melissa Gira Grant writes, surveillance is ‘a way of knowing sex workers that unites the opportunity for voyeurism with the monitoring and data collection performed by social service providers or by researchers’.24 In Mr Gilhooley, the fact that Nelly is a ‘tart’ is discovered via surveillance – the cleaning lady in Mr Gilhooley’s lodging house spies on him through his keyhole and listens at his door for evidence of Nelly’s lowered status. The surveillance of prostitutes (and of women suspected of being prostitutes) is a motif O’Flaherty deploys in order to probe the politics of social purity and prostitution reform more deeply in The Puritan, a novel which daringly emphasizes the relationship between surveillance and voyeurism in Free-State Ireland. Francis Ferriter is an extreme embodiment of the logic of censorship and social hygiene, a more sensationalist and less comical precursor to the sadistic moralist Dermot Trellis in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Like Ferriter, the character Trellis is intent on ridding society of its impurities, and, like Ferriter, Trellis’s purifying impulses are so zealous that they ultimately manifest in violence. Trellis’s plans to dissuade the Irish public from immorality by writing a moralizing tract that contains no less than ‘seven indecent assaults on young girls’ results in the surrealist, metafictional rape and murder of one of the characters, Sheila Lamont, in his own novel. The Puritan is vastly different from At Swim-Two-Birds in terms its plot, register and the metaphysical possibilities of the fictional world it creates. Nonetheless, what O’Flaherty and O’Brien both suggest is a deep hypocrisy undergirding social reform efforts which seek to surveil and protect vulnerable women and the reading public from morally corrupting forces. Both texts represent Free-State social hygiene thinking in its most extreme and hypocritical forms. Indeed, exposing the hypocrisy of the censor’s logic is a running theme in later Irish modernist fiction, particularly in novels which post-date the Censorship of Publications Act. Straddling genres from social realism to satire, The Puritan, Murphy, Finnegans Wake and At Swim-Two-Birds all feature male characters who represent the most puritanical aspects of post-independence Ireland and whose moralizing insistences are revealed to be flimsy veneers under which bubble salacious, dysfunctional and destructive desires. The implication that Ferriter is subconsciously in love with Teresa Burke suggests a form of suppressed desire that motivates the Free State’s most aggressive social purists. While his motives are ostensibly moral (he claims he is policing the community), Ferriter admits that he gains some erotic pleasure from spying on Teresa: I pretended to believe that I listened in disgust, or simply through a sense of duty, because I belonged at that time to a vigilance society and it was part of our duty to report cases of immorality. I really listened for personal reasons. I wanted to hear her voice, because it was particularly soft and melodious, and it gave me an intense and passionate pleasure, even though I lay awake at night afterwards, hating it for the pleasure it gave me.25

Contemporary rescue narratives which construct the prostitute as a victim in need of saving are reflected, in a twisted form, in Ferriter’s character. For Ferriter, the murder of Teresa is conceptualized as a form of rescue. His last acts before leaving her stabbed and bleeding body are to preserve her modesty and remove from her room a photo of

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her as a young girl wearing a Child of Mary medal, as though, Brad Kent writes, ‘he had reclaimed her from her fallen state and returned her virtue’:26 He dropped the dagger to the floor, drew back his foot and picked up the skirt of the kimono, to wipe the blood from his slipper. When he had done so, he dropped the skirt and then flushed with shame, seeing that the dead woman’s naked thigh was exposed. With his face turned away, lest he might look again upon her nakedness, he drew the skirt gently down as far as it would reach.

Despite Ferriter’s veneer of purity, this scene exposes his obsession with nudity. As Kent notes, ‘the perversion of his murderous act is paled by the sight of uncovered flesh.  … A hierarchy of sin is therefore rationalized by Ferriter in which the naked flesh must always remain hidden while murder can be justified through the pseudoreligious chicanery of his treatise.’27 The novel’s plot suggests that the dehumanizing construction of the prostitute as a symbol of degraded womanhood and an agent of social degeneration in some way permits Ferriter to murder her. Ferriter justifies an act of violence against one woman as necessary for the moral purification of society at large. O’Flaherty skewers both the social reformer’s scopophilic gaze and paternalistic impulses in The Puritan, as Ferriter, the anti-prostitution reformer, ‘reveals himself to be the pervert he claimed others had been’.28 O’Flaherty reveals cracks in contemporary anti-prostitution discourses centred on rescue and reform by showing the fine line between impulses to protect women and the desire to harm them. As the police detective Lavan articulates to Ferriter, ‘these vigilance societies, acting on the best motives, might lead people into activities altogether, you might say, criminal and more dangerous than the activities they try to suppress’.29

Conclusion As an economically and socially marginalized figure, particularly so in the asexually puritanical context of the Irish Free State, the prostitute offered a way for O’ Flaherty to call into question the stratification of the Irish city – a project which seemed, to the socialist O’Flaherty, to have been sidelined in the nation-building rhetoric of the post-independence period. While the importance of socialism to O’Flaherty is abundantly clear in his fiction, the subversiveness of the sexual politics of his writing remains more occluded. This is in part because of the contemporary and enduring reputations of writers such as Joyce and Beckett as agents provocateurs whose daring material aroused censors and in part because of O’Flaherty’s formal accessibility relative to these writers. Yet, O’Flaherty’s approach to the fictional representation of prostitution is more radical than that of his modernist precursors and contemporaries. Not least because of the intense state and civic focus on prostitution as a social problem and its status as a focal point for wider anxieties about Irish moral identity in the new Free State, O’Flaherty’s graphic and probing

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apprehension of this nexus of desire, commerce, gender and urban life is palpably modern in its anticipation of the later-twentieth-century reframing of prostitution, now understood as ‘sex work’ as a form of labour under capitalism. O’Flaherty’s representative approach to prostitution is subversive in several ways. First, the decision to include prostitute characters and scenes describing commercial sex in the context of literary censorship in the Irish Free State is flagrantly provocative. Secondly, O’Flaherty’s descriptions of prostitutes transcend an earlier Irish and European literary tradition whereby the prostitute is primarily symbolic, a Baudelairean ‘invisible woman’30 onto whom desires, fears and fantasies are projected. Nelly in Mr Gilhooley, for example, is one of the work’s most developed characters, not merely a referent but a character with a psychology as complex as that of the title character. She is ‘a flesh-and-blood female body engaged in some form of sexual interaction in exchange for some form of payment’.31 The psychological ramifications of the transactional relationship between Mr Gilhooley and Nelly are explored from her perspective as well as his. Indeed, despite the fact that, as Luddy notes, many of the prostitute characters in The Informer are ‘depicted as barely human’, O’Flaherty’s prostitutes, in contrast to his male protagonists, are rarely complete caricatures of moral weakness, perversion or stupidity.32 In this regard, O’Flaherty departs from Joyce, whose texts introduce prostitution as a provocative theme but in a manner that does not challenge dominant views of the social position of the prostitute as a sexual object, as an exploited victim, as a projection of the fantasies of men. In this sense, I would agree with M. Keith Booker that in Joyce’s work, prostitutes are not ‘featured … as important characters with genuine points of view’ but are ‘victims’ or ‘figures of menace’.33 By contrast, O’Flaherty displays an interest in the labour politics surrounding prostitution and, by exploring his characters’ minds, is more critical of the ‘client mentality’, or the desire to view the prostitute as existing completely to fulfil fantasies. Though stereotypes of victimhood and degeneracy are not entirely absent from the depictions of prostitutes in O’Flaherty’s work, prostitute characters exhibit surprising degrees of agency in the brutal male exchange economies he represents. A large part of the radicalism in O’Flaherty’s approach to the representation of commercial sex lies in his insistence upon ‘criminal’ as an ambiguous identity. Through O’Flaherty’s sensationalist urban thrillers, the prostitute is more often than not presented as a worker motivated by complex factors, while the social reformer, her ‘rescuer’, is an embodiment of modern criminality. O’Flaherty’s novels are valuable not only as cultural artefacts which present some of the most detailed and subversive literary representations of prostitution in the early years of Irish independence, but also in that they give a more complete and more varied picture of the sexual politics of Irish literature – modernist, popular and realist – at this transitional moment in Irish cultural and political history. O’Flaherty’s representations of prostitutes, radical for their time and sociosexual milieu, illustrate Irish modernism’s role in constructing alternative narratives of citizenship at a time when Irish writers were characterized in government discourse more often as enemies of the state than as architects of postindependence identity.

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Notes 1. Maria Luddy outlines the renewed efforts of Catholic social purity organizations to control the apparent increase in sexual immorality in Free-State Ireland by focusing on the ‘ignorant, the innocent, or the silly girl who is forced to go out and make a living in conditions dangerous to her virtue’. Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 202. 2. See Mark Finnane, ‘The Carrigan Committee of 1930–31 and the “Moral Condition of the Saorstát” ’, Irish Historical Studies 32, no. 128 (November 2001): 519–36. 3. Seán Kennedy remarks that Beckett ‘deliberately courted censorship in the Irish Free State and was not only gratified to see his book [Murphy] banned but also interpolated materials into subsequent works in the hope that the action would be repeated’. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Reception in Ireland’, in The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, ed. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), 57. Katherine Mullin addresses Joyce’s anticipation of his censorship in James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New’, in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 2. 5. Paul Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 6. See Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. 7. Liam O’Flaherty, Mr Gilhooley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), 8, 9, 28. 8. See Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000). 9. Liam O’Flaherty, The Informer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 37. 10. O’Flaherty, Mr Gilhooley, 7. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. O’Flaherty, The Informer, 41. 13. O’Flaherty, Mr Gilhooley, 42. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen, Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2010), 258. 16. O’Flaherty, Mr Gilhooley, 241. 17. Ibid., 168. 18. Ibid. 19. Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 79. 20. Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation (London: Routledge, 2010), 13–14. 21. See Norman Vance, ‘Region, Realism and Reaction, 1922–1972’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168. 22. Michael G. Cronin, Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 67. 23. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940, 212.

Prostitution, Citizenship and the Free State 24. Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London: Verso, 2014), 60. 25. Liam O’Flaherty, The Puritan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 215. 26. Brad Kent, ‘Zealots, Censors and Perverts: Censorship in Liam O’Flaherty’s The Puritan’, Irish Studies Review 14, no. 3 (2006): 346. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 347. 29. O’Flaherty, The Puritan, 50. 30. Gira Grant, Playing the Whore, 61. 31. Bell, Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, 1. 32. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940, 218. 33. M. Keith Booker, Ulysses, Capitalism and Colonialism: Reading Joyce after the Cold War (Westport: Greenwood, 2000), 45.

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James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Blind bards in the age of silent cinema Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

This chapter posits a connection between Irish modernist literature, bardic tradition and silent cinema, via the (cloudy) lens of impaired eyesight. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of this triangulation for elucidating the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. More broadly, I argue for an expanded conception of Irish modernism that takes into equal account Irish storytelling traditions, modern global technologies and the often politicized, aestheticized and/or metaphorized fleshy bodies of individual authors. Both Joyce and Beckett are known for their bodily writing; Ulysses was famously characterized by Joyce as an ‘epic of the human body’, and in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as in many of his other works, ‘everything oozes’.1 But critics have shied away from considering the impact of the writers’ own bodily experiences alongside wider contextual issues. Tradition, technology and bodily experience have been explored independently, but rarely do these areas overlap productively within studies of Irish modernism. By taking this tripartite approach, I show that widening our focus to include a greater variety of perspectives can provide a more nuanced and fruitful understanding of the work of Joyce and Beckett and of Irish modernism more broadly. My research forms part of the recent scholarly impetus to problematize the seemingly impermeable binaries of Irish/global and tradition/innovation. The field of Irish modernism is, as Lauren Arrington notes, diversifying what we take to be ‘Irish’ literature; scholars are embracing ‘writers who lived and wrote in and about Ireland, as well as those who were Irish by birth but who lived and worked outside of the country’.2 Simultaneously, the supposed nostalgia/newness dualism is being disrupted by scholars who highlight the modernity nestled within Revivalist texts and the traditionality to be found inside modernist texts. As Rónán McDonald explains, both ‘modernism and Revivalism, though often seeking out the new and innovative, are wedded … to ideas of the old’.3 Newness, in the shape of technological innovation, has been a particular focus of recent research in the fields of Joyce and cinema, Beckett and cinema, and modernism and cinema.4 Building upon these studies, I explore the complicated ways in which, for Joyce and Beckett, cinematic technologies become associated with both nostalgia (through the privileging of silent cinema and links to bardic culture) and innovation (through the new ways of seeing and increased narrative possibilities enabled by cinematic advances).

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My focus will move from biographical details concerning Joyce’s and Beckett’s own troubled vision to wider cultural conceptions of ‘Irish eyes’, including allusions to blind Irish bards (such as Turlough O’Carolan and Antoine Ó Raifteirí) and Irish philosophies of perception (including those put forward by George Berkeley). Thus, rather than reducing each author to a set of symptoms or relying solely on metaphorical associations, I shall interrogate the murky space between the bodily and the figurative, exploring how Joyce and Beckett engage with different forms of storytelling and sensory stimuli: visual, oral and aural. By drawing out the similarities and differences between (traditional) bardic and (technological) cinematic cultures, I shall demonstrate how Beckett and Joyce – in ‘Fingal’, Film and Finnegans Wake – interrogate the relationship between nostalgic Irishness and progressive internationalism.

Blind bards Bards are at once quintessentially Irish and thoroughly global. They are valorized in Revivalist and nationalist works – such as W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, Standish O’Grady’s Finn and his Companions, George William Russell’s The Divine Vision and Other Poems – and also feature prominently in works of high modernism, including the ‘Tiresias’ passage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the multiple Homeric references in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Be they Irish, Celtic, Greek or otherwise, bards told their tales via a combination of music (harp, pipe or fiddle) and lyrics, performing to groups and chronicling – objectively or satirically – the stories of their ancestors and patrons. Bards, from Homer and Tiresias through to Turlough O’Carolan and Ossian, were often visually impaired.5 The ‘blind bard’ is, therefore, both a trope and a fact. This trope comprises a constellation of interlinked associations that have been taken up, remoulded and exploited throughout Irish (and global) literary history. Bards were repositories and disseminators of collective memories and ideologies. This dual role – as archivist and narrator – helps to explain the prominence of bards in Revivalist and nationalist texts that aimed to preserve and propagate Irish literary history. But they were not merely mouthpieces – bards were, as Edward Larrissy notes, endowed with ‘premonitory’ abilities and ‘second-sight’.6 Blind bards were ‘seers’; they could visualize, in their mind’s eye, universal truths and certain aspects of the future. As Tiresias exclaims in The Waste Land, ‘I … though blind, throbbing between two lives, … can see’; ‘I … Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest’.7 Blind bards traverse the supposed binaries of local/universal, past/future and seeing/not-seeing. Seeing/not-seeing permeated the lived experience and writing of both Joyce and Beckett. Beckett became short-sighted at an early age and, as Deirdre Bair notes, ‘wore glasses for the rest of his life’.8 His eyesight ‘suddenly dimmed’ in the late 1940s, when he had to use both a magnifying glass and spectacles to look at paintings.9 In 1966, he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes.10 Joyce suffered from a range of conditions, including iritis, glaucoma and cataracts, and underwent several operations. Joyce’s letters are littered with refences to his eyesight. On 10 March 1923, Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver: ‘Yesterday I wrote two pages – the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses.’11 He explains that, ‘having found a pen with some

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difficulty’, he wrote in ‘large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap’ as his eyesight was too bad to read or write in any other manner.12 In the preceding paragraph, Joyce states that Homer ‘went blind from glaucoma according to one of my doctors’.13 Joyce’s own glaucoma had not yet been diagnosed, but he was clearly keen to link himself to the blind bardic tradition via his own eye disease. In his Scribbledehobble notebook, Joyce connects himself to Antoine Ó Raifteirí, also known as Anthony Raftery, the last of the Irish blind bards: ‘Raftery, sight was lost on him: J. Joyce’.14 Joyce played up to the image of the ‘blind tragic figure’ bestowed upon him by journalists and others but chose not to take up the invitation to write a personal essay on ‘what you feel and do when you are going blind’.15 In his reply to the magazine’s editor, Joyce compared himself to Shem, the blind writer in Finnegans Wake, strengthening the link between his writing and his own experience of vision loss: ‘in the best manner of Shem I developed a long painful dissertation, punctuated by sighs, excuses, compliments, hypotheses, explanations, silences = no, non, nein’.16 Finnegans Wake alludes to a myriad of other blind writers. Turlough O’Carolan, a well-known blind Irish harpist-bard from the eighteenth century, appears – as ‘Carolan Cresent’.17 Joyce also references John Keegan’s tale of the blind piper ‘Caoch O’Leary’, the biblical Isaac (‘bland old Isaac’), Blind Harry (‘bland harry’) the wandering minstrel poet and includes multiple nods to John Milton (famously blind).18 Whilst Joyce enjoyed writing his eye disease into his texts and literary history more broadly, self-effacing Beckett did not: ‘I am simply a man who is going blind. Any comparison with others is meaningless, ridiculous, absurd.’19 Despite his protestations, comparisons abounded and were often linked to Beckett’s nationality: ‘Why, he was asked, did he think blindness was an affliction suffered by major Irish writers?’20 Beckett refused to engage with the question, while Joyce linked his nationality to his failing vision via a pun in a 1926 letter to Weaver shortly after an eye operation: ‘I lie on a couch most of the day, waiting for Ireland’s eye this day to do his duty.’21 ‘Ireland’s eye’, here, refers to both the island off Howth – the east Dublin peninsula and provisional setting for Finnegans Wake – and Joyce’s painful, oozing, post-operative eye, yoking Joyce’s fleshy eye to the geography of Ireland. Although Beckett refused to include himself within a larger tradition of ‘irismaimed’ (Irish-and-iris-impaired) writers, he did – indirectly – associate himself with the blind bardic tradition and Ossian in particular.22 This may come as a surprise for critics who take Beckett at his word when, in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, he sets up an opposition between vivacious ‘younger Irish poets’ with an awareness of the ‘new thing’ and mawkish ‘antiquarians’ with their ‘Ossianic goods’.23 According to Mary Power, however, the ‘Fingal’ that provides the title for the second story in Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks comes from the ‘Ossianic material’ of James Macpherson.24 Thus, like the ‘antiquarians’ he derides, Beckett offers up ‘Ossianic goods’. Ossian (or Oisín) was a third-century blind Celtic bard who recounted the military exploits of his regal family, focusing on his father Fingal. Ossian was popularized via a cycle of epic poems, The Poems of Ossian, published by James Macpherson in the 1760s. Macpherson caused significant controversy in Ireland and throughout Europe by purposefully undermining the Irishness of the Ossian poems and failing to admit to any embellishment or creative additions.

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As Clare O’Halloran explains, the ‘tales that [Macpherson] had exploited were of Irish origin’; ‘Fingal and Ossian, were versions of Fionn Mac Cumhal and Oisin of the Fionn or Fianna cycle, part of a pre-Christian oral tradition’, with the earliest surviving manuscripts dating back to the twelfth century.25 Whilst Macpherson acknowledged a link between The Poems of Ossian and the Irish Fianna cycle, he did so dismissively. He describes the Irish tales attributed to Oisín as ‘spurious pieces’ penned by later Irish bards who had faked the origin of their work.26 Ironically, Macpherson quickly gained a reputation as a forger; his poems were not, as he had claimed, direct translations. However, as Dafydd Moore recognizes, Macpherson ‘incorporated both classical and vernacular Gaelic traditions to differing extents across his oeuvre (there are identifiable sources for passages in Fingal …)’, making ‘the notion of fakery or fraud in any straightforward sense untenable’.27 Despite Macpherson’s deceitfulness, The Poems of Ossian were of huge importance to Irish antiquarianism and Revivalism, promoting interest in Irish bardic culture and Gaelic language.28 Outside Ireland, the supposedly oral basis of Macpherson’s poems was of great interest to Johann Gottfried Herder and the German romantics, who were exploring oral folk poetry.29 Ossian, as a blind bard, blurs the binary of seeing/not-seeing, and Macpherson’s actions complicate further binaries, including Irish/not-Irish, real/fake and oral/written. Beckett engages with each of these binaries in ‘Fingal’.

Seeing and saying ‘Fingal’, to mince Beckett’s words, enacts a modernist ‘rupture’ of antiquarian ‘Ossianic goods’ by signalling elements of both bardic orality and cinematic visuality.30 The first few pages consist of Belacqua and Winnie contemplating the landscape, focusing on ‘Ireland’s Eye’. Winnie is content with expressing what she sees: ‘I see nothing but three acres and cows.’31 In contrast, Belacqua is keen to confer meaning, organization and narrative upon what he sees: ‘I see it more as a back-land, a land of sanctuary, a land that you don’t have to dress up to, that you can walk on in a lounge suit, smoking a cigar.’32 Echoing Stephen’s ‘Shut your eyes and see’ in Ulysses, and the visionary (rather than visual) side of bardic culture, Belacqua silently opines, ‘If she closed her eyes she might see something.’33 He then concedes to Winnie’s more immediate, unfiltered way of perceiving: ‘he would not try to communicate Fingal’.34 Whilst Winnie prefers the universal language of direct vision, the neutral camera-like eye, Belacqua favours the descriptive oral storytelling of bards. Towards the end of ‘Fingal’, it is Belacqua who relishes pure spectacle over spoken narrative during an impromptu bicycle ride: ‘on his right hand the sea was foaming among the rocks, the sands ahead were another yellow again, beyond them in the distance the cottages of Rush were bright white’.35 ‘Meantime’, as Beckett tells us, evoking a silent film intertitle, Winnie listens to an old man’s story about ‘Dane Swift’ and the woman he supposedly kept locked in a tower. Echoing Macpherson, the old man’s story within a story mixes oral tales – ‘you might have heard tell of ’ – and written sources: ‘he had read it in an old Telegraph and he would adhere to it’.36 The storyteller and Winnie move further and further away from the original sight (the tower) that

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prompts the tale alluding, as Power points out, to Irish writers such as Swift and Wilde along the way.37 Rather than engaging his audience, the old man’s allusion-filled, wordy narrative distances Winnie as her thoughts wander back to Belacqua. Far from a universal language, the old man’s bardic orality is indistinct and confusing: ‘a tale of a motte and a star. What was a motte?’38 Meanwhile, Belacqua becomes a seer rather than a teller. The scene is presented in the third person, as if a camera is strapped to Belacqua’s bicycle, in the style of early ‘phantom ride’ films, in order to allow readers a direct, unfiltered view of the landscape.39 Winnie, contra her prior predilection, disregards pure visual data in favour of remembered details: ‘But it can’t have been him, … I tell you he had no bike.’40 It is hard to determine which storytelling style – the visual or the oral – is the victor; everyone loses their audience along the way. The intertwining and interrogation of these different styles keeps Beckett’s readers engaged; the old man’s allusions entertain those who enjoy a good yarn and seek meaning outside the text, whilst the natural beauty of Belacqua’s ride pleases those who prefer the directness of literary impressionism. Joyce’s writing is, like Beckett’s, indebted to both ‘Ossianic goods’ and the ‘new thing’ of cinematic vision. As Richard Barlow notes, ‘generally Joyce’s allusions relate to the idea of Ossian, rather than to the internal concerns of Macpherson’s poetry itself ’.41 For Barlow, Joyce’s ‘idea’ of Ossian is founded upon the contested status of Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian as ‘a fake or hoax’ and ‘something created (or recreated) out of previously existing material’, echoing Joyce’s own collage-style method.42 Reflecting ‘Fingal’, a number of Joyce’s allusions to The Poems of Ossian demonstrate an interest in vision and sound and the two senses’ roles in storytelling. In Finnegans Wake, criticizing his brother Shem, Shaun alludes to Macpherson’s ‘stolentelling’, asserting that every ‘dimmed letter in it is a copy’.43 Whilst ‘dimmed’ is obviously a pun on ‘damned’, its literal meaning (less bright) references the poems’ blind narrator and unreliable translator. Overleaf, Shaun boasts that he is a superior storyteller because he follows the bardic tradition of oral narration; it is an ‘openear secret’ that he can ‘soroquise’ (soliloquize) ‘better than most’, and, if needed, rather than rely on dimmed perception, he would employ a sighted ‘immenuensoes’ (amanuensis), as Joyce did.44 Transcription, here, is presented, rather romantically, as a way of capturing the authenticity of the bardic spoken word. As Barlow notes, one particular page in the ‘Shem the Penman’ section of Finnegans Wake contains no fewer than eleven references to the Ossian poems.45 This ‘extended misty, and imprecise, section’ also references cinema: ‘thank Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart’.46 Further down the page, Joyce references a specific genre of movies – the newsreel (or ‘newseryreel’)47: ‘old the news of the great big world’.48 He then presents his own newsreel: ‘sonnies had a scrap, woewoewoe! bab’s baby walks at seven months, waywayway! bride leaves her raid at Punchestime’.49 The ‘waywayway!’ and ‘woewoewoe!’ echo the intertitles between news items as well as the sound of the film as it spools through the projector.50 So there is a link made between the bardic tradition and moviemaking, strengthened by another of Joyce’s letters in which he connects cinema with both the visionary and archival elements that one might readily associate with bardic culture. In June 1924, while again recovering from eye surgery, Joyce writes, ‘Whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph

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going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten.’51 In the same letter, he expresses happiness at ‘finally’ being recognized by ‘the Irish literary movement’ and explains how he has been strengthening his memory through learning, ‘by heart’, Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ (1810) – a romantic poem that features both a bard and a prophetic seer.52 The association between ancient bardic culture and modern visual technologies has gathered impetus within recent scholarship. John Fiske and John Hartley argue that ‘television performs a “bardic function” ’: its ‘voice is oral, not literate’, and it utilizes and propagates ‘myths’.53 Francesco Casetti delineates the ‘bardic function’ of genre film; it conveys ‘issues concerning a community’ to the wider public.54 As Pantelis Michelakis explains, silent cinema is particularly well equipped to carry on the bardic tradition: ‘Early cinema’s totalising aesthetic could claim to embrace as one the textuality of written epic, the visuality of pictorial representations and the orality of performance.’55 In other words, silent cinema successfully blurs the binaries of vision/sound and oral/written.

Bardic cinema According to Michelakis, ‘like epic bards, silent cinema adopts a “rhetoric of traditionality” that facilitates the interplay between film viewing and audience’.56 Despite being a primarily visual medium, silent cinema was drawn to the orality of bardic culture. Bardic orality could be presented pictorially, via exaggerated gestures, and through intertitles containing quoted text. Bards, therefore, proved popular on the silent screen. There are numerous silent films that draw heavily on Homer’s Odyssey, including L’île de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème (1905), dir. Georges Méliès; Le Retour d’Ulysse (1909), dir. André Calmettes; Odissea (1911), dir. Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe de Liguoro and Adolfo Padovan; Die Heimkehr des Odysseus (1918), dir. Rudolf Biebrach; and Circe, the Enchantress (1924), dir. Robert Z. Leonard. All but one of these films was made in continental Europe; none were produced in Ireland. Nonetheless, at least some of these were likely to have been seen by Irish filmgoers. In the 1900s and early 1910s, the Rotunda and other Dublin film venues showed a range of films produced outside Ireland (Méliès was particularly popular).57 As Denis Condon notes, ‘Ireland was not an important country for film production’.58 Between 1895 and 1921, around seventy fiction films were produced in Ireland, the majority by US film companies for an international audience.59 Far more factual films were made, including travelogues, newsreels and informational films.60 The first internationally popular ‘Irish’ film was the silent film Man of Aran (1934), directed by Robert Flaherty, an American of Irish-German descent. Man of Aran blurred the boundary between fiction and fact by including both neutral footage and staged scenes. Made around seven years after the first talkie, Man of Aran chronicles – through a nostalgic lens – the lives of a family on the isle of Aranmore. The Aran Islands were known for their ‘primitiveness’; in 1899, as Synge observed, islanders still practised the bardic tradition of ‘reciting verse in Gaelic’.61 As Richard Barsam notes, Flaherty was, himself, ‘a storyteller in the bardic fashion’: he aimed to celebrate ‘the life, traditions and ideals of the community’, admired the ‘oral tradition’ and had ‘an innate love of

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language’.62 He also loved Irish literature; to prepare for making Man of Aran, Flaherty read two Aran-inspired works by Synge: his play Riders to the Sea and his non-fiction work The Aran Isles.63 Reflecting this reading, Flaherty’s film contains both tragic and documentary-style elements, and thus Man of Aran is at once nostalgic and modern. This blurring of the supposed forward-looking/backward-looking binary can, again, be seen to echo Synge, if one accepts Elaine Sisson’s compelling reading of Synge’s travel writing as ‘early modernist’: ‘While many Revivalists’ work displays a sentimentalized yearning for more “authentic” times, the very act of photographing, documenting, recording and describing rapidly disappearing peasant ways of life … is in itself part of the technocratic apparatus of modernity.’64 Joyce, like Sisson, recognized elements of modernity in Synge’s Aran-inspired writings. As observed by John McCourt, Joyce would have ‘noted Synge’s tendency to de-romanticize the islands, his introduction of an element of real time into a world that was routinely depicted as timeless’.65 The Aran Islands are referenced throughout Joyce’s oeuvre, in both fiction and non-fiction. In Finnegans Wake, the Aran Islands are multilingual and modern. In a linguistic echo of Flaherty’s Man of Aran, Joyce’s ‘man of Iren’ alludes to Empress Irene of Byzantium, whilst ‘man d’airain’ sounds, and looks, faintly Francophone and is also a close echo of Mandarin.66 In an article for Il Piccolo della Sera (5 September 1912), entitled ‘Il miraggio del pescatore di Aran: La valvola dell’Inhilterra in caso di guerra’ (‘The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England’s Safety Valve in Case of War’), Joyce mixes the bardic – an island storyteller and a saintly seer – with modern industry and growing cosmopolitanism.67 Rather than symbolizing isolation and authentic Irishness, the Aran Islands become a meeting place of cultures, where US trade routes are under construction and islanders mix with Danish sailors and Scottish-led day-trippers. McCourt cites Oliver J. Burke’s The South Isles of Aran (1887) as a key source for Joyce’s ‘Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran’, arguing that the ‘mirage’ refers to Burke’s phantom ‘Isle of O’Brazil’, a mythical island sometimes perceived on the Western horizon.68 I suggest that this ‘mirage’ could also gesture towards cinema. In words that echo the gestural language and special effects of early films, Joyce describes how the ‘silent and melancholic’ fisherman disappears, ‘little by little’, ‘wrapped in a slow smoky veil’.69 There is one film in particular which Joyce could have had in mind when writing his article: Whaling Afloat and Ashore (1908), dir. Robert Paul. Paul’s factual film was shot at sea and at the Aranmore whaling station, a Norwegian-owned business based on Rusheen Island, between 1908 and 1911. Reflecting Joyce’s Danish sailors, the film shows Norwegian fishermen frolicking with Irish fishermen and islanders. As Condon recognizes, Paul’s film makes ‘an intriguing intervention into the discourse on the islands off Ireland’s west coast’; ‘the essence of the islands’ attractiveness hinges on their isolation’, but ‘Paul shows us western islands where the inhabitants work in a factory’ and catch fish ‘for the open market’.70 Thus, like Joyce’s article, Paul’s film presents a less isolated, and more modern, picture of Ireland’s western isles. Whilst Beckett’s oeuvre lacks direct references to Aran, he described himself as ‘irretrievably glued to the seat’ watching Man of Aran.71 He particularly enjoyed the film’s natural spectacles, which mirror the visuality of Belacqua’s ‘Fingal’ bike ride: ‘sea, rocks, air and granite gobs very fine’.72 Beckett also liked the ‘trucs of montage’ and

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the gestural language of the islanders – ‘pure Harold Lloyd’.73 According to Anthony Paraskeva, it was the ‘combination of nature documentary and fictional technique’ that Beckett admired and, later, replicated in Film, Beckett’s ‘pseudo-documentary’ in which the aged Buster Keaton contemplates ‘his own distant and irretrievable past’.74 Thus, Beckett was interested in Man of Aran for its blurring of fact and fiction, as well as its disruption of the old/new binary. Film further blurs these supposed oppositions and disturbs the Irish/international dualism by blending Irish philosophy and history with universal concerns and modes of communication.

Irish eyes, global vision In his essay ‘The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”)’, Gilles Deleuze writes, The whole story [of Film] is that of Berkeley, who had enough of being perceived (and of perceiving). The role, which could only have been played by Buster Keaton, would be that of Bishop Berkeley. Or rather, it is the transition from one Irishman to another, from Berkeley who perceived and was perceived, to Beckett who had exhausted ‘all the joys of percipere and percipi’.75

Deleuze’s reference to the idealist Irish philosopher and bishop George Berkeley is based on a direct reference to Berkeley’s famous maxim, ‘Esse est percipi’ (to be is to be perceived), at the start of Beckett’s script.76 Thus, Beckett links Film to Irish philosophy. As Einat Adar notes, whilst it is hard to define who or what ‘Irish philosophy’ refers to, a ‘distinct school of thought’ preoccupied with perception ‘developed in Ireland between the 1690s and 1750s’.77 So blindness, and perception more generally, is part of Irish philosophical tradition as well as bardic culture. Bishop Berkeley is alluded to by Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, often in relation to vision and visual culture. In the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen thinks through Berkeley’s early-eighteenth-century philosophy of depth perception via rumination on the workings of a stereoscope, a nineteenth-century pre-cinematic viewing device that creates the appearance of three-dimensional images.78 In Finnegans Wake, the stereoscope (‘stareotypopticus’) is, once again, evoked in relation to an exaggeratedly solid – or bulky – Berkeley (‘Balkelly’) and the perception of three dimensions: ‘allside showed themselves’.79 The link between Berkeley and film is strengthened when the bishop becomes inexorably, and comically, linked to Busby Berkeley – a film director and choreographer working from the 1920s to 1970s – via ‘the phyllisophies of Bussup Bulkeley’.80 Elsewhere in the Wake, Berkeley’s immaterialist epistemology of ‘too many illusiones’ – his notion that objects have no real existence outside of the perceiver’s mind – is imbued with bardic mysticism when Joyce refers to Berkeley as ‘archdruid of islish’.81 Berkeley is ‘speeching, yeh not speeching’, raising further questions about the relationship between written and oral language, sound and silence. The sound/silence pairing is also explored by Beckett in his Berkeley-inspired Film. As well as borrowing from Irish philosophy, Film draws on silent slapstick. Beckett gives the date of Film’s action as ‘about 1929’, two years after the start of sound film’s

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ascendance and silent film’s decline.82 The silence of Film is emphasized through the single utterance, ‘shh’, which engages the audience’s ‘openear’, solely to draw their attention to the lack of sound, and the abundance of vision, throughout the rest of the film.83 This technique was also used by Charlie Chaplin; Modern Times is silent except for a nonsense song and the transmissions on the factory’s screens. Likewise, Chaplin’s City Lights is silent apart from some incomprehensible chatter during the opening crowd scene. There are, in fact, several similarities between Film and City Lights. City Lights was released in 1931 (‘around 1929’), both films feature a blind flower seller, and Film was going to open with a crowd scene, echoing City Lights, but it had to be cut due to technical difficulties.84 Chaplin was actually the first choice for both ‘O’, Film’s protagonist,85 and Bloom in a never-made film of Ulysses.86 As well as evoking a certain traditionality by working in the universal language of silent comedy, Film can be situated within the blind bard lineage via its allusions to both Joyce’s and Beckett’s lived experience of near-blindness. In 1964, when he was writing Film, Beckett was already suffering from cataracts.87 It is intriguing to wonder whether Beckett’s eye condition might even have supplied the title for Film. The script was originally entitled The Eye; might Beckett have changed it to Film, not only to reference his medium but also to move the focus, as it were, from the organ (the eye) to the ailment (the cloudy film)?88 In Film, Keaton’s character, ‘O’, has a similar impairment, represented via a gauze filter and contrasted with the clear vision of ‘E’. ‘E’, as Beckett notes in his script, ‘is the camera’: the Berkeleian Godlike perceiver – embodied by the roving, gazing camera – from whom ‘O’ is in constant flight.89 ‘O’, who is continually in ‘blind haste’, shares certain characteristics with Joyce.90 As noted by Katherine Weiss, both Joyce and ‘O’ sport an eyepatch over their left eye91 – a ‘blind of black sailcloth’ as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake.92 ‘O’’s shufflinghugging movements along the walls, in desperate flight from ‘E’, are reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s descriptions of a meeting he had with Joyce in 1929, the year Beckett posits for Film: ‘why is he waving his hands and groping so strangely?  … Then it suddenly strikes me how blind the man is.’93 Given that Beckett was close with Joyce, even acting – if Richard Ellmann is to believed – as his amanuensis, it is likely that he would have at least heard about this meeting and, perhaps, read Eisenstein’s account.94 Beckett was a great admirer of Eisenstein: in 1936 he wrote to him – namedropping Joyce – applying, unsuccessfully, to enrol in his Moscow State School of Cinematography.95 As Paraskeva notes, Beckett’s 1929 essay ‘Dante  … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ ‘echoes Eisenstein’s delineation of the cinematic ideogram’ – a filmic form of hieroglyphic.96 Beckett discusses Vico’s ideas on ‘prelingual’ language, explaining that ‘language was gesture’97; gesture, as Stephen tells us in Ulysses, ‘would be a universal language’98 akin to Chaplin’s bard-like ‘universal means of expression’.99 Thus, the nonliterate orality of bardic culture is substituted, by Beckett, for the prelingual visuality of cinematic gesture.

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‘Answer: A collideorscape!’ Through a ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’,100 this chapter has travelled from Ireland’s Eye to Aran and out to Europe, from visual impairment and visionaries to non-literate orality and prelingual gesture, and from blind bardic culture to silent cinema and back again. I have shown that, in the work of Joyce and Beckett, bardic traditions are rendered modern whilst cinema becomes retrograde, disrupting the familiar binaries of tradition/innovation, old/new and backward-looking/forward-looking. Joyce’s cinema allusions are, predominantly, to early and/or silent films, despite talkies having been around for several years by the time Finnegans Wake was published. Beckett made a silent film in 1965, starring an aging early cinema star who reached his prime decades earlier. The two authors’ nostalgia for silent cinema is not dissimilar to their Revivalist predecessors’ nostalgia for bardic culture. However, whilst Synge and others drew upon bardic cultures to subtly push the boundaries of what can be considered traditionally Irish, Joyce and Beckett embraced the universality of silent cinema and, in doing so, disturbed the Irish/international binary. The films alluded to, or praised, by the authors are international in their outlooks and origins, even when they have Irish themes or locations. In the way I have conceptualized them here, Joyce and Beckett have more in common with the ‘independent’ and ‘intermediate’ Thomas MacGreevy, from Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, than they do with the sentimental ‘antiquarians’ or the modish ‘others’.101 They embrace modernity but do not reject tradition. They also share MacGreevy’s keen interest in perception and perceiving. They are fascinated, in part through their own lived experience of non-normative eyesight, in ‘the act and not the object’ of perception.102 For both authors, impaired vision is intertwined with Irishness. Whilst Joyce acknowledges this intertwining more readily than Beckett, both authors reach back to eighteenth-century Irish philosophies of perception to explore more modern and technological forms of vision. Joyce and Beckett are ‘fargazer[s]‌’, but their gazing is multidirectional; they look back as much as forward and inwards as much as outwards.103 In answer to the question ‘what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?’, Joyce writes, ‘Answer: A collideorscape!’104 A ‘collideorscape’ collides together individual elements to create an ever-changing landscape of new views. This chapter has provided a similar experience; I have introduced three different facets of Irish modernism – bardic culture, cinema, blindness – and collided them together to offer some novel perspectives. There is nothing to prevent other Irish modernist scholars twisting the ‘collideorscape’ again and again.

Notes 1. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4. 2. Lauren Arrington, ‘Irish Modernism’, Oxford Bibliographies (2012), DOI: 10.1093/ obo/9780199846719-0069.

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3. Rónán McDonald, ‘The Irish Revival and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Cleary, 52. 4. See, for example, John McCourt, ed., Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010); R. Barton Palmer and Marc C. Conner, eds, Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama (London: Palgrave, 2016); Anthony Paraskeva, Samuel Beckett and Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Cleo HanawayOakley, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, eds, Science, Technology and Irish Modernism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019). 5. Edward Larrissy, ‘The Celtic Bard of Romanticism: Blindness and Second Sight’, Romanticism 1 (2010): 44. 6. Ibid., 46. 7. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 71–2. 8. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 14. 9. Ibid., 361. 10. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 28. 11. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 296. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 295. 14. Thomas Connolly, ed., James Joyce’s Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 112. 15. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 202, 237. 16. Ibid., 237. 17. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 369. 18. Ibid., 43, 3, 484. 19. Bair, Samuel Beckett, 598. 20. Ibid. 21. Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, 239. 22. ‘Irismaimed’ is a portmanteau word coined by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, 489. 23. Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 70. 24. Mary Power, ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Fingal” and the Irish Tradition’, Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 1 (1981–2): 151, 154. 25. Clare O’Halloran, ‘Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past: The Challenge of Macpherson’s Ossian’, Past & Present 124 (1989): 74. 26. James Macpherson, Fingal (London, 1762), preface. Qtd in Clare O’Halloran, 74. 27. Dafydd Moore, ‘James MacPherson’, Oxford Bibliographies, https://www. oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-97801998467190066.xml (accessed 31 August 2019). 28. For a detailed exploration of the influence of The Poems of Ossian on Irish history and Irish literary culture, see O’Halloran, ‘Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past’, 69–95. 29. O’Halloran, ‘Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past’, 76–7. 30. Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, 70.

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31. Samuel Beckett, ‘Fingal’, in More Pricks than Kicks, ed. Cassandra Nelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 24. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 31. 36. Ibid., 32–3. 37. Power, ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Fingal” and the Irish Tradition’, 153–6. 38. Beckett, ‘Fingal’, 33. 39. For an explanation of ‘phantom ride’ films and their relation to Joyce’s work, see Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, 103–6. 40. Beckett, ‘Fingal’, 34. 41. Richard Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 159. 42. Ibid. 43. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 424. 44. Ibid., 425. 45. Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, 177. 46. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 194. 47. Ibid., 489. 48. Ibid., 194. 49. Ibid. 50. Joyce makes several other references to newsreels in Finnegans Wake: to the ‘movietone!’ and Pathé (‘patte’) newsreel companies (62); ‘roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world!’ (64); ‘reeled the titleroll’ (134); and to Pathé again – ‘Moviefigure on in scenic section. By Patathicus’ (602). 51. Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, 216. The letter is to Harriet Shaw Weaver and dated 27 June 1924, seventeen days after Joyce underwent an iridectomy. 52. Ibid., 16. 53. John Fiske and John Hartley, ‘Bardic Television’, in Reading Television (London: Psychology Press, 2003), 64–77. 54. Francesco Casetti, Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002), 31. 55. Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke, ‘Introduction: Silent Cinema, Antiquity and “the exhaustless urn of time” ’, The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, ed. Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19. 56. Pantelis Michelakis, ‘Homer in Silent Cinema’, in The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, ed. Michelakis and Wyke, 160–1. 57. Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 254. 58. Denis Condon, Early Irish Cinema 1895–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), 5. 59. Ibid., 8. 60. Ibid. 61. J. M. Synge’s unfished 1899 novel, Flowers and Footsteps, qtd in Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 80–1. 62. Richard Barsam, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 60. 63. Ibid.

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64. Elaine Sisson, ‘The Aran Islands and the Travel Essays’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, ed. P. J. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 52–3. 65. John McCourt, ‘Into the West: Joyce on Aran’, in Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Juris-fiction, ed. Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 133. 66. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 310, 338. 67. ‘The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran’ is translated and reproduced in James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 201–5. 68. McCourt, ‘Into the West: Joyce on Aran’, 135. 69. Joyce, ‘Fisherman of Aran’, 205. 70. Condon, Early Irish Cinema 1895–1921, 134. 71. Beckett to Nuala Costello, 10 May 1934, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn and George Craig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 207. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Paraskeva, Samuel Beckett and Cinema, 54, 53. 75. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”)’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23. 76. Samuel Beckett, Film: Complete Scenario/Illustrations/Production Shots (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 11. 77. Einat Adar, ‘From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre: The Blind (Wo)Man Made to See’, Estudios Irlandeses, no. 12 (2017): 2. 78. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 3. For further discussion of stereoscopic seeing in Ulysses see ‘Tactile Vision and Enworlded Being’, in Hanaway-Oakley, 85–113. 79. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 611. 80. Ibid., 435. 81. Ibid., 611. 82. Beckett, Film, 12. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 77. 85. Ibid., 66. 86. John McCourt, ‘Introduction’, in Roll Away the Reel World, ed. McCourt, 8. 87. Bair, Samuel Beckett, 361. 88. Beckett, Film, 65. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Katherine Weiss, ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett’s Film’, Journal of Beckett Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 186. 92. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 182. 93. Sergei Eisenstein, The Collected Works of Eisenstein: Izbranniye proizvedeniya, 6 vols (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 486. 94. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 649. 95. Beckett to Eisenstein, 2 March 1936, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 317. 96. Paraskeva, Samuel Beckett and Cinema, 12.

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97. Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 10–1. 98. Joyce, Ulysses, 15. 99. Charlie Chaplin, ‘Pantomime and Comedy; Action vs. Words. The Main Qualifications’, New York Times (25 January 1931): 6. 100. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 3. 101. Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, 70, 74. 102. Ibid., 74. 103. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 143. 104. Ibid.

Part Three

Minor/major modes: Intermedial Irish modernisms The final section of Irish Modernisms confronts critical dualisms that have long organized the field – high and popular genres, new and old movements, central and marginal perspectives – by rethinking the relationship between modality and mediality in Irish-modernist expression. These threads have been woven throughout the previous chapters in their attention to intermedial encounters between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ forms: in Harry Kernoff ’s illustrations of Berman’s short fiction (John Brannigan), in Pamela Colman Smith’s Revivalist designs (Seán Hewitt), in Harry Clarke’s Mr Gilhooley stained-glass window (Laura Lovejoy) and in the interfaces between ‘high’ modernist literature and letters (Katherine Ebury) or silent film (Cleo Hanaway-Oakley). In the five chapters that bring the volume to its close, ekphrastic encounters that cut across highbrow/lowbrow cultural boundaries are foregrounded for a more concerted metacritical reflection on how to theorize and engage rhizomatic networks of ‘minor’ modes, ‘popular’ media, genre fiction and diverse technologies in Irish modernist cultural production. Modernist composition is often multimodal in the sense that a single text may require diverse literacies that extend to literary and non-literary discursive genres and specialist lexicons, as well as media literacies in the visual, musical, performative and kinetic arts. As the critical framing of modernism as a multimodal and multimedial phenomenon has gained prominence,1 it is unsurprising that Joyce has functioned as the primary Irish-modernist test case, given his Sliding-Doors alternative career as a professional singer, his central involvement in the foundation of the Volta cinema in Dublin in 19092 and the vinyl recordings produced of him reading from his work in the 1920s.3 Yet, even as specific studies have substantially advanced and complicated our understanding of the significance of music, the visual arts, film, television and visual-textual hybridity to Joyce’s multimodal aesthetic,4 some critics have challenged the distinct trend of arrogating this focus on multimediality to claims of newness in modernist studies. If Mao and Walkowitz identify the expansive transformation of the new modernist studies, in part, through recent works which ‘locate literary modernism in a rhetorical arena transformed by [mass] media’,5 Paul Morrison charges that they do so by overlooking the centrality of the technological in the old modernist studies

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too, from Hugh Kenner’s ‘mechanic muse’ to the media-centric modernist criticism of Marshall McLuhan, who focused on Joyce extensively in his work.6 Indeed, one might ask, to what extent is the current focus on (Irish) modernist intermedia a return to, rather than turn from, the kind of Greenbergian attention to medium specificity that was a staple of mid-twentieth-century modernist criticism?7 This is not to question the value of recent modernist and Irish modernist scholarship and criticism in these areas but rather to note the necessity of more fully vetting the metacritical characterization of such work as a ‘turn’. The media technologies that were long privileged for reading modernism as a transmedial or hypertextual phenomenon – silent film, photo collage, musique concrète – were avant-garde in nature; financial and technological barriers ensured their creative use remained in the domain of small groups of well-off or patronized modernist innovators until the technological democratizations of the later postmodern and digital eras. This initial, partial focus on avant-garde technological engagements worked to enforce and uphold interrelated false dichotomies both between high modernist art and mass culture and between modes of production and sites of reception, such as in the rigid alignment of genres, media and modes with specific cultural brows.8 And yet, Andreas Huyssen argues, the powerful imaginary of a ‘Great Divide’ between modernism and the market is a critical narrative of categorical separation that is recurrently violated in the actual works and practices of modernism itself.9 The problem with the high/ popular dualism lies, as Franco Moretti contends, partly in the fact that a theoretical emphasis on complexity is a taste- and value-based criticism that renders large parts of modernist output and history invisible. Under such a dualist hermeneutic, the fact that Henry James’s style is ‘an unlikely by-product’ of the dime story novel, or that Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman or Beckett’s Molloy are strange developments of, and not high modernist oppositions to, the detective novel, becomes unreadable.10 Elsewhere, Nicola Humble has detailed how the categorization and exclusion of the ‘middlebrow’ worked to marginalize women’s writing from the modernist canon, while Robert Scholes has reflected in broader terms on how the critical binaries of high/low and new/old ‘share a tendency to reject or suppress any middle term that might mediate between their extremes’.11 That this bias persisted even long after Joyce’s engagements with the popular had become a key coordinate of Irish modernist criticism12 can be seen in the fact that an author such as Brian O’Nolan was exiled to the margins of the canon owing to his supposed turn from the modernist novel to the daily paper. Yet, as Joseph Brooker observes, given that ‘Joyce himself now compels attention for the ways he found himself in the Irish Homestead or the Sporting Times, for the use he made of that grubby, daily world rather than for his ability to rise above it’, O’Nolan’s multi-genre body of writing in diverse registers for a plurality of media and audiences appears increasingly central to current debates in Irish modernism.13 This shifted perspective has tentatively begun to expand the Irish-modernist canon both horizontally and vertically, from Elaine Sisson’s pitch for reading Synge’s Aran travel essays through their aesthetic relation to ‘emergent discourses of modernity such as photography’14 to chapters in A History of Irish Modernism and Science, Technology and Irish Modernism dedicated to the ‘Irish Architectural Modernism’ of Niall Montgomery, the function of the gramophone in Lennox Robinson’s theatre, and the Irish ‘radio modernism’ of figures such as James Plunkett and Denis Johnston.15

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It is as part of this emergent project of using the lens of intermedia to test and challenge the critical concepts of marginality, othering and major/minor that we see the fuller potential of the attempt – in works such as Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments or Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms16 – to open the conversation to different forms of cultural expression in modernity which can be analysed as modernist without being radically symbolic literatures. If the medial expansion of Irish modernism requires a push outwards beyond the organizing canonical figures and critical dualisms of the field, then surely, in part, a finer distinction to be made in terms of Irish modernism is not the blunt fact of its multimodal or multimedial nature but rather the specifics of its distinct nature as a decentralized network of encounters between so-called high modes and popular genres. How might such an Irish modernist studies respond to Jürgen E. Mueller’s call for critical reflection on ‘the concept and study of media history in terms of dynamic intermedia networks’ which ‘leave their traces in the material itself or the media products, but also in their meanings and in the interactions with their users and recipients’?17 Towards addressing these questions, the volume’s last selection of essays theorizes Irish modernism’s more complex inter- and trans-mediality by rehabilitating not only those modes that have gained critical capital, such as early cinema and the ekphrastic role of the visual arts in Irish modernist poetry, but also occluded practices, such as letter writing, and neglected genres and media, such as Irish-language science fiction, comic strips, illustrations, daily newspaper columns, radio and television. In these contested multimodal spaces, the contributors explore the exchanges and clashes of mass culture, coterie fictions, cultural and state institutions in fin-de-siècle and twentieth-century Irish cultural production. Maebh Long opens this conversation by noting that even as the letters of Irish modernists are made increasingly available – in the Samuel Beckett letters project, or in her own Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien – they rarely take centre stage in our scholarship.18 Correspondence is most commonly studied as a supplement to modernist works, rather than a modernist work in its own right, and is typically mined for its content rather than studied as a form. There is also a noticeable tendency to engage with letters as single-author works, despite the dialogic nature of posted exchanges. Long reflects on alternative scholarly practices for research dealing with correspondence and draws on the idea of a postal imaginary to decentre the solo letter-writer and reconceptualize letter writing as a genre of interaction and connectivity. By bringing the epistolary into conversation with minor history and weak theory, Long points towards an engagement with the grid through which the letter travels: that of the post office, which is thus considered not a modernist monolith but a node in a network of brief encounters. Jack Fennell, author of Irish Science Fiction,19 traces a network of marginalized English and Irish-language anti-science genre fiction published between 1890 and 1940 as an under-acknowledged context and framework for the formation of Irish modernism. By drawing together carnivalesque, science fictional, allegorical and fantastical novels and short fiction by Revivalists and Irish-language modernists such as Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Pádraig Ó Séaghda, L. McManus, Seosamh Ó Torna and Brian O’Nolan, Fennell demonstrates that this cultural current was much more generically diverse and philosophically complex than is commonly implied. By these means, the chapter productively problematizes under-historicized and under-theorized

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critical binaries between ‘spiritual’ Revivalism and ‘rational’ or ‘material/realist’ modernism in an Irish context. Michael Connerty, the author of The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats,20 exposes how high/low critical paradigms work to conceal modernist cultural production by directly addressing the almost complete absence of comic strip material from biographical or art-historical accounts of Jack B. Yeats’s career. Certainly, comic art has suffered a critical neglect in the anglophone world generally and has been accorded a relatively low status as a hybrid medium, a subliterary genre and a mass-produced form predominantly oriented towards a children’s market, but Connerty reveals other sociopolitical factors specific to Yeats’s work. These include the Irish nationalist ambivalence (before and after independence) towards the products of British popular culture, aligned with the identification of Yeats with a traditional construction of national identity, which leaves little space for the British comic strip work in the narrative of his development as an artist. Here, Connerty returns Yeats’s popular and widely read publications The Jester, Comic Cuts and The Funny Wonder to critical awareness and, with them, new cultural and geographical coordinates for Irish modernism through the English comic traditions of music hall and popular theatre, and Victorian/Edwardian humour periodicals and comic publications. Reminding us that the ‘critical vocabulary of modernism’ (impressionism, futurism, Vorticism, etc.) ‘began with the visual arts’,21 Daniel Curran explores how Thomas MacGreevy forges a unique poetic modernism through an ekphrastic encounter between verse and continental visual arts movements. In Curran’s reading, MacGreevy is the premier Irish modernist poet of the Great War, whose aestheticization of the conflict treads on the borders of the imagist movement. This more precise placement of his poetics allows Curran to move beyond standard modernist and historicist coordinates to resituate MacGreevy, and by extension Irish modernist poetry itself, in relation to several overlapping and proximal coordinates ranging from anglophone modernists, imagists and war poets such as Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, to continental art movements and modernist visual artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Catherine Flynn brings the collection to a close by demonstrating that even as Brian O’Nolan’s role as newspaperman is often considered detrimental to his status as a major Irish modernist, this work infused strange new life into his writing. If O’Nolan has been unfavourably contrasted with Irish modernist exiles such as Joyce and Beckett and seen as hampered in his writing by choosing to remain in Ireland and the civil service, the particular constraints and challenges that came with this choice prompted the unprecedented aesthetic innovations of Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn. The multilingual newspaper column is conceived here in contrast to the mode of elegy and decline of the Gaeltacht autobiographies encapsulated in Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s self-designation in the opening passage of An tOileánach as ‘dríodar an chrúiscín’, the ‘dregs of the little jug’; O’Nolan springs as a newspaperman not from the empty jug of old Mother Ireland but from a ‘crúiscín lán’ that addresses Ireland’s new global context. In doing so, the newspaper column establishes new dimensions to Irish modernism, as O’Nolan redirects modernist strategies to a non-literary sphere of representation.

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Notes 1. See Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); the section ‘Literature and the Other Arts’, in Modernism: Volume 1, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007), 449–543; and Cara L. Lewis, Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), which proposes to combine new formalism and the new modernist studies. 2. In line with the argument being developed here, the programme that Joyce was involved in curating for the Volta’s opening night combines modernist medial innovation with diverse popular forms, as it mixed comedy (Devilled Crab) and the fantastic (Bewitched Castle) alongside The Tragedy of Beatrice Cenci, directed by Italian expressionist Mario Caserin and other continental shorts (La Pourponièrre, The First Paris Orphanage) accompanied by a string orchestra. See Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 5. 3. See Damien Keane, ‘His Remastered Voice: Joyce for Vinyl’, in Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019), 144–60. 4. See, for instance, John McCourt, ed., Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010); Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Philip Sicker, Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Michelle Witen, James Joyce and Absolute Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); James Joyce and the Arts, ed. Emma-Louise Silva, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle, European Joyce Studies 29 (Amsterdam | Leiden: Brill | Rodopi, 2020). 5. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 743. 6. Paul Morrison, ‘Queer Modernism’, in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, vol. 2, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 790–4. 7. See Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 86. David Trotter’s Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), for instance, contests the dominant mode of reading the cinematic montage and the fragmentation of modernist literature analogically as an ahistorical and theoretically unsound collapsing of distinct materialities into interchangeable techniques. 8. See Sylvie Mikowski, ed., Ireland and Popular Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014); James O’Sullivan, ‘Modernist Intermediality: The False Dichotomy between High Modernism and Mass Culture’, English Studies 98, no. 3 (2017): 283–309. 9. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 10. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 163–4. Indeed, Matthew Levay’s Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) has demonstrated the extent to which ‘high’ modernists not only read but wrote detective fiction. See also Katherine Ebury, ‘New Contexts for Confession: Brian O’Nolan, Golden Age Crime Fiction and Theodor Reik’, Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 1–22. Available at https://doi.org/10.16995/pr.3351.

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11. Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xii. 12. The cultural studies approach to Joyce has been prominent since at least the 1990s, through collections such as R. B. Kershner, ed., Joyce and Popular Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Recent years have seen this approach extended to other canonical Irish ‘high’ modernists, as in David Pattie and Paul Stewart, eds, Pop Beckett: Intersections with Popular Culture (Stuttgart: IbidemVerlag, 2019). 13. Joseph Brooker, Flann O’Brien (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2005), 108. 14. Elaine Sisson, ‘The Aran Islands and the Travel Essays’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, ed. P. J. Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 52–3. 15. Ellen Rowley, ‘1966: The Binary Conditions of Irish Architectural Modernism’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 394–418; Jeremy Lakoff, ‘Broadcatastrophe! Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama and the Aesthetics of Working It Out’, in Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, ed. Conrad, Parsons and Weng, 160–79; Damien Keane, ‘Time Made Audible: Irish Stations and Radio Modernism’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Castle and Bixby, 330–45; and Susanne S. Cammack, ‘Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait’, in Science, Technology and Irish Modernism, ed. Conrad, Parsons and Weng, 131–44. 16. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 17. Jürgen E. Müller, ‘Intermediality in the Age of Global Media Networks – Including Eleven Theses on its Provocative Power for the Concepts of “Convergence”, “Transmedia Storytelling” and “Actor Network Theory” ’, SubStance 44, no. 3 (2015): 21. 18. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 4 Volumes, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn and George Craig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009–16); and Flann O’Brien, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018). 19. Jack Fennell, Irish Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 20. Michael Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 21. Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism, xii.

12

Letters and weak theory in Irish modernism Maebh Long

Are letters literature, or are they simply, occasionally, literary? Are missives and memos, lying in state in an archival folder or published in the pages of collected letters, modernist works? Or are they addendums to modernist works? The publication of edited collections of letters is heralded as a major event, yet how many monographs or collected essays dedicate themselves to the study of letters alone? In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, the purloined letter is hidden in plain sight – there but invisible. The treatment of letters in scholarship is often similar: the letter is there but we fail to see it, as we keep looking through it. We read its contents eagerly but seldom see the letter as a form: we read the letter writer, rather than the letter; we reflect on the subject of letters rather than on letters as a subject. Despite modernist studies’ turn to the material and to the archive, letters in themselves are often under-utilized: they are prized for the insights they offer to authors, works and contexts but rarely allowed to take centre stage in their own right. We write about little magazines as the birthplace of modernism, but before there are magazines, there are always messages.1 What would modernity be without the post office, and what would modernism be without letters, telegrams, radio programmes and phone calls? This chapter reflects on the potential of the letter and the place of the post office within Irish modernist studies and beyond. It asks what new aspects of the field might come to light if we consider modernist studies’ current engagements with weak theory as a postal turn and speculates on the changes we could see within Irish modernist studies were our engagements to mirror the weakness and power of the post.

Letters, routes and weakness Hugh Kenner described the published volumes of James Joyce’s letters as ‘a second Work in Progress, almost an epistolary novel’, and in my introduction to the correspondence of Brian O’Nolan (pseud. Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen), I described O’Nolan’s letters to the editor as fictions that function collectively in much the same way.2 Is there something more at stake in these comparisons, or in the connections we draw between letters and autobiographies, than a simple recognition of similarities between forms? There is, I suspect, a certain twentieth- and twenty-first-century unease regarding

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posted communication, as despite the long tradition of publishing correspondence, we frequently countersign letters with works of weight and bind them to the solid figure of the single author. Letters, be they formal or intimate, are most usually conversations with implied readers. And yet, as these conversations are impeded by the immediate absence of the interlocutor and the delays caused by the post, letter writers converse with an imagined version of the recipient, whose responses to their words they can guess but do not know. Each letter is a monologue that is first a dialogue only in imagination and subsequently a dialogue only when the epistle receives a reply. These dialogues, of course, are overlayered by their potential to become public addresses; politically active letter writers know that state surveillance renders private dialogues public, and reputation-minded writers inscribe future audiences of scholars and admirers into their missives. Yet, despite the rich potential of letters’ shifting temporal, geographical and emotional spaces, our tendency is to stress the monologic and the present and prioritize the single writer, alone, centre stage. When I edited O’Nolan’s letters, I was intrigued by the web of connections between him and other modernist writers, but this web was always dominated by and filtered through O’Nolan. How might the modernist scene change if we read letters less as single-author studies – the letters of Brian O’Nolan or Elizabeth Bowen or Samuel Beckett – and instead as networked, multi-authored works? Even letters to ourselves take account of multiple selves, and our access to authors’ letters depends on the involvement of numerous people, from the person who deemed the letter worthy of preserving to the archive or library who decided to acquire it, to the editors who organize the correspondence for publication, to the estate overseeing the process. Letters presuppose plurality, and yet conversations are often turned into monologues. There are exceptions, of course, such as the publication of the letters between W. B. and George Yeats, or the letters about Joyce between Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, or the exchanges shared by Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett.3 There is also no question that scholarship on Irish writers has engaged with questions of literary circles, mutual inspiration and collaborative work. The potential remains, however, for work on correspondence to have a ‘death of the single-author’ moment and decentre the acclaimed author to accentuate the postal trails of letters between rooms and offices, reading conversations that evince the shifting, networked relations within modernisms. To engage with letters, and collections of letters, as communiques shuttling between mail bags, and less as series of short personal essays, would be to place the emphasis not on one prestigious figure but on the connections between numerous figures. It would be to read with an eye to omissions and delays and to be intrigued by the transient and the arbitrary. It would allow letters to be, at times, far from belleslettres, while avoiding the urge to use letters written with a literary flourish to confirm that the great writer is always great, even in private, or to call on letters dull with commonplace complaints as proof that exceptional art can be produced even when rooms are cold and plates are empty. In the case of certain authors, everything becomes important, which in turn reinforces the author’s importance. In the introduction to the first volume of Yeats’s letters, John Kelly explains that the letters project will stretch to twelve volumes because ‘Yeats is a great poet and the more we can know of him

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and his work the more we shall be able to appreciate his achievement in its entirety’.4 Similarly, in their introduction to the first volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck write that ‘no special pleading need be made as to the importance of even perfunctory letters from the hand of a writer as important as Beckett’.5 The brilliance of Yeats and Beckett is by no means here in dispute, nor is the reward in publishing all of their writing, including notes, postcards and telegrams. But perhaps the real potential of letters is less in the strong, scholarly scaffolding they provide to the few great masters and more in the smaller, brief connections they reveal between writers and between contexts. In their introduction to ‘Remapping Irish Modernism’, a special issue of Irish Studies Review, Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth critique the tendency for Irish modernism to be triangulated through Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. They call for a reorientation of the discipline, which would require scholars to reconceptualize the ‘size, scale, distance, terrain and perspective’ of modernism in Ireland.6 Similarly, Joe Cleary’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism asks how we might ‘reconfigure’ Irish modernism if we shift our gaze from this literary trinity and look instead to the ‘tapestry of modernist artistic achievement’.7 Neither Ó Donghaile, Smyth, nor Cleary are calling for scholarship to ignore the contributions of canonical figures. Rather, they invite a formation of Irish modernist studies less concerned with fixed categories determined by the works of a small number of major Irish or international figures and more engaged with the shifting relations, styles and interests that can be mapped between fluid groupings of different writers. Modernism, particularly in its Anglo-European incarnation, has long been about the coterie, but if we follow the trails of letters, we see that around, through and underneath the clusters of Bloomsbury sets and Left Bank intellectuals are a multitude of tendrils reaching through the mail and extending through the postal service’s communication links – telegrams, telephones and the radio. This is not a new point; the ‘tangled mesh of modernists’ in Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990) traces weak and strong links between modernist writers, some of whom never met in person, but were linked through mutual friends or the writing of reviews and critiques. Yet, the potential of letters as a form through which to map weaker, fleeting connections has yet to be fully realized in modernist studies, and despite the publication of the letters of so many modernists, modernist studies both in Ireland and in general awaits an epistolary, postal moment to permeate its approaches to the field. Modernism is not, or not only, a collection of great works firmly fixed in the literary canon but a postal service rhizome, with roots tracing mail routes through a disordered, fertile series of literary and cultural affiliations. Dominant constellations can be decentred by the myriad of smaller, briefer connections, and by a reading practice attuned to the epistolary, we can trace major and minor notes in Irish modernism and allow new patterns to emerge. Letters allow us to trace all manner of links, between Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Beckett and Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir and Eugène Ionesco. Yeats writes to Lady Gregory, who writes to Joyce. Brendan Behan corresponds with John Ryan about Anthony Cronin, John Ryan pens O’Nolan a letter about Dominic Behan. Joyce writes to James Johnson Sweeney, Sweeney writes to Niall

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Montgomery, Montgomery writes to O’Nolan. Con Leventhal corresponds with Joyce and O’Nolan and Beckett. Yeats writes to Seán O’Casey to criticize The Silver Tassie, O’Casey writes to O’Nolan to praise An Béal Bocht. Joyce and Yeats write private letters to Seán Ó Faoláin; Flann O’Brien writes public letters to and about Ó Faoláin. Letters from Hilton Edwards link Beckett to O’Nolan. Graham Greene writes to Elizabeth Bowen, O’Nolan to Graham Greene. Yeats with Ethel Mannin, Mannin with O’Nolan. Letters present us with a modernism of constantly shifting parts, as links are made in hope or condemnation, about art and about money, directly or through degrees of separation. These networks are bound by historical circumstances, as the popularity of the author during their lifetime, the dependability of those who inherit their public and private writings, social conventions, gendered expectations, social classes and many other factors determine if scholars are left letters to follow. Publishing biases, critical biases and patriarchal structures that, as Virginia Woolf puts it, align against Judith Shakespeare mean that male voices currently dominate female voices, and colonial legacies mean that letters in English are in greater published number than those in Irish. Even a decentred postal network will perform these social biases, but mapping letters will always be about gaps, omissions and palimpsests. Jacques Derrida uses the postal service to insist that every text can always signify differently: in David Wills’s concise formulation, once a ‘letter can not arrive, quite simply, it cannot arrive’.8 That is, it is not that occasionally we do not understand a piece of writing but that it can never fully and completely be understood. There is always more that a message can mean, and so it is always still in transit, never quite arriving: weak. As such, the postcards that Derrida writes in ‘Envois’ (Dispatches), and by extension the notes that we all write, are dead letters, as all letters, to an extent, go astray. Reading the epistolary in this way brings Irish letters into conversation with weak theory, an approach that is currently generating much debate within modernist studies. Wai Chee Dimock’s 2013 essay on weak theory in relation to Henry James, Colm Tóibín and Yeats was followed by Paul Saint-Amour’s special issue on weak theory in Modernism/modernity in 2018, which as of 2021 has led to four rounds of responses and one round of ‘responses to responses’ in Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus.9 In her article Dimock argues that a ‘weak theory’ is a theory that is not sovereign, in that it does not lay claim to a clearly delimited territory, but is leaky and rhizomatic, exhibiting a ‘breakdown of immunities’ and playing out on ‘extended and locally mediated relational threads’.10 A weak theory is one that does not attempt to control a discipline by stipulating strict requirements for inclusion but is tentative, provisional and shifting. It recognizes an academic field, supposedly predicated on clear borders and recognisable, repeatable, knowable content, to be ‘a playing field semiautonomous at many points, open to any number of feedback loops, and open to emerging forms arising at different locales, each ordered in a different way, and each defining its own working coordinates’.11 Weakness means disorder and uncertainty, but it also means complexity, insight and the recognition of difference within networked global flows. Weakness replaces a continental, imperial centre, around which everything revolves – or is triangulated, as Ó Donghaile and Smyth put it – with a series of archipelagos that show countries and coteries to be variegated and interlinked.12 The

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critical lens of a weak, postal modernism gains particular relevance in the context of Irish modernism, for which the stakes of the fleeting, networked movements of the wider postal community are particularly high, as it was for so long a continental modernism, dominated by familiar, illustrious figures resident in Europe and connected to Ireland primarily by exile and the post office. By joining Joyce and Beckett to Ireland through a weak, postal service imaginary we embed them in a larger, more vibrant Irish modernism of diffuse connections: we decentre the continent to network islands. Yet, interlinked archipelagos are not without hierarchy, and connectivity is not innocent of domination: as an instrument of state control and surveillance, first by the colonial administration and then the independent state, a consideration of a rhizomatic Irish modernism must also consider the ways our weak postal connections are facilitated and interrupted by the power of the postal service. By controlling letters, as well as the new media of telegrams and the radio, and by being embroiled in espionage and censorship, the postal networks of modernity are bound and tainted by strong state power. In moving from the strong (major figures, continental/imperial control) to the weak (minor connection, postal relations), we cannot overlook the power concealed within the weak itself (the combined strength of the rhizome, the postal service). Such power, which we explore in the following section, might be less important from the perspective of the heart of empire, but a postcolonial modernism cannot ignore the ways that the tendrils of control accumulate. The ‘new’, expanding modernist studies is a place of vernacular modernisms, bad modernisms, geomodernisms, planetary modernisms, archipelagic modernisms and, in its open, permeable borders, pertains to a weakness that is productive of new thought and engagement. Current definitions of modernism tend towards descriptions of pliable, moveable units, as we see in Jessica Berman’s description of modernism as ‘a dynamic set of relationships, practices, problematics and cultural engagements with modernity rather than a static canon of works, a given set of formal devices, or a specific range of beliefs’.13 Or, in Susan Stanford Friedman’s words, modernism is ‘the expressive dimension of modernity’, which ‘encompasses a range of styles among creative forms that share family resemblances based on an engagement with the historical conditions of modernity in a particular location’.14 In both cases, modernism is that which is fundamentally concerned with modernity, but modernity is recognized as comprising multiple moving parts, some major, some minor, some found in multiple locations, some in isolated occurrences. The critical value of ‘modernism’ as an organizing principle does not lie in a strong ability to organize and systematize but in a weaker capacity to facilitate reorganizations and connect local specificities across transnational spaces. The question, therefore, is not whether certain Irish authors meet the criteria for inclusion within a modernist framework but what our studies of authors, be they progressive or conservative, cosmopolitan or nationalist, avant-garde or realist, can gain from modernism understood as a network – a postal service – comprising multiple parts communicating across villages and seas. Modernism is becoming postmodernism, so to speak, as modernist studies is going postal. If a weak theory can have a perfect form, it is the letter, as it is a form that is almost no form at all. How can one draw fixed and firm boundaries to the epistle? A letter can be a lengthy essay, or a few lines dashed off in haste. It can be sent without salutation

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and sign off, or sent addressing itself to all, and therefore to none in particular. A letter might never meet the hand of postal worker or messenger, but rest, unposted, in a hallway drawer. A letter can be anonymous and unsigned, or legitimized with many signatures. Letters are the direct outpouring of intimate passions: ‘In a man’s letters … his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast; whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process; nothing is inverted, nothing distorted: you see systems in their elements; you discover actions in their motives.’15 And yet, letters are a performance in which writers wear many masks, altering tone, vocabulary and personality depending on the recipient. Letters blur the public and the private to provide news, commentary and chatter. In their border-crossing openness, letters are fundamentally weak. A weak, open form for a weak, open theory. Once a field becomes interested in the variable and transient – brief liaisons rather than entrenched relationships, the connections between various ‘minor’ individuals instead of the singularity of major names – its focus grows to include aspects such as the domestic, the middlebrow and the everyday. Increasingly, modernism is making room for writing and lives, or aspects of lives, that are commonplace, while problematizing the assumption that what constitutes high or low, strong or weak, extraordinary or average is fixed, or indeed that these binaries have longevity. Modernism, that is, is giving space to minor histories: ‘the presence of quasi-events, or events whose eventful status is in dispute, inside the theatre of major history’.16 A minor history is one told in the ‘small dramas that inhabit the lower depths [of a discourse] in the guise of footnotes, fragments, anecdotes, digressions, fleeting testimonies, parentheses, curious asides, affective depositions and the like’.17 Minor histories are the ‘structures of feeling and force that in “major” history might be otherwise displaced’.18 While the large affairs of state or literature are recorded for posterity, minor histories are those small, insignificant occurrences, reactions and hesitations whose passing is noted, sometimes whimsically, sometimes incidentally, but most commonly in passing. Minor histories are accounts told in marginalia. Personal letters are a minor history: personal, affective footnotes to the major works of the literary canon. They inhabit the lower depths, providing us with epigraphs and asides, supplementing engagement with the major texts, adding context and biographical information: so often considered interesting but not quite integral. Domestic, sometimes trifling, and deeply human, letters are full of aches and pains and financial concerns. The publication of letters by an important author is a major event, but as fragments, anecdotes and parentheses, letters themselves are predominantly minor. They tell critics of the conditions under which texts are written; they provide us with glimmers of authorial intention and their addition to scholarship is, at times, little more than supplementary embellishments and scholarly flourishes. And yet, as Sudesh Mishra notes, minor histories haunt and interrupt major accounts, providing narratives that destabilize dominant themes. To listen, he writes, to the seemingly inconsequential is to hear ‘history murmuring in the minor key against its own striving for plenitude and finality’.19 To engage with the minor is to engage with the strength of the weak, and not only to introduce affect and intimacy to our work but also to further undercut totalizing illusions of completion and full representation. There is always another footnote, and always another letter. Always another way the hurried

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note could have been written. Always another link between correspondents, always another complexity arising from the seemingly insignificant.

The post office, roots and power Once we engage with the dead letter offices of the many, we cease to triangulate Irish modernism through the dominant trinity of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett and view it through the perspective of a postal imaginary. This imaginary can accommodate vast connections: in 1914–15, there were some 192 million letters mailed within Ireland.20 Letters had ceased to be the domain of the wealthy in 1773, at least for those in the capital, when the Dublin Penny Post offered a cheap and swift way to correspond across the city and suburbs: at the height of its services in 1822, it offered six deliveries a day.21 Reforms to the Royal Mail in 1840 made penny postage available to the public across Britain and Ireland,22 and as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, and the mail moved from the coach to the train, letters sped across fields and towns. There was correspondence to mothers and cousins, lovers and bank managers. There were letters to newspapers written with pomposity, and letters to bishops written in desperation.23 Letters were dispatched to businesses on the other side of the city, and letters mailed to family on the other side of the world.24 For those abroad, modern Ireland was mediated by crossed-out words in letters, static on the radio and money sent by wire. The first telegraph line in Ireland opened in Dalkey in 1844, and the Telegraph Act of 1868 gave the government a monopoly of the telegraph service to the Post Office of Britain and Ireland. By 1877, there were telegraph stations across the country, and as George Griffiths wrote from Wexford with pride, ‘we can communicate with almost all parts of the world in a couple of hours’.25 When the potential of telephones was realized, the Royal Post Office insisted that these were covered by the Telegraph Act, and a successful court appeal in November 1880 stipulated that telephone exchange business could only be carried out with the permission of the postmaster general. The first telephone exchange opened in Ireland in 1880, and by independence in 1922, there were 19,218 telephones or 12,500 subscribers, served by 192 exchanges in the 26 counties.26 For those like Brendan Behan who did not like to write letters, the post office facilitated communication through the lines.27 But, as technology grows, and comes under the remit of the postal services, the grafting of weakness and power comes ever more into focus. The shifting rhizome of the postal network, with all its weak connections, is facilitated by a powerful institution whose roots go back to Oliver Cromwell’s Postal Act of 1657. The year 1926 was greeted by the first broadcast by Ireland’s radio station, 2RN (‘to Erin’), which was part of the portfolio of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. The postal service was by then quietly in control of a national imaginary propagated through the mass communication of the air waves. From 1928 to 1973, broadcasting issued from the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin, providing the listener at home and abroad with music, live sporting events, sponsored programmes, quizzes, the news and culture. The voices of some of its presenters and commentators provided the soundtrack to Irish lives: Tim Pat Coogan recounts that when he attended an

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All-Ireland final in person, rather than listening to the commentary Michael O’Hehir had provided on the radio from 1938, the live experience seemed like a poor substitute for the thrills and significance that the radio could bring.28 When one follows postal routes, one also follows money: the Post Office Savings Bank was established in 1861, and when it was introduced to Ireland in 1862, it became the largest branch banking institution and the ‘dominant institution of “thrift” ’ in Ireland.29 An international money order service allowing for the transfer of small sums of money was set up by the post office and their savings banks, which in a period of increasing emigration furthered their popularity.30 The UK’s Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, which Cormac Ó Gráda describes as ‘the most radical and far-reaching piece of welfare legislation enacted in Ireland in the twentieth century’, gave pensions to Ireland from 1 January 1909, and these were administered through the post office, which further stamped it as the benevolent face of colonial control.31 The strength of the postal service, of course, lies in its ability not only to connect but also to disconnect, a fact that is of vital importance within a colonial modernity. On 8 August 1914, the British government passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which transferred intelligence gathering in Ireland, and legal action responding to this intelligence, to military control. As part of DORA, postal censorship was established, which meant the interception, examination and potential disposal of certain communication. With the exception of the Pearse brothers, every leader of the 1916 Rising had his or her post censored in the first twenty-one months of the First World War,32 and Ben Novick writes that in December 1915, seventy-one censorship warrants were running simultaneously.33 The efficiency of the postal service in Dublin meant that the suppression was readily evident to those being censored: when letters could take less than an hour to cross the city, consistently delayed receipt of mail was suspicious. Letters began to be written with an awareness of covert readers, and code words began to creep into correspondence, with Sinn Féin meetings referred to as ‘dancing classes’ and those likely to be arrested described as ‘ill’.34 As Darrell Figgis wrote in a letter intercepted at the end of December 1915, ‘I must write, not that there is much to say, or rather there is much that can’t be said, but would not let be suffered to go through the post’.35 A postal modernism, particularly in sites of colonial control, is always a political, polyvalent modernism, as the post office is an agent of state surveillance, and private letters are always potentially public. In our Irish post(al)modern scene, polysemy is escalated by political exigency, which makes the letter even less likely to arrive. Prior to Irish Independence, ‘improper’ books were controlled by statutes including the Post Office Act (1908), which prevented the posting of ‘any indecent or obscene print, painting, photograph, lithograph, engraving, book, or card, or any indecent or obscene article’.36 The censorship that the British operated in Ireland from June 1916 to August 1919 led to the banning of books associated with the 1916 Rising, including P. S. O’Hegarty’s Sinn Féin: A Bird’s Eye View (1917) and Redmond Howard’s Sinn Féin (1917), and nationalist literature continued to be seized during the War of Independence.37 But it was modernist literature that provoked the greatest censorship in Ireland after 1922. The Censorship of Publications Act 1929 led to the banning of major international modernist writers including Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway,

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William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann and Irish authors including Joyce, Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Sean Ó Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Austin Clarke, Kate O’Brien and Sean O’Casey. The Knights of Saint Columbanus had maintained vigilantes at ports and postal depots since 1922.38 The Irish postal service kept a list of novels it detained, including Ulysses in the 1920s, and the American post office’s refusal to distribute copies of the Little Review containing instalments of Ulysses led Margaret Anderson to make cuts to the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode.39 In 1946, a joint customs and post office department called the ‘Bookscale’ was formed, tasked with examining books entering the country by parcel post. The larger consignments that came in crates by sea were checked by customs and post office officials at the ports, and suspicious books were returned to the publisher or burnt.40 The post office thus shaped colonial and postcolonial Irish modernity by facilitating communication, interrupting conversations, transferring money and regulating cultural lives. As Ferguson puts it, with ‘services covering so many aspects of everyday life – from mails and banking to telegraphs and telephones – the Post Office was the greatest department of the state’.41 Pádraig Pearse checked a long history of imperial control when he read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the steps of the GPO. When the building, further battered during the Civil War, was rebuilt and reopened in 1929, W. T. Cosgrave presented it as ‘symbolic of the new order. As this building has come back to us, renewed and beautiful, so is the Irish nation progressing in the path of prosperity and peace.’42 The post office is always belated, as it circulates communiques written hours, days, weeks earlier. Its venerability as an institution further entrenches it in a history of colonial control and rebellion. Yet, its ability to embrace and adapt to changing technologies and ideologies means that it was also a place of reinvention, a site of a modern Ireland making it new. Modernity is a time of rupture and the neoteric, but it is also a time of nostalgia. Modernity, particularly in countries embroiled in or overthrowing colonial power, gazes at tradition while moving towards the future; within an institution such as the post office, the old and the new overlap, which renders it all the more a place of control. And yet, while we must continue to register this strength, perhaps the greatest gain to scholarship does not stem from recognizing the post office’s iconic, emblematic importance, that is, its old imperial strength and new authority in independent Ireland. Rather, we need to concern ourselves with the ways the weak and the powerful aspects of institutions and imaginations interact and track the transitory, fleeting interactions and connections that the postal service enabled and obstructed. We cannot ignore the reach and power of the post office, and must in particular reckon with any strength that, like the purloined letter, has come to be hidden in plain sight, but we are well practiced at mapping dominant figures and fixtures. To the solidity of the post office, we need to add the potential of the epistolary. We need to think of the postal service as the sign system itself and understand it in a way that ‘avoids submerging all the differences, mutations, scansions, structures of postal regimes into one and the same great central post office’.43 Rather than use the post office to create a new modernist monolith, then, the post office can be figured as part of a postal imaginary, not a root but a route – a node that is undeniably a strong one, but that is embedded a network of brief encounters, a point of communication and control, a site of agency and interruption, identity and failure.

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How, finally, might we read in terms of a weak, postal imaginary? An engagement of this type might follow the chance encounters that letters allow, enabling footnotes to tell their story, and prioritizing minor interventions instead of, or in connection with, major works. It might take a form similar to Emily Ridge’s ‘Close Reading an Archival Object: Reflections on a Postcard from Salvador Dalí to Stefan Zweig, Circa 1938’. In this essay, Ridge notes that we tend to plumb the archive in ‘order to add detail, light, shade, colour, or, indeed, a backdrop to our analytical endeavours’ but rarely position the archive outside this supporting role.44 Ridge inverts the relation between footnote and text and uses Zweig’s novel The Post Office Girl to add detail, lighting, support and context to a single piece of correspondence: a postcard. In telling the minor history of the postcard, and her encounter with it, Ridge triangulates Dalí, Zweig and Sigmund Freud, with Derrida as a shadowy fourth, and reflects on postal obstructions, the material form of the postcard, the ways we read a card’s image, the clarity or confusion of the sender’s text and the relation between the places of transmission and reception. Using a postal imaginary to traverse time and space, Ridge follows a minor connection between major names, and while she views her work as ‘reading an archival object creatively’,45 she performs what I have been suggesting as a weak, postal engagement. A weak engagement with the letters of Irish modernist writers would engage with unexpected networks, transitory notes and ephemeral ties. It would explore the value of replacing single-author essays with fragmentary conversations and reconsider major literary contributions in terms of involvements considered minor. It could reconfigure stream-of-consciousness techniques as avant-garde reworkings of the epistolary novel and the gaps and silences of modernist texts as the evidence of dead letter offices. It would stamp modernist works as missives and letters as modernist works that circle through the postal services, never quite arriving, strong in their weakness.

Notes 1. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43. 2. Hugh Kenner, ‘The World – Gritty, Particular’, review of The Letters of James Joyce vols. II and III, in National Review 19 (5 September 1967): 969; Maebh Long, ‘Selection’, in Flann O’Brien, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), xxi. 3. W. B. Yeats and George Yeats, W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, ed. Edward M. Burns (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008); and Elizabeth Bowen, Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett (London: P. Marshall, 1948). 4. John Kelly, ‘General Introduction’, in W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), xxxiii. 5. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, ‘Introduction to Volume I’, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940,

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ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), lxxxvii. 6. Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Gerry Smyth, ‘Introduction: Remapping Irish Modernism’, Irish Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2018): 299. 7. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2. See also Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–24. 8. David Wills, ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/“Envois”/Derrida’, SubStance 13, no. 2, issue 43 (1984): 22. 9. Paul Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 438–59. 10. Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín and W. B. Yeats’, Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 732–53. 11. Ibid., 737. 12. For more on the relation between modernism and archipelagos, see John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the British and Irish Isles, 1890–1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Maebh Long, ‘Aphorisms and Archipelagos: Relationality in Modernist Studies’, in Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the Present, ed. Kostas Boyiopoulos and Michael Shallcross (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Oceania, the Planetary and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda’, in A New Oceania: Modernism and Modernity in the Pacific, ed. Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long (London: Routledge, 2019). 13. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7–8. 14. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 432. 15. Samuel Johnson, letter to Mrs Thrale, 27 October 1777, The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. vol. 1 (New York: George Dearborn, 1837), 519. 16. Sudesh Mishra, ‘ “Bending Closer to the Ground”: Girmit as Minor History’, Australian Humanities Review 52 (2012): 5–17. 17. Ibid. 18. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 7. 19. Mishra, ‘Bending Closer to the Ground’, 6. 20. Ben Novick, ‘Postal Censorship in Ireland, 1914–16’, Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 123 (1991): 350. 21. Stephen Ferguson, The GPO: 200 Years of History (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014), 12; J. Stafford Johnson, ‘The Dublin Penny Post – 1773–1840’, Dublin Historical Record 4, no. 3 (1942): 81, 88. 22. Ibid., 93. 23. In Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Lindsey Earner-Byrne analyses over four thousand letters written to request aid from the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Edward Byrne, between 1922 and 1940. 24. The Irish Emigration Database contains over four thousand letters dating from 1700 to 1940, with the majority dating from 1820 to 1920. The database is hosted by Queen’s

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University Belfast’s Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. http://www.dippam.ac.uk/ied. 25. George Griffiths, Chronicles of the County Wexford, Being a Record of Memorable Incidents, Disasters, Social Occurrences and Crimes, Also, Biographies of Eminent Persons, &c., &c., Brought Down to the Year 1877 (Enniscorthy: Watchman Office, 1877), 15. 26. Roddy Flynn, ‘The Development of Universal Telephone Service in Ireland 1880– 1993’, unpublished PhD thesis, Dublin City University, 1998, 118. 27. Brendan Behan, Letters of Brendan Behan, ed. Edward H. Mikhail (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), ix. 28. Qtd in Raymond Boyle, ‘From our Gaelic Fields: Radio, Sport and Nation in PostPartition Ireland’, Media, Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1992): 628. 29. Eoin McLaughlin, ‘ “Profligacy in the Encouragement of Thrift”: Savings Banks in Ireland, 1817–1914’, Business History 56, no. 4 (2014): 580, 569. 30. Ibid., 582. 31. Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘ “The Greatest Blessing of All”: The Old Age Pension in Ireland’, Past & Present 175 (2002): 132. 32. Katherine Ebury’s chapter in this volume analyses the letters of the 1916 Rising leaders via Derrida’s writing on the seductive allure of the death penalty. 33. Novick, ‘Postal Censorship in Ireland, 1914–16’, 346, 351. 34. Ibid., 350. 35. Ibid., 356. 36. The Post Office Act, 1906, UK, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1908/48/ contents/enacted. 37. Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘A Dark Chapter: Censorship and the Irish Writer’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000, ed. Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 288–9. 38. Evelyn Bolster, The Knights of Saint Columbanus (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), 50, qtd in Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘ “The Best Banned in Ireland”: Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950’, The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 152. 39. Ó Drisceoil, ‘A Dark Chapter’, 289; Chris Forster, Filthy Material: Material Modernism and the Media of Obscenity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 157. 40. Ó Drisceoil, ‘The Best Banned in Ireland’, 152. 41. Ferguson, The GPO, 13. 42. W. T. Cosgrave speaking at the reopening of the GPO in 1929, qtd in Ferguson, The GPO, 149. 43. Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 66. 44. Emily Ridge, ‘Close Reading an Archival Object: Reflections on a Postcard from Salvador Dalí to Stefan Zweig, Circa 1938’, Papers on Language and Literature 55, no. 1 (2019): 33. 45. Ibid., 47.

13

The machine in the (Holy) Ghost: Anti-scientific literature, genre fiction and Irish modernism, 1890–1940 Jack Fennell

The increasingly unsustainable idea that Ireland was uniformly hostile to modernism at the turn of the twentieth century arises from critical assumptions of the nation’s totalizing parochialism, conservatism and religious fundamentalism. Seamus Deane, for example, refers to ‘the cultural regressiveness of a polity that had rephrased spiritual supremacy into Catholic triumphalism and a provincial, censorious and illiberal hatred of modernity’.1 One key element of this critical commonplace is the oft-cited ‘anti-science’ attitude of Irish culture, which was to an extent reflected in its literature: Deane, again, helpfully summarizes this attitude in the writings of W. B. Yeats and Pádraig Pearse, who both equated Irishness with ‘an anti-modernistic spirit’, the consequence of which being, ‘if it was industrial, technological, mass-produced – then it was British. If it was pre-industrial, agrarian, hand-crafted – then it was Irish.’2 The political historian Tom Garvin further links this attitude to Irish conceptions of citizenship and nationhood, stating that the secular ideals of the Enlightenment were ‘commonly blotted out by Catholicism’, with the result that the weakening of the Church’s social power ‘makes us Irish pretty vulnerable to the new superstitions’ of nationalism, fundamentalism and socialism.3 Here, I want to re-examine marginalized English- and Irish-language texts published between 1890 and 1940 in which an apparent anti-scientific attitude is undoubtedly legible, including novels and short fiction by Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Pádraig Ó Séaghda, [Charlotte] L. McManus, Seosamh Ó Torna and Brian O’Nolan. I argue that this anti-modern, anti-scientific cultural current is certainly a real force in the formation of fin-de-siècle Irish cultural production but that it was much more philosophically complex than is implied in the accounts offered by Deane and Garvin. By tracing an alternative to more standard accounts of Irish anti-science intellectual movements as foils for continental modernists, I demonstrate the extent to which this philosophical complexity is reflected in Irish carnivalesque, science fictional, allegorical and fantastical works produced at the time.

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The horns of a trilemma Sean Lysaght attributes the perception of an anti-scientific emphasis in the cultural Revival to nationalist critics’ resentment at ‘the virtual monopoly enjoyed by Protestant Ireland of [sic] Irish image-making’: in other words, the concept is a projection based upon the notion that ‘science was, in most of its manifestations, another aspect of power, authority and respectability’.4 However, there were, in fact, multiple Irish responses to scientific endeavour, be it theoretical advances or new developments in material practice, in fields ranging from biology to quantum physics and technological innovation, and not all of them can be simply attributed to religious fervour or kneejerk political reaction. Plenty of authors and artists were ‘accommodationist’ in their outlook (that is, they tried to incorporate new scientific discoveries into their personal beliefs without compromising either), while others adopted stances that they felt were culturally mandated, regardless of personal conviction; others were equivocal unless the issue was pressed, and others still were apathetic. For one thing, scientific education in Ireland was often politicized, and this politicization mandated an attitude of accommodation between science and faith. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-1800s, travelling scientists staged public lectures on scientific topics throughout rural Ireland, presenting them in such a way that an audience of non-experts would at least find them entertaining. However, these public lectures were the brainchild of British political and religious radicals and their Irish disciples (such as Joseph Priestley, Thomas Dix Hincks and Richard Kirwan) and initially were staged with the longer-term goal of exposing the labouring classes to a rationalist discourse that would prompt them to question the legitimacy of social and political hierarchies.5 To ensure its reception and acceptance, scientific knowledge had to be carefully presented in such a way that it did not contradict religious teaching: instead, the travelling lecturers emphasized that greater knowledge of the natural world could be equated to a better understanding and appreciation of God’s creation.6 As Enda Leaney points out, this approach was also necessary because the predominantly rural audiences had little practical use for the scientific information being imparted – hence, ‘most members of the Irish lecture-going public appreciated science primarily because it validated religion’.7 There were, however, more combative positions to be taken. For example, Auguste Comte, in The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–42, translated into English in 1853), presents what he calls ‘the Law of Three Stages’. According to this model, human societies progress from a theological stage (characterized by personified gods) to a metaphysical stage (in which the divine becomes abstract) and ultimately to a positivist stage, in which rationality and the scientific method supplant the need for religion altogether. In the years following the Great Famine, Comte’s sociology was championed in Ireland by Donegal-born economist John Kells Ingram, who was convinced that social phenomena ‘were data from which a comprehensive science of history could inductively be built’.8 According to the Law of Three Stages, the accommodationist approach was by necessity a temporary arrangement. On the other side of the divide, with particular significance for a majority-Catholic country like Ireland, Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) decried any human

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reasoning that excluded God, condemning pluralism, modernity and the separation of church and state – though it did not make any categorical statements against scientific research per se.9 Though the wording of the encyclical leaves some room for accommodation, its interpretation by the faithful occurred in a historical moment coloured by Comte’s anti-theistic philosophy and the furore over the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, by itself, the Holy See’s stance on secular modernity does not fully account for the emergence of the antiscientific attitude under discussion.10 On the one hand, Irish nationalism as an ideology was generally indifferent to science rather than specifically hostile to it, regarding it as a ‘peripheral concern’11; on the other, a great many of Ireland’s genuine political grievances were derived from sectarian discrimination, meaning that surrendering one’s faith was tantamount to disowning the ancestors who had been persecuted for it. German philosopher Hans Albert frames the problematic trade-off between the ideal of objective certainty and the practical compromise of ‘sufficient justification’ through the ‘Munchausen trilemma’ – named after the story in which Baron Munchausen hoists himself and his horse out of a swamp by pulling upwards on his own hair. The central problem of the trilemma is that justification through proof potentially opens the door to endless demands for further proof. For Albert, there are three possible responses to this problem: first, to keep supplying proofs forever in an ‘infinite regress’; second, to argue in a ‘logical circle’ by using the proposition to validate its own proof; or third, to break off the process entirely.12 Out of the three responses, the last is perhaps the most preferable, but it still involves ‘an arbitrary suspension of the principle of sufficient justification’, by recourse to ‘convictions that bear the stamp of truth and therefore must be believed’.13 In other words, the ‘stopping point’ for any kind of inquiry is axiomatic. When applied to the distinction between science and religion, the trilemma implies an irreducible subjectivity to either side. At its mildest, this gulf of contrasting subjectivities can be read as a ‘difference of opinion’ that invites reconciliation, compromise or accommodation; at worst, it becomes an irreconcilable clash of ideologies.

Positivism and piety For those who were genuinely opposed to science on religious grounds alone, positivism and empiricism appeared as looming threats, and as Juliana Adelman points out, fundamentalist Catholic and Protestant clergymen were equally vocal in their opposition to ‘materialistic’ science.14 They regarded positivism almost as an infectious disease, communicable through the written word, regardless of form or genre, and argued that to read the work of a positivist was to risk being subconsciously influenced towards atheism.15 It is at the end of the nineteenth century that we find the least-ambiguous examples of Irish anti-scientific fiction, two of which I will briefly discuss below. Published under the pseudonym ‘Sirius’, Edward Martyn’s Morgante the Lesser: His Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds (1890) tells the story of a grotesque giant who

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institutes the philosophy of ‘Enterism’, named after the Greek word for bowels.16 Enterism, which treats the stomach as the true seat of learning rather than the brain and promotes the pursuit of sensual gratification as the highest moral action, soon becomes a global phenomenon. The giant travels from London to Paris to Rio de Janeiro and back again with his acolytes, getting into a number of absurd adventures, and the novel climaxes with his ignoble death. Martyn was a central figure of the cultural revival movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being a cousin and confidante to George Moore, a co-founder of the Irish Literary Theatre with Yeats and Lady Gregory, and later the founder of the Theatre of Ireland, which regularly staged plays by international modernists such as Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg alongside Irish works. Thus, Martyn’s embeddedness in the Revival lends his work historical value, and for all its jejune excesses, Morgante the Lesser is worth examining for the ways in which it documents and articulates a philosophical standpoint that assuredly did not exist in a vacuum. For Martyn, who reportedly passed his spare time at his family’s castle reading biographies of St Augustine and St John Chrysostom,17 it seems that nihilism, materialism, atheism and solipsism are interchangeable, and all of Morgante’s ancestors advance this dubious philosophy one way or another.18 The family’s foremost aim is ‘to free the human mind from the trammels of authority; to make every man his own theologian’, and their lineage includes infamous heretics and notable freethinkers.19 His iconoclasm is well received by the sceptics who hold sway at Balliol College in Oxford – so much so that when he announces ‘the destruction of churches is my gift to the human race’, the local atheists tear apart and eat a camel in an ecstatic frenzy.20 Morgante soon develops the habit of swallowing wind, which in sufficient quantities can so stoke the faculty of self-esteem that the subject’s eyes turn inward, ‘to gaze ecstatically and uninterruptedly at the cerebral paradise within’.21 This habit eventually leads to Morgante’s death, as his presence in a London tavern attracts a colossal crowd of admirers; the resulting surfeit of praise causes him to swell up so much that he explodes and dies.22 In the epilogue, we are informed that following the explosion, Morgante’s hip bones were examined by a biologist and found to be not human, leading to speculations that he was in fact the ‘Missing Link’.23 Morgante’s carnivalesque gluttony resonates with a well-known fundamentalist canard, in that he rejects religion because he simply does not want to countenance anything that may impede his self-gratification.24 This speaks directly to the axiomatic ‘stopping point’ inherent in every ideological position: because of this irreducible subjectivity, contradictory beliefs can feel like personal attacks, and this is where Martyn’s attempted satire fails – he is too emotionally invested in avenging a perceived injury. Other authors were better able to articulate their concerns without going to quite such Rabelaisian lengths. In the 1891 novel History of a World of Immortals Without a God, published as by ‘Antares Skorpios’, a shared pseudonym of Jane Barlow and her father, Rev. James William Barlow, the misanthropic physician and occultist Gervaas Van Varken wanders the globe, looking for a way to change himself into something other than human, and in Tibet he learns how to teleport himself magically. His hatred of humanity inspires him to use this ability to travel to the planet Venus (referred to as ‘Hesperos’ in the

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text), which turns out to be a utopian world without death, disease or starvation, where universal equality is taken for granted, and society is communal and organized according to socialist principles.25 Rev. Barlow, a clergyman and Vice-Provost of Trinity College, is acknowledged as the author of the story, but Jane (in addition to her work on the Irish landscape and peasantry) is remembered as a philosophical science fiction writer in her own right, and the ‘Antares Skorpios’ pseudonym was her invention.26 Despite all the Hesperians’ scientific achievements, they have failed to discover their origins.27 They realize that ‘Something’ created them, but ‘the Something either could not or would not speak to them’, which is a cause of great sorrow and confusion; some of them build temples and worship the ‘Unknown God’.28 When Van Varken has acclimatized to their world, they quiz him about Earth, thinking that it may hold some clue to the nature of the Unknown God, and at this point, his misanthropy re-emerges in force. Asked to describe Earth, Van Varken gives a hellish illustration of its climate, physical geography and animal life. Every aspect of human life is denigrated, from reproduction to aging to death, with special ire reserved for education, warfare, the prevalence of disease, hatred and ‘the low civilization in which the masses vegetate, leading the lives of cattle’.29 Religious and philosophical inquiry do not fare much better. Van Varken gives the Hesperians descriptions of fundamentalism, atheism and the theory of reincarnation, all of which disgust him, while he himself appears to be completely apathetic on the subject of God’s existence.30 He is much more enthusiastic in his description of Hell, at which point the Hesperians decide they do not want to hear any more.31 The effect of Van Varken’s pronouncements is to deepen the Hesperians’ gloom: ‘The hopes of the people, which had been strongly excited by his arrival, were as suddenly changed to despondency.’32 The ending strikes a rather bleak note: ‘And here ends our knowledge of the Godless Immortals. It is not likely that their hundred and sixty years’ additional existence have lightened the World-Weariness and Sorrow which was plainly settling down upon them like a heavy pall.’33 In this novel, the Garden of Eden becomes technological, and Barlow seems to be articulating a crisis of faith engendered by technological advance. In an orthodox religious sense, the traveller from our world could potentially still be ‘saved’, but the utopian civilization of Venus is worse than damned, since the Hesperians will never reach an afterlife – instead, they are ignored. They have no material need of God, and therefore He has no need of them.

Cultural Revival As scientific discovery continued into the early twentieth century, and the economic benefits of industrialization became apparent, some fictive explorations of the science/ religion dichotomy took a somewhat more nuanced approach. In Pádraig Ó Séaghda’s Eoghan Paor (1911), which concerns an Irishman’s attempts to buy Ireland’s freedom after becoming a billionaire by playing the stock market, the protagonist specifically denounces the works of Darwin, Lamarck, Huxley and Hegel.34 However, the German intellectuals who teach him these theories are not depicted as liars, fools or moral

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degenerates – he disagrees with their materialist outlook, but he still counts them as friends and allies in the struggle for Irish independence. The title character of [Charlotte] L. McManus’s The Professor in Erin (originally serialized in the Sinn Féin weekly newspaper in 1912), also a German intellectual, hits his head while exploring an old ruin and awakes in a parallel universe where Ireland was never colonized. In this other world, ‘Erin’ has become a powerful nation and retained its ancient traditions, but it has also added a number of scientific achievements to its name: here, the Irish were the first to discover electromagnetism, and they subsequently discovered the ‘White Ray’, ‘which has even greater and more extraordinary properties than Radium’.35 These stories foreground the need for reconciling modernity with the need to reclaim an authentic Irish identity. The problem, of course, was that scientific discourse was changing at the same time. In 1900, theoretical physicist Max Planck’s research into black-body radiation culminated in his discovery of quantization of energy, an idea that was fundamentally incompatible with what was understood of physics at the time. Five years later, Albert Einstein published his first explorations of what would come to be known as his theory of special relativity, which implied counter-intuitive changes to mass, length and time at relativistic speeds. Newtonian physics was seen to be compatible with Christian theology, economic progress and general ‘common sense’, since it reflected and codified that which could be observed through direct experience; now, however, a new kind of physics was emerging, and its development during the early decades of the twentieth century triggered a wider crisis throughout the Western world. Newtonian time, in particular, was held to have certain properties – objectivity, continuity, linearity and directionality – which quantum physics seemed to challenge. The anxieties arising from this paradigm shift can be seen in American ‘pulp’ science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, where time travellers invariably encounter advanced civilizations in the distant past, and barbarism in the future, figuring the literal reversal of time’s arrow.36 As Philip O’Leary’s exhaustive survey of early-twentieth-century Irish-language literature demonstrates, many Irish writers simply ignored or dismissed the field of quantum physics, and Irish-language commentaries on Irish contributions to the sciences usually took the form of biographies of famous scientists in less-contentious fields, such as chemistry and engineering.37 Those who made an earnest attempt to reconcile the new physics with their faith sometimes required elaborate philosophical frameworks to do so. Brian O’Nolan (better known as Flann O’Brien), for example, tried to reconcile science and religion in his writing and his world view, and his need to do so led him, like many other Irish intellectuals, to theories such as the ‘serialism’ of J. W. Dunne; the ultimate result of his philosophical inquiries in this vein was his novel The Third Policeman.38 ‘Serialism’ posits that our sapience rests upon being conscious of our own consciousness; the kind of infinite regress outlined in the Munchausen trilemma is thus deliberately invoked as a kind of refuge from materialism’s existentially threatening implications – if consciousness exists in a state of infinite regress, then it must by necessity be immortal, regardless of any lack of material evidence for the existence of a ‘soul’. During this time, however, modernity’s faith in science and technology was revealed to have been misplaced in several respects: the Victorians had expected that

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new weaponry would actually make the wars of the future more humane, since the faster a war could be fought, and the more effective and powerful the weapons, the fewer people overall would be killed;39 in the 1910s, the futurists took this attitude further and fetishized speed, industry and violence, regarding warfare as a necessary process to scour sclerotic societies clean of outmoded convention. These attitudes were rewarded with the carnage of the First World War, following which many authors and visual artists worldwide rejected the notions of faithful/mimetic representation and objectivity altogether. As if in accordance with this artistic turn away from certitude and objective truth, in 1927 the physicist Werner Heisenberg introduced his ‘Uncertainty Principle’, according to which complete knowledge of a particle’s physical properties is impossible. This Zeitgeist in Ireland is clearly evoked in the short science fiction of Seosamh Ó Torna, whose work dramatizes a wish to turn back the clock to a more certain and reliable age. The titular creature in Ó Torna’s 1938 piece ‘Duinneall’ (a portmanteau of duine (‘person’) and inneall (‘engine’)), published in the Catholic journal Bonaventura, is a human being that has been transformed into a cruel, machine-like thing by working in a factory.40 The narrator warns that thousands of these beings exist around the world, insinuating themselves into political and civic life, and that only the ‘truth’ can defeat them.41 Their aims are the eradication of traditional life, literature, music, freedom and even the human soul, and the telltale signs of their presence are aeroplanes and jazz music.42 While it is an interesting piece, there is no narrative to speak of in ‘Duinneall’. Far more engaging is another work by Ó Torna from the same edition of Bonaventura, written under the pseudonym ‘Seán Sabháiste’, in which the author’s anxieties are creatively dramatized. In ‘Ceithre Bhuille an Chluig’ (Four Chimes of the Bell), an Irishman returns to Dublin to discover that a utopia has been established in his absence. After flying home from Africa, where he has spent a year in the Libyan desert, the narrator pays a visit to his old friend ‘Leon Maolmesmer’ and then goes for a stroll around the city. While walking up Merrion Street, he hears paper-sellers announce ‘Stapras! Stapras! Sárúghadh Einstein! Stapras! Stapras! Deire an Chuar-Spáis!’ (Extra! Extra! Einstein Refuted! Extra! Extra! The End of Curved Space!). When the narrator reads a paper for himself, the story begins with the headline ‘The New Physics Denied’ (Bréagnughadh na Nua-Fhisice) and reports that new measurements of the light of the star Alpha Centauri demonstrate that space is straight rather than curved and that ‘gurab í geometic Euclid a fhóghnann don Chruinne’ (the universe is best described through Euclidean geometry); furthermore, Einstein himself has admitted that the whole field of quantum physics will now have to be abandoned.43 The narrator then learns, from an attorney who happens to be standing nearby, that six months previous, society underwent a profound change, causing the majority of the population to become spiritual, humble and scrupulously honest. When the narrator asks how this event happened, the attorney answers, ‘Tháining sé orainn gan buidheachas d’éinne. Pé caime nó claon a bhí ionainn d’imthigh sé dínn fé mar a d’imtheochadh an staon de bharra iarainn fé bhuille an úird’ (It came upon us without any thanks to anyone. Whatever dishonesty or perversity that was in us, it went away from us like the bend in a bar of iron goes away under the blows

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of the hammer).44 Mountjoy Prison is now the Monastery of the Penitent Bankers (Mainistir na mBonncaeraí n-Aithrightheach), and one of the brothers there is the former chief of the Bank of Ireland.45 On Westmoreland Row, the narrator sees Greta Garbo emerge from Pearse Station, unnoticed by the crowd, and he witnesses a farmer chase a beggar to donate a coat.46 He learns later that the change is a global one: war has ceased to exist, and the weapons manufacturing industry has gone bust, as has practically every industry or occupation related to vice, dishonesty or conflict.47 Towards the end of the story, the narrator ponders where the Great Change came from and its relation to the nature of space: he concludes that space was curved years ago, as Einstein said, but was straightened out at the same time that humanity went through its moral transformation. Both metamorphoses are aspects of the same phenomenon, which he attributes to the will of God. Then, he hears a bell ringing and awakes, realizing that he has been dreaming while hypnotized.48 He tells his friend what he witnessed while in the trance, marvelling at the wonders of the dreamworld; Maolmesmer solemnly opines that in comparison to what the narrator has witnessed, waking life seems stranger.49 Ó Torna’s text invokes the kind of irreducible subjectivity implied by the Munchausen trilemma. When the narrator reads the news story about the end of curved space, he turns to a scholar standing beside him and remarks that this cannot be true. In response, the scholar smirks and repeats that Einstein says quantum physics will have to be abandoned. The narrator is stunned at the idea of a universe without curvature, with ‘Einstein ar lár agus Newton ar a bhonnaibh arís. Euclid ‘na shuirbhéir ar an bhfirmaimint agus Riemann gan gnó!’ (Einstein laid low and Newton on his feet again. Euclid as the surveyor of the firmament, and Riemann out of business!). The narrator again asks what the scholar thinks of it all, and again, the scholar merely repeats ‘Dar leis go!’ (He says so!). When the narrator points out that the curvature of space was taken as fact many years ago and asks whether that means all scientific advances made since then are therefore defective, the scholar stabs at the paper with his forefinger and repeats, ‘Dar leis go!’ Exasperated, ‘D’fhéach sé orm mar d’fhéachfadh fíréan ar peacach bocht agus d’imthigh leis’ (He looked at me as a righteous man would look upon a poor sinner, and he left).50 Argumentation by assertion is more acceptable, of course, when deployed from a religious point of view. Throughout the story, the narrator’s conversation with a bitter businessman provides a point-counterpoint commentary on the state of this altered world. When the businessman points out that the Great Change has put lawyers, soldiers and policemen out of work, the narrator merely responds that such professions are not needed anymore, now that the new Golden Age has dawned; unemployment is irrelevant, now that the Kingdom of God has arrived, and people will recover once they get used to the new order and adjust their priorities.51 When the businessman relates how the country has been bankrupted by pious calls for restitution to the common people, by a shrinking global economy and by a collapsing stock market, the narrator’s advice is to take courage and remember that money is not everything – after all, the Kingdom of God has arrived.52 To the businessman’s pining for foreign trade, and the

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exotic delicacies that came with it, the narrator remarks that the desires of the mind are more important than the desires of the body; he has no retort for the businessman’s observation that the needs of the body have to be seen to first.53 Because faith is a belief in the divine despite the absence of material evidence, religiously inflected texts articulating an ‘anti-science’ standpoint do not have to concern themselves with the problem of ‘sufficient justification’, and hence they tend to be more keenly aware of the irreducible subjectivity which faith implies. The scholar in this story is depicted as a fundamentalist who unquestioningly agrees with whatever Einstein says, but this is not entirely a caricature or a strawman: from Ó Torna’s perspective, believing in science is no less an act of faith than believing in God – the obnoxious scholar is simply omitting the usual argumentation. Furthermore, if God can rewrite the laws of physics as He sees fit, then there is no real contradiction between science and religion anyway, and religious doctrine can be assumed to have a greater claim on the truth.

Conclusion For a variety of reasons, several Irish writers reacted against the wider fin-de-siècle trend of materialism and the abandonment of meaning, and whereas modernist movements elsewhere reacted against tradition, the corresponding Irish movement sought to do the exact opposite, in what Joe Cleary describes as ‘a collective drive … to salvage something from the last great devastation of Gaelic culture in order to create a modern Ireland in terms that would not simply be British’.54 To an extent, the rejection of sclerotic tradition allowed other European nations to approach science, technology and quantum physics in a more straightforward and enthusiastic manner; in Ireland, where the near-total eradication of Gaelic culture still loomed large in living memory, there was an emotional and psychological imperative to preserve the little that remained, which often pitted Irish Revivalist and modernist authors and artists against materialistic science. What becomes clear from the tenor of the various works considered here, however, is that a straightforwardly anti-scientific attitude became less and less tenable with the development of the complexity and dissemination of scientific discourse. Faced with scientific discoveries that they could not deny, writers such as Ó Torna and O’Nolan – whose work straddled the borders of popular, modernist and distinctly ‘Irish’ writing, with varying deference to Catholic orthodoxy – felt obliged to find ways to incorporate these discoveries into their own belief systems. Rather than the simplistic notion of a countrywide, religiously mandated rejection of scientific fact, it seems clear that antagonism to science was rather more inspired by history and national identity. In the context of the Munchausen trilemma, this sense of cultural obligation creates a paradoxical situation wherein the axiomatic breaking-off point for sufficient justification is unrelated to the central topic and may not be sincerely believed. In Ireland, the trade-off between science and tradition was mostly determined, like so many other things, by deference to the dead generations.

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Notes 1. Seamus Deane, ‘Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 111–12. 2. Seamus Deane, ‘Remembering the Irish Future’, Crane Bag 8, no. 1 (1984): 84. 3. Tom Garvin, ‘National Identity in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 95, no. 379 (2006): 249–50. 4. Sean Lysaght, ‘Science and the Cultural Revival, 1863–1916’, in Science and Society in Ireland: The Social Context of Science and Technology in Ireland, 1800–1950, ed. Peter J. Bowler and Nicholas Whyte (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, 1997), 153. 5. Enda Leaney, ‘ “Evanescent Impressions”: Public Lectures and the Popularization of Science in Ireland, 1770–1860’, Eire-Ireland 43, no. 3 (2008): 160. 6. Ibid., 162, 175. 7. Ibid., 174. 8. Terrence McDonough, Eamonn Slater and Thomas Boylan, ‘Irish Political Economy Before and After the Famine’, in Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Terrence McDonough (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 220. 9. The conception of Ireland as a ‘Catholic’ country slightly glosses over the disproportionate influence of Ultramontanist religious leaders such as Cardinal Paul Cullen, whose crusade against syncretism in Ireland did much to entrench fundamentalist social conservatism in Irish culture and politics. 10. After all, section IV of the same encyclical denounces secret societies, but this did not stop Irish Catholics from joining various revolutionary groups; regardless of Papal infallibility, when it came to certain issues, the nationalist cause was more pressing than the Pope’s opinion. 11. Juliana Adelman, Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 168. 12. Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason, trans. Mary Varney Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 18. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. Adelman, Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 133. 15. Ibid., 154. 16. Edward Martyn [as ‘Sirius’], Morgante the Lesser: His Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), 90. 17. Ulick O’Connor, Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Trinity House, 1999), 69. 18. Martyn, Morgante the Lesser, 122–3. 19. Ibid., 17–18. It is possible that this exploration of Morgante’s genealogy might reflect some conflicted feelings on Martyn’s part towards his own family history: the Martyns’ presence in Ireland can be traced back to the Norman invasions of the eleventh century, and though they remained steadfastly Catholic, they were specifically exempted from the Penal Laws by an Act of Parliament, which allowed them to retain their estates in Galway. See O’Connor, 68. 20. Martyn, Morgante the Lesser, 75. 21. Ibid., 55–6.

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2 2. Ibid., 325–8. 23. Ibid., 328–9. 24. Ibid., 181–2. 25. Jane Barlow [as ‘Antares Skorpios’], History of a World of Immortals without a God (Dublin: William McGee, 1891), 49–50, 150. 26. See, for example, her short story ‘An Advance Sheet’ (1898), which applies the Nietzschean idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ to the concept of space travel, in a tale of a man who finds himself mentally transported to a different planet which is an exact duplicate of Earth in every way bar time: this other planet is five years ahead of Earth, and the inevitability of the tragedy he witnesses drives the unfortunate man to insanity. Collected in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, ed. Jack Fennell (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2018), 125–48. 27. Barlow, History of a World of Immortals without a God, 113–14. 28. Ibid., 80–1. 29. Ibid., 162–4. 30. Ibid., 164–6. 31. Ibid., 166–7. 32. Ibid., 167. 33. Ibid., 177. 34. Pádraig Ó Séaghda, Eoghan Paor (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1911), 69. 35. L. McManus, ‘The Professor in Erin, Chapters 16 and 17’, Sinn Féin (20 April 1912): 6–7. 36. Jack Fennell, ‘Irelands Enough and Time: Brian O’Nolan’s Science Fiction’, in Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, ed. Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 37. 37. Philip O’Leary, Irish Interior: Keeping Faith with the Past in Gaelic Prose, 1940–1951 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010), 312, 322. 38. Fennell, ‘Irelands Enough and Time’, 37–8. 39. I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 69. 40. Seosamh Ó Torna, ‘Duinneall’, Bonaventura, Spring 1938, 74. 41. Ibid., 72. 42. Ibid., 74–5. 43. Seosamh Ó Torna [as ‘Seán Sabháiste’], ‘Ceithre Buille an Chluig’, Bonaventura, spring 1938, 94. 44. Ibid., 98. 45. Ibid., 100. 46. Ibid., 101. 47. Ibid., 103–4, 100. 48. Ibid., 104. 49. Ibid., 105. 50. Ibid., 95. 51. Ibid., 99–100. 52. Ibid., 101. 53. Ibid., 102. 54. Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007), 89.

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Mechanical animals, flying men and educated monkeys: Technology and modernity in the comic strips of Jack B. Yeats Michael Connerty

It is a little-known fact that for more than two decades from the early 1890s onwards, Jack B. Yeats contributed hundreds of comic strips to London-based publications such as Comic Cuts, The Big Budget and The Halfpenny Comic.1 He was a pioneer in the techniques of British comic strip art and the developing grammar of sequential graphic narrative, as well as in the creation of popular, recurring cartoon characters, such as the circus horse Signor McCoy, the American con artist Hiram B. Boss and some two dozen others. During this period, Yeats also produced single panel cartoons, as well as illustrations for the various text-based serials that made up a large portion of the early comics. Placed beside his extensive contributions to various humour periodicals, including Punch, before and after his entry into the comics in the early 1890s, this all adds up to a lengthy and successful career as a cartoonist and comic strip artist, by any standards. This is not how Yeats has traditionally been remembered, having been canonized and celebrated both as a maverick painter of expressionist oils and as an iconic national figure, among the most significant Irish visual artists of the twentieth century. In taking up comic strip art, Yeats was adapting to a medium associated with London and the metropolitan centres of Europe and the United States, and really not at all with Ireland, where, although cartooning in general flourished in newspapers and satirical periodicals, sequential strips, much less ‘comics’, rarely featured in indigenous publications. Equally, in terms of the characteristic themes and imagery associated with his best-known work, it is surprising to note the range of generic sources that Yeats plays around with in the comics, from crime to high seas adventure to domestic comedy. In what follows, I will confine the focus to examples that illustrate two broad themes in his strips, both germane to the concerns of this volume: his celebration and adaptation of popular cultural forms, particularly the circus and music hall, and his engagement with technology, in the foregrounding of tropes associated with the nascent science fiction genre. The commodification of science and its increasing intrusion into everyday life fascinated Yeats, and he problematized and parodied these developments in many of his popular series. It is a central premise of this chapter that the comics, in their formal hybridity, fragmentary presentation and celebration of all

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things ‘new’, shared the modernist ambition to be ‘somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents’2 and to rationalize the tumultuous social and cultural upheavals of the time in the form of readily accessible visual narrative. We must recognize, at the same time, that we are situating Yeats here in the context of an industrialized, commercially oriented and mass-market medium, at odds in many respects with the art world with which he was to become identified. Yeats’s career was characterized by multiple identities and stylistic approaches across a range of artistic activities. For some he was a painter whose work could be read in terms of political nationalism, who ‘in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit of his own nation at one of the supreme points in its evolution’,3 for others, including Hilary Pyle and T. G. Rosenthal,4 he was more concerned with the universal, drawing on contemporary movements in international modernism. More recently, this dialectic has been taken up as a frame for analyses of Yeats criticism by David Lloyd and Luke Gibbons.5 That he was also extremely successful in a very different context – that of London-based popular print culture – has not been readily accommodated within the biographical and art-historical accounts of Yeats’s career. In sharp contrast to his better-known work, the strips contain almost no Irish protagonists or locations. Moreover, they are steeped in the parochialisms that one would expect to find in publications that were the forerunners of British classics such as The Dandy (1937–2012) and The Beano (1938–), and much of their fascination derives from their expression of this cultural context. The scale of his contribution to the evolving comics medium in Britain complicates his positioning vis-a-vis Irish modernism, in how it impacts his relationship to Irish art history and to British popular culture. The absence of this significant corpus of comic strip material from the majority of critiques is attributable to a number of factors, chiefly the positioning of Yeats within a specifically Irish arthistorical discourse, and a critical condescension towards the comics themselves, sharpened in the case of Ireland by a nationalist suspicion of their imported status. The following thus involves a shift in the geographical focus of Yeats criticism from Ireland to London, from the periphery to a centre of fin-de-siècle graphic arts. An engagement with this heretofore neglected work also builds on recent efforts to balance the critical emphasis on the literary in the assessment of Irish modernism with a greater focus on the visual arts and particularly to attend to its more ephemeral and popular cultural manifestations.6

Yeats and the evolution of British comics Yeats began his career as an illustrator in England in the late 1880s, contributing single panel cartoons and illustrations to various humour periodicals, including Lika Joko, Judy and Ariel. These publications were very much in the vein of the highly influential Punch magazine and were similarly oriented around social and political satire, the lampooning of contemporary literature and drama, and graphic caricature and cartooning. A shift towards new photomechanical printing processes from the 1880s onwards contributed to a preference on the part of the new comics artists for bold outlines and a more minimal, direct style of drawing, rather than the heavily worked,

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illustrative style associated with earlier Victorian cartoonists. In Yeats we have a cartoonist-illustrator who began his career employing the more conventional style, but who was nimble and flexible enough to adapt to the changes in approach required by the new class of publication that began to appear on news stands during the early years of the 1890s, producing the kind of minimalist, uncluttered panels necessary for rapid comprehension. It was precisely during these few years that the comic strip, which crucially employed sequences of multiple panels, as opposed to single, stand-alone images, was emerging as a dominant popular form. Yeats’s position as a pioneering comics artist has been recognized in various historical overviews, although such accounts have tended to be brief and sketchy (indeed a fully comprehensive history of the development of the comic strip in the UK has yet to be written).7 Many of the most successful early comics were published in the UK by Dublinborn Alfred Harmsworth, the greatest media mogul of his age, who went on to own the Daily Mail, The Times and numerous other successful newspapers, becoming 1st Viscount Northcliffe in the process. His first ventures into publishing included some of the comics for which Yeats created his strips, including titles such as Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder and Puck. These early comics reflect a strategy on the part of Harmsworth and other publishers to exploit a broader demographic than the relatively exclusive readership that existed for Punch and other humour periodicals of the late nineteenth century. The overall tone and style of address is less sophisticated, and far more open and inclusive, than had previously been the case. Equally, Harmsworth explicitly set out to distance his comics from the ‘penny dreadfuls’, the violent and often macabre publications that had been a source of widespread moral panic during previous decades (the masthead of Comic Cuts initially included the phrase ‘Amusing without being vulgar’). Some features that set the new publications apart from their predecessors were a predominance of graphic elements over text, a reliance on recurring characters, and cheapness, in terms of printing and paper quality as well as cover price. The diversity and thrilling chaos of urban modernity are reflected in the graphic style and layout. The pages are a barely controlled mess of multiple cartoons, strips and jokes, competing for the reader’s attention with advertisements, advice columns and scattershot passages of general knowledge trivia. This formal freneticism, novel fusion of the literary and the graphic, and apparently random bricolage are suggestive of modernist modes of articulation, albeit in a form available to a mass public via train station kiosks and street corner vendors for the sum of half a penny. One of the principal characteristics of the comics that was established over the course of the 1890s was the increasing reliance on recurring characters (and formal repetition) as a hook to keep readers returning to specific titles. Yeats was at the forefront of this trend and one of the very first artists to develop regular characters in strip form, the first of which, appearing in Comic Cuts from November 1893, was also one of his most popular: Chubblock Homes was a parody of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who was appearing contemporaneously in literary form, with illustrations by Sidney Paget, in another popular periodical, The Strand. A number of his other strips, including Hiram B. Boss, The Wily Yank and Convict Skilly, also reflect a preoccupation with low-life crime and con artistry, and there is a lively intertextuality at play in the way many of his strips rework tropes from contemporary sensation fiction and adventure stories. Other series

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like The Jester Theatre Royal focus on contemporary stage performance and comedy, and there is a sense in which many of his sequences, whether or not overtly situated on the stage, draw on the conventions of popular comedy established in Victorian and Edwardian music hall culture. The urge to burlesque well-known literary and dramatic texts certainly reflects these origins, as does the reliance on instantly recognizable characters and the punning wordplay contained in the captions located underneath the images. The speech balloon did not become a feature of British comic art until the early 1900s, largely following the influence of reprinted American strips, and Yeats was one of the first to adopt this technique in the UK, his ballooned dialogue evidencing a great deal of concision and dry wit. Perhaps the most obvious area of thematic commonality between Yeats’s comic strips and his better-known work is in the focus on the circus and the fairground. Yeats’s fascination with these milieux, as evidenced in his watercolour and oil painting work, is well documented, and his sketchbooks are full of detailed drawings based on his attendance at circuses in London, Devon and parts of Ireland.8 He produced several series for the comics that were firmly rooted in this world, with two of the most popular featuring equine protagonists: Signor McCoy (1897–9), published by Arthur Pearson in the Big Budget, and Fandango the Hoss (1905–6), in Harmsworth’s Jester and Wonder. The circus was still one of the most popular forms of public spectacle and entertainment during the years Yeats was producing this work, although the impact of cinema and other broad changes in leisure activity meant that its influence waned as the twentieth century progressed. Circus historian Janet Davis characterizes the circus of this period as a ‘ “human menagerie” … of racial diversity, gender difference, bodily variety, animalized human beings and humanized animals that audiences were unlikely to see anywhere else’,9 a description that might equally be applied to the comics, another popular form that specialized in variety, exotic novelty and high impact entertainment. Although many of Yeats’s strip characters have their origins in circus and fairground entertainment, their weekly adventures generally take place beyond these confines, on the streets of contemporary urban Britain. One example of this is Lickity Switch, the Educated Monk (1904–5), published in another one of Alfred Harmsworth’s weekly comics, The Funny Wonder. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods, monkeys were a relatively familiar sight, in the context not only of the circus but also of zoos and menageries, as well as on the streets of the major towns and cities, accompanying barrel organists. An element of contemporary culture reflected in the specifically educated monkey was a general obsession with self-improvement through education, evidenced by the unprecedented rises in literacy levels that were themselves a factor in the growth of the periodical press and, ultimately, the comics. It is clear from the first strip in which he appears that the character aspires not only to humanhood but also to a degree of sophistication and social class. Yeats pictures him in top hat and spats, often smoking an expensive-looking cigar, and, following the conventions of much British social comedy, the humour generally derives from the protagonist’s unsuitability for such a bourgeois environment and from his frequent betrayals of his base origins. Of particular relevance here is the way the figure of the besuited monkey echoes earlier simianized representations of the Irish in the infamously brutal caricatures

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drawn by John Tenniel and others for the pages of popular humour periodicals such as Punch. Although L. Perry Curtis, author of the definitive text on these images, emphasizes that the period from the early 1860s to the 1880s was when the Irish ‘ape-man’ was at its most prevalent in the UK periodical press, he cites a number of examples from the 1890s, which were thus contemporaneous with Yeats’s own work. He singles out a cartoon by Harry Furniss in Punch (26 August 1893) that so incensed the Irish nationalist members of parliament that a number of them angrily confronted him in the lobby of the House of Commons.10 It is highly unlikely that Yeats would have been unaware of this kind of material, as a consumer of Punch and its imitators, but also given his proximity to the production end of such cartoons; the following year he became a regular contributor to Lika Joko, a periodical edited by Furniss. There is no suggestion of an explicit link to the Irish context in the Lickity strips, though Yeats’s incorporation of the ape-man figure is arguably problematic given the caricatural lineage of the type. To return to the roles played by circus culture and science fiction fantasy: another significant series, Dicky the Birdman, was published in Comic Cuts during 1910. Aerial performance was a central element of the circus show during this era and was also to be found in popular theatrical and variety contexts, in the form of high wire acts and trapeze displays, initially popularized by the French gymnast Jules Léotard. There is a certain prescience in the design of this character, given that the flying man, in the form of the caped superhero, itself prefigured in the costume and physical display of the circus, was to become such an emblematic figure of modernity in the mid-twentieth century. As well as sharing these generic origins in circus spectacle, Dicky the Birdman is also a righteous defender of the common good, albeit on a relatively modest scale, delivering swift justice to rude tram conductors and villainous pigeon fanciers. It is interesting to note that Dicky the Birdman is an older gentleman, more eccentric uncle than muscle-bound crime-fighter, and that rather than mysterious superpowers, it is British pluck, ingenuity and scientific know-how that underpin his ability to take to the air. He neatly embodies the Edwardian fascination with flight, something that is also dramatized in the aerial-view compositions, which were unusual in the context of contemporary comic art. Hot air ballooning and subsequent experiments in manned flight received a great deal of media exposure, and this was reflected in the highly publicized exploits of daredevils and ‘birdmen’. Peta Tait also suggests that ‘mastery of the air’ can be read in imperialist terms, particularly given how discourses of Empire shape so much of the circus show in general, a connotation reflected in the elaborate military moustache Yeats has given his protagonist. In any event, he contrasts dramatically with the emphatically earth-bound figures of the West of Ireland fishing ports and farmers’ markets with which Yeats is more commonly associated, revealing a facet to his art that is more directly plugged into contemporary spectacle and fantasy. If the Dicky the Birdman strip is partly explicable in terms of its debt to daredevilry and circus display, it is equally appropriate to situate these images in the context of the emerging science fiction genre, particularly as it appeared, in the form of serialized adventure stories, in some of the comics to which Yeats contributed. The 1890s saw an explosion in the popularity of speculative texts by writers like H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds was first serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897), and work by a variety of

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lesser-known authors, dealing with fantastic machines and utopian worlds, became a commonplace in the pages of the literary periodicals and in the story sections of the comics. Yeats incorporated elements of this fascination with bizarre technologies and imaginary beings into his work, albeit with a lighter touch, introducing them into the quotidian world of strips such as Dr Patent’s Automatic College, which ran in Puck between 1906 and 1910. The conceit of this series is that each week the schoolmaster, Dr Patent, or his pupils, invent some new form of labour-saving gadgetry or bizarre machinery, which often exceeds its ostensible function with unintended and comic results. In his analysis of Irish science fiction, Jack Fennell argues that the popularization of science, in contemporary print media particularly, was a key component of the modernizing processes at work in the late nineteenth century and provided a basis for the development of the genre.11 Harmsworth’s publications feature numerous examples of this celebration of science and invention, in what are often framed as educational articles, replete with diagrams and illustrations. In focusing on the absurdity of devices such as the ‘patent boy laundry’ and the ‘automatic hairdresser’, and their tendency to backfire, Yeats visualizes the failure of technology to live up to the utopian promise of media coverage and advertising.12 At the same time, the strips evidence a fascination with the mechanics of the machines themselves, in a manner similar to the satisfyingly complex cartoons of W. Heath Robinson: the ‘automatic breakfast chute’ is rendered in the ‘cut-away’ style of technical manuals, exploiting the ability of comic strip panels to display multiple planes of action simultaneously. If all this sounds like gentle satire aimed at the contemporary obsession with novelty and ‘up-to-dateness’ (an earlier version of the strip was titled Dr Upp-toDayte’s Academy) rather than science fiction per se, the numerous strips that centre on nonhuman characters, including animal/machine hybrids and mechanical automata, do provide ‘harder’ examples of what Darko Suvin, defining the essential elements of the science fiction text, has termed the novum. The novum is a fictional device which embodies estrangement from the world of the reader’s ordinary experience, provoking the cognitive dissonance that drives the narrative.13 The anomalous nature of the automata that feature in the series, such as the ‘automatic rubber-out’ and the ‘automatic instructor’, including their tendency to become dangerous adversaries, is always emphasized by Yeats.14 The four-legged ‘automatic fire lighter’ is ultimately pursued by an angry mob intent on its destruction in the final panel of the strip in which it appears.15 The hybrid machine-animal became the central recurring character in a series titled The Who-Did-It (1907–8), which ran, concurrently with Dr Patent, in Comic Cuts. Visually, the Who-Did-It is an amalgam of machine parts, with a steel, cylindrical body to which head, feet and lower legs are attached by springs or electrical cable and featuring a tail tipped with mechanical pincers. It is not too much of a stretch to see in the design of the character an anticipation of similar animal/machine hybrids in the work of Dadaist and Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst. Regarding narrative structure, even by the standards of the four-panel comic strip, The Who-Did-It is a highly formulaic and repetitive series. The set-up varies from week to week, but the climax invariably sees the Who-Did-It springing from a hiding place, provoking general alarm and the rapid departure of all present, which is in turn suggestive of the

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public uncertainty around the apparently sudden appearance of new and unfamiliar technologies in contemporary social life. At the time that he was executing this work for the comics, Yeats was also reasonably well known in England for the representations of Irish people and landscapes which accompanied J. M. Synge’s 1905 articles for the Manchester Guardian regarding ‘Life in the Congested Districts’ and also for a series of successful exhibitions in the Walker Gallery, London, titled Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland.16 Although the pages in which his work appeared are populated by other artists’ crude Irish stereotypes – characters like ‘Flannagan’ and ‘Mike McWhusky’ – there is no hint of Ireland in the vast majority of Yeats’s strips. One exception is a Chubblock Homes sequence in which Homes is summoned to Ireland to investigate the theft of a sceptre from a waxwork model of William the Conqueror.17 His search leads him to Donnybrook Fair, the Dublin location famed, earlier in the century, for its mass brawls and bacchanalian degeneracy. In this strip, Yeats does not adapt the conventional approach to caricaturing Irishmen in the simianizing style of Punch, but by drawing on the popular trope of Irish atavistic violence (the sceptre has been repurposed as a shillelagh, and the ‘natives’ are all nursing bandaged heads), he is to a great extent working within the same representational territory as many of his peers in British cartooning. Indeed, Yeats did employ ethnic stereotypes himself, particularly in the series The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor and Roly Poly’s Round-the-World Tour, in which the protagonists visit, for example, cannibal-inhabited islands of the South Pacific. In the context of contemporary cartoon art, it would be more surprising had such imagery not appeared in Yeats’s strips, given that a reliance on graphic shorthand, in the form of racialized and various other ‘types’, was extremely prevalent throughout the period in which he was working. At the same time, these images illustrate the extent of Yeats’s complicity in some of the more unsavoury aspects of colonialist representation and prompt the question of the degree to which ethnic caricature might equally be ascribed to some of his renderings of Irish rural life as a sketch artist and illustrator.

Reception in Ireland It is difficult to assess the reception of these publications in Ireland during the period under discussion, with most journalistic references to the comics contained in outraged opinion pieces complaining about the cultural domination of Ireland by British popular media. Certainly, the titles for which Yeats produced work were widely circulated in Ireland, Comic Cuts having been particularly popular.18 In a 1906 newspaper article promoting the teaching of the Irish language in schools, the author complains, with regard to the quality of English-language material being read by Irish children, ‘How few of them ever see anything better than “Comic Cuts”, “Home Chat”, “Answers”, “Tit Bits”, “Weekly Budget”, and other low class literature of this type, dumped down in this country in tons every week, and spreading like a plague over the land.’19 An earlier article, from 1903, describes the domination of ‘foreign’ media in the following strong terms: ‘The literary cankerworm has eaten into our very vitals.’20 This article also specifies Comic Cuts, home of a number of Yeats strips, along

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with popular magazines published by Harmsworth and others. The author suggests that Irish folklore and legend would make more suitable reading for school children, asserting that there should be ‘no need for “Dead-Shot Dan” among the Indians, while we can roam the heights of Ben Bulbin with Fin’s mighty hunters … or sailing away westward over a sun-purpled sea, and on a straight, crystal gleaming curragh witness the golden-haired Connala gazing into the love-lit eyes of the fairy maiden’.21 As well as producing weekly strips for the comics, Yeats was of course also producing work at this time that might have satisfied the author of those words: illustrations for Norma Borthwick’s series of Irish language textbooks, Ceachta Beaga Gaeilge,22 for example, or for the series A Broad Sheet (1902–3) and A Broadside (1908–15), which featured traditional ballads as well as texts by Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and others. Focusing on what these publications have in common with the comics rather than what separates them, one notes that the illustrations for Borthwick’s textbooks share with the comic strips a minimalist clarity expressed in strong outlines and simple characterization. With both the Broad Sheet and Broadside series, Yeats took another popular ephemeral medium, the then defunct broadside of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and faithfully recreated its bold visual style and handcoloured images, albeit repurposed for a more select readership. An indigenous comics industry did not develop in Ireland during these years; nor to any substantial extent subsequently, with the result that Irish readers of comics continued to rely on imports of British or American material. I should stress that the critical condescension towards the comics was by no means peculiar to Ireland, and of course, given the commercial imperatives that shaped the early publications, they were especially regarded as anathema to the sensibility of the art connoisseur, for whom the medium has traditionally been positioned as ‘modernism’s wretched Other’.23 In any case, its imported status may have sharpened negative attitudes towards the medium in Ireland specifically, as well as making Yeats’s work in this area difficult to square with the conception of him as an intrinsically Irish artist. Exemplary of this approach to constructing Yeats as a national figure was Thomas MacGreevy’s 1945 essay, ‘Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation’, in which he glosses over the cartooning and comic strip work with a brief line indicating that Yeats ‘had done some work of an illustrative character in England but it was only when he returned home that he truly found himself ’.24 This sidelining of the role played by his work in England, and a ‘Year Zero’ conception of his return to Ireland in 1910, is typical of much Yeats criticism and became the conventional view of his progress as an artist. Regardless of where individual critics stand in regard to Yeats’s politics, for example whether a Republican agenda can be ascribed to Bachelor’s Walk: A Memorial (1915) or Communicating with Prisoners (1924), or whether these images represent an observational rather than a polemical stance on Yeats’s part, what can be said generally is that the relationship to English popular culture in Yeats’s aesthetic is rarely acknowledged. The comic strip material was once very well known, and the publications in which it appeared sold in the hundreds of thousands every week, meaning that the strips would surely have enjoyed more widespread exposure than did other aspects of his art during his lifetime. It would not have been possible for Yeats to have his comic strip work published anywhere other than outside Ireland, though

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the narrative of Yeats as an Irish artist in exile differs from that of other celebrated examples, such as Wilde, Shaw or Joyce, in at least one important respect: it was family circumstance, rather than deliberate strategy or ambition, that put him in London at such an opportune time. Although there is some limited reference to his cartooning and illustration work, scholarly engagement specifically with Yeats’s comic strips is rare in art-historical accounts of his career. Hilary Pyle is exceptional in this regard and, particularly in The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats, does aim to accommodate drawing, cartooning and ephemeral production within the Yeats canon.25 She makes convincing arguments regarding relationships between these ‘separate’ areas of practice but also emphasizes the importance of the illustrative and popular graphic work in its own right. As an art historian, Pyle acknowledges work in a variety of media as legitimate components of the Yeats oeuvre in this and other key texts but, while reprinting two examples from The Big Budget and The Funny Wonder, stops short of a thorough analysis of the comic strips themselves. The Yeats Archive in the National Gallery of Ireland, a comprehensive and extensive resource, contains no examples, in original or reproduction, of any of the many hundreds of comic strips that he produced, despite the fact that he tended to be a rigorous archivist of his own work. For example, there are a number of scrapbooks in the archive in which Yeats carefully pasted cut-outs of his early published cartoons. One features work published in Ariel magazine during 1891–2 and is close to being exhaustive. There is no trace of any of his comic strip work in these scrapbooks, the reasons for which can only be the subject of conjecture. It is quite possible that he came to feel that his reputation as a comic strip artist for London-based publications would not be advantageous to him in pursuing a career as a fine artist in Ireland, though this does little to explain the apparent distinction made here between the carefully conserved single-panel cartoons and the absent comic strips. Yeats’s secrecy regarding the contributions to Punch from 1910 onwards and his use of the pseudonym ‘W. Bird’ are also curious and contrast intriguingly with his prominent signing of ‘Jack B.’ (or occasionally ‘Jack Bee’) on many of the strips published by Harmsworth during the 1890s and early 1900s – indeed the editorial decision to post the name ‘Clever Jack Yeats’ above a number of his contributions indicates anything but a preference for anonymity during that period. In fact, such was his fame that his name was frequently cited in editorial addresses trumpeting the unique attractions contained in particular issues. Although economic factors must have been an important motivation for him, particularly in the early years, the longevity of his involvement in comics and humour magazines (about fifty years in total) suggest that he must also have derived personal artistic satisfaction from his prolific output. Whereas the later painting work is characterized by a modernist commitment to formal experiment and personal expressivity, there was little room for these qualities in the work of a comic strip artist. Homogeneity and repetition were the watchwords of British comics at this time, and what limited freedom of expression strip artists may have possessed was inevitably tempered by adherence to a set of tonal, thematic and stylistic conventions that were quickly established during the 1890s. This is not to diminish Yeats’s ability to innovate and successfully work as a comics auteur, despite the commercial demands of this industrialized process. The comics offered Yeats an

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opportunity which he seems to have relished, to indulge in imaginative and creative flights of fancy, allowing him to express a ludicrousness, a daftness, for which there was little place in the world of academic art. These elements of mildly surreal whimsy suggest another context for Yeats – that of the Irish (literary) comic tradition and, for example, the work of Brian O’Nolan, a writer who also operated under various pseudonyms. Writing as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, O’Nolan shared Yeats’s inclination towards parody and pastiche, likewise finding comedy in science and technology. Again, Yeats may have felt that this frivolous tone was at odds with the more serious-minded ambitions he had for the reception of his painting during the second half of his life. In series such as The Jovial Old Farmer and John Duff Pie,26 and in numerous oneoff cartoons, Yeats builds his narratives on oppositions between the traditional and the modern, the rural and the urban. However, it is in the various series I have outlined here, where he engages in what we might term ‘speculative comedy’, that he most explicitly taps into the public excitement around science, invention and technological change and in so doing moves in the same currents as other early practitioners of literary and graphic science fiction. Key to our understanding of this material is the recognition of the comics as a vehicle for popular modernism and their engagement with the contemporary world through forms that were themselves new and vital and which emerged as a response to significant changes in work, leisure and urban living. Furthermore, and crucially, at this stage in his career Yeats was working to the demands of a broadly British, rather than an Irish, national culture. As we have seen, this complicates his relationship to a specifically Irish modernism, by placing his work closer to the centre of the colonial media hegemony and the mass audience that this suggests. Had Yeats stopped working at the age of forty, it would be for his substantial body of work in the comics and humour magazines that he would primarily be remembered, and an acknowledgement of this corpus ought to be a key component of any assessment of him as an artist and a national figure.

Notes 1. For a more detailed discussion of the Yeats comic strips in this chapter, with visual reproductions of the strips themselves, see Michael Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009), 345–6. 3. Thomas MacGreevy, Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation (London: Victor Waddington, 1945), 10. 4. Hilary Pyle, Jack Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970); and T. G. Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B. Yeats (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993). 5. David Lloyd, ‘Republics of Difference, Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett’, Third Text 19, no. 5 (2005): 461–74; Luke Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 128–43.

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6. Linda King and Elaine Sisson, ‘Visual Shrapnel: Rethinking Irish Studies through Design and Popular Culture’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 38, nos 1–2 (2014): 56–83. 7. For brief references to Yeats’s comic strip work, see Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage, eds, Dictionary of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists 1730–1980 (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1994); and Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976). General overviews of the medium at this point feature in Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon, 1996); and David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8. See Róisín Kennedy, Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2007). 9. Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10. 10. L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997). 11. Jack Fennell, Irish Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 3. 12. Jack B. Yeats, ‘Dr Patent, the Beauty of Bath, Gets a Ducking Himself ’, Puck (17 November 1906); Jack B. Yeats, ‘The Automatic Hair Dresser at Dr Patent’s’, Puck (25 April 1908). 13. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, ed. Gerry Canavan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 79. 14. Jack B. Yeats, ‘The Automatic Rubber Out’, Puck (26 October 1907); Jack B. Yeats, ‘The Automatic Instructor at Dr Patent’s’, Puck (22 February 1908). 15. Jack B. Yeats, ‘The Automatic Fire Lighter’, Puck (14 March 1908). 16. The ‘Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland’ exhibitions were held in the Walker Gallery in 1899, 1901 and 1903; two further exhibitions were held in the same venue in 1908 and 1912. 17. Jack B. Yeats, ‘The Sceptre and the Interceptor’, Comic Cuts (15 September 1894). 18. To take 1895 as a sample year, the average weekly import figure for Comic Cuts recorded by the Irish newsagents Eason’s was 7,280; and for The Wonder, another Harmsworth comic paper to which Yeats contributed, 4,281. These figures were small relative to sales in mainland Britain, but we can get some sense of their relative popularity in Ireland by comparing them to the import figure of 856 for Punch (source: Eason’s Archive). 19. Western People (22 September 1906). 20. Kerry Sentinel (3 October 1903). 21. Ibid. 22. Published in three volumes by the Irish Book Company between 1902 and 1906. 23. Jackson Ayres, ‘Introduction: Comics and Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 2 (2016): 111. 24. MacGreevy, Jack B. Yeats, 22. 25. Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994). 26. Published in The Halfpenny Comic (1898) and the Big Budget (1897–8) respectively.

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‘The funeral of one’s past’: Thomas MacGreevy as Ireland’s modernist war poet Daniel Curran

Critics have struggled to place Thomas MacGreevy within the grand narrative of Irish literary modernism. Discussions of the poet and critic usually focus on the pivotal role he played in introducing Beckett to Joyce in Paris in the late 1920s as well as his friendships with both writers and, to a lesser extent, Jack B. Yeats. Yet, even as these acquaintances were singled out and canonized for their ‘attempts at becoming modern’,1 MacGreevy’s own writing often struck those same critics as recalcitrant to the dominant trends of a ‘modernist’ literature. This resistance to fully and unambiguously incorporating MacGreevy into the Irish-modernist canon is due partly to the fact that he wrote and published more criticism about English writing and Irish visual arts than he ever published poetry, and the poetry that was published is far from voluminous or accessible. His literary career was stunted by a personal disappointment at the muted reception of his 1934 collection Poems, and the last publication of his work was 1991’s Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy.2 The difficulty of subsuming MacGreevy within a ‘fashionable’ modernism was noted by his contemporary Brian Coffey, who writes, in 1972, of the relative failure of Poems that ‘MacGreevy was unfashionable, Irish independence, religion, literature and all’.3 Twenty years later, the critic J. C. C. Mays observed that the modernist qualities of MacGreevy’s poetry continued to be obscured by the fact that 1990s writing that claimed a modernist legacy was characterized by ‘verbal high jinks or Nabokovian dandyism, lashings of fun or bevelled reflections on the art of fiction’: forms of playfulness and transferability that MacGreevy’s poetry and criticism seem to resist.4 However, while his predominant output in supposedly minor non-fiction forms combined with the conceived conservativism and realism of his work have often pushed him to the margins of the modernist canon, a sustained challenge to these critical binaries has been mounted by the new modernist studies. The critical complication of the high/low cultural binary has meant that works of non-fiction, criticism and mass print culture can now more easily be viewed through the prism of modernist scholarship, as demonstrated, for instance, in Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser’s recent collection of essays on James Joyce’s non-fiction writing.5 MacGreevy’s devotion to Catholicism is also no longer a deal-breaker for inclusion in the Irish-modernist canon, given recent work on the emergent field of Catholic

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modernism, signalled, for instance, by the section of Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe’s Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics dedicated entirely to ‘Catholic Modernism in Ireland’.6 More broadly, the question of MacGreevy’s modernist bona fides is no longer resolved by comparing his work against the trinitarian coordinates of YeatsJoyce-Beckett, as critical studies such as Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments or Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms have opened the conversation to different forms of cultural expression in modernity which can be analysed as modernist without being radically symbolic literatures.7 The resulting reconceptualization and expansion of modernism have once again complicated MacGreevy’s position in the Irish-modernist canon; yet beyond asking solely what this reorientation means for a re-evaluation of MacGreevy as an Irish modernist in this critical moment, we are also compelled to ask what a reframed MacGreevy can tell us about Irish modernism itself, once the full range of his outputs are reviewed under these new critical conditions. Reflecting on the question ‘How Is MacGreevy a Modernist?’ in 1995, Mays contended that while the poet has been recurrently ‘rediscovered’ since the 1960s to fit changing critical paradigms and narratives of Irish social and literary history, his work itself is seldom closely read and understood on its own terms and in its own contexts.8 The 2013 publication of The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, edited by Susan Schreibman in the wake of her 2007 digital Thomas MacGreevy Archive9 as part of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series, attests to a renewed, if modest, interest in exploring both his poetry and his criticism on their own terms in old and new contexts, even as the predominant focus remains on biographical anecdotes and comparative readings of MacGreevy vis-à-vis Joyce, Beckett and Yeats.10 In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2018), David Wheatley puts pressure on the standard critical narrative of MacGreevy as ‘the modernist who refuses, the recidivist nationalist who swaps the excitements of 1920s Paris for the torpor of the Free State’, drawing our attention instead to how ‘rescuing MacGreevy from the limiting equation of Ireland with the smothering of his talent’ can reveal ‘how closely Ireland and Europe interact in his work, rather than standing lifelessly apart from each other’.11 Pushing new ground on this front, Francis Hutton-Williams’s 2019 monograph Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde significantly reassesses MacGreevy through not only his poetry and critical writing but also his diverse roles as art critic and curator as director of the National Gallery (1950–63) to position him as an art critic conduit for the European literary, artistic and performance avant-garde in Ireland. Yet, even as his focus on MacGreevy’s ‘powerful alternative routes of Irish culture’ through a wider transnational avant-garde network complicates any ‘either/or’ claim to his status as an Irish and European modernist, Hutton-Williams’s historicist focus strongly ties MacGreevy’s significance to the liberalization of a culturally censorious Ireland ‘from the arrival of national independence in 1922 to the moment of programmatic modernization in the early 1960s’.12 Two notable strands have emerged from these studies. The first focuses on MacGreevy as a First World War combatant and Irish/European war poet, both via his prominent inclusion in Gerald Dawe’s Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry (his poem ‘Nocturne’ giving the collection its title)13 and through Lauren Arrington’s foregrounding of MacGreevy’s role in the ‘self-conscious creation of a

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literary generation … defined by participation in the First World War’.14 The second redirects critical attention to MacGreevy’s relationship to the visual arts, from Mark Leahy’s essay on ‘MacGreevy’s Writing in Relation to Perception and Affect in Literary and Visual Arts’ and the chapters in Hutton-Williams’s study dedicated to ‘MacGreevy and Postimpressionism’, ‘Reconstructing the National Painter’ and ‘The National Gallery Revisited’ to Luke Gibbons’s 2019 piece in A History of Irish Modernism which situates MacGreevy within the circle of painters associated with Mainie Jellett and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art.15 And yet, the deeper, mutually shaping relationship between these two strands remains to be fully explored for a more rigorous and nuanced understanding of both the new Irish modernism and MacGreevy’s place in it. The present essay builds outward from this work by moving beyond standard modernist and historicist coordinates to resituate MacGreevy, and by extension Irish modernist poetry itself, in relation to several overlapping and proximal coordinates. Specifically, these comprise anglophone modernists, imagists and war poets such as Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but also continental art movements and modernist visual artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. In line with the present collection’s project to both expand and diversify the limits of the critical rubric and narrative of Irish modernism by comparing diverse modes and media without collapsing them into a single homogenous category, my focus both demonstrates the reductiveness of exclusionary categories of Irish, English or European modernism for coming to terms with MacGreevy and highlights the importance of MacGreevy’s non-fiction and art criticism for understanding the value he places on the aesthetic concept of the poetic image. At the same time, as part of the volume’s challenge to the received wisdoms of historiographical accounts, my analysis tests the limits of a purely historicist reading of MacGreevy’s war poems by showing the significance of the aesthetic, theoretical and material specifics of visual art for his production of a modernist poetic image of an experience of war that merges temporal and spatial coordinates and is imbued with eschatological significance. MacGreevy emerges from this examination as an ekphrastic critic-poet whose artistic work attempts to forge new aesthetic and conceptual frameworks for representing a range of harrowing experiences such as the Great War in Europe and the War of Independence and Civil War in Ireland.

War poetry and imagism MacGreevy’s aesthetic was forged by his first-hand experience of the Great War itself. He enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery in 1916 at the age of twenty-three, began active service in March 1917 and was promoted to second lieutenant that November. Between 1917 and 1919, he served on the front lines at the Ypres Salient and The Somme, where he was wounded twice before being discharged.16 Upon returning to Ireland, MacGreevy was awarded a scholarship to attend Trinity College, where he studied history and political science before taking up the position of lecteur d’anglais at École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1927. As Schreibman notes, MacGreevy arrived in Paris an accomplished critic, having already published a variety of articles,

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essays and columns in The Criterion, The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, and he continued this line of work during this time.17 Having worked with Joyce as part of the author’s circle of researchers and collaborators during the composition of Work in Progress, he published ‘The Catholic Element in Work in Progress’ in Transition in 1928 (republished in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress in 1929). Two monographs, Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study and Richard Aldington: An Englishman, published in 1931 by Chatto and Windus, feature the most sustained development of MacGreevy’s theory on the representative capacities of art. In addition to his work on Aldington and Eliot, MacGreevy was also involved as a contributor and translator for Samuel Putnam’s The European Caravan in 1931. This would have exposed him to a wide range of postwar European modernism, including surrealism, Dadaism and imagism.18 Rather than consider these encounters as supplementary or partial to an evaluation of his literary work, I wish to consider MacGreevy here as a writer whose criticism of English modernists and continental avant-garde visual art yields distinct themes which can be traced into a reading of his own war poetry, particularly with respect to the use of the poetic image to express experience. MacGreevy’s work on Aldington features fascinating insights into his formulations on the form and function of war literature. Aldington had served for the British Army during the Great War and was also a noted member of the Imagist movement. According to Pound, the goal of the imagists was to portray the image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.19 F. S. Flint, taking his cue from Pound, lists the three main tenets of Imagist poetry: 1. ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.’ 2. Economy of language such that the poet ‘use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation’. 3. A rhythmical adherence to ‘the musical phrase’.20 In his monograph on Aldington, MacGreevy writes, ‘It was all very young, and if it was touching in its naïveté it was undoubtedly good for them and for English poetry and criticism, for some of them were serious about their work as poets and the others encouraged them to believe that poetry and poetic experiment were worth being serious about.’21 Despite the fact that MacGreevy is congenial if a little lukewarm in his assessment of the movement, critics have noted the presence of certain Imagist aspects in MacGreevy’s own poetry. Coffey, for example, argues that MacGreevy’s poem ‘De Civitate Hominum’ ‘owes something to the Imagism of the early twenties’, as ‘the poet leads us abruptly out of the phenomenonalistically delineated scene to the place of expectation and prophecy’.22 Elsewhere, Michael Smith argues that ‘what MacGreevy learnt from the Imagists … was the use of the image to articulate experience’.23 While MacGreevy’s poetry exhibits features of the school of English Imagism that challenge a narrow anchoring of Irish modernism to the cultures and political borders of the historical nation, I suggest that, ultimately, the concept of the poetic image that emerges in his war poetry adheres to a certain theory of the image that he sets forth in

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his own criticism, as opposed to a direct or unmediated enactment of the theories of Flint or Pound. Considering MacGreevy’s varied critical explorations of modernist and Imagist poetry, his own poetry appears to have been informed by the idea of the poetic image as an authentic expression of human experience, especially in relation to the war. MacGreevy was not a ‘trench poet’ in the vein of Owen or Sassoon, and his war poetry is not constrained by the belief ‘in the historical continuity of styles’ which Paul Fussell claims characterized the work of other war poets.24 Indeed, Dawe argues that MacGreevy’s poetry stands apart from other war poets in that it exhibits an ‘imagistic clarity’ and ‘existential sense of abandonment’ which is ‘clearly detached from the blood and thunder of fellow first World War poets’.25 The first etching of MacGreevy’s poetics of the Great War is found in Richard Aldington: An Englishman. He criticizes Aldington’s work for exhibiting a depersonalized detachment from the subject matter of the war: Aldington, MacGreevy charges, invokes ‘a generalized idea on the tragedy of war experience’ instead of portraying ‘a personal unique image which would evoke that tragedy not merely for the brain but also for the imagination of the reader’.26 For MacGreevy, the war’s enormity and horror demand of the artist a more authentic mode of representation. In order to bring the work ‘closer to objective reality’, the artist can no longer rely on the abbreviated forms of representation which MacGreevy sees as characterizing other modes of artistic expression such as impressionism or naturalism: ‘the principal reality that has been impelling [the artist] to expression is so vast and so terrible to look back on, that, grasping its full tragic significance’ the artist ‘cannot … fall into the mere pathetic of, say, Monet or Zola’.27 The sheer magnitude of the Great War called into question the possibility of complete representation. In terms of MacGreevy’s own poetry, Alex Davis argues that the war ‘is an event that throws into relief a more diffuse sense of crisis in the representational capacity of art’ and that MacGreevy’s poetry ‘embodies a desire to articulate his [experiences] in an artwork that is not a straightforward “copy” of the non-linguistic world’. For MacGreevy, the solution to the problem the war poses to traditional forms of representation is to go beyond straightforward representation and towards the aesthetic of a ‘personal unique image’.28 Much like the imagists, MacGreevy endorses a form of poetic expression which compresses the indeterminacy of modern existence and experience into the concreteness of an image rather than acquiescing to the abbreviated, fragmentary and minimalist forms of Imagist poetic representation. That MacGreevy considers literature in the transmedial terms of the image and the visual arts is demonstrated, for instance, in an unpublished memoir written after the death of Joyce, in which he praises ‘the beauty of the verbal landscape painting’ of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.29 MacGreevy’s views on the representational capacities of art in the early twentieth century are further discussed through an analysis of Joyce’s writing in ‘The Catholic Element in Work in Progress’. In the essay, MacGreevy endorses a mode of expression which obfuscates the classical distinction made between literature and the visual arts in which literature deals with time while the visual arts deal with space. Instead, MacGreevy supports an ekphrastic, synaesthetic art which fuses both time and space when he suggests that ‘art consists in seeing the funeral of one’s past from the emotionally static point of artistic creation – emotion recollected in

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tranquillity – time recollected in space’.30 In this sense, MacGreevy’s aesthetic differs from the English imagists, who call for a ‘sense of freedom from time limits and space limits’.31 For MacGreevy, art does not have to be a total disconnection from the constraints of time and space but can be an emancipatory conjunction of the two. The relationship between temporality and spatiality in MacGreevy’s war poetry is a fraught one in which the two dimensions seemingly coexist, superimposed onto and into one another to portray the intensity and indeterminacy of the present moment. What results is a poetic image which is not a crystalline abstraction from the constraints of time or space in the mode of the English imagists but rather an aesthetic in which temporality and experience are compressed into the space of the image. Despite MacGreevy’s assessment of the imagists, we find him endorsing an aesthetic characterized by the compression of experiential time into the space of the image to represent an experience which seems to challenge the representational capacities of literature.

Ekphrastic images of war experience MacGreevy’s poem ‘De Civitate Hominum’ is exemplary of how he attempts to portray the experience of the war through the construction of a ‘personal unique image’.32 Jim Haughey highlights the importance of ‘De Civitate Hominum’ when he argues that it is ‘the first major experimental war poem’ by an Irish writer which features a range of jarring and experimental modernist strategies such as ‘free verse, jolting transitions, connotative intensities, multiple-meaning word play, intermedium reference, montage and strategic pause’.33 In keeping with his belief in the authenticity of the ‘personal unique image’34 in the portrayal of the war, one of the defining aspects of MacGreevy’s poetics is what Schreibman calls an ‘aesthetic distance’ between subject and object.35 In practice, the aesthetic distance of MacGreevy’s poetics is achieved in several ways. First, ‘De Civitate Hominum’ resembles a diptych in its formal composition with a ‘still life’ and a ‘quick life’ section. In the ‘still life’ section of the diptych, the poetic speaker adopts the role of ‘the nature morte accessory’.36 The poem opens: The morning sky glitters Winter blue. The earth is snow-white, With the gleam snow-white answers to sunlight, Save where the shell-holes are new, Black spots in the whiteness – A Matisse ensemble.37

What we see immediately is the primacy of colour in perception, which establishes a concrete, distinct image for the reader, yet one which appeals to the aesthetic detail of a ‘Matisse ensemble’. The landscape is portrayed as a ‘snow-white’ harmony which acts as the blank canvas upon which the poet compresses the temporal experience of war, with the ‘new’ violence of the ‘shell-holes’ rendered in visual and spatial terms as ‘black spots in the whiteness’.

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We find a similar description of a war-torn landscape in ‘Gloria de Carlos V’, where violence and atrocity blight the white landscape with a ‘cadaver black’: Here ‘twas scarlet and black, Green and black, Starch white streaked with cadaver black. O Grünewald! O Picasso! Those without gas masks were lost.38

Again, the sparse concreteness of the image is suffused with painterly terms. Words like ‘starch’ and ‘streaked’ evoke that of a painter’s canvas upon which MacGreevy portrays the ‘cadaver black’ caused by the war. In both ‘De Civitate Hominum’ and ‘Gloria De Carlos V’, the experience of war is rendered against the coordinates of Matisse, Grünewald and Picasso in an aesthetic scene, as time is compressed into the composed image of a painting characterized by a series of striking colours. MacGreevy’s treatment of the poetic speaker is a significant component of his image-centric war poetry. We are familiar with Beckett’s oft-rehearsed identification of MacGreevy in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ among the Irish poets who engage poetically the problem of ‘the breakdown of the object’ that has been foregrounded by continental modernism, such as in the Imagist project to decentre the poet’s subject position.39 However, by testing this Beckettian Irish-modernist metanarrative against the specifics of MacGreevy’s war poetry, we can see more precisely the ways in which his concept of the poetic image influences his construction and situation of the poetic speaker. According to James McNaughton, MacGreevy’s aesthetic eschews subjective responses to the experience of war through a disavowal of poetic emotion: MacGreevy ‘renders images in his poem … emotional responses to which can no longer be trusted’.40 In MacGreevy’s oeuvre, the poetic speaker is often portrayed as a laconic observer, barely present on the cusp of the image they witness and bereft of any tangible emotional response. The disavowal of emotion is best demonstrated in the turn of ‘De Civitate Hominum’ from the ‘still life’ to the ‘quick life’ section: It is very cold And, what with my sensations And my spick and span subaltern’s uniform, I might be the famous brass monkey, The nature morte accessory. Morte…! ‘Tis still life that lives, Not quick life –41

In a moment of modernist reflexivity, the poem constitutes the speaker within the frame of the poetic image. The ‘nature morte accessory’ is, as Schreibman points out, ‘any object or figure not belonging to the principal subject of the picture, but added solely to furnish background’.42 By comparing himself to the ‘nature morte accessory’,

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MacGreevy is evacuating the emotive subject from the scene, reducing the role of the poetic speaker to that of an aesthetic accessory, present yet not active and serving only to furnish the margins of the image.43 He inserts the poetic speaker into the frame of the poem only to reduce him to a static image furnishing the margins, whose only function is the further aestheticization of the experience of war. The first section of the poem depicts the war-torn landscape as a static image characterized by a series of colour contrasts. The sense of stasis of the ‘still life’ section is established by the repetition of washed-out colours, which instils a sense of serenity as if time itself has been evacuated from the scene and all that exists is a singular image: The shadows of whitened tree stumps Are another white. And there are white bones. Zillebeke Lake and Hooge, Ice gray, gleam differently, Like the silver shoes of the model.44

In the ‘quick life’ section of the poem, MacGreevy moves away from the serenity of the landscape and depicts – with a certain irony, given the archaic meaning of ‘quick’ as ‘living’ – the ‘fearful death’ of the airman, describing the moment of death in an aestheticized movement of colour.45 The lack of discernible action in the poem’s first half only serves to highlight the intensity of the event which occurs in the second half, which manifests McGuiness’s definition of Imagist poetry as a ‘simultaneous perception of things overlaid, fused, interpenetrating … images as fusions and superimpositions’.46 Whereas the scene in the poem’s first section is a static landscape distilled into a series of washed-out colour compositions, the ‘quick life’ section opens with the first action of the poem as it describes the ‘soft pounding puffs’ of smoke emerging from the engine of a damaged plane: There are fleece-white flowers of death That unfold themselves prettily About an airman.47

The poem exhibits a temporal simultaneity in which the ‘quick life’ section is superimposed onto the image of the ‘still life’ section as it borrows the same reliance on colour to portray its action. The associations between landscape and colour depicted in ‘still life’, such as ‘morning sky glitters, / Winter blue’ and ‘the earth is snow-white’, are abbreviated in ‘quick life’ as the physical landscape is evacuated from the image.48 All that remains are the colours with which the physical landscape was associated in the poem’s opening imagery. For example, the ‘morning sky … winter blue’ in the ‘still life’ section becomes simply ‘the blue’, while the ‘snow-white … whiteness’ of the earth is simply reduced to ‘the white’ in the ‘quick life’ section.49 One of the more striking images in the poem is the death of an airman, described in purely aesthetic terms as the physical is reduced to a purely visual representation:

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I cannot tell which flower he has accepted But suddenly there is a tremor, A zigzag of lines against the blue And he streams down Into the white, A delicate flame, A stroke of orange in the morning’s dress.50

Like the elements introduced in the previous section – the earth, represented by the colour white, and the sky, represented by the colour blue – the flame is here reduced to its aestheticized substitute in the poetic synecdoche of ‘a stroke of orange’. Death, then, is described in terms of a falling back to earth, as a falling ‘into the white’: as an aesthetic movement or metamorphosis from ‘the blue’ to ‘the white’. The result of this aesthetic abstraction from the field of action results in a surreal depiction of the horror of war entirely devoid of an invested subjective response. The event of a plane crashing and the death of its airman is compressed into a series of colours which constitute a poetic image. MacGreevy moves from a static, aestheticized image of war which still contains remnants of a perceptual reality to a mode of complete painterly Imagism. ‘De Civitate Hominum’ is a fitting example of how MacGreevy deploys his theories on literature and art in his own work. As we have seen, the experience of the war is distilled into two distinct images. In the ‘still life’ section, the poet portrays a static image of a war-torn landscape characterized by the repetition of washed-out whites and greys. In the ‘quick life’ section, MacGreevy intensifies the imagistic aspects of the first half of the poem by evacuating the physical landscape from the scene and depicting the death of an airman in terms of pure colour. Yet the poem concludes with an attempt to grasp at something outside the frame of the image that the poet establishes. Throughout his career, MacGreevy emphasized the importance of not only the ‘personal unique image’51 in the work of art but also the individuality and the ‘subjective isolation’ of the artist in the creation and gestation of the image.52 MacGreevy portrays the isolation of the artist in the poem ‘Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence’, where the sustaining feature of the speaker’s existence is an image of pure solipsism: ‘I see alps, ice, stars and white starlight / In a dry, high silence.’53 Yet for MacGreevy, there is always something outside of the image with which a connection is sought and with which the image is the appropriate mode of communicative expression.

Eschatological hope and the new Irish modernism Throughout his criticism, MacGreevy consistently reiterates the importance of Christian eschatology or what he calls ‘the Vision of the City of God’ and ‘the divine vision of the universe’ in art.54 In Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study, MacGreevy writes that it was St Augustine who expressed it most perfectly: ‘The soul of another is dark.’ … it is our isolation from each other that is our personal contact with, our personal

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understanding of, God … the isolation is itself the breath of the Kingdom of God that is in each one of us.55

Beyond the bleak isolationism of MacGreevy’s poetics exists what Benjamin Keatinge calls an ‘eschatological hope’.56 This hope in an eventual reconciliation and salvation is also found in ‘De Civitate Hominum’. After witnessing the death of the airman, a sergeant exclaims ‘Holy God! / ‘Tis a fearful death’, to which the poetic speaker states ‘Holy God makes no reply / Yet.’57 Elsewhere, ‘Gloria de Carlos V’ presents the movement from the isolationism of modern subjectivity through the image and towards a moment of Christian transcendence.58 The poem documents the spiritual trauma of being a survivor after ‘Those without gas masks were lost’ and concludes with the movement from despair to eschatological hope: My rose of Tralee turned gray in its life, A tombstone gray, Unimpearled. But a moment, now, I suppose, For a moment I may suppose, Gleaming blue, Silver blue, Gold, Rose, And the light of the world.59

In the poem’s final stanza, we move through a series of colours that constitute the splintered image to the ebullient climax of colour that concludes with ‘the light of the world’, tracing the movement from a deathly grey to an image of pure light and transcendence. Arising in the grey of what Beckett lauds in MacGreevy as the ‘nucleus of endopsychic clarity’, the image is constituted as the authentic vessel of communication between the isolation of modern subjectivity and the transcendent.60 Despite the apparent solipsism of the poetic image in his work, MacGreevy’s poetry holds out hope as the possibility of Christian redemption and salvation is left open without being definitively asserted. By contrast to the avant-garde fracture and splinter of much Irish, British and continental high modernism, MacGreevy once wrote that ‘out of the apparent chaos of life the artist evolves order, symmetry, grace, movement, as out of the void God evolved the worlds spinning rhythmically in space’.61 MacGreevy too wrote and evolved out of the void: the void of modern subjectivity, the trauma of both the Great War and the Civil War at home and the disappointment of a short-lived literary career. From that void, he creates images that simultaneously encapsulate the horror and absurdity of the Great War and preserve a sense of Christian reconciliation without ever resolving or dissolving the two into each other. In a 1942 essay for Irish Travel on the stained glass of Dublin’s churches, MacGreevy discusses a window by Michael Healy in the Augustinian Church at John’s Lane, Dublin, that depicts the meeting of St Augustine and his mother:

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The glass glows with more richly delicate colour harmonies. There is, however, one difficulty to be taken into account. The wall of a building beside the church prevents the free passage of light on to it, and, except in the early morning, its translucency is dimmed. No adequate idea of its beauty can be gained until later in the day.62

Perhaps, comparably, now that we are ‘later in the day’, when the light has risen high enough that the gargantuan walls of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett no longer dwarf and shadow MacGreevy, we can fully appreciate the scope of his writing and poetry, with the possibility of his inclusion in an Irish-modernist canon left open without being definitively asserted. Even as the distinctions between MacGreevy and his Irishmodernist contemporaries becomes more precise as we relocate from axiomatic critical narratives to the specifics of the work, so too do new similarities and relations emerge. As the significance of MacGreevy’s non-fiction to his modernist aesthetic becomes clearer, so too does the fact that Yeats, Joyce and Beckett also forged their art in the everyday print world of literary and art reviews in print journals and magazines. At the same time, the MacGreevy that emerges from this picture offers a different vantage on an eminent Irish modernist theme – the project of rediscovering or recapturing the experience of the numinous or the timeless epiphany in a secular modernity. To this end, MacGreevy turns to the potential of the image to break through coordinates of time and space, life and death, subject and object, experience and representation. The picture that emerges from this more expansive set of relations – between genres, between media, between modernisms – has significant consequences not only for the diversity of ways in which we might profitably reform and reframe MacGreevy’s modernism but also for how we conceive and think about Irish modernism, as a critical practice and a mode of narration, in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Intellectual and Aesthetic Influences’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 22. 2. Thomas MacGreevy, Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Susan Schreibman (Dublin: Anna Livia Press, 1991). 3. Brian Coffey, ‘Thomas MacGreevy: A Singularly Perfect Poet’, Hibernia Review of Books (4 February 1972): 10. 4. J. C. C. Mays, ‘How Is MacGreevy a Modernist?’, in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 123. 5. Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser, eds, Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6. See Moss Rhiannon, ‘Thomas MacGreevy, T. S. Eliot and Catholic Modernism in Ireland’, in Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics, ed. Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 144.

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7. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 8. Mays, ‘How is MacGreevy a Modernist?’, 104, 106. 9. The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, www.macgreevy.org. 10. Susan Schreibman, ed., The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 11. David Wheatley, ‘Thomas MacGreevy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, ed. Gerald Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 116, 119. 12. Francis Hutton-Williams, Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 6, 2. 13. Gerald Dawe, ed., Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914–1945 (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2008). See also Gerald Dawe, ‘Nocturnes: Thomas MacGreevy and World War One’, in The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Schreibman, 3–16. 14. Lauren Arrington, ‘The Blindness of Hindsight: Irish and British Poets Look Back on Early Fascist Italy’, Irish Political Studies 33, no. 2 (2018): 255. 15. Mark Leahy, ‘ “it is the act and not the object of perception that matters”: MacGreevy’s Writing in Relation to Perception and Affect in Literary and Visual Arts’, in The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Schreibman, 33–48; Luke Gibbons, ‘ “No Irishness intended”: The Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 346–63. See also Wheatley, 120. 16. Susan Schreibman, ‘Biographical Notes’, in MacGreevy, Collected Poems (Dublin: Anna Livia Press, 1991), xv. 17. Ibid., xvi. 18. See Sandra O’Connell, ‘ “Ghosts Matter”: Thomas MacGreevy and the Lost Generation in Paris’, in The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Schreibman, 162–5. 19. Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (October– March 1912–13): 200. 20. F. S. Flint, ‘Imagisme’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 199. 21. Thomas MacGreevy, Richard Aldington (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 11. Interestingly, MacGreevy is less appreciative of one of the chief proponents of Imagism, Ezra Pound, when he writes in a letter to George Yeats: ‘I saw Ezra’s new book [How to Read, Harmsworth]. Fancy a creature who pretends to admire the author of The Resurrection discussing the author of Polyeucte in a scornful parentheses [sic]. God help the poor idiot. And Eliot sent his last poem to Joyce inscribed “Domine non sum dignus”. More cretinism’ (letter to George Yeats, 11 December 1931). 22. Coffey, ‘Thomas MacGreevy’, 10. 23. Michael Smith, ‘A Talent for Understanding’, in The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Schreibman, 269. 24. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 174. 25. Gerald Dawe, ‘Delayed Honour: The Irish War Poets’, Irish Times (5 May 2015). 26. MacGreevy, Richard Aldington, 24. 27. Ibid., 32.

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28. Alex Davis, A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000), 22. 29. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Unpublished Memoir on James Joyce’, qtd in Hugh J. Dawson, ‘Thomas MacGreevy and Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 309. 30. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘The Catholic Element in Work in Progress’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929), 127. 31. Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, 200. 32. MacGreevy, Richard Aldington, 24. 33. Jim Haughey, The First World War in Irish Poetry (Lewisberg: Buckwell University Press, 2002), 217. 34. MacGreevy, Richard Aldington, 32. 35. Susan Schreibman, ‘The Unpublished Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Exploration’, in Modernism and Ireland, ed. Coughlan and Davis, 131. 36. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 3. 37. Ibid., 2. 38. Ibid., 36. 39. Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writing and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 70. 40. James McNaughton, ‘Thomas MacGreevy’s Poetics of Loss: War, Sexuality and Archive’, Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 4 (2012): 137. 41. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 2–3. 42. Susan Schreibman, ‘Annotations’, in Collected Poems, 100. 43. Ibid., 3. 44. Ibid., 2. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Patrick McGuiness, ‘Imagism’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (New Jersey: Blackwell, 2006), 185. 47. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 3. 48. Ibid., 2. 49. Ibid., 2–3. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. MacGreevy, Richard Aldington, 24. 52. Rhiannon, ‘Thomas MacGreevy, T. S. Eliot and Catholic Modernism in Ireland’, 144. 53. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 43. 54. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Art and the City of God’, Father Matthew Record (May 1942): 3. 55. Thomas MacGreevy, Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 54. 56. Benjamin Keatinge, ‘A Matrix of Correspondences: The Critical Voice of Thomas MacGreevy’, in The Life and Works of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Schreibman, 73. 57. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 3. 58. Keatinge, ‘A Matrix of Correspondences’, 73. 59. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, 36. 60. Samuel Beckett, ‘Humanistic Quietism’, in Disjecta, ed. Cohn, 69. 61. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Irish Stained Glass’, The Leader (23 December 1922). 62. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘A Stained Glass Tour’, Irish Travel (May 1942): 135.

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The full little jug: Flann O’Brien and the Irish public sphere Catherine Flynn

Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien, has often been seen as writing in the shadow of great Irish modernists such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The Cruiskeen Lawn column he wrote for the Irish Times has been regarded as secondary to his novelistic output, and even detrimental to it. Hugh Kenner articulates that view most sharply: ‘Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column? For ruin is the word. So much promise has seldom accomplished so little.’1 However, the aims and effects of Cruiskeen Lawn appear only when it is read in its original context and languages, something which recent work in O’Nolan studies has begun to show.2 I would like to examine here a highly popular series of instalments from late 1941 to early 1942 to show that not only was O’Nolan’s column generative in terms of his work as a novelist and a dramatist but also that he used it to figure Irish public discourse. This intervention is surprising not just because it is made in a comic mode but also because it is concerned with public discourse per se in the young Irish republic. If O’Nolan has been seen as constrained by his choice to remain in Ireland, his pursuit of a career in the civil service and his ongoing writing for the Irish Times, it was precisely these constraints that led him to produce unprecedented work. With a series of instalments on a book handling and ventriloquist business, O’Nolan brings modernist tropes and strategies into the realm of journalistic discourse to ask about the nature of Irish culture, the power and role of public speech in Ireland and the very possibility of an Irish voice. Reading these instalments allows us to see an Irish modernism that, in contrast to the high literary modes of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, engages popular and mass cultural forms to speak directly to the Irish public. O’Nolan began Cruiskeen Lawn in late 1940, writing under the pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen. He was commissioned by editor R. M. Smyllie following a series of impudent and amusing letters to the Irish Times in response to Seán Ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor’s exchange in the same newspaper on ‘Ideals for an Irish Theatre’. A fluent speaker of Irish Gaelic, O’Nolan’s brief was to write an Irish-language column for the newspaper, which was attempting to expand from its West-British and Unionist niche to a national readership. From the beginning, however, O’Nolan responded in complex terms to this assignment. I want to show here that O’Nolan’s engagement with the issue of Irish-language discourse yields resources for his writing in the English

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language, tools that he uses to address the issue of discourse in the republic newly established by Taoiseach (prime minister) Éamon de Valera’s Constitution of Ireland. If, in his early letters to the Irish Times, O’Nolan mocks the idea that Ireland is ‘once more the tabernacle of genius’, he goes on to create a series of instalments in which genius is dispersed, dialogic and anonymous.3 With his 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann, de Valera intended to define Ireland as an exemplary Catholic republic; he ‘declared himself convinced that his constitution would simultaneously allow Ireland to give a lead in the world “as a Catholic nation” and yet form a “secure basis for unification” with the North’.4 The new republic, however, was soon subject to the pressures of the Second World War. Ireland’s policy of neutrality was another expression of the isolationism De Valera had held as an ideal for Ireland since the 1920s. As J. J. Lee writes, ‘Ireland had already intellectually isolated herself in large measure since independence. Her links with the outside world were mainly confined to Britain and the Vatican.’5 It is within these constraints and values that Cruiskeen Lawn was commissioned and against which it struggles. Following Anne Clissmann, critics have often observed an ‘intoxicated variety’ in the war-time Cruiskeen Lawn.6 Its title, indeed, has been understood as drawn from the nonsensical drinking song that appeared in the short-lived magazine Blather, which O’Nolan published with his brother Ciarán Ó Nualláin and his friend Niall Sheridan.7 The line ‘Come dance with me on the Cruiskeen Lawn’, in turn, refers to ‘Crúiscín Lán’, a traditional drinking song named after a full little jug of whiskey. I would like to propose here a supplementary origin for the column’s title that is intimately associated with the issue of national identity. In the opening passage of the foremost of the Great Blasket autobiographies that captured the Irish imagination in the first part of the twentieth century, An tOileánach (The Islander) (1929), Tomás Ó Criomhthain describes himself as ‘dríodar an chrúiscín’, the ‘dregs of the little jug’: ‘Is me dríodar an chrúiscín, deire an áil. Sin é an fáth gur fágadh comh fada ar na cíní me’ (You might call me the dregs of the little jug, the last of the brood. That’s why I was left so long feeding on my mother’s breast).8 O’Nolan conceives, in opposition to this nostalgic and elegiac mood, a crúiscín lán, a full little jug that draws its contents not from the empty jug of old Mother Ireland, embodied in a dying island culture, but from the contemporary conditions of the Irish nation. O’Nolan thus conceives of the newspaper column as resisting the insularity and melancholy usually associated with the Irish language and as, instead, repurposing in unconventional and unorthodox ways this minor and traditional language to devise new forms of expression for the contemporary world. Less than one month after the column’s launch, O’Nolan explicitly links its drunken verbosity to Ireland’s global context: Tá litreacha faghálta agam ó lucht ólta an chrúiscín seo. Cuid aca nach dtaithnigheann an bheoir leo, cuid eile a síleann gur ró-iongantach an deór-sidhe atá curtha ar fagháil agam. Acht is ró-chuma liom. I gcionn seachtainne eile, nuair tá tuirse taghaithe orm agus tobair na h-eagna tráighte, beidh an Ghaedhilg chéadna le léigheamh ar an bpáipéar so is abhíonn ar na páipéirí eile. Beidh Nuaidheacht an Lae againn comh maith le cách. Beidh an

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gealt-ghamaidheacht gnáthach again idtaobh Bhársá agus an Éigipt agus an Rúmáin agus an Seacóslóbhaic agus an Rúis agus pé rud is rogha leat féin, a Sheáin. Achrann idir an Rúmáin, agus an Úngáir! Aer-ruathar ar Learpholl Shasana! Dian-chogadh san Éigipt idir an Iodáil agus an Bhreatain Mhóir! Óráid ó Rúisbheilt I dtaobh na Rúmáine agus na hÉigipe! Cogadh idir an Rúmáin agus an Éigipt! An Éigipt ar lár! An Rúmáin ar lár! Síocháin idir an Éigipt, augs an Rúmáin! Aerruathar eile ar Learpholl Shasana! Teinte mhóra i mBeirlín! Aer-ruathar ar Bhaile Átha Cliath! Cogadh idir Éirinn agus an Rúmáin! Is mairg gur beag an tír í Éire agus gur ró-bheag a h-ainm. Ní líonann sí morán spáis. [I have received letters from the people who are drunk from this jug. The beer does not appeal to some of them, others think that the drop-blast I make available here is too wonderful. But I couldn’t care less. In a week’s time, when I am tired and the well of wisdom is dried up, there will be the same Irish to read in this paper as there is in the other papers. We will have news of the day as well as everyone. We will have the usual mad foolishness on Warsaw and on Egypt and on Romania and on Czechoslovakia and on Russia and whatever you want yourself, Seán. Conflict between Romania and Hungary! Air-raid on Liverpool, England! Fierce fighting in Egypt between Italy and Great Britain! Speech by Roosevelt on Romania and Egypt! War between Romania and Egypt! Egypt in the middle! Romania in the middle! Peace between Egypt and Romania! Another air-raid on Liverpool, England! Huge fires in Berlin! Air-raid on Dublin! War between Ireland and Romania! It’s a pity that Ireland is a small country and that its name is so small. It doesn’t fill much space.]9

As Ireland is little and lacks status and dominion, it must suffer the influx of world events. Instead of defining Ireland’s identity in opposition to its colonizing neighbour, here Myles understands the country in terms of its situation in a world in violent transformation. Only one of the scenarios he lists as the world’s ‘usual mad foolishness’ or, more literally, the usual lunatic play (an gealt-ghamaidheacht gnáthach) is not actual: the war between Ireland and Romania. Egypt and Romania initially declared neutrality but were soon co-opted by larger powers, as the former was under British control while the latter, undermined by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, joined the Axis powers in November 1940. German warplanes had dropped bombs on Ireland several times in August 1940, allegedly by mistake.10 In this new global arena, the backward-looking tropes of the Gaelic Revival and Irish cultural nationalism appear increasingly outmoded. Through rehearsals of cultural obsolescence, however, O’Nolan develops a mode of discourse that is characterized by repetition and conformity. In a series of Irish-language articles in the column’s first month, Myles discusses the typical themes of contemporary Irish-language discourse: ‘CEIST NA GAEILGE’, ‘STAD NA TEANGAN’, ‘CEIST NA GAELTACHTA’ (THE IRISH QUESTION, THE STATE OF THE LANGUAGE, THE QUESTION

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OF THE IRISH SPEAKING AREAS). Their appearance in capitalized form in the Irish script stands out to readers with limited knowledge of Irish, engaged in cursory reading. Reiterated over a series of instalments, they become identical counters that are comically reiterated and rearranged.11 These are, O’Nolan announces with the subtitle of the 16 October instalment, ‘DRÍODAR AN CHRÚISCÍN’, the dregs of the little jug. The reuse of these hackneyed, emptied-out catchphrases undermines the discussion’s message and suggests a linguistic domain devoid of positive content. We can see the same catchwords at work in An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), O’Nolan’s 1941 Irish-language parody of Gaeltacht autobiographies.12 Its narrator Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa repeats to absurdist effect Ó Criomhthain’s poignant lament, ‘Ní bheidh ar leithidí arís ann’ (Our like will not be there again).13 An even more pronounced repetition features in the speeches at a Gaelic festival by figures whose names recall former presidents of the Gaelic League: The Gaelic Daisy, president of the feis, The Eager Cat, vice president.14 The Gaelic Daisy uses variants of the word Gaelic thirty-three times in a hypnotic speech of some two hundred words. Delightful in its repetitions, it begins, A ghaela’, a dúirt sé, ‘cuireann sé gliondar ar mo chroí Gaelach a bheith anseo inniu ag caint Gaeilge libhse ar an bhfeis Ghaelach seo i lár na Gaeltachta’

and climaxes in Níl aon ní ar an domhan chomh deas ná chomh Gaelach le fíor-Ghaeil fhíorGhaelacha a bhíonn ag caint fíor-Ghaeilge Gaelaí i dtaobh na Gaeilge fíor-Ghaelaí. Fógraim an fheis seo anois ar Gael-oscailt. Suas le Gaeil! Go maire ár nGaeilge slán! [Gaels! He said, it delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht … There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language. I hereby declare this feis to be Gaelically open! Up the Gaels! Long live the Gaelic tongue!]15

The Eager Cat delivers a similarly repetitive address, centred on the point that Is í an Ghaeilge an teanga is dúchasach dúinn go léir, agus mar sin ni folâir duinn a bheith dâirire I dtaobh na Gaeilge. Ni d6igh Hom go bhfuil an Rialtas dâirire i dtaobh na Gaeilge; ni d6igh Hom go bhfuil said Gaelach ina gcroî. Is ag magadh faoin nGaeilge a bhid, agus ag tabhairt masla do Ghaelaibh. Ni folâir duinn go léir a bheith go lâidir ar son na Gaeilge [Gaelic is our native language, and we must, therefore, be in earnest about Gaelic. I don’t think the Government is in earnest about Gaelic. I don’t think they’re Gaelic at heart. They jeer at Gaelic and revile the Gaels. We must all be strongly in favour of Gaelic].16

If these speeches are intended by the Gaelic Daisy and the Eager Cat as rallying cries for the revival of the Irish language, they are, in fact, rehearsals of an emphatically

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constrained vocabulary, deliriously liberated from meaning and operating through rhythm and intonation. This stereotyped sloganizing lacks the strengths of the Irish language as asserted by conservative Gaelic Revivalists such as Fr Peadar Ó Laoghaire: ‘The Irish speaker has an exact notion of every one of the words in his vocabulary. To him all the words represent Things, not a certain number of letters representing sounds. His words are the names of his ideas, not of certain black marks on white paper.’17 As O’Nolan presents a linguistic domain that is focused on self-assertion, self-preservation and self-isolation, and in which, accordingly, speakers become mere mouthpieces of these values, he produces in his Irish-language novel, as in Cruiskeen Lawn, exactly what Ó Laoghaire reviled: meaningless sounds that are divorced from reference to the actual world. These nonsensically repeated words turn these passages in the novel and the column into linguistic experiments, identifying them as modernist and even avant-garde texts. If Irish-language discourse produces speakers who are mere mouthpieces for meaningless repetitions, a set of related columns in English suggest that the same problem exists in anglophone discussions of culture. Taking as their location the Gate and the Abbey Theatres, these instalments present Ireland’s national theatres not as staging the dramatic works that were central to Irish self-definition – great Irish modernist plays such as W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen or J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World – but rather as hosting, during intermission, subcontracted dramas of self-fashioning. These dramas are made possible by the hiring of unemployed members of WAAMA, the Writers Artists Actors Musicians Association, ‘which O’Faoláin had recently founded to improve conditions for those whose livelihoods were now dependent on the Irish market’.18 These scenarios find their origin in the Myles na gCopaleen book-handling service. Having encountered a rich man’s impressive but unread library, Myles announces, ‘This is what set me thinking. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf?’ This manhandling is soon complemented by a list of stock phrases that can be inserted into the margins of customers’ books: Rubbish! Yes, indeed! How true, how true! I don’t agree at all. Why? Yes, but cf. Homer, Od., iii, 1 51. Well, well, well.19

In addition to this empty commentary, the service also offers fabricated inscriptions ‘by’ writers and letters offering ‘messages of affection from authors’ to be inserted into volumes. Myles describes this as a ‘great cultural uprising of the Irish people’. The bookhandling service allows Irish people to surmount the educational barriers of their past; with its help they can skip education altogether and access the sound and appearance of authoritative discourse. In this purely material and materialistic relationship to

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literary culture, national self-assertion and freedom are identified with the emptying out and commodification of discourse. The Escort Service is born when Myles’s highly successful business is reduced to absurdity by book-handlers who take too hands-on an approach, whipping the books, training terriers to worry them and ploughing them into the ground. Fortunately, the business concept has flaws that point to growth potential. What use are book-handlers to those without books? A new service will provide both books and handlers. Then again, why have books at all? In a moment of inspiration, Myles conceives of the Myles na gCopaleen Escort Service, which will provide hitherto unemployed ventriloquists to speak for customers when they go out in public: Supposing you are a lady and so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at. You ring up the WAAMA League and explain your trouble. You are pleased by the patient and sympathetic hearing you get. You are instructed to be in attendance at the foyer of the Gate Theatre that evening, and to look out for a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman of military bearing attired in immaculate evening dress.20

The Escort will not act out the sexual connotations we now associate with the term but rather will address the lady in a ‘delightfully low, manly voice’ and respond, for her, in a voice that is ‘the tinkle of silver bells’. In pleasing tones such as these, the ventriloquists-for-hire deliver stock language. These ‘dialogues’ begin with pleasant banalities and move quickly into performances that reduce key words to sounds: ‘Well, well, Godfrey, how awfully wizard being at the theatre with you!’ ‘Yes, it is fun.’ ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ ‘Been trying to catch up with my reading, actually.’ ‘Ow, good show, keep in touch and all that.’ ‘Yes, I’ve been studying a lot of books on Bali. You know?’ ‘Ballet is terribly bewitching, isn’t it? D’you like Petipa?’ ‘I’m not terribly sure that I do, but they seem to have developed a complete art of their own, you know. Their sense of decor and their general feeling for the plastic is quite marvellous.’ ‘Yes, old Derain did some frightfully good work for them; for the Spectre, I think it was, actually. Sort of grisaille, you know.’ ‘But their feeling for matière is so profound and  … almost brooding. One thinks of Courbet.’ ‘Yes, or lngrès.’ ‘Or Delacroix, don’t you think?’ ‘Definitely. Have you read Karsavina?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Of course, how stupid of me. I saw her, you know.’ ‘Ow, I hadn’t realised that she herself was a Balinese.’ ‘Balinese? What are you driving at?’

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‘But—’ ‘But—’21

The exchange has the allusive wealth we associate with modernist texts. If works such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are concerned with the decay and fragmentation of European culture and turn to the ancient and distant cultures in the hope of accessing new energy, here those efforts are conscripted for individual self-promotion and commercial gain. This fragmented cultural context is associated with a collapse of effective communication. This is, in fact, its special feature: The conversation I have quoted is one of the most expensive on the menu. You will note that it contains a serious misunderstanding. This makes the thing appear extraordinarily genuine. Imagine my shrewdness in making the ventriloquist misunderstand what he is saying himself! Conceive my guile, my duplicate duplicity, my play on ignorance and gullibility! Is it any wonder that I have gone into the banking business?22

As it plays on the material qualities of the roughly similar words ‘ballet’ and ‘Bali’, this ‘duplicate duplicity’ is the artificial repetition of an artificial repetition. The very absence of unifying narratives within the scene – the unresolved misunderstanding – substitutes for authenticity. The interpretive closure the exchange so ‘genuinely’ withholds is offered by Myles in his explanation of the appeal of the performance. The selfconscious artifice of modernism thus shifts to a metalevel which is, it turns out, the level of commerce. While the array of cultural references in the exchange sounds impressive, it is, in fact, a deployment of words that sound right rather than signs that map the world in any meaningful way. Josefa Durán y Ortega, the Romani Spanish dancer known by the stage name Pepita de Oliva, died in 1871, presumably before most 1941 speakers were born. Neither André Derain nor Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres depicted ballet in their work. Derain is not associated with the grey monochrome paintings known as grisailles but rather with the vibrant colours of the Fauvist movement; he died fifteen years before the retired Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina revived the Spectre de la Rose for the Royal Ballet in 1932. A more accurate reference would be to the paintings of ballerinas by Edgar Degas. Similarly, the references of the ballet fan’s interlocutor (made by the same ventriloquist) to Bali, Gustave Courbet and Ferdinand Delacroix would be more accurate if shifted over one or two steps to the depictions of Tahiti, some six thousand miles east, by Paul Gauguin. The Irish public is thus not only unable to converse in a cultured manner, it is also unable to identify bogus verbiage. Moreover, it is ready to pay for it. This commercial use of nonsensical dislocated language finds emblematic form in a stock sentence offered by the Escort Service – ‘I trace his influences more in sorrow than in anger’ – that can be inflected with the customer’s desired context. Myles gives examples of variants from painting (‘more in Seurat than in Ingres, old thing’), philosophy (‘Suraz and Engels’) and literature (‘Thoreau and Béranger’).23 The Escort Service is wildly successful; Myles reports that ventriloquists ‘can now be heard carrying out their single-handed conversations all over the city and in the drawing rooms of people who are very important and equally

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ignorant’.24 These instalments thus portray the discursive space attendant to Ireland’s foremost national theatres and contemporary Dublin society more generally as a void that can be filled to order with meaningless repetitions. In none of the Escort Service instalments is the material performed on the theatre stage discussed. In the early 1940s, Robert Welch writes, there was a sense that the Abbey Theatre ‘was in the doldrums’.25 The Abbey was still largely focused on rural Ireland for the expression of ‘what were then perceived as the key institutions of Irish society: the family, the land and a code of strict morality enjoined by a vigilant church’; the ‘classic ingredients’ of the typical Abbey play of the time were ‘matchmaking, forced marriages, the land, young versus old, illegitimacy, boozing and incest’.26 Yet the Abbey, and the Gate, also staged productions of foreign comedies and experimental theatre. Mícheál Mac Liammóir defended ‘the Abbey and his own theatre, the Gate, against the charges that they had become too commercial, arguing that all theatres needed long runs (such as was the case with Shiels’s latter comedies) and big houses to keep going, and to ensure the financial stability necessary for experimentation to be carried out’.27 This tension between native and foreign material was the focus of the discussion between O’Connor and Ó Faoláin which prompted O’Nolan’s first letters to the Irish Times, in which he made fun both of the ‘peasant quality’ he saw celebrated by O’Connor and the international culture championed by Ó Faoláin. The Escort Service instalments refuse both the nativist and the cosmopolitan approaches or, more precisely, meld them in an experimentalism that stages contemporary Irish society itself. This dramatic action takes place in theatre foyers, among an intermission crowd made up of individuals who vie with one another as ventriloquist dummies in exchanges of tokenized and imported language and individuals who respond silently or through written entreaties. These ventriloquized performances and the spaces around them – which, as we will see, include courtrooms and the spaces of labour negotiations – suggest the hierarchies, exclusions and struggles of Irish public life in the early 1940s. Through the ventriloquist service, the question of Irish art and of an Irish relation to art becomes an occasion for the depiction of the Irish public sphere. I use here the term coined by Jürgen Habermas to describe a discursive realm that was crucial to the development of participatory democracy.28 The public sphere arose in the eighteenth century as a virtual community of citizens that together developed discourses through which to regulate hitherto absolutist state authority. According to Habermas, the world of letters in general and of newspapers in particular offered fora in which individuals deliberated on issues of concern. If Habermas figures the sphere created by journalism and places like the coffee house as a ‘discursive theatre’, in the Escort Service instalments, Irish theatres become spaces of Irish discourse. Instead of the Catholic, rural, traditional, collective mode of being enshrined in de Valera’s constitution, the instalments depict a contentious and dynamic discursive sphere. Various individuals appear in and around these artificial discussions: a vacuous class of ‘important people’ and also women, country people and labourers, who are forced to communicate in indirect and even triangular ways. The fragmented conversation quoted above presents urbanites who ‘speak’ of foreign culture in an idiom that is far from the typical speech of Dubliners – ‘Godfrey’,

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‘awfully wizard’, ‘good show’ and ‘and all that’ – that would have registered for O’Nolan’s readers as West-British. Myles later represents this accent phonetically when he refers to ‘the morbid sub-human pretenses adopted by Keltured idiocated Dubliners’.29 The moral limits of these higher echelons of society are displayed when the ventriloquists go off script: During the first interval the escorts rammed several rossiners [drinks] into their interiors and began to answer themselves back in somewhat unladylike language. During second interval, things got out of hand. The ladies (very respectable folk from Ballylickey) were heard making boisterous remarks about other members of the audience and inviting elderly gentlemen to see them home. … Respectable pillars of State Bench and Bar were heard taking up the challenges and giving details of the appearance and location of their cars. Outraged wives then inserted perfectly genuine remonstrances into the din of fake conversation.30

Like the imported West-British diction, the bourgeois hypocrisy exposed here evokes the tropes of English comedies of the 1930s. The scene thus presents a group of people who form their identities through the absorption of foreign culture, in an alternative to the earlier, ideal audiences of the Abbey and Gate, who looked to stage plays for models of Irish identity. Other sectors of Irish society are displayed when the ventriloquists redirect their fantastical linguistic skills to negotiations concerning their own pay. Speaking in Myles’s voice, they announce for themselves a salary increase of 50 per cent.31 This gives Myles an idea for a new service that would aid workers’ negotiations on a national scale: ‘Why not make my ventriloquists a bulwark of the Trade Union movement? Why not use their unique gifts to bring the parasite boss class to heel? Why not arrange beforehand, beyond yea or nay, that you will get the answer you are looking for? I’m talking to Mr O’Shannon.’32 Myles refers here to Cathal O’Shannon, a member of the Gaelic League who had fought in the Easter Rising and served in the Dáil, and who, in 1941, became Secretary of the Irish Trades Union Congress. Myles’s proposal is particularly provocative at this moment, when labour negotiations were about to be strictly delimited to state-sanctioned groups. On 13 December 1941, under the Trade Union Act, the Minister for Industry and Commerce mandated that ‘no body of persons, other than those excepted [‘bodies which are authorized trade unions as defined in the Act’], may carry on negotiations for the fixing of wages or other conditions of employment’.33 Myles’s idea is an answer to the limits of union persuasion and business sympathy: it turns the results of protracted negotiations into readily available conclusions and, in doing so, conjures up the possibility of a country radically reshaped by the desires of labour. If Myles presents the Escort Service as a tool for hire, his sense of entrepreneurial control disappears as he realizes the potential of the ventriloquists to go rogue. Myles refers to ‘several “incidents” (using the word practically in the Japanese sense)’, likening these linguistic rebellions to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor twelve days before.34 As a consequence, he realizes that

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the presence of even one small Escort in the High Court could lead to unheard of complications. Soon the nation may be faced with a vast constitutional crisis arising from pronouncements made (or, at all events, distinctly heard to have been made) by the princes of the bench and all sorts of lesser judicial dignitaries. I am afraid the astonishment on His Honour’s own face will not be accepted as evidence to the contrary.35

The judiciary had been moved into a position of central importance by de Valera’s constitution, which rendered them the final interpreters of the constitution and ‘defenders of citizen’s constitutional rights’.36 In this new republic, thrown words can undermine the fundamental principles of the nation and of its citizenry. Conscripted from the ranks of the unemployed, the ventriloquists are artists who can commandeer authoritative discourse. These imitators are fundamentally a disaffected group, which in each of the scenes display hostility towards the establishment and the status quo. Yet Myles displays these same hostilities. His criticism of the intellectual incapacity of the affluent and socially prominent Irish people leans towards sexism in his description of the initial hypothetical customer, ‘Supposing you are a lady and so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at’, and again in that of another woman ‘who barely knew how to ask for her porridge’. Yet he also identifies stupidity in their male counterparts: ‘No matter how good the escort is, he cannot get away with the illusion that his client is making the smart remarks if the latter persists in lolling about with a gaping mouth and rolling eyes. If the client cannot even temporarily remove his stupid, vacant, bovine expressionlessness, the escort is largely wasting his breath.’37 This hyperbolic image of physical and mental atrophy raises the question of the constitution of Ireland’s social elite, presenting the country as governed by a parasitic and incompetent class. Against such a status quo, the ventriloquists’ rebellion, as described by Myles, transforms Dublin city into an unknowable discursive space; it also makes apparent the habitual exclusion of voices capable of insight: ‘Extraordinary utterances have been made in public places but nobody knows for certain who made them. Worse, intelligent and perfectly genuine remarks made by dowdy young women have been completely ignored by the person to whom they were addressed, whose first instinct is to turn round and search the faces of inoffensive strangers to find the “speaker”.’38 This scene of marginalization and objectification of women is particularly timely in the wake of the relegation of women to the domestic sphere by the constitution; ‘De Valera devoted particular attention to the role of the Irish woman. Article 41 emphasized her place “within the home”. De Valera made clear that this was the only proper place for her.’39 The National University Women Graduates’ Association were especially critical of this policy, as it excluded educated women from discussions of public policy.40 Other social exclusions are made evident when the ventriloquists take up blackmail. When wealthy urbanites are targeted, ordinary individuals are caught up in the mix: ‘Innocent country visitors coming to the theatre for the first time, and unaware of the situation, could scarcely be expected to accept the savage jeers of some offensive bystander.’41 The ventriloquists, democratically, put their words in the mouths of all and working people resort to penning earnest attestations of their blamelessness. Myles is

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given written messages that protest their writers’ lack of prominence and wealth: ‘I give you my solemn word of honour that I am a civil servant and that the appalling language that you hear coming from me is being uttered by some other person. Signed, JUST A MINOR STAFF OFFICER.’42 This vulnerability is attested poignantly by individuals lower down the social ladder: ‘So help me, I am a crane driver from Drogheda, and I have not opened my beak since I came in to-night. Cough twice if you believe me. Signed NED THE DRIVER.’ Yet in addition to preying on non-elites, the ventriloquists also make their culture audible through the voices of their social superiors: ‘Just imagine Lord Longford saying: “Has anybody here got a handball? I challenge any man here to a moonlight game above in the gardens, against the gable of the Nurses’ Home.” ’43 When the ventriloquists’ word-throwing becomes separated from both fair practices and organized labour, everything breaks down: ‘When it became generally known that a non-union man had succeeded in extracting a five-pound note from a client by menaces, hordes of unscrupulous ventriloquists descended upon the scene and made our theatre foyers a wilderness of false voices, unsaid remarks, anonymous insults, speakerless speeches and scandalous utterances which had no known utterer.’44 This new linguistic ‘wilderness’ is a place of paradox, aggression and anarchy. The questioning of social conventions so typical of modernism is extended here, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Instead of coining an ‘essential’ Irish idiom, like the Kiltartanese of Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, the Aran-inspired hybrid of Synge, or the Dublin patois of O’Casey, here the deployment of a set of modernist strategies – citation, fragmentation, indirection, irony and materialized language – in a social space in a manner unbound by social convention leads to total disorder. Language recirculates meaninglessly and all existing relations and identities are broken down: One particular theatre has become a bedlam of ‘voices’ and coarse badinage …. If you say something, no one will believe that you said it. Even a simple ‘what-timeis-it?’ simply evokes a knowing smile and an involuntary search of the nearest bystander’s countenance; that or some extraordinary reply like ‘Pie-face!’ ‘Who wants to know?’ or ‘Time we were rid of a hook like you!’45

Instead of generating an image of a true Irishness – whether anthropologically inspired or visionary – the Escort Service turns the theatre foyer into a black box in which words and actions circulate without agents or structure. Rather than representing Ireland to Irish people, this artistic practice pushes them into violent and fundamental contention. In the final instalment of the Escort Service series, the ventriloquists’ predatory behaviour has produced an audience too frightened to go to the foyer. The theatre auditorium now becomes a space inhabited by harmful words that spread like disease: ‘I counselled courage and no truck with the evil voices that were in nesting the national theatre like plague-nits in a rat’s back.’46 Although far removed from the Irish Revivalists, these speakers have names that resemble Gaelic League pseudonyms. The Grey Spider, The Firefly, The Hooded Hawk and The Green Mikado evoke a predatory natural world, and one in which the tokens of Irishness are blended with multiply refracted

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foreign culture. Furthermore, the theatre itself is ascribed a predatory nature: if the ventriloquists are figured here as parasitical ‘plague-nits’, the theatre is their rodent carrier. As the fourth wall is broken, the stage is annexed for plague transmission: a ventriloquist has an actor insult a woman in the audience and ‘uproar’ breaks out. The erasure of the division between performers and audience is one of the key aims of the historical avant-garde,47 but this rupture occurs in the opposite direction to avant-garde events, as the stage is hijacked for mercenary extortion by members of the audience. Myles reports that he brought another ventriloquist who adds a phrase to the first ventriloquist’s words to misdirect the audience’s attention towards another woman. If this is a ‘great cultural uprising of the Irish people’, to reuse Myles’s description the book-handling service, any popular benefit, however materialistic, is annulled in the competitive annexation of cultural space by unrestrained commercial interests. Over the next years and decades, O’Nolan produced works in the dramatic mode, both for stage and for television. His biographer and friend Anthony Cronin observes that O’Nolan’s turn to theatre was obvious: ‘Everybody in Dublin wrote plays, including many people who were not writers at all. And they usually offered them to the Abbey.’48 Yet we can understand the Escort Service instalments as piquing O’Nolan’s interest in drama. Their featuring of language as performance, as thrown voice, as contentless but textured dialogue, suggests that works like Thirst (1942), Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green (1943) and the 24-episode TV series O’Dea’s Yer Man (1963–64) deserve more attention; this lack of compelling subject material, which has disappointed some readers, might be seen as a refusal of content other than the sociolinguistic. Short of an actual ventriloquist rebellion, however, conventional drama seems somewhat limited in comparison to the events described in the Escort Service instalments. As the ventriloquists circulate dislocated words in different spheres of public life, images of an Irish nation in transformation and turmoil result. These scenes of thrown words unfold alongside the other ongoing discussions of the Cruiskeen Lawn column and within the larger context of the Irish Times newspaper, echoing and refracting the contemporary Irish and global events it represents. In contrast to de Valera’s homogenous vision, or the idealized archetypes of the Revival, the Escort Service makes visible the contemporary Irish public sphere: contentious, dynamic and in the process of remaking the country. These newspaper instalments constitute an Irish modernism that calls forth contemporary life, working not to represent but to instigate.

Notes 1. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (New York: Knopf, 1983), 321. 2. See The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, https://parishreview. openlibhums.org/. See also recent collections on O’Nolan and my essays in them: ‘ “Everybody Here Is Under Arrest”: Translation and Politics in Cruiskeen Lawn’, in Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour, ed. Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), 19–33; ‘ “Put ‘Molotoff bread-basket’ into Irish, please”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Dada and the Blitz’, forthcoming in The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey (Edinburgh:

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Edinburgh University Press, 2021); and also ‘ “The Half-Said Thing”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War’, in Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority, ed. Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), 71–86. 3. Flann O’Brien, ‘Times Pocket’, in The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), 25. 4. J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 206. 5. Ibid., 260. 6. Anne Clissmann, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 191. 7. Selected articles from Blather were reprinted in Flann O’Brien, Myles Before Myles, A Selection of the Earlier Writings of Brian O’Nolan, ed. John Wyse Jackson (London: Grafton, 1983). See also Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton, 1989), 79. 8. Tomás Ó Criomhthain, An t-Oileánach (Dublin: Clólucht an Talbóidigh, 1929), 1; Tomás Ó Criomhthain, The Islander, trans. Garry Bannister and David Sowby (London: Gill & McMillan, 2012), 1. 9. Myles na gCopaleen, Cruiskeen Lawn, Irish Times [hereafter CL] (4 November 1940): 4 (my translation). 10. ‘Bomb Starts a Fire’ and ‘Bomb Deaths’, Irish Times (30 August 1940): 5; Clair Wills also discusses the bombing of Ireland in That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 208. 11. See, for example, the 10 October 1940, 16 October 1940 and 21 October 1940 columns of CL. 12. It is important to note that An Béal Bocht existed in manuscript form before the Cruiskeen Lawn columns quoted above. Maebh Long notes a mention of a ‘saga in Gaelic’ in June 1940. The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, 107. 13. Long has persuasively argued that the characters of O’Nolan’s novel figure Irish people in thrall to bogus representations of themselves: they ‘lack agency because the books they repeat contain characters caged by their circumstances’, yet despite these terrible conditions, their ‘endless litany of expressions of finitude serves to render them infinite’. Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 111–12. 14. Douglas Ross Hyde was known as An Craoibhín Aoibhinn [the pleasant little branch] and P. T. MacGinley as Cú Uladh (the hound of Ulster). 15. Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht, Nó an Milleánach: Droch-sgéal ar an Drochshaoghal (Dublin: An Press Náisiúnta, 1941), 47; Flann O’Brien [Myles na gCopaleen], The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life, trans. Patrick C. Power (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), 54, 55. 16. Na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht, 48; The Poor Mouth, 55. 17. Peadar Ó Laoghaire/Peter O’Leary, Irish Language Composition, qtd in Carol Taaffe, Ireland through the Looking Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), 100–1. 18. Ibid., 140. 19. CL (8 December 1941): 6. 20. CL (5 December 1941): 2. 21. CL (8 December 1941): 2.

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2 2. Ibid. 23. CL (17 December 1941): 2. ‘Suraz’ seems to be a reference to the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholastic, Francisco Suárez, misspelled to better echo Seurat. 24. CL (8 December 1941): 2. 25. Robert Welch, The Abbey Theater: 1899–1999: Form & Pressure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 144. 26. Ibid., 143, 142. 27. Ibid., 145. 28. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 29. CL (25 March 1942): 2. 30. CL (12 December 1941): 4. 31. CL (22 December 1941): 2. 32. Ibid. 33. ‘Trade Union Act, 1941’, Irish Times (13 December 1931): 6. 34. CL (19 January 1942): 6. 35. Ibid. 36. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, 208. 37. CL (29 December 1941): 5. 38. CL (19 January 1942): 6. 39. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, 206. 40. Ibid., 207. See, for example, Isabella Carey, ‘Education and Women’, Irish Times (15 January 1941): 6. 41. CL (23 January 1942): 6. 42. CL (28 January 1942): 6. 43. CL (23 January 1942): 6. 44. Ibid. 45. CL (28 January 1942): 6. 46. CL (30 January 1942): 4. 47. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 48. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 144.

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252

Index 1916 revolutionaries 129–38, 180 A Broad Sheet 204 A Broadside 204 Aalen, Frederick 110 Aaronson, Lazarus 17 Abbey Theatre 2, 83, 108, 110–11, 117, 121–2, 124, 227, 230–1, 234 abject 58, 83 Abramovitsh, Sholem 19 Adelman, Juliana 187 Adorno, Theodor W. 25 ‘Antares Skorpios’ (pseudonym of Jane Barlow and Rev. James William Barlow) 188–9 Æ (George William Russell) 43, 108 aestheticism 12, 30, 32–4, 107 aesthetics 2–3, 9, 32, 34, 74, 77, 81–2, 104 affect 4, 20, 43–5, 53, 60, 81, 88, 92, 94, 99, 104, 111, 130, 136 Agamben, Giorgio 82 Ahmed, Sara 87 Aldington, Richard 170, 211–13 Aleichem, Sholem (see also Rabinovich, Solomon Naumovich) 17, 19, 21 Jewish Children 17 Stempenyu 17 alienation 45, 51, 54, 73–5, 77 ambivalence 21, 25, 90, 105, 170 An Claidheamh Soluis 119 Anderson, Benedict 53 Anderson, Margaret 181 anglicization 107, 110, 118 animism 12, 57 anthropocentrism 12, 58, 66 anthropomorphism 61–2 anti-authoritarian fiction 84 anti-scientific attitude in fin-de-siècle Ireland 185 and religion 185, 193 antisemitism 23–4

Arendt, Hannah 16 Ariel 198, 205 Arnold, Matthew 9, 107, 118–19 Arrington, Lauren 116, 153, 210 Asquith, Henry Herbert 133 Athenaeum 37 Bair, Deirdre 154 Balfour, Arthur 110 Balfour, Gerald 109 Balzac, Honoré de 19 Barad, Karen 58, 60, 62, 65 bard 84, 153–62 as archivist and narrator 154 bardic culture 153–8, 160–2 and modern visual technologies 157–8 bardic tradition and orality 157–8 blind bard 154–6, 162 Barlow, Jan (see also ‘Antares Skorpios’) 10, 169, 185, 188–9 Barlow, Rev. James William (see also ‘Antares Skorpios’) 188–9 History of a World of Immortals without a God 188–9 Barlow, Richard 157 Barnacle, Nora 96 Barry, Kevin 82, 87, 131 Barsam, Richard 158 The Beano 198 Beckett, Samuel 1–12, 15, 43, 69–74, 77, 81–4, 87–8, 97–9, 104, 116, 141–3, 148, 153–68, 170, 174–5, 177, 179, 181, 209–10, 215, 218–19, 223 as a ‘blind bard’ 154–5 bilingualism 77 ‘blind bard’ trope in film 161 and cinema 153 Company 77 ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ 161 Film 154, 160–1 ‘Fingal’ 154–9

254 ‘La Fin’ 12, 69, 74–7 L’Innommable 77 Malone Meurt 77 Molloy 77, 168 Murphy 141–3 Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress 212 ‘Premier Amour’ 88, 97 and prostheticized corporeality 81 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ 1–2, 116, 155, 162, 215 Samuel Beckett letters project 169 Waiting for Godot 116, 153 Watt 73 Worstward Ho 77 Behan, Brendan 12, 104, 175, 179 The Bell 44 Bender, Abby 16 Benjamin, Walter 44–5 Bennett, Andrew 60, 65 Bennett, Jane 58, 60 Bergson, Henri 63 Berkeley, George 154, 160–1 Berman, Hannah 11, 15–25, 167, 210 Ant Hills 18, 20 ‘Berman Story’ 22 ‘The Charity Box’ 23 The History of Joseph Sackenovitz 17–18 and Jewish nationalism 16 Melutovna 17, 19–20, 24–5 ‘Nothing – and Nothing’ 22 and the Revival 22 as a translator 21 Berman, Jessica 169, 177 Berman, Levi 16, 22–3 Bhabha, Homi K. 73 The Big Budget 197, 200, 205 bilingualism 77 in Samuel Beckett 69 biography 10, 89, 131 biopolitics 5, 81–2, 111–12, 129 Bixby, Patrick 3, 103, 116 Blackwell, Ernley 133 blindness 155, 160–2 and bardic culture 160 and the Irish philosophical tradition 160 Blitz 32, 58

Index blood sacrifice 135–6, 146 Bloom, Harold 9, 136 blushing 83, 88, 92–8 literary blush as masquerade 92 in Samuel Beckett’s ‘First Love’ 98 body 2, 30, 45–64, 65, 69, 81–4, 87, 92, 95–6, 98, 104, 134, 145, 153, 193 Bonaventura 191 Booker, M. Keith 149 The Bookman 37 Bornstein, George 16 Borthwick, Norma 204 Boucicault, Dion 130 Robert Emmet 130 Bowen, Elizabeth 10–12, 30–1, 57–66, 70, 82, 104–5, 174 A World of Love 64 Bowen’s Court 59 The Death of the Heart 64 Faber Book of Modern Short Stories 31 Friends and Relations 64 The Heat of the Day 58, 59, 62, 64 The House in Paris 60–1 and Irish modernism 66 ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ 60 The Last September 59, 60–2, 64 ‘The Little Girl’s Room’ 62 nonhuman 62 and objects 59, 60–4, 66 on Sheridan Le Fanu 62 ‘The Pink Biscuit’ 65 To the North 59–60 Bradshaw, David 117 Braidotti, Rosi 58, 60, 65 Bramble, John 107 Brandes, George 70 Brannigan, John 11, 15–25, 167 Brennan, Maeve 30 Brinsley Sheridan, Richard 94 The School for Scandal 94 Brooker, Joseph 168 Brown, Bill 57 Browning, Robert 35 Brzezinski, Max 81 Burke, Edmund 93–4, 147, 159 on embarrassment 93–4 Burke, Oliver J. The South Isles of Aran 159 Butler, Judith 46, 82

Index Byrne, Eoin 12–13, 69–78 Byron, George Gordon Lord 31 The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism 3, 11, 15, 46, 175 Cannon Harris, Susan 119 canon 1–5, 9, 10–13, 30, 38, 69, 72, 82, 104, 116, 168, 175, 177–8, 219 critical 47 modernist 30, 38, 47, 58, 72, 104 multilingual 78 of Irish modernism 4–5, 9, 11–13, 33, 82, 116, 168, 209–10, 219 canonical 3, 10, 15, 82–3, 88, 104, 129, 169, 175 canonized 2, 10, 197, 209 capital punishment (see also death penalty) 84, 130 capitalism 109, 142–4, 149 Carrigan Committee Report 141 Casement, Roger 10, 82, 84, 105, 129, 131–3 Black Diaries 84, 129, 133 considered forgeries 133 execution for treason 129 letter to his sister Nina 131 queer readings of his work and correspondence 129, 132 ‘Speech from the Dock’ 131–2 Caserio, Robert L. 112 Casetti, Francesco 158 Castle, Gregory 3, 103, 116 Cathleen ni Houlihan 97, 131, 133–4 Catholic 107, 111, 117, 119, 121, 137, 141, 185–7, 193, 224, 230 Catholicism 110, 130, 135, 137, 185 Celtic Twilight 107–8 Celticism 108–9, 119 censorship 142–4, 147–9, 177, 180 Censorship of Publications Act 46, 142, 146–7, 180 Chaplin, Charlie City Lights 161 Modern Times 161 Chapman’s Magazine 31 Charcot, Jean-Martin 119 Chen, Mel 58 Cheng, Anne Anlin 88 Childs, Donald J. 117

255

cinema 84, 145, 153, 157–9, 162, 167, 169, 200 cinematic technologies 153 cinematic vision in Beckett and Joyce 156–7 silent cinema 153, 158, 162 Civil War 2, 45, 181, 211, 218 Clarke, Austin 44, 181 Clarke, Harry 10, 84, 145, 167 stained-glass window with scene from Mr Gilhooley 145 Cleary, Joe 3, 15, 116, 175, 193 Clery, Arthur 117 Clissmann, Anne 224 Coffey, Brian 1, 43, 209, 212 Coghill, Rhoda 11, 12, 43–4, 53–4 ‘Burren, Co. Clare’ 53 ‘In the City’ 53 Collins, Lucy 12, 43–54 Colman Smith, Pamela 10, 82, 105, 108, 167 colonial 2, 73, 82, 105, 108–9, 135, 143, 176, 177, 180–1, 203, 206 Irish colonial history 70, 73, 129 colonizing 4, 225 Comic Cuts 170, 197, 199, 201–3 comic strips 169–70, 197–206 as a vehicle for popular modernism 206 Comte, Auguste 186–7 The Course in Positive Philosophy 186 Condon, Denis 158–9 Congested Districts Board for Ireland 110 Connerty, Michael 170, 197–206 Connolly, Claire 130 Connor, Steven 87 Conrad, Kathryn 3, 103, 110 Constitution of Ireland 224 constructive unionism 107, 109–11 and domesticity 110 Coogan, Tim Pat 179 Corkery, Daniel 73 Cosgrave, W. T. 145, 181 cosmopolitanism 90, 159 Coughlan, Patricia 1–2 Crackanthorpe, Hubert 31 creativity 11–12, 19, 45, 54, 82 The Criterion 212 Cronin, Anthony 146, 175, 234 Cullingford, Elizabeth 116

256 Curran, Daniel 170, 209–19 Curran, Sarah 84, 129–30, 132–3, 135–6, 138, 209 Curtis, L. P. 92, 201 Cusack, Michael 119 Gaelic Athletic Association 119 D’hoker, Elke 11, 29–39 da Cunha Lewin, Katie 10 Dada 202 The Dandy 198 Darwin, Charles Darwinian reading of Playboy of the Western World 122 On the Origin of Species 187 Daudet, Alphonse 32 Davis, Alex 1–2, 213 Davis, Janet 200 Davitt, Michael 24 Dawe, Gerald 210, 213 de Brún, Pádraig 73 De Hindeberg, Risteard 73 de Valera, Éamonn 46, 224, 230, 232, 234 Bunreacht na hÉireann 224 Deane, Seamus 185 death 5, 12, 18, 45, 76, 83, 88, 115, 123, 130–6, 138, 146, 189, 216–19 and liveness 65 and temporality 64 and textuality 65 in Elizabeth Bowen 57–66 death penalty 83–4 Derrida, Jaques 133 and marriage 135 and masochism 129, 132, 136–7 and sexuality 129–38 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) 180 degeneration discourse 83, 115, 117–18, 123, 148 and Irish Ireland 120 in D. P. Moran 120–1 Deleuze, Gilles 99, 160 Anti-Oedipus (with Félix Guattari) 99 ‘The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”)’ 160 Derrida, Jaques 44, 65, 72, 82, 84, 129–31, 133–4, 176, 182 ‘Envois’ (Dispatches) 176

Index on death penalty and masochism 129, 133 Derbforgaill (Dervorgilla) 135 desire 21, 32, 37, 45, 48–9, 52, 66, 81, 94–5, 98, 107, 119, 130, 132, 135, 137, 143–4, 147, 149, 193 politics of 144 Devenport O’Neill, Mary 11–12, 43, 48–9, 51–2 ‘A Mood’s Extremity’ 48–9 ‘The Bell’ 48 ‘Expectation’ 48 Devlin, Denis 1, 12, 43 Dickens, Charles 19 Dimock, Wai Chee 176 discourse 2, 12, 24–5, 72, 81–3, 87, 116, 129, 133, 137, 144, 168 dislocation 19, 74–5, 77 domesticity 35, 112, 144 Doyle, David 130, 199 Dublin Magazine 18, 23 Dublin Penny Post 179 Dunne, J. W. 190 serialism 190 Eagleton, Terry 2 Easter Rising 46, 84, 111, 129, 138, 180, 231 Emmet/Curran myth 84, 135–6 executions 129, 131, 134–7 female fidelity 135 last letters 129, 131–4, 136–7 male political martyrdom 131–2 masculinity and blood sacrifice 135 and masochism 138 and nationalism 136 mythologizing of 111 postcolonial readings 129 Ebury, Katherine 83–4, 167, 209, 129–38 ecocriticism 12, 82 Edelstein, Joseph 17 The Moneylender 17 Edwardian 170, 200 Egerton, George 29–35, 37 ‘A Lost Masterpiece’ 33 Einstein, Albert 190–2 Eisenstein, Sergei 161 Eliot, T. S. 52, 90–1, 93, 154, 170, 211–12, 229

Index ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 90–1 The Waste Land 52, 154, 229 Ellmann, Maud 57–8, 60–1 Ellmann, Richard 9, 116, 161 James Joyce 116 embodiment 44, 58, 81–2, 98, 224 Emmet, Robert 84, 130, 133, 135 as a martyr 130 ‘Emmet mania’ 133 in James Joyce’s Ulysses 132 last letter to Sarah Curran 132 emotion 32–3, 37, 44–6, 48, 49, 51–2, 54, 58, 76, 81, 91, 136, 215 and creative expression 45 and intellect 54 and reason 52 empire 90, 111, 143, 200 empiricism 187 The English Review 18, 29 Enlightenment 57, 107, 185 post-Enlightenment 107 Eoin, Máirin Nic 72 epidermiology 87, 88 epistolary 5, 169, 173, 175–6, 181–2 Epstein, Jacob 17 Ernst, Max 202 estrangement 43, 45–6, 61, 202 eugenics 81–3, 115, 117, 120–3 evolutionary theory 115, 117 exclusion 4, 46–7, 49, 168, 232 experimentation 30, 33, 47, 69–70, 73, 77–8, 142, 205, 230 Faulkner, William 181 Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow 175 femininity 30, 35–6, 38, 111, 119, 145 feminism 10, 30, 35, 38, 46–7, 58, 104 Fennell, Jack 169, 185–93, 202 Ferguson, Stephen 181 Ferraro, Thomas 19 Fianna cycle 156 fidelity 122, 129, 135–7 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 9, 46 Figgis, Darrell 180 fin de siècle 11, 30, 32, 59, 119, 169, 185, 193, 198

257

Finkin, Jordan 19, 20, 24 First World War (see The Great War) Flaherty, Robert 158 Man of Aran 158–60 Flatley, Jonathan 45 Flint, F. S. 212–13 Flynn, Catherine 170, 223–34 focalization 34 Fogarty, Anne 11, 30, 38, 43, 47 folklore 57, 91–2, 204 Ford, Ford Madox 18, 29, 32, 38 Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences 29 Foster, R. F. 62, 129 Foucault, Michel 82, 110 fragmentation 34, 37–8, 74, 87, 233 of consciousness 64 France, Anatole 32 Fraser, James Alexander 209 Frazier, Adrian 107 free indirect discourse 33 free verse 50, 214 The Freeman’s Journal 121–2 Freud, Sigmund 31, 44–5, 84, 119, 129– 30, 182 Civilization and Its Discontents 130 death drive 130 death penalty and masochism 129 masochism 130 Oedipus complex 130 Friedman, Susan Stanford 169, 210 fundamentalism 185, 189 The Funny Wonder 170, 199–200, 205 Furniss, Harry 201 Fussell, Paul 213 futurism 170, 191 futurity 20, 98, 136 Gaelic League 119, 226, 231, 233 Gaeltacht 71, 72, 75, 170, 226 gaps 5, 6, 11, 34, 65, 82, 176, 182 Garvin, Tom 185 Gate 227–8, 230–1 gender 30–1, 34–8, 46, 48, 83, 87, 103–4, 107, 119, 129, 133, 143, 149 binarism challenged in Urania 112 gender relations in Wingfield’s poetry 50 heteronormativity 104 compulsory heterosexuality 106 norms 11, 35, 110–11

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Index

as performance 34, 36, 119, 137 in Ethel Colburn Mayne 38 roles 30–1, 34, 6, 107, 109, 112, 131, 176 General Post Office (GPO) 179, 181 Gibbons, Luke 198, 211 Giffney, Noreen 105 Gifford, Grace 134–5 Glasheen, Adaline 174 The Golden Hind 31 Gonne, Iseult 133–4 Gonne, Maud 96–7, 133–4 as Ireland in allegorical form 97 Gore-Booth, Eva 10, 82, 104–6, 112 Grahame, Kenneth 31 Grand, Sarah 29, 30, 33–35 Grant, Melissa Gira 147 Great War 45, 170, 180, 191, 210–13, 218 and the problem of representation 213 The Green Sheaf 108 Greenberg, Clement 168 Grene, Nicholas 116 Griffith, Arthur 110, 119–20, 124 Griffiths, George 179 Grünewald, Matthias 215 Guattari, Félix 99 Anti-Oedipus (with Gilles Deleuze) 99 Habermas, Jürgen 230 The Halfpenny Comic 197 Hanaway-Oakley, Cleo 84, 153–62, 168 Haraway, Donna 58, 64–5, 82 Harland, Henry 29, 31 Haughey, Jim 214 haunting 12, 35, 58–60, 62, 65 Healy, Michael 218 Heidegger, Martin 48 Heisenberg, Werner 191 Hemingway, Ernest 180 Hewitt, Seán 83, 103–12, 167 Higgins, Geraldine 110 high modernism 50, 105, 142, 154, 168, 218 highbrow 30, 167 Hincks, Thomas Dix 186 historicism 1–4, 87, 103, 129, 170, 211 history 3–5, 10, 16, 18–19, 30, 50, 53–4, 62, 96, 97, 103, 117, 168, 182, 199 cycles of 53 Homer 154–5, 158, 227 Hoult, Norah 30, 38–39

Houston, Lloyd (Meadhbh) 83, 115–25 Howard, Redmond Sinn Féin 180 Howe, Irving 18 Howes, Marjorie 116 humanism 12, 57, 58 Humble, Nicola 168 Hutton-Williams, Francis 210–11 Huxley, Aldous 181, 189 Huyssen, Andreas 168 Hyde, Douglas 111, 117 Casadh an tSúgáin 111 Hywel, Ap 108–9 Ibsen, Henrik 111 A Doll’s House 111 identity 11, 30, 45, 50, 54, 62, 64, 90, 92, 105, 110, 132, 181 Irish identity 111, 118, 123–4, 190, 231 imagism 170, 211–14 imperialism 57, 70, 108, 136 impressionism 12, 30, 32–4, 38, 157, 170, 213 industrialization 189, 198 Inglesby, Elizabeth C. 57, 59 Ingram, John Kells 186 insularity 117, 120–1, 224 and Irish political life 120 intertextuality 95, 199 introspection 37–8, 54 Irish brogue 25 Irish Ecclesiastical Review 146 Irish Exhibition of Living Art 211 Irish Free State 1, 2, 4, 43, 45, 46, 82, 141–9, 151, 210 anti-prostitution discourse 144 censorship 142–4, 149 idealized femininity 145 social purity discourse 145–7 state surveillance 146–7 respectable and deviant womanhood 145–6 social reform societies 144 Irish Independence 47, 60, 77, 142, 180– 1, 190 Irish Ireland movement 15, 117–24 ‘degeneration’ rhetorics 118, 120 hypermasculinity 119–20 and Irish identity 123

Index purity discourse 123 xenophobia 118 Irish language 5, 10–11, 13, 69–70, 72–3, 76–7, 119, 185, 223–7 as a lost language 69 Irish-language literature 10, 70–2, 77, 190 marginalized status 77 Irish literary modernism 32, 69–70, 72, 84, 107, 112, 116, 138, 141, 142, 147 and impaired eyesight 153 and translation 70 as a multilingual phenomenon 70, 72 major and minor works 129 majority and minority/minoritized languages 70–2, 77–8 popular forms 10, 84, 141–2, 169, 193 prostitutes as characters 141 queer figures 106 Irish literature 1, 9, 13, 47, 70, 78, 90, 103, 117–18, 149, 159 Irish Literature in Transition 3 Irish modernism 1–6, 9–13, 15–16, 24–5, 29–30, 32, 33, 44, 47, 54, 58, 66, 69, 70, 73–4, 78, 82–3, 87, 88, 97, 99, 103–8, 111, 116–17, 129, 138, 142– 3, 149, 153, 162, 168–9, 170, 173, 175, 177, 179, 185, 206, 210–12, 217, 219, 223, 234 as a historical period 82 as a multilingual phenomenon 78 as a transhistorical mode 87 and bardic culture 84, 162 and biopolitics 81, 82, 129 and blindness 162 and British popular culture 170 canon of 5, 9, 11–13, 33, 69, 82, 87, 104, 116, 168, 209–10, 219 and cinema 83, 162 and comic strips 170 and contemporary medical and scientific discourse 124 and the death penalty 83, 129, 136–8 and discourses of sexual hygiene 83 and the Easter Rising 137–8 and evolutionary science 116 genre fiction 5, 167, 169, 185 and gender 38, 83, 87, 103–4, 112, 129, 175

259

historical context 5, 83, 110 and historicist frameworks 3–4, 87, 103 intermediality 167–70 and internationalism 104 major/minor modes 167, 175, 182 and medicine 116–17 and modern technologies 153, 167 and the new modernist studies 2–5, 15, 29, 70, 81, 104, 167–8 and multilingualism 69, 71–3 and nationalism 117, 125 popular and mass cultural forms 167, 223 queer artists and writers 83, 105 queer readings of 83 queerness of 103 and queer sexualities 107 and queer theory 82, 84, 103 and Revivalism 103, 110, 116, 170 and science 117–18, 124 and shame 91, 94, 99 transmediality 169 Irish modernist poetry 46, 169–70, 211 Irish queer studies (see also ‘quare studies’) 103, 105, 107 Irish studies 2–5, 69, 105 and Irish-language writing 69 Irish Times 122, 223–4, 230, 234 Irish women poets 12, 43–8, 50, 54 Irish-Jewish relations 23 Irishness 2–4, 24, 83, 94, 105, 108–9, 155, 159, 162, 185, 233 irony 32, 37–8, 71, 92, 98, 121, 216, 233 isolationism 46, 119–20, 218, 224 James, Henry 29, 31, 176 Jameson, Fredric 4 Jeffreys, Sheila 106 Jellett, Mainie 211 Jenkinson, Biddy 71 The Jester (see also The Funny Wonder) 170, 200 Jewish 11, 15–25 culture 16, 21, 22 Jewish Association of Arts and Sciences (JAAS) 17 Jewish Chronicle 17, 22, 25 Jewish Exponent 17 Jewish polity 20

260

Index

Jewish World 17 Johnston, Denis 168 Joyce, James 1–4, 9, 10–12, 15, 16, 24, 33, 38, 70, 81–4, 87–8, 94–6, 98, 104, 112, 116–17, 129–30, 132–3, 135–8, 141–3, 148–9, 153–5, 157, 159, 160–2, 167–8, 170, 173–5, 177, 179, 181, 205, 209–10, 212–13, 219, 223 allusions to Bishop George Berkeley in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 160 ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ 12 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 213 as a ‘blind bard’ 154–5 and the Censorship of Publications Act 181 and cinema 153 ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ 1, 116 ‘The Dead’ 117 and the Easter Rising 129 Finnegans Wake 12, 142, 147, 154–5, 157, 159–62 foundation of Volta cinema 167 and intermediality 167 and Irish martyrology 137 letters to Nora Barnacle 96 ‘Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran’ 159 non-fiction writing 209 on J. M. Synge’s Aran-inspired writings 159 Scribbledehobble notebook 155 Ulysses 24, 49, 88, 94–5, 116, 129, 132, 136, 141, 143, 153–6, 160–1, 181 Emmet and Curran myth in ‘Cyclops’ 132–3 Judy 198 Kahan, Benjamin 104 Keatinge, Benjamin 218 Kelly, John 174 Kennedy, Seán 103 Kenner, Hugh 9, 116, 168, 173–4, 223 Kenny, Patrick 122, 124 review of the Playboy of the Western World 122 Keown, Edwina 3, 210 Kernoff, Harry 23, 167 kinship 95, 105 Kirwan, Richard 186

knowledge 6, 20, 51, 57, 70, 93, 95–6, 104, 226 Kristeva, Julia 46 Lace Curtain 2 Lacey, Brian 106 Lady Bessborough 23, 31 Lady Gregory (Isabella Augusta Gregory) 30, 82, 104, 111, 121, 188, 204, 233 Cathleen Ni Houlihan 111 on the Playboy riots 121 Twenty-Five 111 Land League 23–4 Lane, Hugh 1, 105 Laqueur, Thomas 59 Larkin, Michael 130 Larrissy, Edward 154 late modernism 11–13, 73–4, 76, 105, 141–2 Laughton, Freda 11–12, 43–4, 51–4 A Transitory House 44, 51 ‘Tombed in Spring’ 52 Laurence, Patricia 64 Lawless, Emily 82, 105 Le Braz, Anatole 109 Le Fanu, Sheridan 62 Le Play, Frédéric 110 Leahy, Mark 211 Leaney, Enda 186 Leavis, F. R. 9 Lee, J. J. 224 Leftwich, Joseph 17–18 The Legion of Mary 141 Leib Peretz, Isaac 19 letters as a form 173, 177–8 as conversation 174–6 as networks 174–6 collections 173–4 of Brian O’Nolan 173–4 of James Joyce 173 and weak theory 173–82 Lewis, R. B. 92 Lika Joko 198, 201 Little Review 181 Litvak, Olga 21 liveliness 65–6 Lloyd, David 98, 198 Lombroso, Cesare 118

Index London Mercury 96 Long, Maebh 169, 173–82 loss 31, 43–51, 53–4, 62 Lovejoy, Laura 84, 141–9, 167 lowbrow 167 Luciano, Dana 58 Luddy, Maria 141, 149 Lysaght, Sean 186 Mac Murchada, Diarmait 135 Macardle, Dorothy 30 MacBride, John 133–4 The Maccabaean 17 MacDonagh, John 24 MacDonagh, Thomas 69, 136 MacGreevy, Thomas 1, 10, 82, 105, 116, 162, 170, 204, 209, 210–19 as a war poet 209–19 as an Irish modernist poet 170 ‘A Stained Glass Tour’ 218 ‘The Catholic Element in Work in Progress’ 212–14 Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy 209 ‘De Civitate Hominum’ 212, 214–18 modernist strategies 214 ‘Gloria de Carlos V’ 215–18 and imagism 170, 211–17 and Irish modernism 209–11, 218–19 ‘Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation’ 204 ‘Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence’ 217 on the representative capacities of art 212 and the poetic image 211–19 portrayal of the Great War in poetry 213–18 Richard Aldington: An Englishman 212–13 Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study 212, 217 and visual arts 211, 213, 215 Mac Liammóir, Mícheál 230 MacLochlainn, Piarais Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed after the Rising at Easter 1916 137 MacNeice, Louis 54 ‘Dublin’ 54

261

Macneill, Ada 133 Macpherson, James 155–7 The Poems of Ossian 155–7 male gaze 32, 49 Mallin, Michael 137–8 letter to his wife Agnes 137 Mann, Thomas 89, 181 Mannin, Ethel 133 Mansfield, Katherine 29, 31, 38 Mao, Douglas 81, 142, 167 marginalization 2, 4–5, 10–11, 30, 38, 45, 47–8, 70, 77, 146, 148, 169, 185, 232 marriage 31, 34–8, 44, 112, 120–1, 124, 130–1, 133, 134–6 as economic imperative 120 Martin, Henri 118 Martyn, Edward (Sirius) 82, 105, 169, 185, 188 Morgante the Lesser: His Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds 187–8 and the Revival 187 martyrdom 5, 134, 137 masculinity 58, 98, 103, 119, 131, 135, 137 masochism 84, 129, 130, 132, 136–8 and the death penalty 136–7 as a union of Eros and Thanatos 130 mass culture 168–9 mass media 116 materialism 2, 20, 63, 87, 190, 193 materiality 57, 61, 81 Mathews, P. J. 116 Matisse, Henri 170, 211, 214–15 Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan 108, 116 Mattison, Laci 63 Mayne, Ethel Colburn 11, 29–39 ‘A Pen-and-Ink Effect’ 31, 33 as a biographer 29, 31, 39 as a translator 29, 31, 39 as an Irish modernist 29 Blindman 31 ‘Blue Muslin’ 32, 34, 36 The Clearer Vision 30, 32, 34, 36–7 Come In 31 ‘Desertsurges’ 36 ‘Embassies Delayed’ 34 ‘The End of It’ 33, 36 The Fourth Ship 31 Gold Lace 31 ‘Herb of Grace’ 32, 34–5

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Index

Inner Circle 31–2 Jessie Vandeleur 31 ‘The Lost Leader’ 35–6 ‘Lucille’ 32–3, 36–7 ‘Madeline Annesley’ 34 Nine of Hearts 31 ‘One by One’ 36 One of Our Grandmothers 31 ‘On the Programme: Three Ball-Room Studies’ 32, 34, 36 ‘Paradise of Perception’ 37 ‘Points of View’ 33 ‘The Red Umbrella’ 32, 34, 36 ‘Ritournelle’ 34, 36 ‘The Study of an Emotion’ 32 There Were No Windows 39 Things That No One Tells 32, 34 Mayne, Rutherford 17, 29, 30, 34 Mays, J. C. C. 11, 209–10 McBride, Eimear 4, 87 The Lesser Bohemians 87 as a ‘modernist’ writer 87 McCormack, Mike 4 McCourt, John 159 McCrea, Barry 72 McDiarmid, Lucy 135–7 McDonald, Rónán 117, 153 McGuiness, Patrick 216 McLuhan, Marshall 168 McManus, Charlotte (‘L.’) 10, 169, 185, 190 The Professor in Erin 190 McNaughton, James 215 Meade, L. T. 29 mediality 167, 169 medical and scientific discourses 117, 123–4 melancholia 12, 43–50, 54, 159 and creative contemplation 45 as creative impulse 49 memory 20, 52–3, 58–9, 75, 136 metafiction 37, 94, 99, 147 Mhac an tSaoi, Máire 70 Michelakis, Pantelis 158 middlebrow 30, 32, 168, 178 migrant authors 16 migrant communities 19, 20, 21 Miller, Cristanne 47 Milton, John 9, 155 Miron, Dan 19–20

modernism 48 aesthetic and political definitions of 46 affective 81 American 15 anglophone 211 as a multimodal and multimedial phenomenon 167–9 as a network 177 ‘bad’ 142 biopolitical 5, 81 and cinema 153 and connectivity 169, 177 and the epistolary 169 ‘ethnic’ modernism 11, 24 haptic 81 Irish-language 169 Jewish 11, 21, 24 and mass culture 168–9 and minor histories 178 and nationalist discourses 82 political discourses 82 popular 206 postal 177 postmodernism 177 prosthetic 81 and Revivalism 108, 116 queer 81, 103 relationship with the past 45 weak 177 modernist short story 11, 13, 16–17, 22, 30–4, 37–8, 69, 74 modernist studies 1–5, 11, 12, 15, 29, 44, 53, 81, 90, 104–5, 142, 167, 173, 176–7 intellectual emphasis of 53 political turn 81 turn to material and archive 173 modernity 2, 4, 16, 18–19, 21, 25, 53, 58–9, 73, 81, 104, 106, 116, 143, 153, 159, 162, 168–9, 173, 176–7, 180–1, 185, 187, 190, 197, 199, 201, 210, 219 Montgomery, Niall 168 Moore, Dafydd 156 Moore, George 32, 33, 188 Moran, D. P. 118, 124 and ‘degeneration’ discourse 118 and Young Ireland 118 Irish Ireland movement 15, 63, 117– 21, 124

Index The Leader 120 The Philosophy of Irish Ireland 118 Moran, Patrick 61 Morash, Christopher 111 Morel, Bénédict Augustin 118 Moretti, Franco 168 Morrison, Paul 81, 167 Moses, Michael Valdez 15 motherhood 30, 35, 38, 51 mourning 5, 12, 44–5 Mr D. Sheehan 122–3 Mueller, Jürgen, E. 169 Muiris Ó Súilleabháin 71 Fiche Bliain ag Fás 71 Mulhall, Anne 43, 103, 105–6 Mullen, Patrick R. 82, 107, 111 multilingual 5, 12, 69–70, 72–3, 78, 159, 170 multimodal 167, 169 Munchausen trilemma 187, 190, 192–3 Munt, Sally 94 Murphy, William 146 Musser, Amber 130 na gCopaleen, Myles 170, 173, 206, 223, 227–8 (see also O’Nolan, Brian and O’Brien, Flann) Cruiskeen Lawn 12, 170, 223–8, 234 Escort Service 228–34 and Irish-language discourse 223, 225 WAAMA, the Writers Artists Actors Musicians Association 227 Nally, Claire 136 The Nation 31, 212 nation state 1, 3, 12, 81 national identity 10, 45, 103, 117, 170, 193, 224 nationalism 1, 2, 5, 11, 15–16, 18, 20, 24, 38, 53, 82–3, 90, 104, 107–11, 116–18, 120, 123–4, 130–1, 135–6, 142, 154, 170, 177, 180, 185–6, 198, 201, 210, 225 and Irish Identity 124 cultural 11, 225 cultural nationalism 16, 110, 117 intellectual sterility of 124 Jewish nationalism 18, 20 national purity 115

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naturalism 12, 30, 32, 33, 142, 213 French naturalism 32–3 networks 22, 43, 47, 176, 182 New Age 1 New Irish Review 118 new materialism 12, 58, 60, 63, 65–6, 81 new modernist studies 2–5, 12, 15, 29, 47, 70, 81, 104, 142, 167, 177, 181, 209 New Statesman 212 New Woman 10–12, 29–30, 35, 38–9 newness 153, 167 Ní Dhomhnaill, Noula 71 Nobel Prize 88–90 Nolan, Emer 116 nonhuman 11–12, 57,–58, 60, 62–3, 65, 82, 202 non-representational art 83 Nordau, Max 118 nostalgia 19, 81, 131, 153–4, 158–9, 162, 181, 224 nostalgic Irishness 154 Novick, Ben 180 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín 10–11, 13, 69–77 ‘Fuíoll Fuine’ 13, 69, 74–6 Cré na Cille 69, 70–2, 74 translations of 70–1 Ó Conaire, Pádraic 70 Ó Criomhthain, Tomás 71, 170, 224, 226 An tOileánach 71, 170, 224 Ó Donghaile, Deaglán 3, 15, 175–6 Ó Faoláin, Seán 176, 181, 223, 230 Ó Gráda, Cormac 180 Ó Laoghaire, Fr Peadar 227 Ó Nualláin, Ciarán 224 Ó Raifteirí, Antoine 154–5 Ó Ríordáin, Seán 70 Ó Séaghda, Pádraig 10, 169, 185, 189 Eoghan Paor 189 Ó Súilleabháin, Muiris 71 Ó Torna, Seosamh 10, 169, 185, 191–3 ‘Ceithre Bhuille an Chluig’ 191 ‘Duinneall’ 191 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 130 O’Brien, Flann 2, 9, 81–2, 142, 147, 168–9, 173, 190, 206, 223 Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien 169 At Swim-Two-Birds 116, 142, 146–8 The Third Policeman 168, 190

264 O’Brien, Kate 10, 30, 104, 181 O’Carolan, Turlough 154–5 O’Casey, Seán 111, 181, 233 The Plough and the Stars 111 O’Connor, Frank 181, 223 O’Connor, Laura 47 O’Connor, Maureen 12, 57–66 O’Flaherty, Liam 10, 12, 82, 84, 141–9 and subversive sexual politics 148 as an Irish modernist 142 Mr Gilhooley 84, 143–7, 149, 167 prostitution as critique of Free-State sexual politics 142 The House of Gold 142 The Informer 144, 149 The Puritan 145–8 surveillance and voyeurism 147 works banned under Censorship of Publication Act 142 O’Grady, Standish 154 Finn and his Companions 154 O’Halloran, Clare 156 O’Hegarty, P. S. 180 Sinn Féin: A Bird’s Eye View 180 O’Hehir, Michael 180 O’Leary, Philip 190 O’Nolan, Brian (see also O’Brien, Flann and na gCopaleen, Myles) 10, 12, 168–74, 185, 190, 193, 206, 223–7, 230–1, 234 as a journalist 223 as a newspaperman 170 as an Irish modernist 170 in the shadow of canonical Irish modernists 223 O’Dea’s Yer Man 234 Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green 234 Thirst 234 O’Shannon, Cathal 231 O’Sullivan, Seamus 18 objectification 93, 232 occultism 107–8, 116 Oedipus complex 95, 130 ontology 65, 99, 60 relational 65 Osborn, Susan 64 Ossian 154–7 (see also Macpherson, James) othering 60, 124, 169

Index otherness 58, 61 Overbeck, Lois More 175 Owen, Wilfred 170, 213 Pall Mall 31 paralysis 52, 61, 94 paranoid reading 10 Paraskeva, Anthony 160–1 Parsons, Cóilín 3 patriotism 123, 137 Paul, Robert 159 Whaling Afloat and Ashore 159 Pearse, Pádraig 72–3, 82, 84, 105, 130, 133, 180–1, 185, 192 Pearse, William James 180 Pearson’s Magazine 201 performance 36, 38, 45, 47, 123, 158, 178, 200, 210, 229, 234 performativity 36, 65, 94 as inter-activity 65 phenomenology 87, 88 Picasso, Pablo 170, 211, 215 Pilkington, Lionel 110 Planck, Max 190 Playboy riots 1, 119, 115, 124 and national purity 115 critics depicted as syphilitic 123 Plunkett, Joseph 10, 82, 84, 134–6, 138, 168 ‘The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last’ 134, 136 pluralism 187 Poe, Edgar Allan 173 ‘The Purloined Letter’ 173, 181 popular culture 170, 198, 204 positivism 107, 187 post 173–82 and Irish modernity 181 postal censorship 180 postal imaginary 169, 179, 181–2 Post Office Act 180 postcolonial criticism 2–5, 12, 46, 73, 77, 82, 87, 98, 105, 129, 138, 177, 181 postcolonial Ireland 77, 138 posthumanism 5, 12, 58, 81, post-independence Ireland 13, 47, 77, 84, 142–3, 145–8 and moral purity 141 sexual and cultural politics 141 postmodern 2, 37, 168

Index Pound, Ezra 1–3, 73, 133, 154, 170, 211–13 ‘The Non-Existence of Ireland’ 1 The Cantos 154 power 9–10, 12, 29, 35, 37–8, 47, 50–3, 62, 70, 81–3, 107–8, 130, 173, 177, 179, 181, 186, 223 Power, Mary 157 Priestley, Joseph 186 primitivism 107–8, 116 Pritchett, V. S. 174 Proclamation of the Irish Republic 137, 181 prostitute 98, 141–9 as critique of Free-state sexual politics 143 as moral threat in Free-State Ireland 141 as worker exploited under capitalism in O’Flaherty 142 in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett 143 prostitution 5, 84, 141–9 and labour politics in O’Flaherty 149 narratives 84 and respectability 146 stereotypes of victimhood and degeneracy 149 and surveillance 146 Protestant 31, 38, 77, 122, 186–7 Proust, Marcel 180 psychoanalysis 83, 89 Puck 199, 202 Punch 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205 Pyle, Hilary 198, 205 ‘quare theory’ 105 quantum physics 186, 190–3 as a challenge to Newtonian time 190 queer 5, 83–4, 103, 105–7, 109, 112, 129, 132 queer approaches 82, 87, 103–4, 106 queer modernism 103–4, 107, 112 in the Irish context 105 queer studies 104–6 in the Irish context 105 queer temporalities 105–7 queer theory 5, 29, 34, 38, 58, 66, 81–4, 94, 103–7, 112, 129 queerness 94, 103–8, 111–12 erasure of lesbian relationships in queer history 106

265

and Ireland’s postcolonial situation 105 and Irishness 105 in Irish Revivalism 112 male homosexual relationships 106 and modernist studies 105 of the Revival 108, 111 and traditionalism 104 Quigley, Mark 142 Quinn, John 133 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 3 Rabinovich, Solomon Naumovich 17 (see also Aleichem, Sholem) race 5, 11, 22, 88, 92, 107, 111, 118, 122 radio 3, 168, 169, 173, 175, 177, 179, 180 rationalism 57, 186 Read, Herbert 50 realism 1–2, 19, 25, 76, 92, 99, 122, 147, 149, 170, 177 Reavey, George 1 Reform Advocate 17 Reid, Forrest 10, 82, 105 Renan, Ernest 107, 109 reparative reading 10 representation 23, 45, 49–54, 58, 71, 82, 92, 95, 135, 141–2, 148–9, 170, 178, 191, 213, 216, 219 respectability 141, 143, 145–6, 186 Revival 2, 15–17, 21, 22, 46, 76, 83, 105, 107–9, 111–12, 116, 119, 124, 186, 188, 189, 234 Revivalism 10, 22, 30, 83, 103–4, 111–12, 116, 153, 156, 233 biopolitics 111–12 dialectical relationship with modernism 107–8 and feminism 104 gender roles 107, 110, 112 and heteronormativity 83, 104, 110 idealized femininity 110 and masculinity 83 and nationalism 111 and normative sexuality 110 queer artists and writers 83 queer readings of Revivalist authors 104 and queer temporalities 105, 107 queering functions of 104, 107, 108 Raftery, Anthony 154–5 (see also Ó Raifteirí, Antoine)

266 Revivalist 2–3, 47–9, 107, 108, 116, 153–4, 162, 167, 169, 193, 225, 227 Reynolds, Paige 3, 103, 116 Ricks, Christopher 93–4 Ridge, Emily 182 Robinson, Lennox 168 Robinson, W. Heath 202 Rodker, John 17 Rodstein, Susan de Sola 129 Rohman, Carrie 57 Romanticism 49, 53, 104, 108, 129 Roper, Esther 106, 112 Rosenthal, T. G. 198 Rotunda (cinema) 158 Royal Mail 179 Royle, Nicholas 61, 63, 65 Russell, George William 154 The Divine Vision and Other Poems 154 sacrifice 129, 130, 134–7 Saint-Amour, Paul 176 Samhain 124 Sass, Louis 99 Sassoon, Siegfried 170, 211, 213 Sayers, Peig 71 Scholes, Robert 168 Schreibman, Susan 43, 210–11, 214, 215 Schwartze, Tracey 129 science and religion 186–9, 192–3 and technology 190, 193 and tradition 193 antagonism towards 193 commodification of 197 popularization of 202 science fiction 10, 169, 189, 190–1, 197, 201–2, 206 scientific education in Ireland 186 scopophilic gaze 148 Scott, Bonnie Kime 175 Scutts, Joanna 10 ‘Seán Sabháiste’ 191 (see also Ó Torna, Seosamh) Second World War 18, 50–1, 77, 224 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 4, 10, 95 self-sacrifice 133, 136 The Sentinel 17 sexual health 117, 123

Index and national identity in fin-de-siècle Ireland 117 sexuality 9, 30, 81, 84, 103, 107–10, 115, 129–33, 135–7, 143 commercialized 145 shame 87, 91–5, 99, 148 Shandler, Jeffrey 19, 21 Shaw, George Bernard 181 Sheils, Barry 82–3, 87–99 Sheridan, Niall 224 Sherman, David 47 shtetl 18–21, 25 as discursive phenomenon 19, 21 as metaphor 19 as myth 19 symbolic function 19 silent film 156, 158, 161–2, 167–8 simultaneity 53 Sinn Féin 110, 117, 120, 123–4, 180, 190 Sir Walter Scott ‘Lady of the Lake’ 158 Sisson, Elaine 159, 168 skin 83, 87–8, 92, 95, 98, 121 and blushing 88 as a ‘membrane of felling’ 87 of discourse 98 text as skin 88 Smith, Michael 212 Smyth, Gerry 175 socialism 46, 143, 148, 185 sonnet 50, 134 Spanish Civil War 50 spatial turn 15 Stacy, Jackie 87 stage Irishman 122 The Strand 199 stream of consciousness 137 Strindberg, August 88–90, 92 Le Plaidoyer d’un fou 88–9 Sturgeon, Robert 135 subjectivity coherent 51 dissolution of 54 fragmented 43 human 44, 58, 60, 62 irreducible 187–92 sublime 49 Summers-Bremner, Eluned 60, 63 surrealism 57, 60, 64, 147, 202, 212

Index surveillance 146–7, 174, 177, 180 symbolism 12, 19, 30, 32, 33, 84, 107 Synge, J. M. 1, 10, 12, 82–3, 104, 108–9, 111–12, 115, 120–4, 158–9, 162, 168, 203, 227, 233 The Aran Isles 159 ‘The Curse’ 115 divine retribution against critics 115 and Irish masculinity 122 ‘Life in the Congested Districts’ 203 The Playboy of the Western World 83, 111, 115, 117, 119–20, 121–4, 227 Playboy riots 1, 83, 117, 121, 124 and the Revival 116 Riders to the Sea 159 The Shadow of the Glen 111 Taaffe, Carol 3, 116, 210 Tait, Petra 201 Taylor, Julie 53 Telegraph Act of 1868 179 temporality 11, 47, 58, 65, 104–5, 108, 130 and masochism 130 modernist 105 Newtonian time 190 queer 105–7 uneven 105–8 Tenniel, John 201 Thurston, Katherine Cecil 30 Tiernan, Sonja 106 The Times Literary Supplement 212 Tóibín, Colm 176 Tolstoy, Leo 19 Trade Union Act 231 Transatlantic Review 18, 31 transcendence 45, 49, 64–5, 218 Transition 212 trauma 45, 50, 59, 218 Tynan, Katherine 17 Uddgren, Carl Gustaf 89 Strindberg: The Man 89 United Irishman 110 United Irishmen 131 unreliable narration 32–3, 36–7 Urania 112 Valente, Joseph 105, 111, 119 Vanity Fair 31

267

Vico, Giambattista 161 Victorian 34–5, 111, 170, 199–200 vitality 60–1, 120 voyeurism 143, 146–7 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 81, 142, 167 Walshe, Éibhear 107 war 5, 21, 23, 50–1, 59, 60–2, 65, 192, 209, 212–17, 224 war literature 212 War of Independence 180, 211 war poetry 170, 211–15 weak theory 5, 169, 173, 176–8 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 154, 155 Weiss, Katherine 161 Welch, Robert 230 Wells, H. G. 201 The War of the Worlds 201 Weng, Julie McCormick 3 Wiegman, Robyn 106 Wilde, Oscar 12, 81–2, 94, 95, 104, 157, 205 and queer aesthetics 81 The Importance of Being Earnest 95 Williams, Raymond 15 Wills, David 176 Wingfield, Sheila 11–12, 43–4, 49–51, 54 ‘Odysseus Dying’ 49 Beat Drum, Beat Heart 50–1 Poems 49 Wollstonecraft, Mary 46 womanhood 35, 112, 142, 146, 148 Woolf, Virginia 38, 63, 72, 176 Yeats, Elizabeth Corbet 133 Yeats, George 174 Yeats, Jack B. 108, 170, 197–206, 209 and British popular culture 197–8, 204, 206 as cartoonist and comic strip artist 197, 198, 197–8 as illustrator 197–8, 203–4 as national figure 197, 204, 206 as painter 197–8 Bachelor’s Walk: A Memorial 204 Chubblock Homes 199, 203 Communicating with Prisoners 204 Dicky the Birdman 201 Dr Patent’s Automatic College 202

268

Index

Dr Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy 202 Fandango the Hoss 200 Hiram, B. Boss, The Wily Yank, Convict Skills 199 and international modernism 197–8 John Duff Pie 206 Lickity Switch, the Educated Monk 200, 201 racialized stereotypes in comics 200, 203 Roly Poly’s Round-the-World Tour 203 Signor McCoy 197, 200 The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor 203 The Jovial Old Farmer 206 Theatre Royal 200 Who-Did-It 202 Yeats, Lily 133 Yeats, William Butler 2–4, 9–10, 15, 30, 32, 43, 45, 53, 70, 82–3, 87, 104, 108–9, 111, 129–30, 138, 154, 170, 174–6, 179, 185, 188, 198–9, 204, 210–19, 223, 227, 233 ‘A Man Young and Old’ 96 Cathleen ni Houlihan 119 Deirdre 109 ‘Easter, 1916’ 13, 136 and eugenics 123 and evolutionary theory 117 ‘First Love’ 96, 97, 98 ‘Four Songs from the Young Countryman’ 96 ‘I See His Blood upon the Rose’ 135

and Maud Gonne 133–4 and nationalist politics 123, 124 on J. M. Synge 123 on Pàdraig Pearse 133 ‘On Those that Hated The Playboy of the Western World, 1907’ 124 on the death penalty 133 on the Irish dramatic movement 91–2 on the Rising 133 Responsibilities 117 Synge and the Ireland of His Time 123 ‘The Bounty of Sweden’ 89 ‘The Claim That Has the Canker on the Rose’ 135 The Countess Cathleen 227 The Dreaming of the Bones 135, 136 The Green Helmet 117 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 53 The Tower 96 The Well of the Saints 123 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ 154 The Yellow Book 29, 31–3, 38 and Ethel Colburn Mayne 31 Yiddish 15–23, 25 literature and culture 15–16, 18, 21–2 folk culture 23 Zionism 21, 24 Zweig, Stefan The Post Office Girl 182