Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism 9780815635987, 9780815654483

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Revival Dynamics
Natural History and the Irish Revival
John Eglinton
The Easter Rising as Modern Event
Machine Fever
Infernal Machines
Machinic Yeats
Accelerate
Sounds Modern
Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s
His Remastered Voice
Broadcatastrophe!
Body Trouble
Corrigan’s Pulse, Medicine, and Irish Modernism
Sassenachs and Their Syphilization
Strange Experiments
Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama
The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism
John Banville, Long Form, and the Time of Late Modernism
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism

Irish Studies Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Series Editor

Select Titles in Irish Studies All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry Joan FitzPatrick Dean

Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien, eds.

J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival Giulia Bruna

Kate O’Brien and Spanish Literary Culture Jane Davison

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel Bridget English

The Rebels and Other Short Fiction Richard Power; James MacKillop, ed.

Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 Tara M. McCarthy

Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel Kathleen Costello-Sullivan

For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/irish-studies/.

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism Edited by

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2019 19  20  21  22  23  24    6  5  4  3  2  1 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu. ISBN: 9  78-0-8156-3593-2 (hardcover) 978-0-8156-3598-7 (paperback) 978-0-8156-5448-3 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available from the publisher upon request. Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

  

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction

 

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng 1 part one :

Revival Dynamics

 

1. Natural History and the Irish Revival Seán Hewitt

19

 

2. John Eglinton: An Irish Futurist Julie McCormick Weng

 

34

3. The Easter Rising as Modern Event: Media, Technology, and Terror Luke Gibbons part t wo:

53

Machine Fever

4. Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism

     

of Tom Greer and James Joyce Kathryn Conrad

5. Machinic Yeats

Gregory Castle

77

95

6. Accelerate: Why Elizabeth Bowen Liked Cars Simon During

113

vi  Contents part three :

Sounds Modern

 

7. Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait Susanne S. Cammack

 

131

8. His Remastered Voice: Joyce for Vinyl Damien Keane

144

9. Broadcatastrophe!: Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama

 

and the Aesthetics of Working It Out Jeremy Lakoff part four :

160

Body Trouble

 

10. Corrigan’s Pulse, Medicine, and Irish Modernism Enda Duffy

183

11. Sassenachs and Their Syphilization: The Irish Revival,

   

Deanglicization, and Eugenics Alan Graham

203

12. De generatione et corruptione: Samuel Beckett and the Biological Chris Ackerley part five :

215

Strange Experiments

 

13. Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett Katherine Ebury

229

14. The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism: Flann O’Brien

 

and Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin Andrew Kalaidjian

 

248

15. John Banville, Long Form, and the Time of Late Modernism Cóilín Parsons

       

Notes 283 Bibliography Contributors Index 377

264

339 371

Illustrations

 

   

3.1. Charlie Chaplin impersonators line up in Dublin 3.2. Title page, The Only Way

59

3.3. Military checkpoint, Mount Street Bridge, 1916

   

3.4. Ruins of the Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street, 1916 3.5. Count Plunkett speech, Butt Bridge

54

 

64 65

67

 

3.6. Publicity postcard for The Only Way

70

4.1. Cover, first edition of A Modern Daedalus

90

 

7.1. Mainspring mechanism, from Common Things Explained

 

132

8.1. J ames Joyce’s design for the label of the “Aeolus” gramophone discs 148 8.2. Gramophone disc label, with Joyce’s signature

 

 

148

8.3. D  etail of back sleeve of 1971 Caedmon recording from James Joyce Reading 157

 

9.1. Radio Times feature on Denis Johnston

vii

165

Acknowledgments

The editors of this book wish to thank the following for their help: At Syracuse University Press: Deborah Manion and all the editorial staff; Kate Costello-Sullivan; and two anonymous readers. For financial support: the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas; the Center for Research, Inc., at the University of Kansas; the Provost’s Office at Georgetown University; the English Department at Georgetown University; and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. For editing support: Luke Brown, Jeanne Barker-Nunn, and Hannah Ekeh. For archival materials and images: The Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin; the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo; Harper­ Collins Publishers; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas; Ulster University, Coleraine; the Immediate Media Company; the National Gallery of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland; Michael and Rory Johnston; the BBC Written Archives Centre; the Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and the Archive and Special Collections Centre at the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway. ix

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism

Introduction Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Since W. B. Yeats made his infamous proclamation in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the antiscientific and Luddite bent of Ireland’s Literary and Cultural Revivals has been taken as a given.1 Coming from the selfappointed spokesperson of revivalism, Yeats’s rejection of “the man of science” established a tone and direction for twentieth-century Irish literature that appeared dismissive of emerging sciences and technologies, and this approach was adopted in much of the popular artistic production of the revival period. A few years later, in “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art” (1899), Yeats underscored his dismissal of hard science, issuing a call for Irish poets to create poetry not of “physical science” but of “transcendental science”—he appealed to writers to “liberate the arts from ‘their age’ and from life” and instead seek an “exaltation of [their] senses,” one found only in “beauty” and “old faiths, myths, dreams.” On this basis, he felt, the poet could transform into a “seer” who reveals “great passions that are not in nature . . . ‘the beauty that is beyond the grave.’”2 Yeats’s position reinvigorates the Arnoldian conviction that “it is not in the outward and visible world of material life, that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought,” though Yeats recodes Arnold’s argument into an unabashed endorsement of the poet of “great passions.”3 Arnold’s view of Irish incompetence in practical matters is reinforced, 1

2   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

then, by Yeats’s aesthetic philosophy, and it stands as an enduring stereotype that hinders a view of Ireland’s centrality to scientific and technological discoveries and debates. For all Yeats’s resistance, however, he was far from entirely skeptical of the world of science and technology; he nurtured, for example, an enthusiasm and talent for natural science as a youth. Although he drifted away from this attachment to naturalism, he cultivated a lifelong interest in questions of scientific epistemology, as Katherine Ebury shows in her contribution to this volume.4 Nevertheless, Yeats’s particular antimaterialist brand of literary revivalism is too often a primary lens through which Irish culture of the early twentieth century is characterized in scholarship and taught in the classroom today. Such ambivalence about the place of science and technology in Irish culture, the contributors to Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism prove, is not the province only of revivalism but also of Irish modernism. This line of argument goes against received wisdom: while revivalists may have a reputation for being technophobic, modernists are often cast as embracing wholeheartedly the new sciences and technologies of the early twentieth century.5 The reality is, of course, more nuanced, and this volume joins a broad conversation in recent scholarship that aims to capture more accurately the messy entanglements of Irish literature and scientific and technological developments.6 We can find an example of these entanglements in the “Aeolus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), where we meet the ultimate voice of skepticism about the claims of science and technology, and about their capacity to underwrite human progress: Professor MacHugh. MacHugh admires not the Romans’ ability to build infrastructure (to instrumentalize learning), an expression of their “cloacal obsession,” but the Jews’ desire to build altars.7 His later homage to the Irish attachment to lost causes is a continuing reminder of the ethical place of failure in the face of the potential violence of progress and success, as he reminds his listeners that “success for [the Irish] is the death of the intellect and of the imagination.”8 MacHugh’s voice belongs to the world of revivalism, but his appearance in Ulysses gives him a place at the table of modernism, even if that place is hazily rendered. He is a sympathetic character who makes

Introduction  3

a compelling case, but his appearance in a chapter that is so mechanically and technologically exuberant produces a profoundly unstable image of the politics of scientific and technological modernity. As such, MacHugh stands as a fitting emblem for all of the writers whose work is analyzed in the pages of this volume: straddling a revivalist politics and a modernist moment, grappling with the cultural implications of science and technology, and questioning the logic of empire. To write of science, technology, and Irish modernism is, almost by default, to make an implied argument about the relationship between the experience of empire and the aesthetics of modernism.9 This is thanks in no small part to the looming presence of empire in the practice of science in the nineteenth century. In Eve Patten’s survey of the history of colonial scientific control, she suggests that the comparatively early professionalization of Irish scientists, resulting from systematic government funding for a series of scientific and technological ventures in Ireland, served to consolidate the association of science with manipulative British policy, while individual contributions from Irish sessions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to subjects such as mapping or statistics were seen to underpin imperial development, the “fruits” of research being visibly digested by the Empire and not the nation.10

In addition, J. W. Foster argues that the Irish experience with colonial land management and applied science led to a resistance to a scientific worldview.11 Certainly, texts such as Robert Kane’s The Industrial Resources of Ireland (1845) and the memoirs of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland focus on the country’s potential for industrial and economic development, a possibility also acknowledged by Bram Stoker in The Snake’s Pass (1890). Throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Irish science and technology were largely sponsored by or created in the service of the British empire, and they often provided legitimacy to the empire. We might therefore reasonably attribute any Irish resistance to the claims of science to the lack of evidence for any of their practical benefits being shared with the indigenous population.

4   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

Given that the empire was seen by the vast majority of the population of Ireland as an alien force, were science and technology then necessarily alien impositions on the Irish experience? Gyan Prakash, in his study of science in colonial India, describes the assumptions about modernity and the civilizing mission that patterned the practice of science in the British empire, writing that “the British saw empirical sciences as universal knowledge, free from prejudice and passion and charged with the mission to disenchant the world of the ‘superstitious’ natives.”12 Such assumptions emerge at least in part from scientific exceptionalism, or the conviction that there is only one recognizable form of science.13 This is an insidious enough conviction even in London or Paris, but entirely ruinous elsewhere, where scientific and technological advancements, narrowly conceived along European lines of rationality, are seen as the only markers of progress. The effects of this exceptionalism are evident first in the dismissal and then in the quiet appropriation of indigenous knowledge systems throughout the colonized world—as when, for instance, indigenous knowledge is harnessed and monetized by Big Pharma, which we see happening today. In Ireland, while Gaelic culture was in many ways instrumentalized in the Irish anticolonial struggle, indigenous scientific knowledge was not. For an example of this we need only look to Éamon de Valera’s establishment of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an organization founded to promote the study of theoretical physics and Celtic studies, which Andrew Kalaidjian discusses in his contribution to this volume. De Valera’s move reveals an assumption that the future of knowledge in the postcolonial state would be underwritten by a mixture of local culture and imported science. Prakash diagnoses the deformations that result in newly independent states buying into scientific exceptionalism wholesale: “Introduced as a code of alien power and domesticated as an element of elite nationalism, science has always been asked to accomplish a great deal—to authorize an immense leap into modernity, and anchor the entire edifice of modern culture, identity, politics, and economy.”14 As decolonization movements seek to identify the newly emerging nation-state with modernity and progress, scientific achievement becomes the guarantor of success.15

Introduction  5

The exceptionalist thinking that allows for the triumph of a particular form of knowledge is not simply a matter of antiquarian interest, as debates over what counts as scientific evidence have erupted in the public sphere over, for instance, the question of the human causes of climate change. While antiscientific and anti-intellectual claims that there is no evidence at all for climate change or its human causes are deeply problematic, banners and t-shirts that proclaim that “Science is Real” are symptoms of another troubling set of assumptions. The assertion that debate of any kind can be shut down by “science” enacts its own sort of illiberalism. The study of science, technology, and literature—and particularly Irish modernist literature—emerges from a particular space and time, and it offers a corrective reminder that science is also profoundly imaginative, deeply human, and unavoidably political.

The essays in this collection are arranged into five sections—“Revival Dynamics,” “Machine Fever,” “Sounds Modern,” “Body Trouble,” and “Strange Experiments”—which offer fresh interventions into key areas of debate in the field of modernist studies today, both in Ireland and elsewhere. These chapters capture not only the varied ways that Irish writers were plugged into the scientific and technological impulses and networks of the age, but also how those writers shaped modernist attitudes, aesthetics, and ideologies, and how they shaped the cultural and political forms in which they were enmeshed. The collection’s opening section, “Revival Dynamics,” features chapters that explore the relationship between science, technology, and the Irish Literary Revival, examining a selection of revivalists who wrote in conscious opposition to Yeats’s disdain of the material world. Their expansive treatment of science and technology reveals the Revival’s intimate relationship with literary modernism and inhibits an easy separation between the two. This confluence between the Revival and modernism is supported in part by Irish artists who were amateur scientists themselves. Seán Hewitt’s chapter underscores this fact as he surveys a burgeoning interest during the period in the science of the natural world and considers the work of Emily Lawless, John Millington Synge, and Seumas O’Sullivan (James Starkey). All three

6   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

were active participants in their fields of inquiry—Emily Lawless’s investigations, for instance, impressed Charles Darwin, who urged her to publish in the academic journal Nature. These writers’ scientific practice, Hewitt emphasizes, preceded their literary pursuits and informed their later creative writing. While John Eglinton (William Fitzpatrick Magee) was not a scientist himself, Julie McCormick Weng writes in her chapter that the essayist was recognized publicly as a keen observer and philosopher of the material world, who challenged Irish writers to render lived experiences of technologies in art. She concludes that Eglinton formed a “renegade revivalism” that, like later modernist movements such as Italian Futurism, reconfigured the relationship between technologies and literature, and between machines and artists. While the material turn at the core of these chapters’ studies of science and technology sits at odds with Yeats, Hewitt suggests that a revivalist interest in materialism shares with Yeats a rejection of the Enlightenment effort to disenchant the material world. Indeed, this notion is the crux of Hewitt’s argument: that Lawless, Synge, and O’Sullivan composed texts that bridged science and spirit, placing the “spiritual experience” “within, rather than beyond, physical nature.” Luke Gibbons takes a different approach in his chapter, offering a historical study of media technologies, including film and photography, used during and after the 1916 Easter Rising, and he considers their interrelations with a range of transnational historical and literary texts. Through this array of media, he proposes a counternarrative of the Rising, declaring that it is an event belonging “to a world illuminated by electric light as well as the Celtic Twilight.” Drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin, Gibbons claims that Easter 1916 was an enchanted event, with photographs of the destroyed city featuring billboards that captured coming attractions never realized. These images froze the present and its possibilities while deferring the future; they expose a Rising that did not occur as imagined but was forced to engage “alternative futures for its realization.” At the same time, the chapters in “Revival Dynamics” underscore the often occluded transgressive politics of the Revival. As Hewitt writes, Irish field clubs became hotbeds for navigating social and

Introduction  7

political issues, with Anglo-Irish naturalists in particular seeking in nature a new way to defend their diminishing influence and authority, and to burnish their nationalist credentials. Weng reveals that Eglinton’s cosmopolitan leanings provoked his turn to modern machinery, his belief that “technological tales” could counter what he saw as the Irish Revival’s dangerous fostering of cultural nationalism. In a different vein, Gibbons paints an irreverent picture of the Easter Rising as not a hallowed national rebellion but a Chaplinesque tragicomedy, with images of the Rising’s many “sideshows” cultivating a “spin-off of modernism” through their montage-like effects. “Machine Fever,” the second section of the book, builds on the explorations of “Revival Dynamics” by focusing more explicitly on Irish modernist literary engagement with technology and tracing an arc from the late-1880s novelist Tom Greer, through Yeats and Joyce, to the 1930s writing of Elizabeth Bowen. This collection of chapters may appear, at first glance, to mark a shift from a protomodernism that shares a profound ambivalence toward technological innovation (Greer) to a late modernism that anticipates and celebrates such innovation (Bowen). But just as the chapters in “Revival Dynamics” mark a material turn in Revival literature that refuses a simplistic binary between material and spiritual, so too do the chapters that comprise “Machine Fever” suggest that writers are not neatly situated on one or another side of a strict divide—here, between the technophilic and technophobic. What Greer, Yeats, Joyce, and Bowen share is a sense of the significance of the relationship between the human and the technological as they explore how the “machine” shapes the modern world. The technologies examined in “Machine Fever,” like the archive of Jacques Derrida’s “archive fever,” are not merely additive artifacts, but, as these chapters suggest, are profoundly constitutive—of the human, of the social, and of Irish modernism itself. “Machine fever” captures the notion that we are simultaneously and paradoxically in need of, sick with, and burning with a passion for the technologies that shape our ways of being and knowing in the world.16 The particular exigencies of empire at the end of the nineteenth century informed not only scientific exploration, but also the various

8   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

technologies that sustained and advanced the imperial project. As Kathryn Conrad’s exploration of Tom Greer’s novel A Modern Daedalus (1885) reveals, even when individual technologies were developed and used in opposition to that project—for instance, the submarine, invented by Irish American scientist John Holland for American Fenians—they became part of a larger networked assemblage, a war machine, that crossed national boundaries and shaped the humans caught within it. This war machine, as Greer’s work reveals, extends beyond the more obvious technologies of warfare and includes media technologies and their networks—larger assemblages, comprised of weapons and words, that implicate the work of the artist in the work of empire. Joyce’s response, Conrad argues, is to acknowledge these networked assemblages while seeking actively to use them rather than be manipulated by them. Joyce’s recognition of the need for the artist to make deliberate and creative use of technologically mediated assemblages is echoed in Gregory Castle’s exploration of Yeats’s Cuchulain plays. Castle’s essay reveals a writer conscious of the material constraints of theater and actively using those limits to shape a new modernist form. While he acknowledges that Yeats resists the materialism and mechanism of his time, Castle offers a more nuanced view of Yeats’s creative approach, arguing that he embraces artifice as a means toward a new modernist aesthetic. Yeats, Castle suggests, rejects a slavish devotion to a backward-looking cultural authenticity, instead reimagining the authentic as the result of a creative, active, and machinic process, in the sense meant by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In doing so, Yeats forges “a new pathway through technological modernity.” Elizabeth Bowen’s work both takes us beyond national boundaries and reinforces the notion of an Irish modernism forged in the crucible of the imperial project and in the conflicts that emerged from it. Focusing his attention on To the North (1932), Simon During insists that Bowen’s novel does not fall into the “critique of technology” genre, as Maud Ellmann has argued. Indeed, according to During, Bowen’s work emerged at the particular moment when literary criticism was inventing modernism, and her brand of modernism, typified

Introduction  9

by Emmeline’s (ultimately fatal) embrace of new transportation technologies, did not fit comfortably into those new categories and narratives. During’s rendering of Bowen’s engagement with technology contrasts with that of Greer, whose novel sounds a warning even as it acknowledges the ways in which humans are inevitably embedded in, and shaped by, the networks of their time. But both of these writers, ultimately, leave us with a sense of an Irish modernism that is aware of and entangled in a networked, transnational, technologized modernity, and that puts that awareness to creative use. “Machine Fever” then echoes Christopher Morash’s claim, in his influential examination of Irish media, that “the defining feature of Irish culture in the early 21st century is . . . a deeply engrained mediated connectedness between Ireland and the rest of the world.”17 That mediated connectedness is not limited to traditional media or communication technologies, however; it is facilitated by machines more broadly. Nor does the phenomenon Morash is describing emerge from nowhere at the beginning of the twenty-first century: media technologies played an important role in shaping the landscape of Irish modernism, as exciting recent work by Emily Bloom, Damien Keane, and others has shown.18 Following their lead, the “Sounds Modern” section of this book attends to technologies of sound recording and transmission and the cultural phenomena they help to enact, speaking to a lively ongoing conversation about media in the broader field of modernist studies.19 The gramophone is one such technology with a notable presence in Irish modernism, appearing in several texts in the 1920s, including Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), and Bowen’s The Last September (1929). While gramophone recordings, as Keane notes in his chapter, were on their way to being superseded in popularity by the superior “aural presence” of radio broadcasting and its attendant technologies when Joyce recorded a selection from “Aeolus” in 1924, the gramophone itself was by this point ubiquitous in Irish homes. As Susanne Cammack writes in her chapter, the gramophone, whose inner mechanisms comprised finely calibrated springs and tensions, could serve as a timely metaphor for a country that had

10   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

most recently emerged from the Civil War and almost a decade of armed conflict. Lennox Robinson’s play Portrait (1925), she argues, not only offers a dramatization of the stresses and trauma of a postwar generation but also enacts the modernist fascination with the intertwined relationship between mind, culture, and machine. By drawing attention to the gramophone itself, Cammack’s analysis of Portrait endorses Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the “medium is the message,” and, indeed, the authors and actors examined in this section each focus on the nature of their chosen media in order to explore the implications of their use.20 Keane’s detailed and archivally rich chapter examines the history of Joyce’s 1924 gramophone recording of a section of “Aeolus,” showcasing what Keane describes as a “drama about authority, mediation, and access.” The commercial success of vinyl LPs brought with it a rise in the popularity of authorial recordings, with different record companies seeking to produce different effects through audio equipment. Joyce’s recording, made before such equipment was available, was situated oddly in this new environment; fresh attempts to frame the value of this recording reveal shifting ways of thinking about meaning, not only of the recording itself but of Joyce’s written work and its relationship to audience(s). This recording history reveals the extent to which modernist writers were engaged in conversations about shifting understandings of the place and value of communication technologies beyond the printed page. Jeremy Lakoff argues that Denis Johnston’s radio plays also offer a drama of mediation, to echo Keane’s phrase, by foregrounding broadcasting technology as a thematic of the plays. In doing so, Lakoff argues, Johnston’s radio dramas resist the “ethos of immediacy” associated with wartime journalism. And just as Keane argues that the history of the “Aeolus” recording shows us a tension between the elite and the “middlebrow” in modernist culture, so too does Lakoff reveal that the modernist experimental process, as Johnston’s work makes clear, resides as much in the broadcasting house as it does in the writer’s study. Ultimately, these chapters highlight the importance of individual media and show, to borrow Lakoff’s words, “how the material means of dissemination condition artistic

Introduction  11

expression” and reveal a broader vision of the modernist creative process itself. In the fourth section of the book, “Body Trouble,” our contributors situate medical, eugenic, and evolutionary discourses of the body within the Irish modernist landscape, as scholars such as Maren Tova Linett and Marius Turda have done with regard to transatlantic and European modernism more broadly.21 Modernism is inescapably concerned with the body, Tim Armstrong has argued, in the way that it grapples with the tension between the notion of the body as a “complex of biomechanical systems” and the body as a site of crisis, perpetually unstable and at risk of regression.22 This tension informs Irish modernism’s troubled relationship with the body as a locus of control as well as creativity. Certainly, the abject Irish body—the diseased body of the Famine and the corrupted body of the allegedly mad or alcoholic Irish peasant of nineteenth-century discourse—was one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century science and governmentality. In his chapter, Enda Duffy argues that Joyce’s refiguring of the heart from sentimental metaphor to clinical reality in his fiction emerges directly and deliberately from the nineteenth-century Irish medical tradition. The turn to observation of the processes of the body initiates a “radical turn in the literary representation of subjectivity” that “may have been an Irish innovation,” he suggests, emerging out of the post-Famine burst of medical research and the public health apparatus the Famine engendered. Duffy’s essay, like many in this volume, gestures toward the larger material and discursive inheritance of colonialism, which is also the foundation of Alan Graham’s argument in his chapter: that eugenic thought, so long reduced to an association with the Yeats of the 1930s, underwrote much of the Irish literary and cultural rhetoric at the turn of the century. Writing of Douglas Hyde’s message of “cultural selfsufficiency” in the 1890s, which resonates to various effects in the writings of Synge, AE, and Joyce, Graham concludes that it came to bear as well on public policies of the Irish Free State. Latent within that rhetoric were “potent narratives of Irish identity” that implicated the effort to deanglicize Ireland with the desire to locate within the

12   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

Irish body a kind of superiority that could only be recognized if this body was part of a biologically esteemed “race.” The perception of a decay of culture and language coincided with the urge to reimagine the Irish body as vigorous—for it was felt that the alternative choice, submitting to the decay of language, would signal the “impending extinction of Irish ethnicity itself.” Decay and extinction are more frequently Beckettian than revivalist concerns, and it is to Samuel Beckett that “Body Trouble” turns next. Beckett’s own attention to the body has become a fixture of scholarship about the writer, with studies ranging from Yoshiki Tajiri’s Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (2006) to Ulrika Maude’s Beckett, Technology, and the Body (2011). These works have emphasized Beckett’s attention to, if not obsession with, the decaying, afflicted, and technologically enhanced body. Chris Ackerley’s argument, then, comes as a surprise. He reveals in his chapter that for all Beckett’s attention to the body, he disregarded popular trends in the biological sciences. Why, this essay asks, does a writer as “scientifically literate” as Beckett ignore the apex of the modern biological canon—Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendel’s laws of inheritance, and Watson’s and Crick’s identification of the double-helix configuration of DNA? Ackerley proposes an answer with strikingly modernist implications, suggesting that Beckett hearkens back to older scientific models to allow for a longer, more comprehensive view of natural development. Beckett’s interest in other scientific approaches arguably displaces the contemporary ethnonationalist focus on the racialized body. Beckett’s willingness to borrow the structure of an outdated theory like Ernst Haeckel’s, or to look for inspiration in Aristotelian models rather than contemporary physics, marks a larger Irish modernist challenge to the temporalities of modernism and modernity.23 The final section of this book, “Strange Experiments,” gathers together three essays that also trouble the temporal boundaries of Irish modernism, bringing into view a field that stretches beyond World War II, the long-held, arbitrary (though not entirely unwarranted) historical moment of modernism’s decline. If Ireland did not participate in the war, declaring a suspended state of “emergency” instead, the narrative

Introduction  13

of a cataclysmic coincidence of total war and the end of a particular vein of experimental literary production finds its limit.24 “Strange Experiments” explores what modernism looks like in the wake of this “emergency,” in a world in which literature and theater are haunted by what had come before. With essays on the shadows that Yeats’s drama shed on Beckett’s work; Flann O’Brien and the search for uncertainty; and John Banville’s long spaces of time, this section of the book wagers that modernism experienced not just an afterlife in the latter half of the twentieth century, but lives on, in strange experiments that expand and strain the moment of modernism.25 What Joe Cleary has called “a remarkable but still scarcely conceptualized late Irish modernism” comes into focus in these three chapters through the prism of science.26 The argument for a peculiarly Irish late modernism—explicitly marked in Andrew Kalaidjian’s and Cóilín Parsons’s chapters but also present in Katherine Ebury’s contribution—rests in large part on the principal conviction of this book: that reading Irish modernism’s interest in science and technology yields profound new insights. All three chapters in this section prove that the question of the time of modernism needs to be posed not just historically but also formally and philosophically. The question is not simply “When was modernism?” but “How did and do Irish modernists think about the very idea of time and historical location?” The expanding time of Irish modernism is not an anomaly or a hangover; it is, rather, a defining feature of any cultural project that takes an active interest in the new science that parses the atom and finds that the universe is expanding.27 Ebury, drawing on a deep reading of advances in the science of light in the early twentieth century, proves that Yeats was very much interested in these discoveries. This science, she argues, finds its way onto the stage in the form of Yeats’s experiments with lighting to signal the ghostly, an innovation that lives on in Beckett’s occult imaginings. While Yeats’s and Beckett’s haunted stages disrupt the physical presence of the stage and dislodge any easy idea of a unity of time in the theater, other experiments were taking shape in Ireland that would further unsettle the parameters of the here and now. For

14   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

Kalaidjian, modernism is defined by an interest in “revolution itself, a restless and continual remaking of art and culture”; it is marked by both stasis and dynamism, with an unchanging commitment to change. Late modernists—and, in this case, Erwin Schrödinger and Flann O’Brien—are wary of the certainties of an earlier revolutionary age, constructing images of a world that is known rather by its uncertainties. Reaching back to before the new sciences of relativity and quantum theory that Ebury and Kalaidjian address, Parsons’s essay approaches the latest of our modernist writers, John Banville, following him back to the Copernican revolution. Banville’s science tetralogy, Parsons argues, is a long-form experiment, played out over a decade of writing and hundreds of years of historical setting, that seeks to reset the clocks of modernity and modernism, recognizing their jagged and overlapping temporalities. Modernism is not dead for Banville, nor it is especially revitalized; it is recontextualized within a longer and deeper planetary history that eliminates the times and spaces through which we have previously thought it. Late modernism’s strange experiments are both lingering effects and new horizons.

This book is being published at a time of growing interest in the question of the complex entanglement of science, technology, and modernist artistic production, an interest that is driven not only by external pressures to marry the humanities to STEM fields, but also internally, by the insights of new materialism and by an ever-widening sense of the interdisciplinary reach of the phenomenon known as modernism.28 The field has moved substantially beyond early questions of how scientific knowledge and technological advances influence literature by providing metaphors and content, toward thinking about the coemergence of scientific ideas and literary forms, as well as investigating the artistic elements of scientific thought and writing itself.29 After the initial blush of influence studies in the field of science and literature, critical attention began to turn to the idea that there was not, in fact, a one-way flow of information and ideas from science to art, with science providing raw material for artistic

Introduction  15

work. This approach is perhaps best explained by Gillian Beer, in her magisterial work on Darwin’s profoundly humanistic writing: “The traffic [between science and literature] was two-way. Because of the shared discourse not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly and freely to and fro between scientists and non-scientists, though not without frequent creative misprision.”30 Literature provides no mere embellishment for the hard knowledge of science and technology: writers offer a wealth of words, images, and ideas with which to imagine and describe the world. Though highly visible in Darwin’s amateur-scientific literary peregrinations, this twoway street has become occluded as scientific metaphors have hardened into structures, and the figurative origins of explanatory structures like the evolutionary tree (to take just one example) get lost. Mark Morrison has recently offered a formulation of the relationship between modernism and science that avoids the trap of this debate over one-way or two-way influence. Modernism, he writes, is not the domain of writers, dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, or architects alone. Many in the world of science and technology “selfconsciously understood themselves to be participating in a present intensely marked by its modernity and modernization . . . so much so that we might speak of a ‘scientific and technological modernism.’”31 The implication is that scholars need to learn to recognize the changing but related shape of ideas as they slip into and through various discursive fields. The sharp delineation of fields that even the title of this present volume suggests has served to misdirect our attention from the mutually constitutive emergence of science/technology/literature as a variegated but interdependent field of knowledge. While all who engage in this self-conscious refashioning of the world understand “science and technology as a feature of the modern world, and in many ways key to its newness . . . the terms in which they understood their own technological and scientific modernity varied greatly.”32 Recognizing and doing justice to the myriad terms in which scientists and writers understand their own modernity calls for historically and geographically situated scholarship that grasps the particulars of a given place and time. Extending Morrison’s argument, we might say that the

16   Conrad, Parsons, and Weng

salient distinctions to be made are not between disciplines of knowledge, but between the historical and geographical locations of those disciplines. Delineating these locations is precisely the work of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. The authors of the chapters in this book take as a given the fact that science, technology, and modernist literature are intimate strangers. What the chapters explore in detail is how this intimacy is played out against the background of a particular set of historical processes that took place in Ireland in the course of the twentieth century. Yeats’s proclamation about the “man of science” is demonstrably different from C. P. Snow’s famous lamentation about the two cultures, the sciences and the humanities, for it emerges from an entirely different set of concerns. It is also disingenuous, coming from a poet who read widely and at times deeply in scientific writing. The “man of science” may not be Irish and is as likely not to be a man, but Yeats’s declaration is decidedly Irish, carrying with it all the complications associated with that identity at the turn of the last century. Many of the writers discussed here lived and wrote outside of Ireland, some famously choosing exile over remaining at “home.” Theirs are locations that straddled Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe—they lived in and wrote about an in-between world in which boundaries of both disciplines and identities were not meaningless, but were constantly being fractured and re-formed. It is the ambition of the chapters in this volume to lay bare precisely those fractures and formations.

pa r t o n e

 

Revival Dynamics

Natural History and the Irish Revival Seán Hewitt

By the end of the nineteenth century, the craze for amateur naturalist study had taken a firm foothold in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and a number of smaller Irish towns and cities.1 Throughout Britain and Ireland, up to one hundred thousand people were engaged in entomology, botany, marine biology, ornithology, and lepidopterology through organized scientific societies.2 The main field clubs in Ireland were formed later than their counterparts in Britain, with the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (DNFC) being established in 1886.3 Hence, the popularity of amateur naturalism coincided roughly with the more general Cultural and Literary Revivals in Ireland. As Juliana Adelman has noted, the memberships of scientific and literary societies in Ireland during the latter half of the nineteenth century often overlapped.4 By the time of the Literary Revival, which sought in various ways to counter the Enlightenment’s apparent “disenchantment of the world,” and to assert the Irish as a race equipped to oppose the spread of Anglicized modernity, there were a number of writers engaged in naturalist study who attempted to harness the discourses of natural science into narratives of spiritual resurgence.5 In doing so, these writers created a form of positivist spiritualism that moved beyond the Romantic search for the sublime (and beyond the dominant Symbolist-inspired aesthetic of the early Revival, which emphasized physical nature as a symbol) and into a number of more modern formulations, which foregrounded the materiality of the natural world, and the spiritual potential of close, detailed scientific attention. 19

20  Hewitt

Natural history was fundamental to many revivalist works, and an engagement with the burgeoning culture of natural science in late nineteenth-century Ireland pre-dated many writers’ “conversions” to literature. Emily Lawless (1845–1914), Charlotte Grace O’Brien (1845– 1909), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), Alice Milligan (1865–1953), J. M. Synge (1871–1909), Seumas O’Sullivan (born James Starkey) (1879–1958), and, later, Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), to name but a few, were (to different degrees) naturalists before they were writers. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) also attended the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the early years of the twentieth century. Others who chose natural science and natural theology as their careers also moonlighted as poets: J. J. Murphy (1827–94) and Thomas Corry (1860–1883) are examples. Both as a social and an intellectual pursuit, natural history intersected with nationalism, class politics, and religious contention. As Enda Leaney has argued, in nineteenth-century Ireland “the Anglo-Irish minority looked to their hegemony in science for an intellectual defence of their increasingly precarious political status.”6 Far from providing “neutral ground,” the field clubs of turn-of-the-century Ireland were fraught with political implication. In the literary works of revivalist naturalists, natural history is intertwined with, and reinterpreted to serve, both aesthetic and political ends. This chapter will focus on three principal writers: Emily Lawless, J. M. Synge, and, to a lesser degree, Seumas O’Sullivan, about whom we have less archival material from this period. Each of these writers continued their scientific pursuits after their “conversion” to literature, and all three of them were accomplished naturalists. Unlike some other revivalists, they did not claim to have left science behind in their adolescence. O’Sullivan has the rare distinction of having a find marked in J. M. Halbert and W. F. Johnson’s Irish Coleoptera (1902), and his first publications were papers in the Irish Naturalist (organ of the DNFC). Synge, a member of the DNFC alongside O’Sullivan, collected and bred moths and was confident enough in his knowledge of coleoptera to contradict an eminent scientist at a meeting.7 Of the three, Emily Lawless was by far the most accomplished naturalist. In fact, Charles Darwin initiated correspondence with her about

Natural History and the Irish Revival   21

discoveries she made regarding the fertilization of plants, which he encouraged her to submit to the journal Nature.8 For each, entomology, ornithology, botany, and lepidopterology constituted a new way of being modern: the latest scientific research, and the modes of close looking that natural history engendered, were used to counter the more airy symbolism of the Celtic Twilight and its focus on the nonphysical world. In the main, this involved a migration of the spiritual or sublime to being seen as within, rather than beyond, physical nature. The legacy of such scientific engagement among the revivalists has been underplayed or even ignored in favor of a more Yeatsian image of an antiscientific movement, comprised of “the last romantics.”9 John Wilson Foster has suggested that these revivalist “literary Protestants” constituted an “impediment to an Irish scientific culture.”10 However, not only were these revivalists practically engaged in scientific culture; they used this engagement to inflect a decidedly modern literature often explicitly in contention with the tradition of the presiding figures of Yeats, AE, and O’Grady. Although not always associated with the Irish Revival, Emily Lawless was a renowned writer (she was described by the Irish Times in her obituary as “perhaps . . . the most distinguished literary woman of her time”) as well as an accomplished naturalist.11 Her reluctance to become involved in the dramatic movement, along with her unionist politics, makes her perhaps unsuited to our view of the typical revivalist; however, her deployment of naturalist discourses in relation to narratives of spiritual resurgence in the Irish landscape suggest commonalities between Lawless’s work and that of more accepted revivalists such as Synge and O’Sullivan. Lawless’s first publication was a contribution to Entomologist’s Weekly, and her output of scientific articles was prolific, though this did not temper critics of her novels in questioning her ability to accurately explore scientific themes. Before she began to set her novels in Ireland, Lawless wrote A Chelsea Householder (1882), in which the main character enjoys mothing, and she later wrote Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (1887), in which the protagonist is (as his postnominal letters suggest) a fellow of the Linnaean Society. In a review of the latter, the Pall Mall Gazette questioned Lawless’s authority, suggesting

22  Hewitt

that “when a lady undertakes to make her hero a man who is a rising Indian officer and a naturalist, the wary reviewer looks out for a chance of setting his authoress right on several points connected with soldiering and science . . . Her application of proper names in science is not always quite happy, particularly when they are given to creatures of the sea.”12 Such a wary reception reflects the added hostility that Lawless was subject to as a woman scientist, though (unsurprisingly) the reviewer was unable to suggest any failings in either her military or scientific knowledge. In fact, Lawless continued to feature naturalist characters in both her short fiction and her novels, and her literary use of naturalist discourses moves closest to the concerns of her contemporaries in The Book of Gilly: Four Months Out of a Life (1906), which follows a young English protagonist during a long holiday on the Irish coast. During Gilly’s sojourn in Ireland, he is assigned a tutor, Mr. Griggs, who is a naturalist researching an article on “The Respiratory Action of the Dytiscidae.” For the young Gilly, Griggs becomes an incongruous emblem of modernity in an Irish landscape otherwise seen as a place of timeless adventuring: “Mr. Griggs might have stood for some Avatar of the modern world, an embodiment of the scientific spirit, newly alighted upon one of the waste places of a darkened and unregenerate Past.”13 Another of Gilly’s acquaintances in Ireland, a disabled young Oxford graduate named Phil Acton, presents the young boy with a binary in the choice of adult companions, who “stand at exactly opposite poles of the intellectual sphere.”14 The positivist Griggs, who systematically studies the marine life of the area, is contrasted sharply with the more Romantic figure of Phil Acton, who professes his hatred of “rotten materialism! . . . Rotten anything that could make a man suppose all earth, and sea, and sky were able to be summed up, packed away and settled in a handful of trumpery formula!”15 Lawless, certainly, leans much closer to Acton than Griggs in her sympathies, probing at the limits of scientific taxonomy and positivistic knowledge, asking “Can there . . . be a more ridiculous, a less profitable pursuit than to try to define what is in its nature indefinable? to set down in hard dull words, that which has in reality no bounds and no precise

Natural History and the Irish Revival   23

limits?”16 Heidi Hansson has carefully explored Lawless’s critiques of taxonomy as a protofeminist critique of scientific knowledge, and in this book Lawless explicitly pushes against the restrictive nomenclature of biology in order to open up a space for spiritual experience.17 In what is perhaps the pivotal chapter in The Book of Gilly, “In which the hero studies zoology beside a lake and the cosmos upon a rocking-stone,” Lawless combines both the scientific and the spiritual in a defining moment of Gilly’s intellectual development. Standing on a stone by the sea that momentarily unbalances, as though “the island had suddenly unfastened itself from its base and begun to move,” Gilly experiences “a sense of something remote from himself, something planetary, something crushingly vast and incomprehensible,” but Lawless is careful to define the resultant state as “a natural, not a religious awe.”18 This sense of what Philip Fisher has termed a “moment of pure presence,” or what Jane Bennett has described as an uncanny “enchantment” in nature study, is pervasive in the Irish Revival’s attempt to both adopt and counter the positivist knowledge of the Enlightenment.19 Here, Lawless insists that Gilly’s experience is based in nature, not in the supernatural, but it has all the characteristics of religious wonder. This textual replication of the sense of “enchantment” often entails a recourse to gothic undertones as a way of conveying the uncanny sense of extrabodily revelation, in which the natural world appears momentarily distinct and charged with independent meaning. In an account of her childhood pursuit of natural history, “An Entomological Adventure” (1898), Lawless draws heavily on gothic tradition in order to underscore the excitement of naturalist practice. The landscape becomes “a region full of bewitching suggestions, of haunting mystery, of dim, untravelled possibilities”—it is transformed by scientific activity into something more, rather than less, enchanted: “To walk out at dusk, for instance, with a bull’s-eye lantern in your hand, along the tottering edge of some ivy-mantled ruin, where the difference between masonry and leaves is hardly perceptible even in the daytime, is a proceeding that abounds in very exciting moments, quite apart from the question of whether the entomologist returns home

24  Hewitt

with full or empty pill-boxes!”20 This use of gothic tropes, and the language of adventure, is common to each of the three writers discussed here. Likewise, the necessity of nocturnal activity to pursuits such as mothing seems to provoke an association between liminality, a time when boundaries between things seem fluid, or “hardly perceptible,” and an awareness of the spiritual potential of such activities. J. M. Synge, similarly, draws on childhood adventure, and the trope of being abroad at night alone, in his literary presentation of naturalism and his attempt to rehabilitate science into an aesthetic that privileges spiritual experience and connection with the natural world. The apparent opposition between scientific enlightenment and religious experience is denied by all three revivalist naturalists discussed here, and the moment of childhood revelation allows for a combining of the religious (and also “primitive”) sense with the positivistic. Writing his “Autobiography” in 1898, Synge drew links between his childhood self and his adult preoccupations, giving a clear picture of the artist as natural historian. Referring to his early childhood, Synge writes that “even at this time I was a worshipper of nature.”21 The ease with which he links religious and naturalist practice (he “worships” nature) is indicative of the survival of pre-Darwinian, even Romantic, tendencies. In fact, the phrase itself is a direct echo of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” in which the older poet imagines his younger self, “so long / A worshipper of Nature.”22 Yeats, who described being “deprived by [Thomas Henry] Huxley and [John] Tyndall . . . of the simple-minded religion of my childhood,” claimed to have retaliated by creating “a new religion” in the form of “an infallible Church of poetic tradition.”23 Though Darwin may indeed have precipitated his loss of orthodox faith, Synge, like Lawless, did not feel “deprived” in the same way, and turned not to a “Church of poetic tradition” but rather deeper into the world of the naturalist. He remained a member of the DNFC until 1888, “worked systematically at his hobby” of collecting butterflies, moths and beetles, and kept detailed notebooks documenting his naturalist pursuits.24 Synge’s initial traumatic encounter with evolutionary theory, in his own “Autobiography” and in later criticism, is given to mark the

Natural History and the Irish Revival   25

beginning of “a flight from religious belief.”25 It has been seen as an archetypal late Victorian crisis of faith that prompted the writer to “replace” religiosity with a “natural community” of peasants. Synge’s The Aran Islands (1906), one critic maintains, is an effort to “replace an absent center, the death of a transcendental God.”26 Others have done well to differentiate between a rejection of Christianity, especially the evangelical Protestantism of Synge’s mother, and the wholesale rejection of spiritual belief. Daniel Casey, in a short biographical sketch of the writer, suggests that “he was, at heart, an inquiring, meditative, deeply religious man, but his sense of religion was pantheistic—encompassing a divine scheme promoting uniformity and cosmic harmony in nature.”27 Throughout his early writings, from the prosimetric “Vita Vecchia” (1895–97) to the “Autobiography,” Synge explores in minute detail his relationship to the natural world. From more general statements on the tendency of his personality to elaborate passages on the relationship between scientific materialism and his “strange sense of enchantment,” Synge’s early works carefully discuss the specificities of his changing approach to the study of environment.28 His “Autobiography” is an important account of the ways in which his view of nature was altered during his early life. After the death of an aunt, for example, the younger Synge’s encounter with mortality has a direct impact on his experience of a local woodland: “The sense of death seems to have been only strong enough to evoke the full luxury of the woods. I have never been so happy.”29 Here, the unexpected turn from death to unparalleled joy reveals the realization of a new connectedness, or even ability to communicate with, the natural world. The woods are not perceived as simply mirroring back Synge’s own awareness of mortality; rather, Synge’s encounter with death seems to evoke some hidden potential in the landscape. This hidden potential, the unseen aspect that might be revealed, is a recurring preoccupation for Synge and is theorized as the potential meeting point for spiritual and scientific approaches to nature. From this point on, Synge tells us, he became “more interested in definite life,” developing a naturalist’s eye, crouching in bushes to watch “the mere movements of the birds.”30 The emphasis on “definite” life suggests an accuracy of

26  Hewitt

observation; likewise, the “mere” movements of the birds draw attention to the idea that the natural world is being watched, not for any sense of higher meaning, but for a simple joy in witnessing the quotidian processes of life. However, moving through the “Autobiography,” Synge begins to link his naturalist’s eye with a type of observation and experience more akin to mysticism than materialism. Like Lawless, Synge writes of his moth-collecting hobby that “it gave me a great fondness for the eerie and night and encouraged a lonely temperament which was beginning to take possession of me.”31 Although, he tells us, he eventually “lost almost completely” his interest in natural science, he is keen to emphasize that the link with nature itself remained potent: “The beauty of nature influenced me more than ever.”32 His abilities as a writer, and as a writer concerned with a largely enchanted vision of the natural environment, are associated directly with his reading of Darwin. Jason Willwerscheid has suggested that Synge’s experience of religious trauma on reading On the Origin of Species was not merely a theological but also an aesthetic crisis, seeing in the “Autobiography” a “dying out of poetry” when faced with the natural world as a material rather than spiritual presence.33 However, such an argument conflates the physical, page-by-page chronology of the “Autobiography” with the chronology asserted by Synge himself. According to the “Autobiography,” Synge first encountered Darwin at the age of fourteen, and this does indeed precipitate the oft-quoted “agony of doubt.”34 However, earlier in the text, recounting his “sixteenth year” (i.e., after his reading of Darwin), Synge makes it clear that his poetic apprehension of nature was not diminished but enhanced by Darwin: Natural history did [much] for me . . . To wander as I did for years through the dawn of night with every nerve stiff and strained with expectation gives one a singular acquaintance with the essences of the world. The obscure noises of the owls and rabbits, the heavy scent of the hemlock and the flowers of the elder, the silent flight of the moths I was in search of gave me a passionate and receptive mood like that of early [man]. The poet too often lets his intellect

Natural History and the Irish Revival   27 draw the curtain of connected thought between him and the glory that is round him. The forces which rid me of theological mysticism reinforced my innate feeling for the profound mysteries of life.35

The heightened awareness, the “passionate and receptive mood,” is both connected with natural science and with “early man”; the figure of the naturalist poet, freed from the obstructive “curtain” of intellect that Synge associates with other writers, is both modern and premodern. The dualism associated with the project of the Enlightenment, scientific positivism, and modernity in general is avoided through natural history: the attentive poet, newly acquainted with “the essences of the world,” is made alert to “the glory that is round him.” Furthermore, this focus on sensitivity, on receptiveness to the “mysteries of life,” is figured as “innate” rather than learned, as “primitive” rather than civilized. There is a contradiction in the passage above that can be explained by the persistent tensions, the “contested territory,” between progressive and degenerationist evolutionisms in the Ireland of the late nineteenth century. As Greta Jones notes, members of nationalist groups often saw the primitive, the “ancient,” as noble, simple, and wise; Darwinian evolutionists, on the other hand, were inclined to view “primitive man” as “simpler in construction, uni-dimensional in many of its cultural characteristics, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped.”36 Synge’s encounter with natural science, though made through Darwin, does not result in a perception of his own superior culture and development, but rather emphasizes a connection with more vital, “primitive” modes of being. This passage reworks the typical associations of materialist science and Enlightenment with “the disenchantment of the world” by collapsing any neat vision of progress itself: the acquaintance with natural history becomes an acquaintance with the “eerie” mystery of nature, and the scientific modernity implicit in being “rid of theological mysticism” becomes, in its own way, a route to the “profound mysteries of life.” The critical misunderstanding that Synge’s attempt at “bridging the gap” between himself and the natural world might constitute “a way of denying Darwin” is the result of a too-strict

28  Hewitt

application of a binary of Enlightenment vs. Faith, or Romanticism vs. Science, which is not consonant with Synge’s much more nuanced negotiation of these large-scale approaches to the natural world.37 When it came to writing his first play, When the Moon Has Set (1900–1903), Synge uses the proxy character of Colm to articulate his own developing theory of nature study and spirituality. Throughout the drafts, Colm (who is attempting to woo a nun, Sister Eileen), deploys his naturalist knowledge as a form of persuasion, linking this to a vision of primitive, pagan unity of the soul with the earth. In fact, the title of the play itself refers back to Synge’s experience of mothing as described in the “Autobiography”: “Do you hear the night-jars? It would be a fine night to hunt moths in. They will be thronging here when the moon sets.”38 Colm boasts, at the end of a draft of When the Moon Has Set, that he knows the order that the birds sing during the morning chorus, and this is used by Synge as a temporal structuring device leading up to the pagan marriage ceremony that concludes the play: “There are the larks and the wrens; you have half an hour”; “There is the willow warbler, you have a quarter of an hour.” In fact, the young Synge himself kept a detailed nature diary between 1883 and 1893, and he noted down the order of the birdsong at dawn during April 1886. The order he notes corresponds with that given by Colm in the play (“blackbirds and thrushes begin singing about 1 hour before sunrise, wrens about ½ an hour and hedgesparrows at sunrise. April”), suggesting that Synge either remembered or used this diary as a source text for Colm’s naturalist knowledge.39 (One is reminded, here, of Yeats’s own research into the activity of seabirds for use in The Shadowy Waters.)40 The overwrought courting speech of Colm propounds this knowledge at every opportunity and is inflected by a Nietzschean language of the “male power” and the mask, in order to establish a philosophical and spiritual understanding of scientific observation: “Your soul has been growing like a germinating seed, and your mind like a moth within the mask of the chrysalis. Now the seedstalk has split the mask and you are born again.”41 This rather confused set of analogies hints at Synge’s difficult wrangling of naturalist and spiritualist ideas into a single theory; however, his use of scientific language to illustrate Nietzschean

Natural History and the Irish Revival   29

ideas is exemplary of his own unique approach to naturalist knowledge in the context of revivalism. A number of passages originally written for Synge’s “Vita Vecchia” were later reconstituted as speeches for When the Moon Has Set and thus become part of Synge’s spiritual-scientific theory. As in the “Autobiography,” there is an emphasis in “Vita Vecchia” on the relationship between simplicity, associated by Synge and others with the “primitive” and, implicitly, the more “natural,” and receptiveness to a sort of secular mystical experience. Toward the end of the piece, there is an evocative description of the arrival of springtime in Ireland, full of striking detail and a sense of the uncanny. Woods “grow purple with sap,” birches stand “like candle-sticks,” hazel trees come and “[hang] the woods with straight ear-rings of gold, till one morning after rain spectres of green and yellow and pink began to look out between the trees.”42 Again, however, the mystical, otherworldly sense of the “essences” in the world are tied by Synge not to a religious experience but rather to an intense and scientific observation: “We do wrong to seek a foundation for ecstasy in philosophy or the hidden things of the spirit—if there is a spirit—for when life is at its simplest, with nothing beyond or before it, the mystery is greater than we can endure. Every leaf and flower [and] insect is full of deeper wonder than any sign the cabbalists [sic] have invented.”43 Rather than meditating on any occult symbolism, Synge’s narrator gives his attention to what the “Autobiography” might call “definite life.” Here, Synge deploys naturalist study in order to distinguish his spiritual experience from that of Celtic Twilight theosophy. The mystery does not come from anything “beyond” nature, but rather from a close and simple observation of physical nature itself. Synge’s acknowledgement of his debt to natural science, and his association of this body of work with an increasing sensitivity to the mystical, suggests that a “re-enchantment” is possible through the application of scientific principles. This is what George Levine would later term a “secular re-enchantment.”44 The immediacy and close attention to the natural world stressed by Synge’s early prose emphasize the possibility of recovering a “primal at-one-ness” with an

30  Hewitt

atemporal genius loci or entelechy in nature through science, repudiating mediation (whether via religious iconography or occult symbolism) in favor of a communion modeled on “natural” or “primitive” relationships to nature.45 In other words, this re-enchantment works to recover the “natural link” between mankind and the environment that Synge observed in The Aran Islands. This strand of modernity, found in Nietzsche and others, forms the basis of much of Synge’s work, which uses the image of the primitive as a way of stressing the possibility of recovering the premodern. Where common philosophical narratives of modern disenchantment suggest that the projects of rationalization and intellectualization, and the growing authority of scientific explanation, have driven the “mystery” from the world, Synge, Lawless, and Seumas O’Sullivan offer a counternarrative. Rather than Darwin and the naturalists being seen as among the principal disenchanters of the world, Synge’s nuanced exploration of ecological relationships suggests that a radical re-enchantment is made possible not by any practical occultism but by practical scientific observation. The techniques and principles of modern science are applied by the modern writer to suggest the potential of attaining a unity with nature exemplified in the perceived premodernity of certain types of Irish peasantry. An emphasis on the primitive connection to nature links, as Yeats suggests, the Irish Revival and the earlier Romantic movement; however, a study of natural history through local scientific societies leads to a definite shift in aesthetic among revivalist naturalists. Just as Synge rejects cabalism in favor of a spiritual but also scientific positivism, another revivalist, Seumas O’Sullivan, rejected the aesthetic of the earlier Celtic Twilight through his emphasis on a spiritual experience rooted in nature rather than in pagan deities or the folkloric supernatural. O’Sullivan’s formative years were taken up by various natural history projects, and he worked regularly with the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club. He read Darwin, Huxley, and a number of writers on evolutionism, and his library contained a large number of practical guides to natural history, ranging from the general (such as Lady Kane’s Linnaean Irish Flora [1833], to the niche (Anton de Bary’s Comparative Morphology and Biology of the Fungi Mycetozoa and Bacteria

Natural History and the Irish Revival   31

[1887]).46 As with Lawless, he regularly contributed to scientific journals, notably the Irish Naturalist, and held a particular interest in lepidoptera. O’Sullivan’s engagement with naturalist study, however, was also coupled with pursuits more traditionally associated with the Irish Revival. A theosophist interested in folklore, his publishing house published books by a number of key revivalists, and his at-homes were a staple feature of the social life of the Dublin literati. Although his earlier work was heavily influenced by AE and the aesthetic of the Celtic Twilight, O’Sullivan began to recalibrate his poetic relationship to the natural world by attempting to show a reenchantment of the physical through a rejection of folkloric and religious motifs. Whereas O’Sullivan’s first collection, The Twilight People (1905), was a clear inheritor (even through its title) of the Twilight aesthetic, his Verses Sacred and Profane (1908) and The Earth-Lover and Other Poems (1909) move more closely toward a vision of a material world that is somehow self-enchanting. Though AE wrote about O’Sullivan’s verse as though it were a continuation of his own project, the younger poet departed significantly from the Twilight model.47 Before the publication of the Boston edition of his Collected Poems in 1923, O’Sullivan wrote to the editor, Padraic Colum, instructing him to “cut out all that twilight stuff for God’s sake. The very thought of it makes me ill.”48 Even as early as 1912, when putting together a compilation volume of his first three collections, O’Sullivan was already editing a number of the poems from The Twilight People out of his oeuvre.49 However, as Sean Mannion has suggested, the association between O’Sullivan and the Twilight seems to have stuck since the publication of this first collection.50 In “The Gleam,” which acts as a sort of ars poetica for O’Sullivan’s aesthetic shift, the poet directs the reader away from the Twilight and calls for a focus on a spirituality rooted solely in the study of material nature. “Bundle the gods away,” he writes, finding in “the whisper of the leaves in the rain’ something “Richer than Danaan gold.” Here is a solid refocusing on the material, and a rejection of the occult. O’Sullivan presents the figure of Merlin, who followed magic and “a vision beyond the eyes,” as contrary to the ideal “earth-born” life. He

32  Hewitt

ends the poem with the imperative to “harbour” in the heart “No vision but earth can give / No rapture but earth may share.”51 Of course, the archaic language and use of Romantic apostrophe keeps the poem rooted in an older style; however, it is self-consciously pushing against the tropes of its predecessors. Much in the same way that Synge emphasized naturalist study as yielding greater knowledge and spiritual experience than cabalism, so O’Sullivan turns against “magic,” “gods,” and supernatural folkloric treasure in favor of a “rapture” rooted in, and defined by, physical nature. Though O’Sullivan’s poetry remains Romantic through to his shift toward an urban and historical focus on the 1910s, he diverges early on from the Twilight poets through his emphasis on a close attention to the natural world and the experience of “enchanted” ecosystems. Whereas Yeats had criticized, as part of the Twilight project, “that ‘externality’ which a time of scientific and political thought has brought into literature,” O’Sullivan situates his vision in the external, utilizing what Yeats would term the “scientific” in order to mark his own divergence from the Twilight paradigm.52 As with Lawless and Synge, naturalism and scientific engagement result in an aesthetic shift that is defined against both symbolism and positivism through its careful negotiation of these two loci. It is this that makes these revivalists’ engagement with natural history modern, rather than Romantic. All three emphasize the migration of the spiritual experience so that it is located within, rather than beyond, physical nature. Such a transition marks the way for later, more overtly modernist re-enchantments, though all three revivalists achieve their re-enchantment through, rather than in spite of, natural scientific knowledge. However, each also suggests the limitations of science, offering through literature new routes for spiritual experience. Lawless, who was much more consistently and deeply involved in natural history than either Synge or O’Sullivan, uses her position as writer both to challenge the norms of taxonomy and to launch a more general critique of positivism in literary terms. The difficulty of adequate description in the novel form is used as evidence to suggest the reductiveness of scientific terminology, though it is also through scientific

Natural History and the Irish Revival   33

pursuits, or naturalist knowledge, that many of her characters undergo a spiritual experience. For Synge, positivism is reconfigured as having spiritual potential in itself: in fact, naturalist study is seen as more successfully spiritual than more traditional mysticisms. Building on this, Seumas O’Sullivan (himself a committed theosophist) works to reconcile mysticism with positivism. Each, therefore, mobilizes natural historical knowledge in order to mark a new literary direction, with O’Sullivan and Synge explicitly framing their break from the Celtic Twilight and “theological mysticism,” respectively, in terms that emphasize a return to nature as material rather than primarily symbolic. Engagement with naturalist study, in this way, allows us to complicate our understanding of the trajectory of revivalism, whereby proscientific writers create spaces for spiritual revival that sit within an apparently atavistic movement but do not conform to the tenets assigned to it in later criticism. Each of these writers, to different degrees, works against modern disenchantment, though for them (unlike Yeats and others), this project is openly consonant with, rather than a reaction against, the new practices and worldview ushered in by the proponents of natural history.

2 John Eglinton An Irish Futurist Julie McCormick Weng

Who was William Fitzpatrick Magee, better known by his pseudonym John Eglinton (1868–1961)? To AE (George Russell), he was “one of [Ireland’s] most thoughtful writers, our first cosmopolitan.”1 Austin Clarke called him “the necessary advocatus diaboli of the Irish literary revival.”2 And W. B. Yeats remarked that he was “our one Irish Critic . . . permanently in friendly opposition to our national literary movement.” Yet “he has influenced us all I think even though we curse him at times.”3 James Joyce took a more playful approach in his poetic portrait: There once was a Celtic librarian Whose essays were voted Spencerian His name is Magee But it seems that to me He’s a flavour that’s more Presbyterian4

Today we remember Eglinton best as one of the librarians that Stephen Dedalus debates in the National Library in Ulysses (1922). Joyce’s caricature pokes fun at Eglinton’s status as a bachelor and Presbyterian, but it also positions him as the most open-minded member of the library’s cohort. As Stephen attempts to argue via “algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father,” librarians Richard Best and Thomas Lyster civilly disagree.5 Taking a harder line, AE asserts his disbelief 34

John Eglinton  35

in autobiographical readings of literature and claims that art should unearth “spiritual essences.”6 Eglinton, however, probes Stephen’s propositions, eventually conceding that “the truth is midway”; “[Shakespeare] is the ghost and the prince,” but, even more, “he is all in all.”7 In this scene, Joyce depicts Eglinton as the only member of the group willing to compromise. He also distinguishes an ideological divide between Eglinton and AE. Whereas AE connects art to Platonic ideals, Eglinton endorses an interdependence between life and art—a belief that the material, historical world may enliven the creation process. Joyce’s casting of Eglinton mirrors his biography. Indeed, a gloss of Eglinton’s life and oeuvre evinces his openness to a range of philosophical approaches, including transcendentalism, cosmopolitanism, and materialism. He was particularly attracted to ideas that would advance humanistic thought and practices in Ireland. Amid what he perceived as the country’s dangerously impassioned political atmosphere, Eglinton theorized an ideological and aesthetic counterculture, a literary method that would privilege the material over the immaterial and the present age over the past. As he saw it, Irish artists were negatively conditioned to seek inspiration from Ireland’s fraught history in order to express from it a distinctly national form of art. Apprehensive about the consequences of cultural nationalism and notions of Irish distinctiveness—the separatism and violence that they often entailed—Eglinton encouraged writers “to dispense with traditional methods and traditional themes” and to instead represent the material elements of ordinary life in literature.8 Pointing to new technologies in particular, he lauded them as wellsprings from which to shape modern art. The resulting unorthodox expressions, he felt, would allow Irish writers to ignite a revolutionary “thought movement” rather than a language, religious, or violent political movement.9 With this history in mind, this chapter argues that Eglinton was not just Dublin’s local librarian and noted essayist; he was also an Irish Futurist, advocating a transgressive literary standard for the Irish Revival. Anticipating the materiality and technophilia of Italian Futurism, Eglinton developed his own materialist and technological

36  Weng

aesthetic for his Irish audience. Unlike the younger generation of Italian Futurists who would adore machinery’s capacity to inspire chaos and violence, Eglinton viewed machines as vehicles that could advance cosmopolitan impulses in Ireland and Irish literature. Technological tales could play a role in his larger ideological vision by placing people into a material kinship, an awareness of their shared experiences of modern life despite other differences. Eglinton thus saw machines as working for a noble purpose, beyond the functions of their nuts and bolts. They could take part in a literary revival inspired not by the glamour of patriotism or enduring allure of Irish mythology, folklore, and history, but by technological interlocutors that would spotlight features of the modern human, over the merely Irish, condition. the se arch for a

“ patriotism

which looks forward”

Eglinton’s Irish Futurism evolved through a series of “manifestos” published at the turn of the twentieth century. The first of these essays, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?,” was printed in the Daily Express on September 18, 1898, as part of a public debate with Yeats, AE, and William Larminie about the future of Irish literature. With the possibilities of the new century looming, these writers deliberated the most suitable subjects and ambitions for a literary revival, and they covered, as Ernest A. Boyd notes, all of the “conflicting theories . . . as to the true function of Irish literature.”10 Declan Kiberd writes that the result of the debate would prove Yeats as the “upholder of nationalism” and Eglinton as the “defender of cosmopolitanism.”11 In the debate’s inaugural essay, Eglinton questions what topics a national drama should champion: Supposing a writer of dramatic genius were to appear in Ireland, where would he look for the subject of a national drama? . . . Would he look for it in the Irish legends, or in the life of the peasantry and folk-lore, or in Irish history and patriotism, or in life at large as reflected in his own consciousness?12

Following these loaded questions, Eglinton wages an argument aimed at debunking traditional subjects, topics especially romanticized by

John Eglinton  37

popular figures such as Standish O’Grady and endorsed by Yeats and AE. Yeats writes of his desire to see “‘old faiths, myths, [and] dreams’” establish Ireland as “a holy land to her own people,” and AE emphasizes his ambition to “liberate art from life” so as to enable artists to tap into a greater “spiritual consciousness.”13 “Contrairy [sic] John,” however, promotes an antithetical aspiration; a turn away from myths and dreams in favor of an art inspired by ordinary life.14 Although Irish people may esteem legends, folklore, and history, Eglinton asserts that they are incompatible with the concerns of the modern age. They contain “lost” “secrets” and, consequently, resist contemporary appropriation. If artists preoccupy themselves with these remote tales, Eglinton warns that they will be forced to turn to belles lettres, a genre that “seek[s] a subject outside experience.”15 This search for “an escape” from the “facts of life” would result in an art form that promotes private rather than shared experiences, tales that cannot characterize Ireland or its people and therefore “cannot be representative or national.”16 Eglinton also objects to the use of patriotic themes in literature, themes that he believed had become compulsory in Irish art. In perhaps his most famous essay, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature” (1902), he opines that Young Irelander Thomas Davis crystalized the connection between the Irish poet and nationalism, making a “true religion” out of patriotism. Since Davis, the writer is forced to pledge fealty to Ireland through art, to “speak in his national rather than in his human capacity.” If Irish society repudiates alternative themes, Eglinton laments that writers will feel forced into exile in order to “find themselves.”17 Eglinton’s analysis of Ireland’s creative climate was not so much a foreshadowing as it was an acknowledgement of what was already occurring on the island. Indeed, during his youth, he had witnessed notable writers abandoning Ireland, including Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and George Bernard Shaw. Their grievances are reflected in the contents of Eglinton’s “De-Davisisation” essay as the writers denounced what they perceived as Ireland’s stifling artistic atmosphere. As Shaw reasoned, for “every Irishman who felt that his business in life

38  Weng

was on the higher planes of the cultural professions felt that he must have a metropolitan domicile and an international culture: that is, he felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland.”18 With piercing cynicism, Moore called Ireland “a country to which it was fatal to return”; for Irish artists could only write “well . . . by casting off Ireland.”19 Later writers such as Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett would also further their careers abroad. In Joyce’s case, he knowingly followed in the footsteps of his Irish predecessors by moving abroad, writing in his bitter broadside “Gas from a Burner” that Ireland “always sen[ds] / Her writers and artists to banishment.”20 Also persistent in Joyce’s mind was the life of James Clarence Mangan, a poet and friend of Davis who maintained ambiguous politics, suffered from mental health issues and substance abuse, and died prematurely during the Famine. For Joyce, Mangan was “the type of his race” and represented the doomed fate of a great writer who remained in Ireland.21 In an effort to redress this inhospitable artistic atmosphere, Eglinton challenges the assumption that writers are intrinsically indebted to Ireland and must pay their debt through patriotic art. He declares that all poets “have owed far less to their countries than their countries have owed to them.”22 Inverting the status quo, he insists instead that Ireland is beholden to its artists and must cast off Davis’s artistic model. It must initiate a “de-Davisisation of Irish national literature  .  .  . the getting rid of the notion that in Ireland, a writer is to think, first and foremost, of interpreting the nationality of his country, and not simply of the burden which he has to deliver.”23 By uncoupling the artist from nationalism, Eglinton believes that Ireland will alter the object of the writer’s gaze, allowing the poet to work uninhibitedly on behalf of human, rather than national, interests. With this shift in practice, Eglinton argues that the country will redefine Irish patriotism, “exchang[ing] the patriotism which looks back for the patriotism which looks forward,” encouraging writers to fix their eyes on Ireland’s future and to refashion Irish literature through new sources of inspiration.24

John Eglinton  39 a technological tale of

“ epic”

proportions

This oppositional aesthetic and political posturing undergirds what I am calling Eglinton’s Irish Futurism, an outlook driven by a desire to see new, diverse, and relevant renderings of modern life represented in literature. Eglinton promotes this outlook by undermining the conventions of Irish literary tradition. From his perspective, then, what subjects should writers adopt if not legends, folklore, history, and patriotism? To what muses should artists turn? Eglinton’s essay, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry” (1898), marks a shift in his rhetoric, a moment when he philosophizes not generally about representing ordinary life but specifically about technologies. He composes this essay in the wake of Yeats’s publication “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art” (1898), a treatise that decries Eglinton’s philosophies as pragmatic and utilitarian. Yeats argues that artists should not seek the relevant and real. They should instead “liberate the arts from ‘their age’ and from life,” so that, in AE’s words, the “common man” may be “exalted.”25 Responding to Yeats directly, Eglinton turns to technologies, spotlighting recent innovations amid his broader theory of materiality and suggesting that machines can serve as exemplary artistic muses. He urges his generation of “poetic dreamers to apply their visionary faculty and quaint rhythmic trick to a treatment of the mechanical triumphs of modern life, as Homer treated the manners and customs of an heroic age,” for the epics of the present age are the steam-engine and the dynamo, its lyrics the kinematograph, phonograph, etc., and these bear with them the hearts of men as the Iliad and Odyseey [sic] of former days uplifted the youth of antiquity, or as the old English ballads expressed the mind of a nation in its childhood.26

With this declaration, Eglinton avows that the age’s great national tales feature a new cast of heroes. No longer comprised of divine, halfdivine, or mortal figures, these stories star engineered bodies artfully constructed by human hands. They include transportation vehicles and electrical, visual, and audio technologies, machines that engage a

40  Weng

host of the senses and serve a spectrum of purposes. And they exemplify a broad and relevant material category from which he believes artists may devise modern art. Technological tales, however, should not merely affirm Ireland’s modernity or industrial development. They should disturb their audience. Eglinton charges that a great work of art should have the effect of “engine-screeching.”27 Through this description—one familiar to an audience of tram and train riders newly accustomed to the dissonant sounds of screeching engines—Eglinton proposes that poetry should play a disruptive role. It should stir “trouble and wisdom,” provoking acts of reflection and “skepticism.”28 For it is “far better,” he writes, to scrutinize “modern tendencies, like Ruskin or the grim Carlyle” than to chase Yeats’s and AE’s “phantasms.”29 The result, however, is not mere moral or fabular tales but conscientious literature shaped through new objects of interest, objects relevant to readers’ lives. Eglinton’s theory reflects aspects of what Vicki Mahaffey calls “challenging” fictions—“textured and comprehensive” literature that does not “countenance a reader’s repression (of what she doesn’t know or understand),” thereby “mak[ing] it easier for that same reader to overlook social policies of oppression (of people she doesn’t understand).” Instead, challenging fictions are “oriented toward adventure” rather than “consumption” and enable readers to become “more attentive to what they may discover” rather than “retain.”30 In a similar vein, Eglinton suggests that if Irish writers showcase familiar technological encounters, their challenging tales may instigate new insights and discoveries about the modern human experience. futurist connections and collisions

Almost a decade after Eglinton published his essay on technological epics, Italian Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti would also turn to technologies as sources for modern art. Vexed with Italy’s devotion to the past, Marinetti writes that Western literary tradition had exhausted antiquated muses, such as “Woman and Beauty,” and left artists “fatally spent, diminished, crushed.”31 Instead, he argues that artists should seek “mechanical beauty” and a picture of the

John Eglinton  41

“mechanic lovingly at work on the great powerful body of his locomotive,” showing the “knowing tenderness of a lover caressing his adored woman.”32 By admiring machines, writers can reimagine literary custom and develop a “scientific literature” liberated from “classical claptrap.”33 Marinetti’s imaginings, similar to Eglinton’s, endorse a new relationship between artists, art, and machines. Yet Marinetti’s futurism takes a distinct position on the role that artists play in this bond. Rather than support human ambition, he promotes a world where machines “reign.”34 They reign, not in a symbolic, idle fashion but as powerful and autocratic agents: “naturally cruel, omniscient, and combative.”35 Through this new ontological and hierarchical order, writers will learn to revere the “life of matter” and humble themselves before it; they will obliterate the human “I” in literature so as to uplift “the life of a motor, a new instinctive animal.”36 Lawrence Rainey writes that Marinetti’s topsy-turvy system produces an artistic “idiom synchronized to the radios, telephones, phonographs, airplanes, and cinemas inundating the new century.”37 And through this idiom will arise, as fellow futurist Umberto Boccioni declares, a “renewed consciousness,” one that enables artists to “reenter into life,” not through the power of blood flow but through voltages of electricity.38 By literally and figuratively plugging into technological outlets around them, artists may simultaneously reinvent art and life itself. To be sure, with each turn of phrase, Marinetti and Boccioni dramatize Italian Futurism with sentiments beyond the scope of Eglinton’s interest and imagination. Although he admires technologies, Eglinton has no desire to establish a “scientific literature,” to fetishize a romantic connection between humans and machines, or to supplant human authority with “matter.” Yet both his and Marinetti’s futurisms share a similar core—a motivation spurred by a shared rejection of their homelands’ literary traditions and fashionable politics. As a result, both writers turn to the technologies that characterize the era. Even Eglinton offers a watered-down version of Marinetti’s nonhuman ontology. As if taken from a page of Marinetti’s own writings, Eglinton exclaims,

42  Weng the kinematograph, the bicycle, the electric tramcars, labour-saving contrivances, etc., are not susceptible of poetic treatment, but are, in fact, themselves the poetry.39

In an unexpected maneuver, Eglinton suggests that machines embody artistic expression in and of themselves. They are not merely passive instruments that the poet may reduce to a pithy phrase and casual brush of the quill. Quite boldly, he declares that technologies exude poetry autonomously within their discrete material forms. If only artists will open their ears, they will hear, like Stephen does in Ulysses when he walks past Fleet Street Electrical Station’s powerhouses, these machines’ songs. Stephen realizes that the dynamo “sing[s]” not only of itself but of himself; it “hum[s] . . . without” as well as “within” him.40 In this encounter between human and machine, Joyce offers a glimpse of what Eglinton’s Irish Futurism endorses—not a picture of humanity debased before the machine but one where people are receptive to the creative expressions already sounding from technologies themselves, one attuned to the way that the lives of humans and machines are already intimately intermingled. Eglinton’s and Marinetti’s futurisms together thus shape, as Rainey writes of Italian Futurists, “a coherent body of theoretical precepts grounded in not just arbitrary aesthetic preferences, but a systematic reading of contemporary society.”41 As Eglinton reads Irish society, however, he seeks an alternative end; while some Italian Futurists, including Marinetti, eventually retreat into fascist ideology, Eglinton turns to cosmopolitanism. His understanding of cosmopolitanism differs from that of Italian Futurists, whose ideas of cosmopolitanism and internationalism were politically suspect and even nefarious.42 Instead, Eglinton felt that cosmopolitan literature would accomplish his overarching ambition: to override Irish separatism through an inclusive aesthetic practice that looks both inward and outward, at home and abroad. This alternative ambition associates his Irish Futurism with characteristics unique to Ireland’s colonial history, a history marked by political divisiveness that often relied on looking inward, backward, and communicating through violence. Uneasy with the currents of

John Eglinton  43

cultural nationalism and its influence on Irish art, Eglinton believed that cosmopolitan literature could serve as a counterforce to nationalism, assuaging the sting of historical troubles and offering “faith and hope” in their stead.43 Furthermore, a cosmopolitan literature might enable Irish writers to more creatively capture the range of human experiences that define the age, drawing divided Irish and global audiences together in new accord. a cosmopolitan literature as

“ free

as the elements”

But how does Eglinton conceive of cosmopolitanism? And how might it function in a technological tale and literary revival movement? Eglinton defines cosmopolitan literature as one that is “free as the elements.” Turning to a technological metaphor, he adds that cosmopolitan literature reveals its “elemental force” when it pursues “truth and wisdom” and produces “an electric discharge of thought.” This pulsation of thought springs outward from its source, “attract[ing] attention” centrifugally, as the audience is joined in a charged network.44 But what does Eglinton mean through his reference to “the elements”? With this phrase, he points to the natural elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Cosmopolitan literature, then, should bear qualities similar to these entities. Jane Bennett brings attention to their characteristics, writing that the elements are “strong, diffuse, and durable,” and that they have material features. Yet she acknowledges that the term is “wonderfully vague with regard to . . . whether it refers to something exclusively ‘outside’ of the human body like the weather,” or “(inside) us as well,” for even the human body is made up of tiny molecules of water and air.45 I would argue that Eglinton relies on the term’s ambiguity in order to avoid a prescriptive theory of cosmopolitan literature and to instead emphasize its malleability and variety. Unlike the similarities shared in many nationalist narratives, he stresses that cosmopolitan literature will take different shapes and forms to express the modern human experience; it will unfold as the “faithful and unbiased rendering of the individual impression.”46 At its best, cosmopolitan literature conveys

44  Weng

the nationality of a people, but in a way that values it as a kaleidoscope of experiences—for “the expression of nationality, literature cannot fail to be; and the richer, more varied and unexpected that expression the better.”47 This preference for plurality follows Boyd’s summation of Eglinton’s ambitions: to discover “a new and living creed,” one that never “harden[s] into dogma,” but is “flexible” and “ever-changing.”48 Eglinton’s allusion to the elements also reflects his devotion to American Transcendentalism, a movement known for its humanism and celebration of democracy and the natural world.49 Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of the stars and Henry David Thoreau of apples.50 In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman brings these attributes together best under its banner, “grass,” an emblem of neutrality and democracy.51 Grass grows indiscriminately; it is free of bigotry. There is a whisper here, too, of another thinker Eglinton admired, Friedrich Nietzsche, and his fascinating refrain in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: do not rely on “extraterrestrial hopes” but “remain faithful to the earth.”52 Eglinton’s invocation of the elements aligns with Whitman’s use of grass and Nietzsche’s call to look not to the heavens but to the abundant table already set before people on earth—to not seek transcendence through beauty but actualization through the technologies and other material elements that exemplify the age. Like these thinkers, Eglinton desired a sense of liberty, simplicity, and realism in literature—for, as he argues, literature should spring from “normal” experiences rather than the “‘exaltation of the senses,’” which he believes the Symbolists so fruitlessly pursue.53 Broadening his theory, Eglinton deploys another term as a close synonym for cosmopolitanism: “universal[ism].” He uses the term to express his approval of literature that not only echoes people’s lived experiences but also achieves popularity in the eyes of the public: “The facts of life with which poetry is concerned are . . . the simple and universal”; the poetry preoccupied with the “fact[s] of life . . . has been most universal in its appeal”; “the poetry of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning—is more important than the poetry of art and artifice—the poetry of Coleridge, Rossetti, Swinburne—because of its  .  .  . more universal appeal”; “man has only to be original to be universal.” In

John Eglinton  45

these declarations, Eglinton touts literature that treats the affordances particular to the modern era, expressing the “age better” and “what is best in the age.”54 He believes this literature will resonate memorably across boundaries, exceeding local settings and amassing global audiences. Taking Shakespeare as a case study, Eglinton claims that Yeats’s argument in “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art” misunderstands and misrepresents what motivated the Elizabethan’s creation process. Whereas Yeats believes Shakespeare looked to humanity only insofar as it enabled him to create art for art’s sake, Eglinton contends that “the source and power” of his writings stemmed from his “broadly human and representative interest” in life. Shakespeare was not, he argues, a symbolist—one who “twist[s]” reality into an “abnormality,” leaving people “indifferen[t],” for “if the transcendant [sic] realities do not exist in the normal human consciousness, they do not exist in ‘poetry, music, and painting,’ or at all.”55 Rather, Eglinton positions Shakespeare as his ally, a fellow cosmopolitan who successfully captured the universal matters of people’s lives through their ordinary elements. Moreover, cosmopolitan literature for Eglinton relies on a deliberate realism, not by adhering to the mundane, everyday realism theorized by Henry James and depicted by such writers as George Eliot and Mark Twain. By contrast, Eglinton’s realism joins cosmopolitanism and materialism. Through their interdependence, Eglinton expounds a philosophy of what I call cosmomaterialism—an outlook in which modern elements connect people, an outlook that positions technological materials as cosmopolitan ambassadors. These cosmopolitan technological ambassadors speak not on behalf of a country but an age, enhancing human relations through their broad use, relevance, and appeal. At a time when Irish artists were encouraged to represent the Irish as an “exalt[ed] . . . race,” Eglinton proposes that stories featuring machines may reinforce human kinship, binding people together through material connections rather than ideological differences.56 In his philosophy, people need not share a language, political affiliation, or religion in order to appreciate a narrative about a tramcar bustling across town. Whether this tale serves as a comedy,

46  Weng

tragedy, or satire is unimportant. Instead of literary genre, Eglinton values literary effect—a piece’s power to break down, as Ulrich Beck writes of cosmopolitanism, divisions between “internal and external, national and international, us and them.”57 By speaking across boundaries, Eglinton’s cosmomaterial literature strives to leave people in a more attentive and attuned relationship with each other. Eglinton’s cosmopolitan futurism, therefore, aims not to promote the “reign of the machine.” Neither does it reflect Italian Futurists’ ambition to subordinate humanity before machines. Rather, his futurism encourages Irish people to open themselves to the possibility of the material world, including its technological elements, to transform artistic traditions, politics, and the means by which people connect. Eglinton thus sees machines as resources from which to amplify thought about the modern human, rather than Irish, condition. By typifying modern life, technological tales may change the trajectory of Ireland’s creative conventions and political impulses, serving as interlocutors for what he envisions as a more conscientious and ethical tradition of Irish art.58 As Eglinton speculates, these tales may enable Irish people to see beyond their “hatreds and despondencies of the past” and “sober hopes for the future.” Perhaps instead they will come to believe that “the present” moment “belongs” to them and that its material affordances will bolster both the Irish Literary Revival and its affinity with audiences abroad.59 To AE, however, Eglinton’s cosmopolitanism was a threat to Ireland’s national literary movement through its potential to “hastily obliterat[e] distinctions.”60 Eglinton responded to AE’s criticism directly, countering that it is nationalism that disallows distinction. Nationalism requires that “all private differences are sunk,” and Ireland’s endorsement of Davis’s model of the patriotic poet is evidence of this prohibition.61 Contrary to AE’s assessment, Eglinton claims that cosmopolitan literature seeks not to elide differences but to understand them, to explore the range of “questions which divide household and nation against themselves, religious, political, fundamental questions” in the “hope to shed some light.”62 Eglinton’s stance thus recalls Joyce’s famous quip that “in the particular is contained the

John Eglinton  47

universal.”63 It also anticipates Richard Fallis’s belief that “a strong national literature must be both particular and general; it must speak directly out of a particular place to a particular people, but it must also have a significance which goes beyond that place and those people.”64 a technological aesthe tic : in practice

Eglinton’s writings forge a futurism aimed at strengthening the ties of human kinship through technological modernity. In the end, however, Eglinton offers an ambitious philosophy rather than example. He was more a theorist than an artist. We are left with questions, then, when evaluating his ideas: What might a technological tale look like—one that utilizes machinery in a way that resonates beyond its local setting, bearing the cosmomaterial elements that Eglinton deems as fitting for modern Irish literature? Let me consider briefly a subtle but significant example from Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”65 The story occurs at the turn of the twentieth century when Dublin gradually shifted from using gaslight (a relatively new technology) to electric lighting. Because the city’s power stations could not provide electricity for a full twenty-four-hour period, Dubliners often employed both forms of lighting in a single day.66 The locals would have been aware of these changes in technology by sight alone, as gaslight was softer in appearance than electric lighting.67 This season of transition proves significant when analyzing the story’s climax, where Joyce references both lighting technologies. Joyce draws attention to lighting just as the plot of “The Dead” shifts from Gabriel Conroy’s critical perceptions of his aunts’ annual Christmas party to his admiration of his wife, Gretta, and her changed countenance. As Gretta stands in the shadow of the staircase, pausing to listen to Bartell D’Arcy sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” she is reminded of Michael Furey, the lover of her youth, because he used to sing it. At the song’s conclusion, she descends the steps and the gaslight illuminates her form; the “dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit the rich bronze” of her “hair.” As she prepares to leave, she retains the “same attitude” that entranced Gabriel during D’Arcy’s song, and he is stirred by his tender feelings toward her. Later, when the couple

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returns to their hotel, they pass the porter, who apologizes for the failure of the “electric-light” to turn on.68 Although the hotel is wired for electric lighting, there has been a shortage or short circuit—a common occurrence also captured in Ulysses.69 Because of this electrical failure, Gabriel and Gretta rely on the streetlamp outside to illuminate their bedroom. As the light pours into the room, it brings with it an aura of disturbance for Gabriel. While he stands at the window and watches the falling snow, he imagines a memory of Gretta’s—one she only just now divulged about her adolescent years in Galway. In the memory, she too stands at a window in the night, watching Furey wait outside for her in the cold rain. He would die only a week later. Whereas Joyce overtly cues the reader to the hotel’s electrical outage, he never states outright what kind of lighting the streetlamp employs. Dublin’s first electric arc lamp was installed on Prince Street as early as 1880, the same year that Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan invented the electric filament lamp, but the city’s transition to electricity took decades, with Ireland’s full electrification taking nearly a century.70 In “The Dead,” Gabriel and Gretta could have experienced either form of lighting. Joyce’s description of the streetlamp’s “ghostly light,” however, gives it away indirectly.71 It is gaslight. And because it is gaslight, this scene of two people is haunted by a third party, a party closely associated with the gaslight, a party who was already present earlier in the evening as the light haloed Gretta’s hair. Michael Furey has entered these scenes through the medium of the gaslight. Gretta verifies the connection between the gaslight and Furey as she confesses that he was “a boy in the gasworks” of Galway, a producer of this technology from which Ireland was transitioning.72 Joyce’s choice of the word “in,” as Michael Rubenstein contends, not only signifies Furey’s occupation but that he is actually in the gaslight— “everywhere that gaslight is . . . everywhere the story takes place.”73 The gaslight, then, links Furey not just to this scene but places him in every moment of their gaslit evening and gaslit past. Through the technology, his specter has haunted their marriage. Gabriel perceives Furey’s ghostly “shade” in the light of the room even more keenly after Gretta discloses her belief that he died, not merely from exposure to

John Eglinton  49

the elements, but because of his love for her.74 From this revelation, Gabriel experiences a new estrangement from Gretta and everything he has ever believed. Did he ever know her? Has she spent their years together comparing his devotion to Furey’s? Has he ever loved anyone as much as this boy loved Gretta? While Gabriel ponders these questions in the dimly lit room, he begins to feel a new connection with “the dead” and with his own mortal condition. While “conscious” of Furey’s “wayward and flickering existence,” he senses that “the solid world” of the present, too, is “dissolving and dwindling.” He feels “his own identity fading out into a grey impalpable world.”75 The past and the present, the material and immaterial, the old and new collide yet rapidly recede before his eyes. Gabriel’s encounter with Furey through the gaslight also challenges his sentiments about Ireland—the fact that he prefers touring continental Europe and feels “sick of [his] own country, sick of it!” Although he balks at Miss Ivors’s accusation, he is more of a “West Briton” than a devotee of Ireland’s traditions and national ideals.76 He enjoys looking forward instead of backward, abroad rather than at home. And while Joyce never states it explicitly, Gabriel, as a progressive and cosmopolitan, would favor electric lighting over gaslight, the newer technology rather than the older one. While looking into the night, however, Gabriel questions his standards. With all of their advancements and newfangled ways, he senses that the moderns could not rid the present of the weight of the past. Although the gasworks were an entirely modern institution—too new to be considered a “traditional” mode of lighting—they nonetheless represent, like Furey, a “flickering” feature of Ireland’s past, a past Gabriel had chosen to turn away from. In this moment, however, Gabriel reconsiders his relationship to his homeland’s past and present. Which Ireland is he a part of—the old or the new? In the end, he submits to all Irelands, old and new and in between. At the story’s end, still positioned at the window, Gabriel looks westward, toward the region associated with Gretta’s past, Furey, and Galway’s gasworks, and where modern amenities such as electricity were still considered out of reach. Furey’s union with the gaslight accelerates Gabriel’s acceptance of the enduring presence of

50  Weng

this Ireland and its material coalescence with his present. The falling snow, now “general” on the island, freezes and preserves this Ireland, capturing it in time. While Gabriel does not joyfully embrace it, he feels compelled to “journey westward,” to explore it anew.77 By reevaluating his homeland, he is able to recognize Ireland’s variegated character and to surrender to the collage of elements that make up the island. He concedes to the power of this Ireland and its place in his life and marriage. The final image Joyce paints of snow blanketing the island is often read as a metaphor for Ireland as an “imagined national community.” Rubenstein writes that this imagining is only made possible by the gaslight, for snow cannot produce but merely reflect light. He concludes that the gaslight and Furey himself “might be said to be the narrative apparatus” of the story.78 In my argument here, Joyce’s depiction renders this imagined national community more diverse and dynamic than Gabriel formerly perceived it to be. Gabriel’s experience of the “ghostly gaslight” gives insight not just into his psychological state but his recognition of Ireland’s heterogeneous identity. It enables him to reconcile forces that he previously believed to be contradictory—past and present, material and immaterial, old and new, dead and alive, himself and others. He comes to see with new acuity continuums rather than binaries, relationships rather than oppositions. As Gabriel’s perceptions shake, he opens himself to change. Joyce brings Gabriel’s personal transformation into parallel with Ireland’s transformation; he is changing just as the island is processing its own technological changes. He is transitioning just as Ireland is also transitioning from gaslight to electric lighting. Gabriel’s inner revolution allows him to establish a new kinship with Gretta, Furey, and Ireland and to reckon more conscientiously with his own mortal destiny. He recognizes that he can no longer live a divided life but rather one that embraces all parts of himself, all constituents, whether welcome or unwelcome. Gabriel’s revelation amid the gaslight displays Joyce’s creative use of modern lighting technologies to enhance the telling of a local Dublin tale. Although the tale is not a story where a machine itself

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takes center stage, Joyce’s representation of lighting allows his readers to recognize the tensions of living in a period of rapid technological transformation. Through modern lighting, Joyce emphasizes for his generation—in a way it would have understood—pressing concerns of living in an evolving technological age, an age still calculating its ideological and material relationship to the past, present, and future. His portrayal of these “facts of life” also holds the power to resonate with audiences abroad, audiences attuned to their own technological transitions. The story’s casting of lighting technologies thus exemplifies the cosmomaterial elements that Eglinton believed would allow art to speak across national contexts and to represent the modern human experience. Indeed, Eglinton’s philosophies reverberated in Joyce’s writings in a way that he recognized.79 As he avowed, Joyce “discover[ed]  .  .  . a new method in literary art,” becoming Dublin’s “Dante with a difference.” Through Leopold Bloom, Joyce illustrated the human and universal, originating a “jumble of ordinary human consciousness in the city” but also “in any city.”80 In many ways, Joyce became the Irish Futurist that Eglinton so fervently described in his debate with Yeats and AE.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Eglinton sought to define a new philosophy of art, one that would enable the Irish Literary Revival to create and expand communities of different people through literature. He believed that modern technologies themselves could serve as conduits for this ambition—that artistic representations of machines could generate a sympathy between people, no matter their ideological affiliations or national origins. Whereas Italian Futurists would venerate machines as emblems of authoritarian power, Eglinton believed that they could act as compelling interlocutors in a politically divided Ireland and culturally divided world. Through this cosmomaterialist method, Eglinton’s Irish Futurism was a renegade revivalism, opening the literary movement to unconventional ways of conceiving of Irish art, its form and function. Eglinton’s ideas, however, were largely rejected by his peers. They ridiculed his pragmatism and his emphasis on realism. AE would tell

52  Weng

him that the work of the “scientist,” along with the “educator” and “common man,” was incompatible with the “mystic”—his model of the true artist.81 And so Eglinton remained, and still remains, a shadowy figure of the Irish Literary Revival, relegated to the footnotes of the history books. Too modern for his moment, he was a fish out of water, swimming awkwardly through an age that did not quite know how to appreciate him.82 Yet he forecasts the materialist and technological preoccupations of authors and texts now quintessential to Irish modernism: Elizabeth Bowen’s study of social and sexual relations through planes, trains, and automobiles in To the North (1932); Samuel Beckett’s and Flann O’Brien’s fantastical and absurd renderings of men and their bicycles throughout their oeuvres; and Joyce’s merriment with the many technological wonders of his age in Ulysses. What Eglinton could not foresee was that elements of his artistic outlook would come to typify those of Irish modernism, with features of his Futurism making these authors’ works so memorable and so resonant among audiences around the globe today. Although branded a skeptic by his colleagues, Eglinton’s literary vision shows that he was at heart an idealist who believed that Ireland’s “untrodden future” lay in the hands of its diverse range of storytellers. “The true destiny of Ireland,” Eglinton wrote in 1919, “is to be a composite nationality,” where writers discover points of intersection even amid differences.83

3 The Easter Rising as Modern Event Media, Technology, and Terror Luke Gibbons

Accounts of the Easter Rising in 1916 are frequently offset by the comic bathos of looting on Dublin streets, the upstaging of the heroic ideals of the leaders by the tawdry appeal of commodity culture and the harshness of life in the tenements. “Probably never in the world’s history,” wrote an onlooker (not without a little hyperbole), “had there been such a strange combination of pathos and humour, and it will haunt everyone who saw it to their dying day: and if mere passive spectators felt the clash of divergent emotions how much more must these [the leaders], for all their idealism must have appeared to them as crashing down with the first touch of reality.”1 But the “clash of divergent emotions” may also release other energies: those of montage effects, bringing the Rising within the sphere of the modern, and the new medium of cinema. Certainly, some of the looters added a touch that would not have been out of place in Hollywood genres such as the western or slapstick comedies. Ernie O’Malley noted how looted toy shops added to the cinematic mise-en-scène: “Ragged boys wearing old boots, brown and black, tramped up and down with air-rifles on their shoulders or played cowboys and Indians, armed with black pistols supplied with long rows of paper caps.”2 In this spirit, another contemporary witness observed “a youngster go up to the very steps of the Provisional Government House of the New Republic of Ireland [the GPO] and amuse the armed rebels with impersonations of Charlie Chaplin.”3 53

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3.1. Charlie Chaplin impersonators line up in Dublin, Film Fun, January 1916. Private collection. With permission of Ruth Barton.

These sideshows draw attention to an aspect of the Easter Rising often lost in Celtic Revival narratives: its essential modernity and integration into the world of media technologies, transport, mass culture, and urban warfare. As Denis Condon has shown, Chaplin was general all over Dublin in the lead up to the Rising, impersonation competitions already proving crowd-pleasers at the Masterpiece Theatre in Talbot Street and at the Rotunda.4 The major National Museum of Ireland centenary exhibition in Collins Barracks, Dublin, in 2016, Proclaiming a Republic: The 1916 Rising, opened with a slideshow highlighting the screening of Chaplin films at the Bohemian Picture Theatre, Phibsboro, and Chaplin’s fame was such that, as early as 1915, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who committed the National Volunteers to fighting in the Great War, was depicted in a cartoon as a figure of fun in the image of the comedian. The incongruity of Chaplin on the streets or in public life can be seen as a spin-off of modernism, for one of the functions of montage, in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, was to close the gap between image and event. Montage was not only a theoretical or aesthetic principle: it also took shape in the material culture of the city, “a form which, if already visible in the early arcades, in the kaleidoscopic fortuitous juxtaposition of shop signs and window displays, was raised by technology during the course of the century to the level of a conscious principle of construction.”5 Considered in this light, it

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was not only heroic ideals that came up against reality in the mayhem of looting; with the smashing of shop windows, the dream of the commodity also crashed to earth. The Easter Rising is frequently viewed as a throwback to Romantic Ireland and the mythic elements of the Celtic Revival, but in what follows it will be shown that it belongs to a world illuminated by electric light as well as the Celtic Twilight. Looked at through its relation to new media technologies of photography, film, advertising, the wireless, and, not least, mechanized urban warfare, the Easter Rising takes on aspects of modern life more in common with James Joyce’s Ulysses than with a rearguard insular nationalism. Media technologies themselves are culturally inscribed from the outset, shaped by transformations in society as much as acting on them, and it is in this sense that media forms recast many of the structures of experience—republicanism, the heroic, even the coordinates of space and time themselves in film and photography—that took effect in the Rising, helping to constitute it as a distinctively modern event. screen memories

According to Benjamin, “The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film.”6 With the disenchantment of modernity, “aura” passes out of everyday life to be replaced by spectacle, but it is not clear that the two are incompatible, especially in situations where the modern notion of the heroic has lent itself to aspects of the star system. One of the dominant myths of the Rising is the attribution of beliefs in sacrifice solely to auratic Catholic cults of bloodshed, and Christ-like (rather than Chaplin-like) impersonations. If we look at the principles behind the staging of the Rising, it is clear that, notwithstanding spiritual graftings, they are also derived from civic republican concepts of honor, virtue, and upholding the public interest. The Proclamation of the Republic dedicated itself to saving the honor of the nation, but honor, in this sense, is republican virtue, placing the

56  Gibbons

public good before narrow selfish interests, or even one’s own life. Sacrifice is only mentioned in the Proclamation in the context of the common good, and in the run-up to the Rising, the IRB’s newspaper, Irish Freedom, looked to Socrates and Cicero as models of self-sacrifice, in keeping with the tenets of classical republicanism. Socrates is cited on the notion of duty to the Athenian Republic (for which he famously gave up his own life): “Are you not so wise as not to know that one’s country is more honorable, venerable, and sacred and more highly prized . . . [and that one is obliged] to suffer quietly if it bids one suffer, whether to be beaten, or put in bonds? . . . For justice so requires; and one must not give way or retreat or leave one’s post.” Cicero is also quoted to this end: “No man could be called good who would hesitate to die for his country.”7 These were the motives that informed the republicanism of the United Irishmen at the end of the eighteenth century and, above all, Robert Emmet, whose selfless vision owed little to Catholic teaching, messianic or otherwise, and who was almost a ghostly presence in the grounds of Patrick Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, at Rathfarnham. Emmet’s mind “was so imbued” with “the oratory and poetry of Greece and Rome,” according to his biographer R. R. Madden, that he seemed “to have lived in the past”: “The poets of antiquity were his companions, its patriots his models, and its republics his admiration.”8 In the 1840s, Thomas Davis re-created Ireland’s claim to be “A Nation Once Again” in the image of the “ancient freemen” of Greece and Rome: “three hundred men and three men.” At his trial for treason in Dublin in 1848, John Mitchel similarly invoked republican ideals of self-sacrifice: “The Roman, who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant, promised that three hundred would follow his enterprise. Can I not promise for one, for two, for three, aye for hundreds?”9 The point of these classical allusions, as W. B. Stanford notes, was not a display of classical erudition but instead to show a common touch: the assumption was that these are “familiar and emotive emblems and exemplars,” and listeners would be expected to know them.10 That Pearse was conscious of this classical republican legacy is clear from his homage to Davis: “The Romans had a noble word which summed

The Easter Rising as Modern Event   57

up all the moral beauty and civic valour: the word virtus. If English had as noble a word as that it would be the word to apply to the thing which made Thomas Davis so great a man.”11 The Irish public, moreover, did not have to read Socrates or Cicero (though the classics were integral to education), for much of the currency of these ideals derived from the popular literature of the French Revolution. In Eimar O’Duffy’s autobiographical novel The Wasted Island (1919), a key text in understanding the formation of political sensibilities in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, a “history of France came into the hands” of the young protagonist Bernard Lascelles, “and the tale of the French Revolution made him at eleven years of age a red republican.”12 Notwithstanding his loyalist Catholic upbringing, republicanism provides a “creed” and a passion for “the general revolution.” In the young boy’s newly politicized imagination, the ideal “state became a republic of extraordinary virtue in desperate contention with the villain state, now a bigoted upholder of the ancien régime.”13 It was perhaps through the extraordinary fame of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) that the association of the French Revolution with virtue and self-sacrifice took hold in the popular imagination. As the insuperable odds facing the rebels during the Easter Rising become clear in The Wasted Island, one insurgent, Moore, announces, “I’m going to my death so I salute you. Goodbye all,” to which his friend, Hektor, responds, “I thought that kind of character didn’t exist outside novels. . . . Who says Sidney Carton’s improbable now?”14 Dickens and Shakespeare were staples in the Pearse household: Willie Pearse, according to Desmond Ryan, was “a devout student of Dickens, he told me once that nothing delighted him so much in all the volumes of that writer than David Copperfield slapping Uriah Heep in the face.”15 As founding members of the Leinster Stage Society, both Willie and Mary Brigid Pearse staged dramatizations of Dickens’s works, and Willie adapted several of them to celebrate the centenary of the writer’s birth in February 1912.16 Nor were the Pearses strangers to the modern cult of the celebrity: they subscribed to the George Newnes series, Celebrities of the Stage, twelve issues of which remain in the Pearse Museum at St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, Dublin.17

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Sidney Carton’s words on the scaffold in A Tale of Two Cities—“It is a far greater thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”18 —passed into popular culture to such an extent that they exemplified the set piece pilloried by Gustave Flaubert in his encyclopedia of clichés or “Accepted Ideas”: “SCAFFOLD. When mounting it, be sure to utter several eloquent phrases before dying.”19 In Ireland, Carton’s iconic status was given additional currency on account of the highly successful dramatization, The Only Way (1899), cowritten by the Rev. Freeman Wills, son of the historian and philosopher, Rev. James Wills, a close friend of the Wilde family in Castlerea, County Roscommon (one of Oscar’s middle names, Wills, derived from their neighbors). The Only Way opened in Dublin at the Theatre Royal in 1899, showcasing one of the first stars of the modern stage, John Martin-Harvey. As Stephen Watt notes: “Harvey was by 1904 one of Dublin’s favourite actors, especially in his portrayal of Sydney Carton.”20 Among Martin-Harvey’s admirers, we learn in Ulysses, was Gerty McDowell, who uses “matinée idol” in one of the first mentions of the term to evoke his modern aura, but the starstruck Milly and Molly Bloom were also among his avid fans.21 Milly was so carried away by his performance, Molly recalls, she clapped when the curtain came down because he looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man gives up his life for her that way.22

It is striking that it is not just his looks, à la Gerty, that stays with Molly but the heroic gesture of giving up one’s life for another, a combination of romance and political sacrifice in the case of Carton and Lucie Manette that also surrounded the story of Emmet and Sarah Curran. The cult of Martin-Harvey found a ready audience in the Dickens Fellowship of Ireland, founded in 1907, and whose members made a pilgrimage to “the residence of Mr and Mrs Martin-Harvey” in October of that year.23 Martin-Harvey’s appeal embraced high as well as popular culture; he took up invitations to lecture on the art

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3.2. Title page, The Only Way, with frontispiece of matinee idol John MartinHarvey. Private collection. With permission of Luke Gibbons.

of acting at Trinity College (he was involved with Gordon Craig in setting up a School for the Art of Theatre) and also lunched with literati such as Edward Dowden, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, and political radicals such as Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz.24 Yeats was greatly taken by his playing of Hamlet, praising it in terms that would not have been out of place in perceptions of the Easter Rising: “A performance of Hamlet is always to me what High Mass is to a good Catholic. It is my supreme religious event, I see in it a soul jarred & broken away from the life of the world. . . . I feel that the play should seem to one, not so much deep as full of lyrical loftiness & I feel this all the more because I am getting tired of our modern delight in the Abyss.”25 Martin-Harvey’s charisma even extended to the outskirts of the Pale, leading, as Watt notes, “one resident at Maynooth to request that a special train be assigned to leave Dublin at 11.30 P.M. so that playgoers living in outlying suburbs could see

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Harvey when he visited Dublin and still manage to find their way home that night.”26 The reference to Maynooth may not be entirely unrelated to Martin-­Harvey’s reception in Ireland, for while the first part of Dickens’s hero’s name has been traced to the English republican martyr, Algernon Sidney, the link of the surname Carton to another Republican figure, at least where Irish readers and audiences were concerned, has received less comment.27 Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763–1798) was born at Carton House, outside Maynooth, and Fitzgerald’s escapades in France and Ireland—as well as his French love interest, Pamela de Genlis—almost vied with Emmet and Curran in the Irish national imagination. Dickens published material relating to Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the 1798 Rebellion in his periodicals: “The Last Howley of Killowen,” dealing with the execution at the gallows of an innocent man, young Howley, was published in Household Words in 1854, and the later “Old Stories Retold: The Battle of Vinegar Hill,” featured in All the Year Round in 1867.28 Dickens began work on A Tale of Two Cities following his “provincial” reading tour of Ireland and Scotland in 1858, and Ireland was close to his heart in another way: his secret relationship with the young actor Ellen Lawless Ternan, daughter of the Irish actor-manager Thomas Lawless Ternan and actor Frances Jarman, had begun. Lucie Manette’s name in A Tale of Two Cities was drawn from the character played by Ellen in the stage performance of Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, the occasion of her meeting Dickens in 1857, and the physical resemblance of Lucie to herself can hardly have escaped Ellen’s notice when reading proofs of Dickens’s novel while it was being prepared for publication.29 It did not take long for A Tale of Two Cities to find its way onto the cinema screen. Though adapted as early as 1907, the first major film, citing The Only Way in its inter-titles and starring the Irish American actor Maurice Costello, was made for the Vitagraph Company in 1911 and was screened in 1913 at the Camden Theatre in Dublin. On a visit to Long Island, New York, it caught the eye of another Irish admirer, the future director Rex Ingram, who found that the theatrical version was hard to emulate:

The Easter Rising as Modern Event   61 I did not go to the picture with an open mind, for I had seen the stage version, The Only Way, at the Theatre Royal in Dublin with Martin Harvey as the star. It was the first play I had seen and was still my favourite. But after the Vitagraph version got underway I found myself liking Costello in spite of my prejudice.30

Impersonation was the theme of Dickens’s novel, and it is not surprising it had its own doubles in Irish republican fiction, not least of which was Annie P. Smithson’s best-selling The Walk of a Queen (1922), which ends with a prison escape in which a morally compromised IRA Volunteer saves his more heroic twin brother in a last-minute, Carton-like substitution—a stark contrast to the grim ending that awaits the brothers in the much later film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).31 The reception of Dickens suggests that much of his fame derived from popular versions on the stage and screen, as well as abridged versions of his novels. By 1886, up to sixty plays had been staged based on his work. By the same token, over forty plays were written about Emmet, including Dion Boucicault’s melodrama Robert Emmet (1884), not to mention two operas and innumerable novels. It is not surprising, as Kevin Rockett has shown, that the story of Emmet dominated the first Irish political films, featuring as the subject of a 1911 silent film that proclaimed “the pathetic love story of Emmet and Sarah Curran is a page of history that will never be forgotten by their countrymen.”32 Emmet took center stage in the historical film, Ireland, A Nation (1914, 1917, 1922), and, as W. J. McCormack has suggested, Emmet’s story may also be backlit by Dickens’s version of the French Revolution: Suffice it to say  .  .  . that the influence of Charles Dickens can be assumed in the household of James Pearse, and that of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) discerned in the tangled political rhetoric of Patrick, his son. Juxtaposition of “the republic” and “resurrection” gradually converges in the death of Sydney Carton, whose demeanour surely contributes to Pearse’s imagined Robert Emmet.33

McCormack is right to focus on “tangled” rhetoric, and an aesthetic of “juxtaposition,” for republicanism is being mediated through the

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jarring techniques of modern cinema. The heroic in this sense may have less to do with Romantic Ireland than with the aura of the matinée idol, or indeed the comic montage of a Chaplin impersonation in front of the GPO. As Benjamin recognized, new media technologies in their initial phases borrow from existing forms and genres, but they work also to transform this body of content, realigning it in a distinctively modernist direction. Film does not simply represent but permeates reality: “The cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue . . . its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law.”34 It was in fact the narrative techniques of Dickens, according to Sergei Eisenstein, that prepared the ground for the disjunctive methods of narration in early cinema, the disruptions of time and space occasioned by close-ups, cross-cutting, flashbacks, panning, and tracking shots, that early commentators discerned in the films of D. W. Griffith and others. “This is why I dig more and more deeply into the filmindications of Dickens,” Eisenstein writes: So I must be excused, in leafing through Dickens, for having found in him even—a “dissolve.” How else could this passage be defined— the opening of the last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities: “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. . . . Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!”35

It is striking that a “dissolve” is used in A Tale of Two Cities to bring different epochs into contact, for similar juxtapositions between past and present—the French Revolution, the 1798 Rebellion, and 1916—are also found in the staging of the Easter Rising. “Have they a flag?” a character asks, looking at the GPO, in Michael Farrell’s novel Thy Tears Might Cease (1963): “Those colours come from ’98 and the French Revolution. It’s like the Republican tricolour.” “Bloody playboys—doing

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the Robert Emmet!” another responds.36 Farrell’s posthumous novel, along with O’Duffy’s The Wasted Island, one of the few literary depictions of the Rising written by a participant in the Irish revolution, recounts how the succession of past revolts invoked in the Proclamation makes a deep impression on Martin, the main protagonist of the story: “In the name of the dead generations  .  .  . The people of Ireland . . . Six times in the last one hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Again asserting it in arms.”37 As Roisín Higgins notes, “The Easter Rising was itself a commemorative event,” and each commemoration “carries echoes of previous demonstrations and anniversaries so that they can be understood better as palimpsest than replica.”38 For Yeats, famously, the proximity of past and present extended to anti­ quity: “When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, / What stalked through the Post Office?”39 time transfixed

Recasting the Rising through the lens of new media technologies familiar to Dubliners at the turn of the twentieth century is in keeping with its own dynamic interventions in time and space. One of the recurrent features in the background of photographs of the Rising is billboard advertising. Recruitment campaigns for the Great War are prominent, as in a poster on the walls of the Four Courts in one photograph, picked up later in Radio Telefís Éireann’s drama series Insurrection in 1966. A detail in another photograph of a military checkpoint at Mount Street Bridge, the scene of the heaviest fighting during the rebellion, shows another set of posters, including a billboard display with an advertisement for the Coliseum Theatre on Henry Street. In this, we see the photograph’s own intervention in time: not only the frozen moment, but the cancellation of the future. The coming attractions on the poster never took place, for the Rising diverted the course of events in another direction; in a sense, the Rising as originally envisaged did not take place either, but also looked to alternative futures for its realization. In a photograph from the Smith Album, taken of buildings behind the ruined General Post Office on Sackville

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3.3. Military checkpoint, Mount Street Bridge, 1916. Note poster for Coliseum Theatre in background. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Street, it is clear why the future attraction at the Coliseum never materialized: the new theater on Henry Street is reduced to rubble, barely identified by its canopy. Other images show the tangled girders of the shattered auditorium in the theater where Volunteers had holed up to escape the shelling of the GPO. In other images of Lower Sackville Street, a sign on Chancellor’s shop proudly proclaims “Photographers to the King.” Photography, newspapers, the iconic telephone box in the GPO, and, indeed, the seizure of the post office itself, testify to the importance of mass production and new technologies in the Dublin of 1916: one photograph featured the burnt-out shell of the high-end De Dion-Bouton car owned by The O’Rahilly, who joined the Rising at the last moment and was killed on a street close the Coliseum; the burnt-out car is near

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3.4. Ruins of the Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street, 1916. Copyright National Museum of Ireland. Image HE:EW.4451.25.

the telegraph station that, according to Marshall McLuhan, sent the first radio broadcast in history announcing the Rising.40 According to Max Caulfield, life in the center of Dublin came to a standstill during the Rising: “There was no theatre, no cinema. There was no time indeed; for every public clock in the city had stopped—in need of rewinding.”41 The famous image of the stopped clock in the GPO did not need a revolution to arrest time, for the photographic event, in Benjamin’s estimation, also shares the capacity to interrupt the present. As Eduardo Cadava notes, this does not so much step outside time as redirect it: [The photograph] interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, one that spaces time and temporalizes space. A force of arrest, the image translates an aspect of time into something like a certain space, and does so without stopping time, or without

66  Gibbons preventing it from being time . . . [It] opens a space for time itself, dispersing it from its conspicuous present.42

Holding on to the now and then in one frame, the capacity of the photograph to suspend the flow of time opens up the present to unrequited pasts, reconnecting with other narratives whose time has not yet come. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’s imagining of “a very short space of time through very short times of space” finds its political expression in an anticipation of the turmoil of Easter Week: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?”43 These lines refer to an earlier phase of Fenian/IRB violence in the Dynamite War in London (1881–85), and the assassination of Thomas Henry Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish in the Phoenix Park in 1882 by the Invincibles also figures prominently in Ulysses. In a number of photographs of crowds greeting returned prisoners in the aftermath of the Easter Rising at Butt Bridge, a cabman’s shelter is visible in the background, the late-night rendezvous memorialized in the “Eumaeus” chapter as the haunt of the notorious jarvey for the Invincibles, James Fitzharris (“Skin-the-Goat”). It is not surprising that in times of crisis, the camera was considered a threat by the authorities, leading to an official ban on troop photography in the Great War, and on suspicious uses of the camera or photographic displays in Ireland (under the Defence of the Realm Act). Given the portability of the new “Soldier’s Kodak,” as noted by Orla Fitzpatrick, it was not too difficult for soldiers or civilians to evade the ban and to take surreptitiously many of the photos that have now passed into popular circulation.44 What is remarkable is that, notwithstanding the detached precision of the lens, the camera at times seemed to convey the subjective experience of those looking through it, reenacting “expressionist” or modernist forms in a mechanical medium. In an extraordinary picture taken on the Western Front by the sixteen-year-old German soldier Walter Kleinfeldt, a tree is twisted as if pain is emanating from the waste land itself.45 Certain photographs of the Rising also come across as violent exercises

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3.5. Count Plunkett speech, Butt Bridge, with Cabman’s shelter visible in crowd. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

in abstraction, as angular ruins or spatial forms are bent out of all recognition. In Thomas Westropp’s pictures looking down into the GPO from the top of Nelson’s pillar, flattened planes and diagonals out of kilter vie for attention. The power of the image showed that those with something to hide, or who had good reason themselves to hide, were justifiably wary of the camera. The myth that Michael Collins escaped capture because Dublin Castle had no photograph of him has been dispelled, but the story is not entirely without foundation. Several accounts survive of Volunteers meting out rough justice to photographers suspected of working for the state. Patrick Kelly noted how he, along with a number of others, was ordered “to intercept a camera man who had taken photographs of Mick Collins,” but who eluded them: Some time later we carried out a raid on a photographer who had taken pictures of a review by Lord French. [We] waylaid him on

68  Gibbons his way to the Castle at the junction of Cork Hill and Dame St. He struggled to retain his camera but finally relinquished it. We passed it to [Tom] O’Reilly who was on a bicycle in Parliament St. He rode away with it and dumped it in the Liffey.46

In a well-known photograph of prisoners on a landing in Stafford jail after the Rising, the “x” marking Collins in the background is so insistent as to seem part of the original scene: this is a marked man. Collins himself was not averse to the use of the camera, particularly for propaganda purposes. Following the example set by the Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa funeral in 1915, he arranged for the filming of Thomas Ashe’s funeral in 1917, at which he gave the graveside oration. Five years later, at the height of the Civil War, it was the turn of his former friend Harry Boland to die at the hands of the state, except this time Collins was in power: cameras were confiscated at the entrance to Glasnevin cemetery, and the only visual record of the event is the evocative painting by Jack B. Yeats. Photography did not only represent but was part of the struggle. When Tom Kernan in the story “Grace” in Joyce’s Dubliners states he is willing to make his peace with the Catholic Church apart from “the magic lantern business,” he could have been referring to advanced nationalism as well.47 During the Queen Victoria jubilee celebrations in Dublin, Maud Gonne used a magic lantern to project images of recent eviction scenes onto a large screen in Rutland (now Parnell) Square, Dublin.48 To ensure a darkened setting, James Connolly arranged for workers in the corporation to cut electric wires to black out city center electric displays in shop windows and streets celebrating the jubilee. As Catherine Morris has shown, magic-lantern shows of Irish scenery and history were central to Alice Milligan’s state-of-the-art cultural revival activities, the still image finding its charged dramatic equivalent in the “living pictures” of tableaux vivants.49 For all his interest in photography, Pearse was camera-shy for sensitive, personal reasons: a slight cast in his eye, which he concealed by looking away from the camera or cultivating a profile. Ironically, it was this pose—head “worthy of a Roman coin,” in Yeats’s description

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of John O’Leary—that contributed to the nobility and idealism that retrospectively surrounded the image of Pearse.50 Like Cuchulain, the camera seemed to be a member of the staff at St Enda’s, resulting in an enormous visual archive of photographs of sporting teams, pageants, and pictures of individual pupils: in the promotional literature for The Boy Deeds of Cuchulain at St Enda’s, the casting of a pupil, Frank Dowling, as Setanta, is imbued with the look of the modern photogenic face consistent with Pearse’s self-conscious approach to photography. As Elaine Sisson has noted, the promotional literature for the school included photographic postcards publicizing its achievements: images of the boys dressed in the clothes of ancient Ireland—as warriors, saints, and heroes . . . were a visual shorthand to suggest that the current pupils and heroes of ancient Ireland existed within the same narrative . . . How better to isolate a single moment and present it as a visual link between past and present than to produce a fixed image which can also be mass produced? Photographic images produced at St Enda’s of Cúchulainn as a boy illustrate how the photograph is a powerful way to demonstrate the collision of history and temporality.51

As a young man, Pearse followed Milligan’s lead and overcame his natural shyness in public speaking by lecturing with the help of magiclantern slides: among the images in the Pearse family’s collection were slides showing a military display by the French Army in Versailles in 1889 to commemorate the centenary of the first meeting of the Estates-General in Versailles in 1789, and another depicting the iconic Eiffel Tower, which was the centerpiece of the Exposition Universelle, held to mark the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889. future pasts

In the tableau vivant favored by the magic lantern, still and moving image, photography and film, come together. But the charged figure of the tableau vivant has another peculiarity: its moment of transformation lies not in the present but in the future. The exemplary scene

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of  the tableau denotes the point of “peripeteia” in an action, “that pregnant moment in the narrative in which the past can be seen to give way to the future.”52 In Jacques-Louis David’s emblematic Oath of the Horatii (1784), or Henry Fuseli’s Oath of the Rutli (1778–81), the warrior sons are not so much engaging in heroic action as pledging themselves to a future of honor and virtú. The countenance of a profile may suggest, as we have seen, that one eye is focused on higher things, but in John Hassall’s famous poster for The Only Way, two eyes are uplifted to the future, a stance given further popular currency in postcards of Martin-Harvey. That this became a set piece is clear from other dramatizations, such as the dénouement of James W. Harkin’s American version of Dickens’s novel, Sydney Carton: A Tale of Two Cities (1900):

3.6. John Martin-Harvey as Sydney Carton on Scaffold: publicity postcard for The Only Way. Private collection. With permission of Luke Gibbons.

The Easter Rising as Modern Event   71 gua r d. Hello! hello! here’s a saint with upturned eyes, but they are fixed on eternity. What is it, O great and honored saint, that you see so far away? (bows mockingly) c a r t on. I see long ranks of this new oppression—leaders, judges, spies, and all mounting the same steps that we’ll ascend and leading to the guillotine.53

This redemptive vision may be abbreviated to the point of caricature, but it is consistent with Dickens’s view in the original novel that seemingly futile or destructive actions in the present, such as revolutionary violence, may await their vindication in the future. Though hardly a Republican sympathizer, Dickens’s treatment of the French Revolution carries certain pro-Jacobin sentiments, not least in its justification of the fall of the Bastille and revolt against the brutality and corruption of the ancien régime (as in the dissolve, noted above, to “absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves”).54 Dickens drew much of his knowledge of events in Paris from Thomas Carlyle’s monumental history of the revolution. Gareth Stedman Jones points out, however, that Dickens did not share Carlyle’s contempt for the starving populace (“the mob”): “Dickens’s language for the description of crowds and of the violence of the French Revolution was not that of Burke or Carlyle, or later of Hippolyte Taine, but of the radicals of the 1790s, Paine and Wollstonecraft.”55 A Tale of Two Cities can thus be read as a warning to unpopular, autocratic regimes, and Carton’s sentiments on ascending the scaffold would not have been out of place in the Dublin of the Easter Rising: “If the Republic really does good to the poor, and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less” due to revolutionary violence, then it may be possible to envisage “a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come.”56 In naturalistic tableaus or history-painting, the frozen moment is part of a linear narrative unfolding toward the future. With montage, linear time is disrupted, the shock of discontinuity precipitating other

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possible futures.57 It is for this reason, Hayden White maintains, that the dissolution of narrative is itself bound up with revolution or traumatic social upheavals: “This is why it seems to me that the kinds of antinarrative nonstories produced by literary modernism offer the only prospect for adequate representation of the kind of ‘unnatural’ events—including the Holocaust—that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all of history that has come before it.”58 In Mise Éire (1959), the first major documentary film about the 1914–21 period, the director George Morrison, in Steve Coleman’s words, “wove fragmentary archival footage of events surrounding the Easter Rising of 1916 into a national narrative,” as much through the powerful soundtrack of Seán Ó Riada’s music as through editing, and the use of nature imagery. It is notable, however, that the film is composed of fragments: “An admirer of Eisenstein, Morrison collaged together fragmentary newsreel footage to recreate the story of the 1916 Dublin insurrection and the birth of the Irish State.”59 That the fragmentary footage was not due solely to archival loss but was constitutive of events as they took place is suggested by the contemporary film Ireland, a Nation, noted above, made in the turbulent years of the Rising, when national narratives were far from secure. Structured in a reasonably linear fashion at the outset, the film reenacts scenes from Michael Dwyer’s role in the 1798 Rebellion, Emmet’s uprising, and Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation, before the narrative breaks down and is overtaken by events following the 1916 Rising.60 Actuality footage, devoid of narrative coherence, is assembled for the reminder of the film, the ad hoc collage featuring (among other scenes) Éamon De Valera’s visit to the United States, Michael Collins at St Enda’s school issuing Republican war bonds, and the death of the hunger-striker Terence MacSwiney, with his pledge to the future: “Our country will again in the near future regain her place among the nations of the world.”61 It is not that incongruous film techniques were being imposed on reality in this instance: rather, as Benjamin suggests, one of the shocks of modernity is precisely that experience itself is restructured through new visual and narrative forms: “The first stage in this undertaking

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will be to carry over the principle of montage into history.”62 Modern media technologies were not just in the business of reporting the Rising: in their reconfigurations of time and space—past, present, and future; national and international—they were giving the Rising itself a global dimension. “To assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components,” continues Benjamin, is to break “with vulgar historical naturalism”; it is “indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.”63 It is perhaps at such stray moments that Chaplin, like montage, enters into history, even into minor incidents in the Irish War for Independence. Describing a raid on an income-tax office and an RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) barracks in Cork during the War of Independence in 1920, Sean Healy, an IRA captain, recalled: “I remember that my disguise was made up of heavy goggles and a small moustache. When I was about to enter the barracks, a youth remarked to his companion: ‘Charlie Chaplin is going into the barracks.’”64 Nor was Chaplin himself entirely above the fray: when James Larkin was sentenced to five years in Sing-Sing prison in New York for sedition in 1920, one of his visitors was Chaplin, who was so moved by his predicament, as an exiled and imprisoned radical, that he arranged to send a package of gifts to Larkin’s wife and children back in Dublin.65

pa r t t w o

 

Machine Fever

4 Infernal Machines Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce Kathryn Conrad

From 1881 to 1885, the Fenian dynamite campaign terrorized London and several other British cities, including Manchester, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. The dynamite was new, but the campaign was not: it was the most recent strategy in a longer campaign in Great Britain that began in 1867 when the Fenians, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, were discovered planning an armed insurrection against British rule and made violent attempts to rescue their captured leadership. During this period, Northern Irish surgeon and onetime Derry Home Rule candidate Tom Greer composed his novel A Modern Daedalus (1885), a near-future fantasy in which an inventor’s mechanical wings become an aerial weapon with a profound effect on the conflict between England and physical-force Irish nationalists. A Modern Daedalus has been little treated in literary scholarship; when it has, it has been seen primarily either as an Irish nationalist example of the “dynamite novel” genre that emerged from this period or as a footnote to James Joyce, as a possible influence in his naming of Stephen Dedalus.1 In the latter camp, Joyce critic Brandon Kershner sees the novel both as an inspiration for Stephen Dedalus’s metaphorical flight from Ireland and as a fairly uncomplicated endorsement both of scientific discourse and of Irish nationalism, arguing that “flight in A Modern Daedalus serves as a symbol for the awakening spirit. . . . Similarly, ‘science’ is a heavily coded term implying spiritual aspiration, social progressiveness, and 77

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a putatively disinterested openness to revolutionary ideas.” Furthermore, he asserts that “Greer’s book does not face squarely the issues it raises; instead, it embraces Irish revolutionary ideology, wherein the liberation of the country more or less automatically resolves all other conflicts.”2 But this reading, and indeed most of the literary criticism of the novel, takes the plot of the story too simplistically as representative of the novel’s larger project. A Modern Daedalus deserves further examination as a text that emerges out of the context of Victorian debates about the ethics of science and military technology and deliberately engages with the relationship between scientific and technological development and imperial and revolutionary violence. The novel, I argue here, anticipates Peter-Paul Verbeek’s call for a “philosophy of mediation,” an examination of the “moral environment” created by technologies, suggesting the importance of attending to how “[technological] artifacts mediate human experiences and interpretations of reality.”3 In so doing, Greer’s novel illuminates elements of Joyce’s engagement with science and technology, highlighting the latter’s wariness toward as much as his enthusiasm for scientific and technological change. More broadly, A Modern Daedalus sets up Irish modernism’s complex attitude toward technology as emerging not simply from a naïve opposition to Victorian British materialism or resistance to change, but from a subtler recognition of how technologies—including technologies of the word—both mediate human experience and are necessarily embedded in larger systems that cannot simply be ignored or evaded. victorian technologies of war

The fevered pitch of technological advancement in Europe and America in the late 1800s brought a host of ethical questions with it. The Victorian period was a time of accelerated development of technologies of war in particular, as well as technologies that could be put to military use more generally. Trains and telegraphs, for instance, while not specifically military weapons, were employed in the colonial landscape not only to create an infrastructure for industry and commerce but also to facilitate troop movement. The American Civil War saw

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advances in weapons development, soon shared throughout the world, including ironclad ships; Gatling and other machine guns; floodlights, used to illuminate targets; repeating rifles; submarines; and “torpedoes,” or naval mines, also known at the time as “infernal machines,” a term later applied to dynamite bombs more broadly. The end of the century saw advances in long-range artillery and the development of smokeless powder, which was more powerful than black powder and made weapons operators easier to conceal. And, perhaps most notably, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, which he patented in 1867. All of these technologies worked together to make it possible to wage war more quickly, effectively, and at a farther distance from the enemy than ever before. The ethics of these developments were debated both in military contexts and in the mainstream media, in relation to both state and revolutionary action and as part of a larger conversation about the legitimacy of warfare, particularly in Great Britain (including Ireland) and the United States. For instance, as historian Niall Whelehan notes, Civil War veteran Clinton Sears delivered a paper at West Point in 1879 entitled “The Legitimate in Warfare” in which he imagined the uses to which aerial weaponry might be put, asking, “Will we not be sending up balloons to rain upon the enemy from directly overhead every possible device for burning buildings, blowing up his magazines, and destroying his personnel? To fail to use such affairs when practicable would be, I think, a neglect of duty.”4 The justification for such a use of force, as Whelehan suggests, lay in its ability to “speed up warfare,” seen as a benefit to combatants and victims and thus framed as an ethical imperative. That Sears felt the need to justify here the aerial warfare that we now take for granted suggests the public’s discomfort with threatened changes to the space and time of the traditional battlefield and to the humaneness of the wars that would result from the changes new technologies afforded. Militant revolutionaries, including Irish nationalists in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, would nonetheless follow the logic of Sears and others in advocating the use of all available technologies toward advancing their cause—technologies welcomed under the

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banner of “science.” In 1881, an article in the American newspaper Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, organ of the Fenians in the United States, declared, “if weak peoples go to war to wrench back their rights from titanic powers, common sense will suggest that they use such appliances as physical science puts into their hands.”5 Two years later, John Finerty, Illinois congressman and outspoken Fenian, wrote that “in this struggle, this vendetta, which England has now distinctly challenged, science . . . must match itself against strength.  .  .  . In this our battle for vengeance and for liberty, one skilled scientist is worth an army.”6 Although the uses to which such technologies were to be put were politically revolutionary, the justifications emerged from mainstream military discourse. As Whelehan points out, “A look at diverse publications reveals that the Irish World article keyed into larger discourses on science, technology and warfare that fascinated several layers of society. Journalists, army officials, statesmen, novelists and revolutionaries all participated in debates about the consequences that new technologies held for society, and militant Irish nationalists were no different.”7 It was explosive devices, particularly dynamite, as Whelehan and literary critics Barbara Melchiori and Deaglán Ó Donghaile in particular have demonstrated, that seem to have most captured the imagination of the Victorian public.8 Almost immediately after its invention, dynamite appeared in discussions of the ethics of new technologies of warfare and on the doorsteps of political figures, demonstrating that the invention was being used not only in “legitimate” open warfare but also as part of the guerilla tactics of revolutionary groups. Fairly quickly, dynamite was associated with the Irish, and especially with Irish American Fenians.9 The Fenian cause was assisted by the ready availability of instructions, in newspapers and other periodicals, for building dynamite bombs. As Whelehan notes, “Endless articles on technological advances, both fictional and factual, provided reliable copy for a print-media industry that was constantly expanding,” and periodicals such as Scientific American and Prairie Farmer printed instructions on the building and use of such devices.10 Print media not only facilitated the circulation of information about scientific and

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technological advances; it also offered a platform for the Irish nationalist cause. Jeffory Clymer has pointed out that mass media “radically increased the potential for publicity” of terrorists in the late nineteenth century and addressed the spectacle of violence to a national public sphere rather than only a local one.11 The connection between media and dynamite found its expression in popular writing of the period. Melchiori, Ó Donghaile, Sarah McLemore, and Alex Houen have explored the subgenre of “dynamite novels” inspired by the new threat, particularly the Fenian bombing campaign of the 1880s.12 Ó Donghaile argues that such novelists “were responding to Fenianism by integrating its political shocks into their writing”; in his reading, dynamite explosions, modern expressions of a consciously modernizing political philosophy, and the media that reported them eventually inspire the shocking, explosive aesthetic of Modernism.13 These dynamite novels, in his analysis, capitalized on the media exploitation of the dynamite campaigns and other proto“terrorist” events, reaching for an audience shaped not only by the events but also by their sensational media coverage. All of the dynamite novels share a similar disdain for the use of dynamite even as they rely upon its “shock,” as Ó Donghaile rightly notes, for their own appeal. Some—such as, for instance, The Dynamiter, The Dynamite Ship, and A Modern Daedalus—more directly suggest that print media are implicated in the destruction that the infernal machines facilitate. Not only did print media offer the actual tools of the trade, as suggested above; even as they condemned the violence, they offered sensationalist perspectives on the events that inflamed both the revolutionary actors and their opposition. Up to this point, following Ó Donghaile and Clymer, I have conflated “print media,” “mass media,” and “journalism.” The changes in media technologies extend beyond those of newspapers, however: the nineteenth century saw the development and refinement of a number of media technologies, from improvements in printing such as the linotype machine to the development of sound recording equipment, photography, telegraphy, telephony, and radio. And “media” itself is a term worth examining, since it is in the word’s broader sense, as

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a shorthand for technological mediation, that I believe some literary writers saw the connections between the technologies of communication and the technologies of destruction. Media historian Lisa Gitelman defines “media” as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.”14 The distinction, however, between what we now characterize as “media” and other new technologies— such as, for instance, weaponry and transportation—was not so clear at the end of the nineteenth century; the seemingly endless succession of new technologies were all part of that new, shared “mental map” increasingly defined by the relationships among people and their tools. With this in mind, we might consider the possibility that weapons technologies did not just mature alongside or make use of print; they provided an alternative medium of expression, a different form of address, to the same public, and in so doing, shaped the public to which they were addressed and the “mental map” that they shared. The “structures of communication” to which Gitelman refers, in other words, also included technologies that facilitated new relationships between bodies—and, by extension, between nations—and required new social protocols, technologies such as the repeating rifle (Remington, after all, made both guns and typewriters), electric lighting, the train, dynamite, and other innovations that arranged people both in their own “mental maps” but also on literal ones. The revolutionary use of new weapons such as dynamite—the “propaganda of the deed,” to use the language popularized by nineteenth-century anarchists—was a form of address that, just as much as the linotype or the typewriter, communicated meaning. Ó Donghaile gestures toward the notion that dynamite bombs themselves function as a form of media when he writes, in his discussion of Robert and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s The Dynamiter, that “dynamite is not just a high explosive: it is the ‘chosen medium’ of the

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conspirator who uses it to convey a message and, in trying to depoliticize the motivations of Irish bombers, Stevenson suggests that their method is a wickedly artistic one,” one that relies on the “particularly visual quality that appealed to late Victorian news consumers.”15 Ó Donghaile’s quotation marks around “chosen medium” suggest that the “message” to which he refers is a political one and the bomb a way of reinforcing that message. But we might read “medium” more literally and, following Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, consider how the “medium is the message.”16 The “message” sent by the revolutionaries via the medium of dynamite was sent by means of a technology with the physical capacity violently to destroy bodies and structures; it was encased in everyday items such as parcels, portmanteaus, coats, and tool baskets; and it “communicated” destruction, quite literally. It further communicated that destruction for political ends was not limited to the battlefield but might be found on the Underground or on one’s doorstep. In this way, dynamite was a form that heralded an iconoclastic modernism, insofar as dynamite “made it new” by violently defamiliarizing everyday objects and offering instead a kind of sublime ontological instability in its wake. Perhaps just as important, the similarities between the way that weapons technologies and print media functioned highlight the larger systems—such as empire, trade, and finance—in which they were enmeshed. That is, as forms of mediation, weapons and print media cannot be seen separately but rather to use the language of political scientist Caroline Holmqvist discussing contemporary drone technology, as part of a “human-material assemblage of war” that mediates between and intersects with larger networks of human relationship, an assemblage comprised not only of “bodies of flesh and bodies of steel,” as Holmqvist describes it, but also the larger network of materials and techniques that facilitate violence.17 Rather than acknowledging this interconnectedness, however, many literary responses to the use of dynamite resorted to the trope of the “mad bomber,” a subset, I would suggest, of the “mad scientist” trope common to eighteenthand nineteenth-century fiction, and one that links “madness” to individual moral failure.18

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The subtler indictment of the role of science and technology in the perpetuation of political violence, however, comes when writers place the “mad scientist” into a narrative that exposes how science and technology are embedded in larger networks. Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus does so, signaling the end of—and mourning—any notion of “a pure, ‘disinterested’ science, independent of political ideology and even religious doctrine . . . dedicated to the ‘benefit of all mankind.’”19 Science and technology, as the novel suggests, never exist in isolation from politics, economics, and culture. By inventing a technology that taps into Romantic Icarian imagery and changes the literal geography of violent conflict, and by framing that technology less as a means to an idealistic individualism and more as a component in a humanmaterial assemblage of war, Greer makes visible how technologies profoundly shape our ways of knowing and being in the world. infernal machines and printers’ devils

Greer’s popular novel, while well received, seems to have made some English reviewers uncomfortable and inspired one sympathetic Dublin reviewer to remark that “the story is told with much spirit, but we have not much belief in the judiciousness of writing such narratives.”20 Reviewers were concerned, in other words, that popular imaginative texts had as much potential to shape their audiences as journalistic texts did—a kind of recognition, perhaps, of the extent to which print media, including novels, could be complicit in violence. Nonetheless, critics both then and now have failed to recognize the warnings implicit therein. The book’s title echoes the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and the narrative itself echoes a similar warning about the risks involved with scientific and technological development that proceeds in isolation without consideration of the political, economic, or philosophical systems in which it is necessarily embedded—the discursive and systemic connections that facilitate the “human-material assemblage of war” to which Holmqvist refers—or the ethical implications of its use. To begin to situate the politics of the text, we can first look to the book’s preface, which begins by asserting, “Let no reader suppose

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that this book is the work of an enemy of England.”21 While obviously intended to distance Greer from the rebels represented in the novel, the preface also appeals to the political logic of liberal Unionism, not revolutionary ideology: The incidents of this story are purely imaginary; but the ideas and forces with which it deals are real, and may at any moment be brought into active play by the inevitable development of the “resources of civilization.”  .  .  . My earnest prayer is that England may be able calmly to await it, clad in the impenetrable mail of Justice and of Right, and strong in the love and devotion of a free and united people.22

The preface’s “ideas and forces” that threaten a conflagration gesture both toward the politics, policies, and attitudes of the day—those of Great Britain and Ireland as well as the Fenian diaspora in the United States—but also more generally toward scientific and technological discovery. Indeed, the novel was published after Irish emigrant John Phillip Holland, scientist and brother of an American Fenian, had developed a submarine; his research was bankrolled by the Fenians until he parted with them for nonpayment for his “Fenian Ram.”23 In response, the Fenians, in 1883, stole the Fenian Ram and the Holland III prototype, but were unable to operate the submarines. This story alone, on which A Modern Daedalus—whose protagonist’s invention is stolen by his Fenian brothers but is discovered to be unusable because the Fenians cannot operate it—clearly draws, would have been a reminder of how easily scientific and technological inquiry and discovery could be coopted by politics.24 Greer’s preface proposes that the immanent developments in science and technology will redound upon Great Britain to its detriment if it does not consider the implications of its current path when he writes that “such development is certain to take place; it is in rapid progress at this moment. . . . Come it will in some form as little expected, as impossible to control.”25 These words, combined with his reference to the explosive “resources of civilization”—an Irish American Fenian euphemism for dynamite— might at first suggest that the main “development” of which he warns

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would come from physical-force Irish nationalism.26 It is not only specific scientific and technological advances by the Fenians, however, but a narrow, objectifying approach to scientific development and the unknowable results of the technologies that emerge from it that threaten the fabric of British society. In other words, the preface implies that empire does not only create its own enemy through its repression of nationalism or through its discursive construction of the Other, but through its very approach to knowledge-formation. Greer’s novel further implies that revolutionary activity is indebted to and enmeshed with the distancing rhetoric so typical of scientific and technological discourse. Greer reveals these arguments by showing us the development of his narrator, an idealistic but obsessed scientist and inventor who eventually awakens to the destructive consequences of his narrow, if initially idealistic, vision. A Modern Daedalus is narrated by an Ulsterman, Jack O’Halloran, a “bookworm” and recent university graduate who has been obsessed since childhood with the idea of “rivalling the flight of birds.”27 He invents a flying machine after returning to his family’s tenant farm in the rural northwest, adding to his scientific scholarship a practical apprenticeship with a blacksmith, and isolating himself in his labors in order to “solve . . . the problem of aerial flight,” which he does with the invention of mechanical wings.28 Greer frames the isolated rural space of the northwest of Ireland as fertile ground for his protagonist’s intellectual obsession, evoking most immediately the Romantic trope of the salutary effects on the imagination of connection to the land and thus affiliating the narrator with an idealistic and Romantic view of science. But just as important, the narrator’s isolation evokes the trope of the mad scientist-inventor whose work is facilitated by disconnection from others even as his obsession is ostensibly geared to uniting the brotherhood of man by bringing people together quickly across vast distances. In the process of testing his new invention, Jack sees, from his vantage point in the sky, that one of his brothers, who is a nationalist, has shot a local landlord in reprisal for evictions. His brothers and father realize he will not engage in physical-force nationalism,

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committed as he is to his apolitical ideals, so they steal his wings, though they are unable to operate them. Jack flees to Letterkenny and makes a new pair with the help of the patronage of a friend; but when his friends suggest that he use the wings to help the police capture the antilandlord snipers, he moves to England, hoping for a more open and apolitical audience there who will help him to realize his dream. When he arrives, however, he almost starts a stampede; the papers fight for readership with headlines and editorials about this mystery man and his invention, many assuming he is a dynamiter; and he is discussed in Parliament (with a cameo by a fairly sympathetic Parnell, represented by a barely anonymizing P—, who nonetheless uses the event as an opportunity for political maneuvering). Ultimately, he is imprisoned by the chancellor of the exchequer, who offers to buy the wings but, failing that, will be satisfied with imprisoning Jack for life—both out of concern that his wings will be the weapons that tip the balance toward the Irish revolutionaries, but also because he recognizes that Jack’s wings threaten the infrastructural investment capitalists and government have already made in the train system. These events, from the invention of the wings to their seizure by the chancellor, make clear that scientific invention is inevitably embedded in the tangled and messy networks that include empire and commerce—what Jack himself recognizes as a “network of interests” in which he finds himself “inmeshed.”29 Jack refuses the chancellor’s offer, knowing that governmental control of his invention will mean its suppression, and recognizing that its future is at the mercy of British political and economic interests that easily manipulate the emotions of the British public through the print media. Jack’s Romantic goals are set aside in the face of his immediate problem of incarceration, and his loss of innocence and idealism is followed by his escape from captivity, facilitated by another brother, Dick, who has also brought along his first set of wings. After Dick helps Jack escape, they retrieve his other set of wings from where Jack has stored them at a guesthouse, and Jack teaches his brother how to use them. Together they go back to Ireland, where they make more

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wings, train revolutionaries, and wreak bloody havoc on British forces in order to win Irish independence. Although it may seem at first glance as if the novel endorses physical-force Irish nationalism—and, as I have suggested above, it has generally been read in this way—the novel’s concern with the affective impact of science and the technologies that emerge from it suggests another reading. While focused on his invention, Jack is a fairly typical, although likeable, mad scientist with an idée fixe. Unlike many of the mad scientists of dynamite novels, however, Jack’s madness is not written so much as an individual affective disorder as it is a symptom of the distortion of perspective necessarily afforded by the social isolation of scientific endeavor, an isolation that is invisible to him despite the larger systems, including the system of colonial education in Ireland, in which he is embedded. Once he uses his wings, there is a moment of humane affective connection to those he knows have been evicted when he sees the emptied countryside and is overcome by a “most unscientific sorrow and indignation.”30 Soon, however, the technology of the wings allows him to distance himself not only physically but also emotionally from the scene below him, a flattening of his affective response that parallels the cartographic flatness of his vision from above. Eventually, the affective flatness and coldness—“cool” and “cold” being the description Jack uses for himself and the other violent revolutionaries using their technologies, whether wings or rifles—allow him to perpetrate revolutionary counterviolence. Jack’s responses to that violence throughout the novel, however, give the lie to Brandon Kerschner’s claims that Greer “embraces Irish revolutionary ideology” even as the Irish are represented as fully justified in their dissatisfaction with British misrule: Jack dwells too frequently on the horror of the violence he and his compatriots have wrought in the name of revolution—not only with the wings but also the real military technologies used by the rebels—for Kerschner’s reading to ring wholly true. The focus of Greer’s critique is not the cause itself, however, but the effects of supporting that cause with these new technologies. As Luke Gibbons notes, Jack’s responses to

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the rebel bombing of the castle and the destruction it wreaks make clear to him “that the ground rules of war, and notions of a fair fight, courage, etc, have been altered fundamentally, as was later to transpire on a massive scale in the Great War.”31 Indeed, technological changes in weaponry have profound effects on the entire experience of conflict. We find Jack repeatedly “sick with horror” at the “lurid visions” of violence, referring to the rebels’ work in the chapter “Victory” as “the hellish phantasmagoria of a witch’s nightmare,” even as he points out that, at the time, his “intelligence was keen and cool” as he carried out his plans.32 But weapons are not the only technology that Greer subjects to critical scrutiny: the print media are, throughout the novel, implicated in the sickening violence, offering only a parody of public dialogue. The revolutionary ideology promulgated in cheaply available texts and newspapers, which would have been associated with the dynamiters of Greer’s time, gives bloody direction to the justly dissatisfied Irishmen at the start of the novel. The newspapers in London, in turn, shape the British public’s response to the rebels, securing popular support for violent suppression by inserting the wings into their predetermined and predictable narratives. While Jack holds out some hope that the editor of the liberal Echo will print the true story, the pressures of the news cycle disrupt the presentation of the “connected and authentic narrative of what happened.”33 Even though the Echo and its editor are never condemned, the print media are implicitly damned in the chapter “Going to Press,” where the editor explains to Jack that “the devil will call for copy in five minutes, and every five minutes till you have done”—a simple reference to the printer’s apprentice, or “printer’s devil,” but one that takes on a different resonance in the larger context of the novel.34 At this point, Jack has already identified his wings as an “infernal machine” as he imagines how he must look to a policeman, and he has described the crowd action that follows him and his wings through London as “the devil” he has raised.35 In light of these two images, Greer’s evocation of the “devil” of the newspaper’s print room connects print media and weaponry as diabolical. Greer reinforces the diabolical quality of the wings when Jack, just before destroying the

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4.1. Cover, first edition of A Modern Daedalus (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1885). Courtesy of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.

British encampment in the North near the end of the novel, notes wryly that “I remember remarking with a certain feeling of amusement how like huge bats were the figures that flitted round me in the gloom, and remembering that the wings they used were of the form attributed by superstition to devils, rather than to angels.”36 In his alignment of various “devils,” Greer encourages us to see a connection between the print media and his protagonist’s machine,

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revealing the similarity in the moral environment provided by what are otherwise wildly disparate technologies. As the novel comes to a close, Jack rhapsodizes in the present tense about what he hopes to do now that his war duties are over. But it is difficult to see the end of the novel as hopeful, given what has preceded it; it is difficult to read Jack’s Romantic vision of the future—“I see everything, I sympathise with everything, I love everything”37—as sustainable in the face of the hard lessons of his own story, a story he imagines to be a “plain unvarnished tale.”38 His nostalgic yearning for the “peaceful dreams which filled [his mind] in the old quiet days of science and experiment” mourn the loss of an idealized Romantic notion of science and lead the reader full circle to the preface and the discourse of science that the text itself engages and critiques.39 Greer’s text anticipates Paul Virilio’s argument that war is a matter of perception as much as it is a matter of destruction.40 We begin the text encouraged to share the narrator’s Romantic worldview, one that seems to celebrate and indeed never fully abandons the promise of an organic and unified ontology.41 But while the text never fully undermines that ontology, it does at least profoundly shake any epistemological certainty, suggesting that technologies (flying machine, dynamite, sharpshooters’ rifle, print media) are part of larger networks (empire, education, commerce) that all shape our perceptions. Greer stresses how these technologies, and the scientific discourse out of which they emerge, create an assemblage, an infernal machine, that fails to amplify or enhance the human experience, but rather diminishes it. In that, they comprise as much juggernaut as bomb. flying by those ne ts

Echoes of Greer’s novel and its anxieties about how technologies affect the human experience can arguably be found throughout the Irish modernist corpus that follows. W. B. Yeats, for instance, famously wrote that the “man of science has exchanged his soul for a formula,” but his indictment of “science” was aimed at the violent and reductive nature of scientific positivism further filtered through print media: “What lover of Celtic lore has not been filled with a sacred rage when

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he came upon some exquisite story, dear to him from childhood, written out in newspaper English and called science?”42 Later, Yeats writes in “The Tree of Life” that “we should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market-place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole.”43 Where Yeats differs from Greer, perhaps, is that he not only mourns the passing of the notion of a unifying Romantic metaphysics, but assumes that it can somehow be recovered through a return to a robust artistic individualism. In that, Yeats may resemble more the idealistic Jack than the somewhat more cynical Greer. Joyce’s borrowing from Greer, I would argue, is more than simply a shared nod to Icarian mythology, but rather tied to the notion of the network. Greer’s nascent notion of the network or assemblage—a “network of interests, of political hopes and fears and dangers”—is multifaceted: connections are suggested between the discourses and technologies of education; scientific discovery; kinship networks; international revolutionary discourses and technologies, from the Boer War to the American Fenian diaspora to German socialism and Russian nihilism; and capitalist infrastructural investment, particularly in the train system.44 As such, Greer’s networks belie the notion of the network as a wholly emancipatory form. Although Jack dreams of being able to unite people, his is the fantasy of an idealistic and egalitarian network, a notion that fails to consider the real and often competing networks in which he and his invention are embedded and the violence of which they are capable. If Jack, as a modern Daedalus, serves as an inspiration for Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, then the networks in which Jack is embedded provide, in turn, the backdrop for Stephen’s own Icarian and arguably Romantic desire for flight, a desire and strategy Stephen articulates to his friend Davin near the end of Portrait: —When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion.

Infernal Machines  93 I shall try to fly by those nets. . . . I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.45

Stephen’s vision here is both pacifist and artistic. By the time we see Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, however, he has returned to Dublin; and as he walks along the strand in the “Proteus” chapter, he notices the presence “at the land” of “a maze of dark cunning nets.”46 These are, of course, literal fishing nets; but in the context of this chapter, they resonate with his musings on his failure to escape those “nets” mentioned in Portrait through the use of silence, exile, and cunning. “Cunning nets,” however, are not only nets that are made with skill or cleverness. The phrase can also be understood as standing in for networks of knowledge: “cunning” is not just an adjective synonymous with “crafty,” but also a noun that means knowledge. If we think about Stephen’s first comment, that he will “fly by those nets,” we might think he simply means that he plans to avoid them, and that he has, by Ulysses, failed because he has returned from exile and considers himself by that point to be the servant of three masters: Church, the imperial British state, and Ireland—an echo of the disillusioned but naïve Jack at the end of A Modern Daedalus. Stephen does not mention science as one of the “nets” by which he might fly. But the fact that, for instance, Joyce elsewhere describes the “Ithaca” chapter’s discourse as “a mathematico-astronomico-physicomechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen (devil take ’em both),” and notes the “coldness” of “Ithaca” in a letter to Frank Budgen, supports the notion that Joyce shares with Greer a suspicion that scientific discourse itself is as guilty of doing violence to human interaction as any other.47 Jay Jin has argued “that ‘Ithaca’ . . . parodies the scientist, imported from nineteenth century discourses of determinism and British imperialism.”48 Indeed, it seems likely that “Ithaca” in particular, as a mode of questioning that has variously been

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described as scientific, mathematical, legal, and catechetical, brings a particularly Victorian version of science into focus as one of the many discursive nets from which Stephen hopes to escape. That said, Joyce also takes from Greer a sense of the futility of Stephen’s initial plan: to try to escape the nets completely. Those nets are constructed by the technologies that inform them, and many are media technologies—from the gramophone of “Hades” to the mutoscope of “Nausicaa” to the linotype machine of “Aeolus” and “Eumaeus” and indeed to the printing presses that would produce Ulysses itself. As Greer’s novel shows us, these technologies mediate between humans and their environments, melding and shaping both human interaction and the wider world of which they are a part. But Joyce’s own experiments with the very technologies and discourses in which he is embedded suggest he himself intends something different by “fly by those nets.” Instead of escaping, Joyce suggests the artist’s need to fly by means of those nets. In so doing, he suggests ultimately his vision of the role of the modernist artist: to acknowledge, reveal, and use those technologies and networks actively rather than being dragged by them.

5 Machinic Yeats Gregory Castle

drama and machinic desire

In a late unpublished essay, which was to be a “General Introduction to My Work,” W. B. Yeats noted that a poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.”1 Critics tend to emphasize the completeness of the poet, and the “Unity of Being” that Yeats believed was the source of culture.2 I would like to shift the focus to “accident and incoherence”—that is, to the disruption and rearrangement that prepares for completion. Underlying the Unity of Being is the artist’s “shaping joy,” a process of “making and mastering” his materials in which creative desire is freed from the very necessity it requires: It is in the arrangement of events as in the words, and in that touch of extravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the desire of logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary established, and that leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but caught up into the freedom of self delight.3

Throughout his career, Yeats exerted this “shaping joy” in new arrangements—to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s language, new assemblages—of the legends surrounding Cuchulain, hero of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley).4 If by doing so Yeats resembles “some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of time” and who wanders “amid the splendours of ancient courts,” he also resembles the ur-maker Daedalus, architect of labyrinths.5 In his 95

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sequence of plays dedicated to Cuchulain, Yeats seeks not to transmit the legend in a pure and unadulterated form, but to reassemble it into a new kind of completeness, with a “touch of extravagance, of irony, of surprise”—a Daedalian touch, I would argue, that is neither historical nor scholarly but aesthetic. However, the playwright’s creative disruptions of the mechanics of dramatic production are not pure expressions of the artist’s “freedom of self delight”; they have their own concessions to necessity, to the material limits of theater. As Richard Allen Cave argues, the technologies of modernist theater manifest themselves in the conjunction of the aesthetic and the material. In Yeats’s case, dramatic innovations came by way of the avant-garde theater, in which a greater awareness of the mechanical and the machinic arose in part out of necessity (one must have sets, costumes, and so on) and in part out of aesthetic design (one can draw attention to these things, make them an integral part of the world of the work).6 His “wholly new aesthetic of staging,” Cave argues, particularly his experiments in “scenography,” were part of a “subversive anti-English ideology” that rejected conventional theatrical realism and the “decadence of English culture with its fixation on materialism.”7 During the time Yeats wrote and premiered his Cuchulain plays, the technologies of dramatic production had adapted to accommodate new modes of innovation, from symbolism to expressionism. Of particular interest to generations of critics was Yeats’s ability to stage inner life and its struggles, and the way he and collaborators such as Gordon Craig and Robert Gregory used set design, costume, lighting, music, and dance to subvert the expectations for character created by conventional staging. The conjunction of necessity and the artist’s “shaping joy” resulted in a dynamic form of aesthetic ritual made possible by material alterations (of voice, costume, scene design, props, musical instrumentation, and even of the audience) that made the production of the plays a vital part of their meaning. At each phase of the evolving sequence, they become increasingly about their own invention; from the framing device in On Baile’s Strand to the ritual formalism of At the Hawk’s Well, to the ironic self-reflexivity of The

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Death of Cuchulain, Yeats’s sequence offers the legends in a vital contemporary arrangement. Yeats’s aesthetic method in the Cuchulain plays is defined by a modernist sensibility that is antimaterialist and antimechanistic. His attitudes toward positivist science and certain aspects of technology (especially connected to “theater business”8) is reflected in his refusal to tell the ancient story in a way that would facilitate its unadulterated transmission. To some extent, his approach to Revival drama is in line with modernist ideas of performance as Carrie Preston has described them. Focusing on Isadora Duncan, Preston describes the dancer’s employment of “the language of technology as a dialectic to ways of being (the motorized machine rather than the mechanical puppet), and her motor in the soul indicates a reinterpretation of the spirit through images of modern technology.”9 In Yeats’s Revival drama, particularly in the Cuchulain series, we see something like the inverse of what Preston describes—for, rather than embrace the “motorized machine,” as Duncan and the Futurists had done, Yeats reimagines, through a similar “reinterpretation of the spirit,” the “mechanical puppet” as an artifice of infinite potential. “The real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and mechanism,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “but between two states of the machine that are two states of the living as well.”10 In the plays, Cuchulain’s story, and his body, are broken up and reassembled in ways that reflect these two states and confirm Yeats’s belief in a “rending” of the self that leads to a new, not an original, wholeness: “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”11 Yeats’s rendition of the Cuchulain legend reassembles tradition, but this is not the same as recovering or retaining an original unity or the authenticity it is meant to guarantee. From his early work in folklore, through his apprenticeship in the theater, to his mature work as a modernist bard, he found himself increasingly less bound to the idea of cultural authenticity understood as the confirmation, through historical change, of an original truth. This historical possibility is what Walter Benjamin means by transmissibility: “The authenticity of a

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thing [i.e., work of art] is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it.”12 Authenticity of this kind is jeopardized by technological reproduction, which destroys aura in order to liberate the work. Giorgio Agamben, reflecting on Benjamin’s concept of aura, writes about what happens after its demolition: By destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics recuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge. This space is the aesthetic space, but what is transmitted in it is precisely the impossibility of transmission, and its truth is the negation of the truth of its contents.13

I think Agamben is describing what happens when an artist persists in working within a tradition, even when it must be deconstructed and then reassembled; this persistence creates an “alienation value” that supersedes the value transmitted in “a mythical-traditional system,” in which there “is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.” To succeed, as Yeats does in the Cuchulain plays, in acting within the tradition while creating aesthetic and ethical values outside of its transmission is to perform the “specific task of the modern artist,” which is “the destruction of the transmissibility of culture.”14 Revival writing (along with other artistic and cultural pursuits) is so often misunderstood because its detractors believe that it has not earned the authenticity it claims. Part of the confusion derives from a failure to see two forms of authenticity at work: one based on the undiminished aura of the object (an artwork or any other cultural artifact) transmitted by tradition, the other based on the creative potential that comes with the loss of aura—that is, its intransmissibility. Standish O’Grady, one of Yeats’s intellectual mentors, recognized the need, in Irish historiography, for this second form of authenticity. In the introduction to his History of Ireland (1878), which features

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the story of Cuchulain, O’Grady frankly concedes intransmissibility when he speaks of a “loose chaotic mass of bardic story and monkish archive” that required selection and rearrangement before it could be legible to modern readers.15 He believed that “the actual language of the bards” could serve as a source of historical knowledge, despite the general unreliability of the archive. By virtue of “sympathy, imagination [and] creation,” he sought to bring unity to a chaos of reliable fragments: “Upon the realisation of the bards, I have superadded a realisation more intense, working closer to those noble forms, whose outlines are more or less wavering and uncertain in the literature of the bards.”16 Superaddition makes history machinic in the sense that it is entirely the result of selection, arrangement, and style, rather than of a painstaking fidelity to statements found in well-ordered archives that attest to a truthful (that is, causal and mechanistic) version of past events. O’Grady aspired to write an authentic and readable history of Irish heroism, but he was shrewd enough to understand that he required a break in the line of transmission (from ancient oral traditions to modern scholarly accounts of them) in order to reach that goal. The technique of superaddition is a requirement if the historian is to translate and transfer the ideals and “noble forms” of ancient heroism in a manner not just acceptable to a modern reading public but desirable as well.17 Yeats described O’Grady as “the first historian who has written Irish history in a philosophic spirit and as imaginative art.”18 He made this judgment in 1897, when he was seeking a similar approach to collecting and recording folklore. He resisted the idea that authenticity was an unchanging quality, subject to idealist or taxonomic proof; in the preface to his Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, he excoriated those who “tabulated all their tales in forms like grocer’s bills—item the fairy king, item the queen.” He preferred collectors who “caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.”19 The test of authenticity for him, as for O’Grady and other revivalists, was this “pulse of life,” which found expression in a style of writing that conveyed the vitality of contemporary speech. He admired Lady Augusta Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902)

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in part because its style was so closely wedded to the Kiltartan dialect in her part of Galway. The linguistic vitality she brings to the legends transforms them into an “image of aesthetic beauty,” as Agamben says, which compensates for what is lost in transmission. For this reason, perhaps, Yeats could write that the stories she tells in Cuchulain of Muirthemne “are a chief part of Ireland’s gift to the imagination of the world.”20 Gregory’s gift was to convey the vitality of the ancient heroic world in what O’Grady would call a readable style. And while their style and arrangements differ remarkably, their texts are machinic in a similar way: she “has taken the best bits out of many manuscripts,” Yeats writes in his preface, “and sometimes, as in her treatment of Deirdre, “a dozen manuscripts have to give their best before the beads are ready for the necklace.” This alignment of “best bits”—like O’Grady’s arrangement of a chaotic archive—reflects a necessary selection and addition, for she adds “no more indeed than the story-teller must often have added to amend the hesitation of a moment.” In Yeats’s view, Gregory’s arrangement acknowledges the impossibility of smooth transmission—“We do not perhaps exaggerate when we say that no story has come down to us in the form it had when the storyteller told it in the winter evenings”—even as her language, a “fitting dialect,” gives to her version of the Cuchulain story a quality of “living speech,” the “beautiful speech of those who think in Irish,” told “perfectly for the first time.”21 Something of this vital “living speech” finds its way into Yeats’s series of plays, in which Cuchulain’s heroism finds a contemporary voice. Each play focuses on a stage in the hero’s life and offers a form of amendment, a negative recuperation that sustains something vital in the legend—despite its intransmissibility—which O’Grady identified as “the profound and vital humanity with which the whole is instinct.”22 At the same time, the playwright’s reassembly of Cu­chu­ lain’s story, beholden in part to the material supports of theater, introduces elements of “what was most noticed in [the artist’s] day.” Like the imaginative historian, Yeats savors the permanent condition of creative recuperation, in which the aura of tradition is a function of an ongoing dialectic of making and remaking, all in the interests of the artist’s “self delight,” his machinic desire.

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The idea of the machinic that I have been invoking is grounded in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “desiring machine,” which offers us a new understanding of desire and agency in art. A desiring machine is an assemblage—for example, a psychological condition, a human body, an institutional structure, a work of art or an artist’s oeuvre—that produces desire as a reterritorializing flow. It operates according to the logic of superaddition (“and then . . .”) in the furtherance of the subject’s enjoyment; but it also blocks or redirects desire, “interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth).”23 The concept of the desiring machine is meant to resist all forms of “classic mechanism and vitalism,” in which “the whole is considered as a totality derived from the parts, or as an original totality from which the parts emanate, or as a dialectical totalization.”24 Desiring machines generate and contain the flow and intensity of power along lines established in territories (from texts to battlefields): old lines are rooted up (deterritorialized) and new ones laid down (reterritorialized). Artistic and literary texts, the canons they constitute, and the archives that support them are exemplary machines, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, because they model the logic of the assemblage, in which nothing escapes arrangement and production, including totality, which they regard as simply “a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes.”25 Hence the paradoxical flavor of their conclusion: “We believe in totalities that are peripheral.”26 On this view, the literary text is “a montage of desiring machines” that disrupts the unified work whose totality transcends the sum of its parts.27 Deleuze and Guattari exemplify the dynamics of the literary machine by pointing to modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, whose works link desire to machines in dysfunctional and disjunctive ways (as we see in “The Penal Colony” and Krapp’s Last Tape). In their work, and in the work of many others who dismantle and reassemble traditions, mechanism as such is subjected to a principle of rearrangement that challenges the sovereignty of enlightenment notions of the author who alone commands the autonomous work. Author and text, hero and narrative—each is “a bloc of sensation . . . a compound of percepts and

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affects,” and their rearrangement in the work is the artistic expression of machinic desire, which reterritorializes the world in the formation of a new one.28 This way of thinking about the machinic (and of resisting mere mechanism) is rooted in post-Cartesian concepts like “common substance” (from Baruch Spinoza) and “multiplicity” (from Henri Bergson) and was vital for the development of a modernist critique of technological modernity. I believe that in Ireland, during the era of decolonization that also saw the rise of Revival, this development was nurtured by a fertile complicity between mainstream media and Revival institutions, preeminently the theater.29 The Dublin media habitus was a vast machine for the production of other machines; the sheer multiplicity of political, religious, and aesthetic points of view shaped the habitus into “a system of interruptions” in which any given cultural production—for example, Yeats’s rendition of the Cuchulain story— underwent the “hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures” that characterize the machinic assemblage of desire.30 It was a contentious and disunified yet tightly interconnected social field that included theaters and lecture halls, newspapers and publishing houses—in effect, an endlessly reimagined community in which nationalism and Revival flourished and defined themselves, in part by providing a means both to educate the nation and to represent in its name. Yeats’s Cuchulain plays stand out as a model of the fundamentally machinic character of the habitus, not least because of the material technologies that enabled them: stage machinery and sets, costumes, music, and props; the audience, the press, and publications associated with the dramatic movement, transport for tours, and so on. If Revival coheres as a mode of production in the habitus, it does so, as often as not, by seeming to deny the modernity that makes it possible. When the industrialist William Martin Murphy criticized cultural nationalists for taking as its ideal “an antiquated and unamiable provincialism,” it should not come as a surprise if some revivalists took up this provincialism as a tactic to stave off market-driven, commodified versions of Ireland’s indigenous past and its international future.31 When Yeats reimagined the story of Cuchulain, the Iron-Age

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hero of the Red Branch of Ulster, he sought a new pathway through technological modernity: his dramatic productions superadded to the legend the basic mechanics of modern theater as well as avant-garde innovations that sought to undermine them. He worked with translations of Irish originals by O’Grady and Gregory, but in large measure fashioned his own machinic arrangement of the story, an arrangement that accommodated tradition as something added to the work—or, as Marcel Proust put it, speaking of the unity of Honoré de Balzac’s oeuvre, as “some inspired fragment composed separately.”32 cuchul ain on stage

At the end of his life, this is what Yeats remembers of Cuchulain: When all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of.33

Each of the Cuchulain plays presents, in highly stylized form, a particular aspect of the hero’s character “isolated by a deed.” Each recapitulates the narrative dynamic of the whole, but then alters that dynamic by adding to it or subtracting from it, shaping the story around innovations in stage production—the pacing and sequencing of characters (entering, exiting, moving on stage), dialogue and gesture, mask and voice, dance and music, “the form and colour of scenery and costume”—all of which are capable of seemingly infinite variation and transposition in the service of “dominat[ing] memory.”34 As Richard Taylor writes, Yeats’s “ideal of stage design was to suggest an imaginative reality through architectural form and decoration while avoiding a meretricious and vulgar illusionism.”35 In this “imaginative reality,” in the stylized “emblems” the playwright offers to the world, traditional stories find new grounds for recognition. Yeats’s offering was made over the space of thirty-five years: from the first production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) to that of The Death of

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Cuchulain (1939). The sequence powerfully illustrates the idea that a machinic play is a reassembled story, with no necessary connection to any prior version, for “no story has come down to us in the form it had when the storyteller told it in the winter evenings.”36 This necessary break in transmission is reinforced by the fact that two of the Cuchulain plays, At the Hawk’s Well (1917) and The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), also belong to an entirely different sequence, Four Plays for Dancers, that invokes an entirely different ancient tradition. Yeats’s use of avant-garde dance, vocal, and design techniques in Four Plays, many derived from Japanese Noh drama, freed him from the conventions of naturalist performance. Noh drama helped him establish an aesthetic of machinic adjustment and intensity. According to Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, Noh consists of “slow and beautiful postures,” with a “simple melody, hardly more than a chant, accompanied by drums and flutes”; it entails “a delicate adjustment of half a dozen conventions appealing to eye, ear, or mind [and] produces an intensity of feeling such as belongs to no merely realistic drama.” The components of the drama—“costume, motion, verse, and music,” “sculptured masks”— are supposed to unite in order to form “a single clarified expression.”37 In Yeats’s use of them, however, a single unity of expression is supplanted by an arrangement that permits multiple clarifying expressions of the legendary material. As he notes in “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” “with the help of Japanese plays,” which Pound and Fenollosa had “translated . . . and finished,” “I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way—an aristocratic form.”38 Yeats goes to Noh drama for components that have the potential of breaking theater apart and rebuilding it; he goes “for more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action, and perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows of the fourteenth century. A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some commonplace player . . . the fine invention of a sculptor.”39 Formality, separation, mechanical movement, interchangeable masks, translation, “finish”—these new “stageconventions” give the playwright a formal machinic basis for the break with tradition that he contemplates in his aristocratic “inventions.”

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In At the Hawk’s Well, the first in the sequence, Yeats confounds esoteric traditions—ancient Irish legend is reassembled with Japanese Noh signifiers—in a way that transmits neither in an absolute or undiluted way.40 In keeping with the antimimetic style of Noh drama, Yeats positions the young Cuchulain (referred to as Young Man) in a stark setting, stylized and temporally open: “Time—the Irish Heroic Age. The stage is any bare space before a wall against which stands a patterned screen.” One of the musicians carries a “folded black cloth” used to demarcate space, and music is provided by “a drum, a gong and a zither.” Ordinary lighting of the sort “we are most accustomed to in our rooms” contributes to this reterritorialization of theatrical space. “Masked players” moving about “seem stranger when there is no mechanical means of separating them from us.”41 These dramaturgical techniques have the machinic effect of eliminating the temporal and geographical distance between the audience and the legendary story. The play frames a moment when desire arises in a primeval territory, the faerie otherworld where Cuchulain comes upon the Old Man who has waited many years by an enchanted well for “miraculous waters” that offer eternal life. Hovering nearby among the hazels is a hawk-like woman, the Guardian of the Well. Yeats’s play twines different strands of Irish folklore around the motif of the predatory bird, meant to invoke the Morrígan, Irish goddess of fury who takes the form of a black bird (among other things) and who tempts Cuchu­lain in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. By focusing on a scene not found in O’Grady or Gregory, Yeats adds a new element to the tradition, which is thereby rearranged in a way that emphasizes the contradiction in Cuchulain’s heroic desire, for his enjoyment of the otherworld and his desire to drink the “miraculous waters” conflicts with the ideal of the warrior who “blazes out with surpassing splendour, dimming all the lesser lights in that heroic age.”42 Cuchulain’s antagonism toward the Guardian is partly in response to her avatar, “A great grey hawk [that] swept down out of the sky.”43 But it is mostly in response to her possession of what he desires: “Do what you will, I shall not leave this place / Till I have grown immortal like yourself.”44 When he hears a “clash of arms,” he is faced with

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a choice: he can stay and pursue his desire for eternal life or he can abandon his vigil with the Old Man and accept his mortal destiny in battle. The song that ends the play spells out for us what Cuchulain recognizes: Folly alone I cherish, I choose it for my share; Being but a mouthful of air, I am content to perish; I am but a mouthful of sweet air.45

Folly and ephemerality, “a mouthful of sweet air,” signify a world that cannot be escaped by the wild desire for eternity. At the Hawk’s Well, like The Only Jealousy of Emer, uses masks, spare set design, unorthodox, non-Western music, and modern dance to break from theatrical realism. According to Cave, Yeats’s experimentation in these plays reflects “a shifting of emphasis to what previously were the marginalized elements of scenography: lighting, costuming and, most importantly, the arrangement of performer’s bodies within dynamic spatial relations which approaches the art of choreography.”46 If At the Hawk’s Well interrupts and rearranges the elements of the legendary story in ways that reinforce Yeats’s vision of Cuchulain as a warrior susceptible to otherworldly spiritual influences, the two plays that follow in the sequence, The Green Helmet and On Baile’s Strand, use a mix of comic and heroic modes to stage familiar scenes in Cuchu­ lain’s story, to illustrate his heroism, his self-sacrificing commitment to his community, and to prepare the audience for the divided and conquered man Yeats presents in The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Green Helmet is a version of “Bricriu’s Feast,” in which Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue hosts a banquet for Cuchulain and his men, but in Yeats’s play, Bricriu is nowhere in attendance.47 Instead, the play focuses entirely on a small part of the story involving the “Champion’s portion.” Cuchulain’s men encounter the Red Man, a giant who mocked and derided them, a “wide, high man  .  .  . / With half-shut foxy eyes and a great laughing mouth.” Conall confronts him and “whipped off his head at a blow.”48 When the Red Man returns a year

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later seeking his revenge, “poll for poll,” Cuchulain chides him, “Old herring—You whip off heads! Why, then, / Whip off your own, for it seems you can clap it on so.” The giant tells them his wager was “a drinking joke and a gibe” and offers his own helmet as a “gift” “for the best of you all to lift / And wear upon his own head, and choose for yourself the best.”49 The men begin a debate about who might be “the best” of them, until the giant returns and demands “the debt that’s owing.” Cuchulain ultimately agrees to “give him more than he gave, for he comes in here as a guest: / So I will give him my head.”50 The Red Man refuses, however, because Cuchulain “hits [his] fancy.”51 Nonsensical turnabout, head upon head, whipped off and clapped back on—all of this is done with a gleeful but measured panache that comically illustrates machinic dismemberment and disarticulation, modes of interruption and breakdown that undermine the sovereignty of the organic human body.52 The Green Helmet, with its traditional structure and verse form (heroic farce in hexameter couplets), introduces comic conventions that undercut the ritual formalism of At the Hawk’s Well, not least because it was written at a time (1907) when the playwright was deeply involved in the production of folk comedies by J. M. Synge and Augusta Gregory. On Baile’s Strand, also written at this time, depicts events that come late in Cuchulain’s life, when his value as a solitary hero, answerable only to himself, is cast into doubt by Conchubar, his king, and the Young Man, a stranger who comes to challenge him. It also superadds a frame, which introduces comic characters (the Blind Man and the Fool) with no basis in tradition or in O’Grady’s and Gregory’s accounts. The play is formed around a dynastic struggle in which King Conchubar seeks to subordinate his champion, to compel him to give up his reckless life of combat—“It’s time the years put water in my blood / And drowned the wildness of it”—and “be bound into obedience” and live among “settled men.”53 At the same time, the Blind Man and the Fool offer commentary on Cuchulain’s struggle. He needed to be reined in, the Blind Man says: “He ran too wild, and Conchubar is coming to-day to put on oath upon him that will stop his rambling and make him as biddable as a house-dog and keep him always at his hand.”54 If the Blind

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Man possesses some of the comic malevolence of the Red Man (and Bricriu in The Only Jealousy of Emer)—an expression of desire inimical to heroic social values—the Fool seeks to sustain those values by making sense of the action. The Blind Man has been going back and forth between the story of Cuchulain’s oath and the Young Man who has challenged him to combat: “a queen’s son,” he confides to the Fool, “that has his mind set on killing somebody that you and I know.”55 But the Fool is confounded: “You were telling me one story, and now you are telling me another story. How can I get the hang of it at the end if you mix everything at the beginning?”56 The Fool’s frustration with seemingly endless arrangements of the story undermines his faith in any one of them as accurate or truthful. In a machinic interpolation of traditional mise-en-scènes, farce and heroic tragedy engage in stylized interaction, as if one stage jutted into another, and the Blind Man and the Fool are able to see into another’s world without leaving their own.57 What they see, what the audience sees, is a tragedy of misrecognition. After his submission to Conchubar, Cuchulain comes upon a Young Man on the strand. He is a double for the Young Man in At the Hawk’s Well and a stand-in for the adult Cuchulain, in the sense that the latter’s compromise with Conchubar is a form of self-slaying that adumbrates the Young Man’s suicidal challenge. This avatar of Cuchulain’s youth proclaims himself with a statement that, in its indomitable self-possession, uncannily echoes the father he has not yet come to recognize: “I will give no other proof than the hawk gives / That it’s no sparrow.”58 When Cuchu­lain brashly confronts the king’s men, who believe him possessed by the Women of the Sidhe, he does so by wishing for what he already has: “Boy, I would meet with them all in arms, / If I’d a son like you.”59 These events are conveyed with barely suppressed glee by the Blind Man, who tells Cuchulain that he has killed the son of Aoife, warrior woman of Alba, with whom he had once briefly dallied. “It is his son he has slain,” he adds, though Cuchulain appears not to hear. His sense of himself has taken a double blow, and he seems at the conclusion to submit to derangement, to a doubling and displacement that he can only credit to the Sidhe: “’Twas they that did it, the pale

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windy people.”60 In his confusion and rage, he lashes out at himself, at his king, at the very idea of the law of the father, assaulting the sea, beheading wave after wave: “He sees King Conchubar’s crown on every one of them,” says the Blind Man.61 He has finally recognized himself, but at the cost of fatally misrecognizing his son. The derangement into which Cuchulain is thrown by his final actions, at once heroic and despicable, cleaves the self whose wholeness he had struggled to maintain while remaining loyal to his king. The failure to attain the self-possession he recognizes in the son he has slain is dramatized in The Only Jealousy of Emer, where he is subject to a self-shattering into Figure and Ghost, an addition to the legend that illustrates, in a formally excessive way, how the literary machine reterritorializes the ground of heroic action. The Figure of Cuchulain, an image and a changeling, is possessed by Bricriu—not he of the Bitter Tongue who fails to appear in The Green Helmet, but rather “Bricriu of the Sidhe,” a “Maker of discord among gods and men.”62 Cuchulain has become the stake in a perverse wager: if Emer gives up hope for his love, he will return to himself as a singular being, but he will not return to her. Mirroring this exchange is one between the Woman of the Sidhe (Fand in Gregory’s version) and the Ghost of Cuchulain, who is exhausted by life and beaten down by time, but must endure again the temptation of immortality. In a moment of recognition (“I know you now”), the warrior recalls his own earlier desire to be like the hawk woman, Guardian of the Well: A woman danced and a hawk flew, I held out arms and hands; but you, That now seem friendly, fled away, Half woman and half bird of prey.63

The same strange desire again nearly overtakes him: “Time shall seem to stay his course,” the Woman of the Sidhe assures him. “When your mouth and my mouth meet / All my round shall be complete.”64 But just as he is about to kiss her, he cries out for Emer, breaking the spell and returning himself to his own mortality, her name caught in a “mouthful of air.” Once she renounces “Cuchulain’s love forever,” he

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is freed, but we are left with the ambivalent specter of “a statue of solitude” who may “turn from a statue / His too human breast.”65 He has become a marmorean machine, his stillness signaling the possibility of a “turn” toward whomever he desires, whoever would validate the “bitter reward” of his traumatic self-splitting. The turn is completed some twenty years later in The Death of Cuchulain, an addition to the sequence that alters the whole arrangement. The sequence now ends on a note of tragic joy rather than the Gothic resignation that hovers over The Only Jealousy of Emer. In a gesture pointing to his bardic command of the legend, Yeats superadds himself in the person of the Old Man whose opening monologue on the play’s production makes the case for a machinic rendering of Cuchulain’s story. The scene is “A bare stage of any period. A very old man looking like something out of mythology.” In his monologue, the Old Man reflects on the production of the play: Emer must dance, there must be severed heads—I am old, I belong to mythology—severed heads for her to dance before. I had thought to have had those heads carved, but no, if the dancer can dance properly no wood-carving can look as well as a parallelogram of painted wood.66

The Old Man, presumably speaking for Yeats, rejects mimetic fidelity in favor of geometric objects that serve a purely technical function. The setting—“a bare stage of any period”—frees the playwright to use a mélange of styles, each one heightening a dramatic moment. It also prepares the audience for a play that “shifts effortlessly between the modern period and the ancient world of the sagas, contracting the complexities of the tales surrounding the hero’s demise to a few taut, fragmented scenes,” a “structural technique” that Cave links to German Expressionism.67 The play opens with Cuchulain’s mistress, Eithne, imploring him in Emer’s name to return to Muirthemne, for Maeve is on the attack. He does not know whether to believe her, for she may have been bewitched by Maeve’s priests, but she swears loyalty to him and offers herself in sacrifice: “Put me to death,” she exclaims, so that she might defend him “among the shades.” Cuchulain’s proclamation,

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“I make the truth,” settles the matter, by discounting Maeve and her magic. It is his last defiant act, for right then the stage “grows dark for a moment.”68 When the light returns, he is wounded, fastened to a pillar stone. As in On Baile’s Strand, one world (that of life and mortality) juts in upon another (that of spirit and eternity). In the haunting and haunted space where they overlap, Cuchulain is visited by figures from his past who come to find recognition from a man who is no longer recognizable as himself. He is first confronted by Aoife, who asks, “Am I recognised, Cuchulain?” She is free to approach him at this final moment because she “has the right.”69 So does the Blind Man from On Baile’s Strand, who shows up to repeat the trope of beheading that crops up whenever Cuchulain’s desire, his wayward heroic aspiration, is confronted with a limitation imposed by another. In this case, the Blind Man appears as a bumbling assassin: Somebody said that I was in Maeve’s tent, And somebody else, a big man by his voice, That if I brought Cuchulain’s head in a bag I would be given twelve pennies.70

Immediately after this final comic turn, Cuchulain experiences a liberating break from the heroic system in which his name is supposed to be a guarantee of the future. He no longer sees himself as a name to be remembered, he no longer wants the immortality of the Woman of the Sidhe. The “miraculous waters” of eternity, having become a “mouthful of air,” buoy an infant soul: The shape that I shall take when I am dead, My soul’s first shape, a soft feathery shape, . . . is not that a strange shape for the soul Of a great fighting-man?71

By the end of the sequence a “strange shape” is all that is left of the bold Young Man in At the Hawk’s Well who announces to the future, “He comes, Cuchulain, son of Sualtim, comes!”72 The ethical promise of the earlier play is fulfilled in the great warrior’s “creative joy,” his acceptance of death, and the “soft feathery shape” his soul takes, a shape

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that is of a piece with the hawk and the blackbird, those totems of war and loss that have shadowed a short life of “surpassing splendour.”73 The Cuchulain plays provide a new ground of recognizability for the heroic values they exemplify, a provision that Yeats ratifies in the enigmatic late poem “The Statues,” which meditates on the difference between the vitality of the present and the profound stillness of its monuments to the past. The poet imagines “boys and girls, pale from the imagined love / Of solitary beds,” placing “live lips” on the statues that men “with a mallet or a chisel” have made, cold precise things designed to “put down / All Asiatic vague immensities.” But calculation and plumb line do not totally obscure the “many-headed foam at Salamis” or the “live lips” discernible still in “the lineaments of a plummet-measured face.” It is of course significant that Yeats plumbs the nation’s depths in a machinic rearrangement of the Easter Rising, for the last stanza begins with a question that drops the plummet along another plane of vital life: “When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, / What stalked through the post Office?”74 Ireland reimagined never loses its ambiguous relation to legend, a relation immortalized in Oliver Sheppard’s great statue of Cuchulain, mounted in 1937 in the General Post Office on O’Connell Street. Machinic artists, whose “shaping joy” keeps rebuilding this iconic figure, are possessed of amor fati, a Nietzschean faith in the future. This is what I think Yeats means when he writes, in “Lapis Lazuli,” another late poem about plumbing destiny, that “all things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.”75

6 Accelerate Why Elizabeth Bowen Liked Cars Simon During

Today the first ten or so pages of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition remain as arresting as ever. Written just after the launch of the first Russian satellite in 1957, they reflect on a headline heralding that event: “Man will not remain bound to the earth forever.”1 Which is a sign, Arendt thinks, that the satellite launch culminates a collective will which has long motivated “the emancipation and secularization of the modern age.”2 She refers here to the will to escape “imprisonment” by the earthly and the human, and thus to exchange what was given to the species (its humanness, its habitation on this planet) for what the species has itself created (for technology and artifice).3 But, Arendt argues, this will is “murderous” since technology is in train to “enslave” us, all the more so because the language that orders technology—the language of science—is so removed from actual “speech.” The language of science fails to connect to the ways in which lived experiences are shaped and connected in being communicated in natural languages. Thus, crucially, it fails to connect to politics. We have no discursive means to resist our enslavement by technology. Individually, Arendt’s arguments were not especially original. They belonged to what was already by 1957 an established genre—we can call it the “critique of technology” genre, which had been elaborated by, to cite some recent names, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Carl Schmitt, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger. It is, however, worth noting that what marks Arendt out is her insistence on 113

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a will to technology in the service of a will to liberation. Other critics of technology—like Friedrich Georg Jünger in his Der Perfektion der Technik (1946)—contended rather that human beings become pliant or passive to technology and its twin, “organization.”4 Under the impact of technology, human beings lose their will. They allow themselves to be mechanized; they give themselves to the “automaton” in the pursuit of technical perfection. Likewise, Arendt’s sense that language itself was dislocated from everyday life as well as distorted by technologized capitalism was a commonplace. It was shared, for instance, by the period’s most important Anglophone literary critic, F. R. Leavis. Since the 1920s, the sense that language itself was under stress and open to social intervention had, more or less implicitly, motivated much literary writing. And this argument was related to a broader, more abstract one, most famously put forward by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, for which received language had become inadequate to express everyday experience.5 Today these kinds of arguments continue to undermine some social and literary theories.6 But a different understanding both of technology and of the relation between language and experience could be found in 1932 in a little-noticed, somewhat Bloomsburyite novel, To the North (1932), written in Oxford by a then quite obscure young upper-class AngloIrish woman, Elizabeth Bowen. It is a text that bears close examination because it can take us past the “critique of technology” genre. To begin with, Bowen’s novel is not about society or the species in general. It is about a particular social fraction—the postwar metropolitan, young haute bourgeoisie. Likewise, it is not about technology and organization in general, but, as Maud Ellmann has recognized, about transport—trains, airplanes, and cars.7 Especially cars. In the context of the critique of technology genre there was nothing surprising about Bowen’s focus on transport. Marinetti, a pioneer in celebrating technology against the organic, focused on the automobile, while Friedrich Jünger was to contend that street traffic is “where automatism is particularly far advanced” and, more surprisingly, that the accident—including the car accident—can be understood as the human’s

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last trace.8 And To the North is about language in the sense that, as we will see, it develops a particular novelistic discourse appropriate to its revisionist sense of relations between technology and life. Ellmann has given us the most careful reading of the novel, which, however, she takes to belong to the critique of technology genre. She believes that it describes characters whose “key symptom was ‘aboulia,’ or diminuation of the will,” a condition that nineteenth-century medical researchers believed to be caused by trains in particular. More broadly, she proposes a chiasmatic structure for it. On the one side, Bowen’s characters become “automata” and “behave like transport systems” themselves; on the other, technology itself becomes moralized and humanized.9 So, again, if subtly, technology damages the human. Against this, I want to insist that To the North is not to be read as a critique of technology. Rather, it affirms technology by encountering it through a battery of categories, frames, and literary devices which have no truck with either critique or with humanism. If we were to sum up the novel’s perhaps rather surprising project in a phrase, that phrase might be: to love technology is to love the world is to love death. We can begin to make this case by suggesting that To the North is marked by the particular year of its publication—1932. That was a year in which transport was in the news, a matter of some concern to Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin’s coalition government. By the early 1930s, it was clear that road transport had become the primary means of mechanical locomotion in Britain. There were a million cars on the road; over six hundred thousand motor bikes and nearly four hundred thousand trucks; the (private) railway companies were losing profitability; traffic jams and accidents were mounting; license fees and petrol duty were only just offsetting the costs of road building and maintenance, including a sustained effort to lay asphalt on major roads. To respond to this situation, the government established the Salter Committee to examine policy possibilities. In 1933, it reported and recommended, for the first time, speed limits for cars, a planned road system based on interconnected bypasses and motorways, and a new system of transport infrastructure funding. All its main recommendations would be implemented, so that the report can

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be seen to normalize a transport system based on privately owned cars. Bowen’s novel imagines a moral—or, better, spiritual—economy that turns around precisely the car’s normalization.10 In another direction, 1932 was also the year in which, as I would argue, the literary field came fully to recognize itself as a stratified commercial system. It did so mainly through Q. D. Leavis’s important Fiction and the Reading Public, which famously divided fiction into four sectors: highbrow, literary middlebrow, nonliterary middlebrow, and bestsellers. Leavis made the case that a literary ecology dominated by market forces as well as a mass media, owned by what she called “Big Business,” could not provide the conditions for a collective appreciation of literature’s full capacities and value.11 She also argued that the bourgeoisie no longer had a stake in literary or creative appreciation, as shown by the fact that Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse could only attract a tiny readership while a hundred and fifty years earlier, there had been a wide ruling-class audience for texts like Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and Paradise Lost.12 At the same time, Leavis implied that experimental modernism had reached an impasse: it could no longer address the forces that were ravaging received social formations. To make that argument, Erik Partridge’s perceptive review of Leavis’s book referred to the literary failure of Woolf’s The Waves and Joyce’s Work in Progress, while Leavis herself made a similar point about Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.13 The implications of experimental writing’s dead end were explored in detail in another Leavisite project, the journal Scrutiny, which also first appeared in 1932. Here the literary tradition began to receive a new kind of attention, as already sketched out in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), an essay that was not nearly as famous in the early 1930s as it was to become. Eliot had insisted that a contemporary work must “be judged by the standards of the past” and that “its fitting in is a test of its value,” where fitting in is not to be thought of as conforming to the tradition, but, rather, to gesture at Boris Groys’s rather similar argument in our own time, as consciously making a new move within it.14 This meant, in effect, (1) that the literary archive required more finely considered attention than it had

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received since romanticism; (2) that the tradition was a standard but not a constraining limit; and (3) that strong writing was to be mediated by the tradition rather than directed immediately at the new or at the real, as experimental modernisms typically intended. Scrutiny itself belonged to the critique of technology lineage: it aimed to preserve the resources of the English language against capitalism and technology. For it, more than for T. S. Eliot, the tradition was a reserve whose language and forms could remind us of, and so maintain, experientially rich, English lifeways. Scrutiny would soon place a certain line of novels at the center of the culture—Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the early Henry James in particular—against experimental modernism, the middlebrow, and the bestseller. This retrieval of nineteenth-century realism in particular was not, however, a uniquely Leavisite enterprise: it was shared by critics like Lord David Cecil and Humphry House, both of whom Bowen was close to at Oxford, and it resonated widely in a period when Stanley Baldwin was the country’s most popular politician. This is relevant to us because, although Bowen had no relation to Leavisism and was never recognized by Scrutiny, she does belong to this revisionist project, especially in To the North, which itself can be understood as mediating between the automobile’s normalization, literary newness uncovered in relation to the tradition, and an ethicospiritual framework liberating itself from that same tradition but from within it. Nonetheless, in the 1930s, criticism—both academic and journalistic—failed to adequately address some vital contemporary literary developments. In particular, it failed to recognize that alongside the demise of high experimentalism and the classification of the literary field into various “brows” and layers, alongside the turn to tradition as a criterion of judgment, a suite of new fictional modes had emerged that had little or no relation to any of this. Two of these modes are particularly relevant to Bowen. The first, a form of modernist comedy of manners, was inaugurated by Ronald Firbank, and by Norman Douglas in South Wind (1917) and, more especially a little later, by Aldous Huxley in Chrome Yellow (1921), as well as by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies

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(1930). This genre broke decisively with nineteenth-century humanism and naturalism, as did Bowen’s To the North. It—again, like To the North—took no interest in the public, let alone the political, sphere. It deployed a muted literary experimentalism to comic effect in the interests of a complicit mockery of young metropolitan “Society.” In this lineage, however, characters acquire an almost utopian freedom from moral constraints and conventionality, so that, paradoxically, in its lightness, irony, and wit, the genre articulates a powerful image of ethical autonomy that was soon to be constrained by the depression and the consequent politicization of the social field. The second new fictional mode was pretty much the opposite of this. We can call it abject feminist modernism, as developed by Colette and also by (a certain strand within) Katherine Mansfield and that was taken furthest in the period by the then-neglected Jean Rhys in fictions like After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1927), although it seems unlikely that Bowen herself read Rhys at this time. These two lineages are worth mentioning because To the North is written at their intersection. Or, to put this more carefully, it is a novel that triangulates the Leavisite Great Tradition (as it existed in the 1930s after having been spiritualized by Woolf and E. M. Forster in particular); the formal and ethical liberty imagined in the modernist comedy of manners; and an upper-class version of abject feminism. It does so in a form projected from and toward a technologized social order in which motorized transport, in particular, has been normalized. This project upsets the classification of the literary field that Queenie Leavis had inaugurated, which, I would conjecture, helps account for why Bowen—like Waugh and Rhys—long failed to receive the critical attention she deserves. To the North is a novel about two high bourgeois couples living in London.15 After a class-based glance of “half recognition,” Cecilia Summers, a twenty-nine-year-old widow, allows herself to have lunch with a louche thirty-three-year-old barrister, Mark Linkwater (Markie), in the dining car of a train traveling from Rome to London. Cecilia isn’t much interested in Markie—she is wondering whether she ought to marry an established businessman, Julian Tower, but it turns out that

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her younger housemate and ex-sister-in-law (and the novel’s central character), Emmeline Summer, falls in love with Markie. Cecilia and Emmeline live in St John’s Wood, within hearing distance of Abbey Road’s traffic roar. This matters because Cecilia’s social life—she does not work despite being short of money—is constrained by her having to take taxis into town, while Emmeline, who owns a boutique travel agency with a partner, drives her own car. Indeed their suburban life is ordered by their transportation needs. One reason that they cannot quite share the ironized, idealized lives of Evelyn Waugh’s characters is because, very materially, they need cars to get around. Neither Emmeline nor Cecilia has living parents, although a parental role is ineffectually assumed by a distant relation, Lady Waters. An interfering and rather silly woman (with an interest in psychoanalysis and Havelock Ellis), she is reminiscent of Lady Catherine De Burgh in Pride and Prejudice and Maud Lowder in Henry James’s The Wings of a Dove. Like Jane Austen’s inadequate elders, she signifies a loss of coherent and legitimate moral authority, which here exists only in rather Jane-Austeny scenes set at Lady Water’s country house where her capable husband, Sir Robert, Emmeline, and the local vicar enjoy each other’s company, as we will see. But Lady Waters has a chauffeur and a car—a Daimler—and her unexpected visits to Cecilia and Emmeline in St John’s Wood cause consternation. The spontaneity and mobility that her car enables break the distance, both social and spatial, around which relations between people were formed in the traditional realist novel, just as it does in, say, the last scene of Howard’s End (1910). Emmeline lies at the novel’s center. We have to be a little careful here, however, since in To the North “character” is a different device than it was in moral realism or in various versions of high experimental modernism. Bowen’s characters do not quite possess “personalities” or “characters”—concepts indeed about which she often complained in real life: “Take it from one of the best living novelists that people’s personalities are not interesting,” her lover Charles Ritchie reports her telling him in 1941.16 Her characters have minimal, mainly no psychological backstories, although Cecilia may be in mourning for her

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dead husband. They do not have the capacity for moral development or even for self-analysis and recognition. They do not come under narratorial moral judgment, so that it is a category mistake to account for them morally in any conventional way, although a particular mode of goodness (and badness) is available to at least some of them. It is true that, early on, the narrator does declare that neither Markie nor Cecilia are “nice” people, but “nice” here measures likeability as much as morality. All this makes them like comic characters in the HuxleyWaugh mode, which, however, they are not. They are given some fixed traits. Cecilia, for instance, hates being alone and feels a more or less constant desire for mobility (although she does not drive and hates trains). Emmeline is chronically shortsighted, impractical in many (but not all) ways, and beautiful. What Bowen’s characters mainly do is just talk, feel, and act, and they do these things in situations or scenes to which they bring a particular mood, the novel’s plot moving from one mood-bound situation to another. What is remarkable, however, is that even where these situations are presented by an extradiegetical narrative voice, they too have the qualities of experiences, so that social ecology blends with characters’ moods and points of view. The world that the characters inhabit in the situations they find themselves in has its own range of feelings: indeed it is this device that constitutes Bowen’s experimentalism in the novel. And the experiences that are granted both to characters and to their settings have quite a limited and repetitive range of sensory qualities: they mainly exist on gradients between hot and cold, light and dark, stillness and speed. These repetitions pattern the novel, in a way familiar from James and Woolf’s fictions, as well as from Caroline Spurgeon’s literary criticism, all the more so because certain objects— arrows and arches, for instance—appear often in various scenes, either literally or figuratively, thereby stilling narrative drive. So it is not just that Bowen avoids the distinction between narration and description that György Lukács would formulate a few years later, but that character and situation merge, mainly because they are both saturated in feeling but also because of their joint tendency

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to stasis and repetition.17 For this reason too, Bowen’s situations are immersive for characters. It is difficult for them to struggle out from their settings. But not so much in Emmeline’s case. She habitually removes her feelings and consciousness from situations. She is, as Jessica Gildersleeve has shown, often suspended: not just in, but out of, her life.18 That is one way in which she stands apart from other characters. Another is the way in which she drives the plot. Cecilia and Julian finally agree to marry—but their marriage plot is secondary to Emmeline and Markie’s love story, in a meaningful inversion of what the marriage plot meant in the Great Tradition. Emmeline and Markie have an affair, they break up, and after Cecilia’s clumsy attempt to deal with the matter by inviting Markie to dinner at St John’s Road, Emmeline and Markie die in a car accident, as Emmeline is driving Markie back home. The plot ends with Cecilia unsuspectingly waiting for Emmeline to return home. Most of all, however, Emmeline is the novel’s central character not because she can de-immerse herself from her surroundings or because she contests the marriage plot, but because she is good. And she is good in a way that carries philosophical freight. By which I mean to suggest that she is good precisely on the terms that George Moore defined goodness in his Principia Ethica.19 I do not know whether Bowen herself was aware of this, but I do know that when George Moore is said to have been an influence on Bloomsbury it is generally for different reasons: because of his views about the ethical importance of personal relations and imaginative creativity.20 But, still, Emmeline seems be a good person in just the way that Moore thought of good—namely, as a quality that cannot be assigned on the basis of effects or reasons or intentions or causes feelings like pleasure. To assign goodness in those terms was to commit what he famously called the “naturalistic fallacy.”21 For Moore, goodness is “indefinable.” It just is. It is a quality that can only be intuited. And because it is an essential quality rather than a disposition to practice, it lies aslant morality itself, as we usually think of it as a criterion for action.

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This strikes me as exactly how Emmeline is good: she just is good. The novel itself often describes her as an “angel” or as “angelic,” which points both to her benignly unworldly qualities and to the hint of something revealed in her that secular reason—naturalism—does not recognize. This has practical implications for how the novel is to be read. Because her goodness does not take a worlded form; because it is not a matter of morality or utility or reasons or ethical hedonism; because it is not rational, it is to be intuitively recognized by readers by examining the passages that present the situations in which she acts, feels, talks, and so on, particularly carefully. I will offer such a close reading in a moment, but first, two points. One is a clarification; the other exposes the crux of my argument concerning technology. Emmeline is sometimes said not to be good but to be “innocent.”22 Innocence is closely aligned to goodness, of course, and we know that, across her career, Bowen was fascinated by innocence and its loss. But a nonnaturalistic account of goodness dissolves goodness’s connection with innocence, since, there, goodness is not based on experience or its lack. In To the North Bowen makes this clear by creating a merely innocent character—Julian’s schoolgirl niece Pauline—and implicitly defining her against Emmeline. Likewise Emmeline’s goodness is defined against Markie’s character. Some critics, notably Ellmann, view Markie as Satanic, evil. Certainly he seems to count himself a Byronic âme damnée.23 But while Emmeline is good, nobody here is evil, not even Markie. Rather, he is selfish, dissolute, and dishonest in his personal dealings and indeed sometimes seems to enjoy making Emmeline suffer. His is a mundane and sporadically guilt-stricken form of domineering masculinity, not of evil, whatever that may be. (It is worth noting that Moore’s ethics knows no evil.) Indeed it is this that allows Bowen to broach the abject feminist genre most nearly: Markie’s brutality is a sign of how men are given license to dominate women by society at large, and how some women love men who take advantage of that. Emmeline is good not against Markie but in her unaccountability in relation to him. Although she loves him, and for a time at least he loves her too, in her goodness she doesn’t know how to play the submissive gender role he would assign to her. She remains

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out of his control and reach, and in the end, of course, she kills him, but without losing her goodness, as we will also see. Emmeline’s goodness may be indefinable and elusive. Nonetheless it is embedded in the formal structure of her manner of being in the world. This can be defined quite simply. Emmeline is good in that she affirms the world, in that she has no negativity. She does not judge the world or reflect on it or critique it or interfere in it. When she is to be found in situations in which “affirmation” may be too strong a word to define her attitude, she stays neutral, at the very least, in the sense of “the neutral” that Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes have articulated—outside the play of oppositions and typifications.24 She is in this, of course, the very opposite of the nihilist, alienated, restless subject who is often said to characterize modernity. More still to the point, for all her vagueness and impracticality, Emmeline feels at home with modern technology, maybe especially at home with it. She is, so to say, closer to Marinetti in this than to Ruskin. She embraces new gadgets: when Markie sends her a newfangled electric kettle to use in her office for which they have no plug, she has the bright idea of using the light socket instead, and it works. And, as we know, she likes to drive. She is an entrepreneur too: she and her partner run (albeit rather inefficiently) a small business using modern business and marketing techniques that exploits a new and growing niche for (mechanized) leisure travel. All this she—and the text with her—affirms. That Emmeline is the character that the novel turns on, that she is good and that her goodness is expressed in her affirmation of and competence with modern technologies, cars most of all, marks the novel’s decisive break with the critique of technology genre and its presuppositions. What is in question here is not a complaint about the damage that technology is inflicting on human autonomy and moral capacities. Technology is rather a particular arena for the exercise of a goodness which bears no clear relation to the human as such or even to morality, but is a quality commensurate only to itself. What, then, about the fact that Bowen has a stake in the Great Tradition and its moral realism, in which Emmeline’s kind of unworlded

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goodness has little place? And, more still to the point, what about the fact that Emmeline dies in a car crash that, if not exactly a Thelma and Louise type of event, is almost a murder/suicide? Given these questions, I want to test and flesh out my reading of the novel and its devices by paying close attention to two scenes in particular: one that broaches traditional moral realism and its conventions and one in which Emmeline drives to her and Markie’s death. I want to show that these situations are congruent with each other in terms that not only overcome the opposition between technologization and the tradition but disable the critique of technology itself. In the first scene Emmeline, Sir Robert Waters, and the local parish vicar are taking tea together on the lawn of Lady Waters’s country house. Self-consciously, the scene belongs to the tradition that flows from Austen, centered as that tradition is on the Anglican rural parish and the great house. Emmeline, leaning back in her long chair, looked up through the lime. She loved to be with Sir Robert and liked the Vicar. Looking back at the house she saw through the open windows rooms undiscovered in shadow, empty and kind. The departure of Lady Waters with her plaintive uninteresting party had reassured house and garden, in which a native conventional spirit crept out to inhabit the rooms and alleys, shaking away the decades with their mounting petulance like creases out of a full silk shirt. Lilac embowered the arbours where love had once sought seclusion or grief privacy. The whole garden, tilting down to the west, gave to the autumn sunshine its smooth mown lawns and May borders. Here Emmeline, step-child of her uneasy century, thought she would like to live. Here—as though waking in a house over an estuary to a presence, a dazzling reflection: the tide full in—she had woken happy. But already a vague expectation of Monday and Tuesday filled her: looking out from the shade of the lime already she saw the house with its white window-frames like some image of childhood, unaccountably dear but remote.25

The scene may be conventional, but the writing is not: it creates new flows and connections, indeed new experiential possibilities, as if to

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resist language’s depletion. Albeit that it is organized around gradations of light, here objects and settings themselves have experiences. A sentence like “The departure of Lady Waters with her plaintive uninteresting party had reassured the house and garden” supposes that house and garden have feelings and live in human temporality too, and the sentence goes on to present them as possessed by “spirits” that are not so much supernatural as affective. As suggested above, things have moods that belong to the diegesis itself so as to fissure the conventional separation of character from narration, character from setting. At the same time, flashes of a more conventional narrative mode appear. Emmeline is forthrightly and almost conventionally described in the narrative as the “step-child of her uneasy century,” a stepchild one assumes precisely because she is so at home in this less-than-modern place. In her goodness, she affirms this too. Except, of course, that she is not quite there: her own spirit is already partly in the working week to come. It is as if this uneasy century and its enemies just do not matter to her. This passage’s effect is to concede the appeal of a certain old “organic community” but to do so in a form of writing that is foreign to that community in its rupture of the divisions between the extradiegetic and the diegetic, between affect and thing. And it is if Emmeline’s absence both as an agent here and as a personality is to be understood as an expression of her capacity to work as a secret mediator between these different orders: the house and garden are capable of being “reassured” by Lady Waters’s absence because Emmeline is there, even if less than present herself. Her goodness is being revealed not just as a lack of negation but in her spiritualizing, almost pantheist, power, which is, from the analytic point of view, the power of the novel’s language itself. Emmeline—or, rather, Bowen—is renewing the language within the tradition that it, nonetheless, breaks with. The next scene comes near the novel’s end and describes the moment when Emmeline decides to drive herself and Markie to their destruction—or, better, because “decide” is too transitive a verb here, when she enters the condition—the situation—of death-at-speed.

126  During Running dark under their wheels the miles mounted by tens: she felt nothing—Like a shout from the top of bank, like a loud chord struck on the dark, she saw: “to the north” written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow. Something gave way. An immense idea of departure—expresses getting steam up and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert— possessed her spirit, now launched like a long arrow. The traveler solitary with his uncertainties, with apprehensions he cannot communicate, seeing the strands of the known snap like paper ribbons, is sustained and more than himself on a great impetus: the faint pain of parting sets free the heart. Blind with new light she was like somebody suddenly not blind, or, after a miracle, somebody moving perplexed by the absence of pain. Like earth shrinking and sinking, irrelevant, under the rising wings of a plane, love with its unseen plan, its constrictions and urgencies, dropped to a depth below Emmeline, who now looked down unmoved at the shadowy map of her pain. For this levitation, a total loss of her faculties, of every sense of his presence, the car and herself driving were very little to pay. She was lost to her own identity, a confining husk. Calmly, exaltedly rising and balancing in this ignorance she looked at her hands on the wheel, the silver hem of her dress and asked herself who she was: turning his way, with one unmeasured swerve of the wheel, she tried to recall Markie.26

The arrow that Emmeline sees on the travel sign “to the north” refers back to her travel agency, which has on its walls maps with arrows denoting its clients’ routes. Becoming arrow herself, it as if she herself has at last fully joined the spirit of modern travel, where to travel means most of all to fly. Emmeline is in fact driving and flying: she is “elevated,” just as she was during her plane flight with Markie to Paris. She is above herself and the love that caused her pain. But, paradoxically, she is above and outside herself just because she, in her goodness is, at last, so in the situation (i.e., the speeding car). When Markie, terrified, interrupts her, she does not so much as recognize him. She is so much there that she is no longer there, any more than

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she was there on the country lawn at Lady Waters’s country house, a scene that, remarkably, forms a pattern with this, as we are reminded when she looks into Markie’s eyes at the end of the passage in the same terms as she then looked into the house from the garden—into “empty windows.”27 By the journey’s end the car itself has become a passive agent: “Head-on, magnetized up the heart of the fan of approaching brightness, the little car, strung on speed, held unswerving way.”28 Here the magnet sucking the car toward it is the North Pole as, arrestingly, figured in the brightness of the oncoming headlights. But the point is not that Emmeline has lost her will or become merely mechanical, or, more abstractly, that technology is the cause of her death. Rather it is that Emmeline’s goodness—her lack of negativity—is quite indifferent not just to the distinction between, say, modern technologized society and the traditional organic community of the rural parish but to the distinction between life and death itself. That is a final consequence of her being so of the life-world in her goodness and lack of negativity as to be not of it at all. This returns me to my main argument. For Bowen, correctly (as I think), technology does not place the human at risk, nor social cohesion, nor free will. For these categories were always vulnerable, always less than they appear, especially when viewed under the glare of the good, the angelic, which—is it redundant to add?—may not actually exist in the material world and in material history, but can be imagined in literature, even in literature whose roots lie in genres that know no goodness of this kind. Bowen’s accomplishment here is to recognize that goodness in a new mode—Moore’s goodness—cannot just renew the tradition but reconcile it, and its readers, to a technological society to which (as Christianity indeed has longed preached) the difference between life and death is not central.

pa r t t h r e e

 

Sounds Modern

7 Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait Susanne S. Cammack

By the 1920s, the gramophone had hit its commercial stride in Ireland and was a ubiquitous part of daily life for the new postindependence generation. For instance, in the July 24, 1923, edition of the Irish Times, an article on gramophone maintenance makes the assumption that “every home possesses a gramophone of sorts.”1 Among the article’s reminders to keep records stored flat to prevent buckling and to remove dust from both needles and records before playing to avoid damaging the quality of the recording, readers are also directed not to “wind the machine to its full extent at any time” and to “never leave the spring wound” for long periods of time.2 Otherwise, readers are warned, “the spring will be weakened.”3 To contextualize this advice, it is helpful to have a basic level of familiarity with the gramophone’s inner workings. The mainspring of a gramophone motor (based on horological principles) is a ribbon of steel bent into a tight coil (see fig. 7.1). The exterior edge of the coil is fixed to the spring’s outer casing within the gramophone while an arbor at the center of that spring winds the coils even tighter to then propel the motor via a regulated mechanical release. Even in its fully unwound state, the mainspring holds immense compressed energy. But if the gramophone motor is wound up and held in that state, the mainspring experiences extreme perpetual stress, which may result in one of two problematic outcomes. The first is a “tired” mainspring, meaning that the outer coils relax and lose their tensile dynamism. The second is a “fatigue failure” in 131

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7.1. Mainspring mechanism. Illustration by Dionysius Lardner, Common Things Explained (London: Walton and Maberly, 1855), 23.

the mainspring. In this case, the tight inner coil of the spring cracks, resulting in sudden jolts of energy to the gramophone that may arrest the gramophone’s playback, or, in extreme cases, a complete fracture that results in a sudden and violent release of the spring’s coiled potential energy. This release could be so violent that gramophonists were discouraged from trying to fix issues related to the mainspring; the sudden release of all that coiled energy could result in terrible lacerations for the would-be repairer. The Irish Times article’s strict caution about the consequences of an overly strained spring motor is timely in many ways, not only because of the popularity of the gramophone, but also because of its potential to represent a larger cultural phenomenon in Ireland. Only two months prior to the article’s publication, the Civil War had officially ended, concluding what amounted to nearly ten years of continual armed conflict (from the Great War starting in 1914 and the Easter Rising, to the War for Independence and the Civil War). But an official political peace did not automatically resolve the tensions that had propelled those conflicts. In July 1923, the Irish Free State’s borders were still in flux, since the Boundary Commission had yet to be formed to determine the border with Northern Ireland. The Indemnity Act—which restricted the pursuit of legal proceedings against many actions taken by the state during the Civil War—was days from being enacted. And there were still reports coming in from across the country of post-cease-fire violence and executions. As a result, a culture of violence and psychological strain had wound up the larger Irish

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populace for an extended period of time and postwar tensions were still very palpable. In this light, the Irish Times article on avoiding prolonged tension extends beyond the gramophone’s mainspring and into postwar Irish culture, suggesting that protracted tensions of both a culture and a gramophone may share startling and potentially violent consequences. While this may initially appear to be an unlikely or obscure parallel, a little-known play written and produced by Lennox Robinson at the Abbey Theatre draws specific attention to a strained gramophone mainspring in a work meant to be a “portrait of our times” in postindependence Ireland.4 Robinson, manager and producer at the Abbey from 1918 to 1958, was considered by many to have his finger on the pulse of the era during this tumultuous developmental period. Portrait (1925), written and produced less than two years after the Civil War cease-fire, was considered to be a play that “captured something of the attitude of the post-war generation,” represented by the four young people of the work: Peter, his fiancée Maggie, his brother Charlie, and Tom, their new acquaintance.5 Over the course of the play, they discuss the spirit of the age, Tom explains his philosophy of always toting a gun, Maggie breaks her engagement in light of her confessed attraction to Tom, and Peter commits suicide with Tom’s gun. These events are accompanied by Charlie’s inconsistent gramophone, which breaks and rebreaks due to a malfunction with its spring-based motor and blares in stops and starts in order to draw our attention to the very real physical strain on the machine and psychological strain on the characters. On opening night, March 31, 1925, the play was met with great approval. According to a review in the Irish Times, “The author was loudly called for and cheered at the end of the play.”6 But while the first-night audience of Portrait “strongly applauded the rather bizarre ending,” Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham point out that “the critics had many reservations.”7 Andrew E. Malone from Dublin Magazine particularly pointed out that the finale tended toward “the crudest of melodrama.”8 Another reviewer, Susan L. Mitchell from the Irish Statesman, pinpointed the ending as especially poignant, though she

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confessed to particular confusion over the role of the gramophone in the final moments of the play: The extraordinary invention of Maggie’s dancing with the dying man . . . with its horrible accompaniment of the gramophone . . . gives the play the crowning touch of the fantastic. I cannot understand why Maggie, as she leaves the room where the dead man is stretched on the floor, turns on the gramophone.9

Mitchell’s perplexity is perhaps understandable. The finale is admittedly rushed and intensely dramatic (or melodramatic, if one adopts Malone’s perspective). But Robinson’s use of the machine throughout the second act makes its physical and aural presence inescapable. The gramophone marks the beginning and end of the play’s second act. The first words of the act are from Charlie, when he curses the malfunctioning machine: “Damn the thing!”10 And the play ends with the stage directions, “The gramophone declares that to-night we’ll merry, merry be.”11 Furthermore, the gramophone is the reason the main characters gather on this climactic evening, since Maggie comes to hear Charlie’s new records, which are reportedly real “beauts” for dancing.12 These perpetual references to the gramophone, specifically to its faulty mainspring, create space for Robinson to demonstrate the anxiety of the era via the machine. Robinson was clearly fascinated with the gramophone during this period. In his capacity as manager of the Abbey, he facilitated “gramophone recitals” hosted at the theater, like the one held on December 9, 1924, in which recordings of popular singers were played for a full house while a gramophone agent provided clarification on the gramophone’s functions and variations in recordings.13 Robinson also used the gramophone in at least five of his plays in the 1920s and 1930s.14 His particular attention to gramophonic detail in Portrait implies a deep interest in representing the mechanics of the machine in a play with deep psychological impact for its contemporary audience. And when Robinson uses the gramophone to represent a culture under tensile stress, he capitalizes not only on his mechanical knowledge of the machine but actually builds upon previously established

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analogies between the gramophone and the mind, adding nuance to the machine’s capabilities of representing the human psyche. Nearly from its inception, the gramophone was considered to function as an apt analogy for human psychology. Only a few years after the machine’s invention, Jean-Marie Guyau pointed out that the gramophone served as a potential metaphor for the way the brain formed memory, explaining that the process of a needle scratching recorded sound into a wax or metal surface is analogous to “invisible lines . . . incessantly carved into the brain cells” to record memories; playback of the record was the recollection of that memory.15 It was an analogy similarly adopted by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. He described the gramophone as a mechanization of human memory, similarly capable of recalling auditory snippets verbatim.16 Furthermore, he describes the machine as the ideal psychoanalytic listener when he admits that his own capacity to listen to and recall accounts of his hysteria patients is nearly perfect, though “not absolutely—phonographically—exact.”17 Robinson’s work was likely influenced by these latter analogies between the gramophone and psychology, since, according to Andrew Malone, the “theories of Freud [went] into the making” of Portrait.18 And yet Robinson does not rely exclusively on recorded sound to delineate his own iteration of the mechanized psyche, as Guyau and Freud essentially do. Instead, by frequently drawing attention to the wear on the gramophone’s spring, Robinson employs the “theories of Freud” to portray the traumatized mind. After World War I, the impact of violence on the mind gains importance with the relatively new diagnosis of “shell shock.” Freud’s previous work with trauma victims, such as Anna O., whose case is discussed in Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), deeply informed his and others’ psychological study of shock victims. And while Robinson does not overtly venture into discussions of shell shock in Portrait, Peter and Tom both show a keen awareness of previous violence and display different manifestations of residual stress and trauma in this new peace. Tom remains constantly armed and Peter becomes unstable, committing unexpected violence. So, when Robinson adopts the established

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gramophone and human mind parallel, he enhances that metaphor by representing the potential for breakage that a mind endures after years of sustained stress, violence, and trauma. The gramophone’s playback abilities are therefore directly impacted by the stressed mainspring. The music is frequently interrupted, not allowed to flow seamlessly to a natural conclusion at any point during the action of the play. Instead, the mechanism malfunctions, wears out, threatens to fracture. It is essentially performing its own trauma narrative. Also noteworthy in Robinson’s extension of the gramophonic analogy is that he has captured, in Portrait, a tension unique to Ireland after its cease-fire, nearly five years after the rest of Europe’s armistice. Essentially, this is an Irish gramophone, enacting an Irish cultural anxiety.19 Robinson’s characters begin the play by discussing the new spirit of the age, illustrating the unresolved tensions left in the wake of the cease-fire. The Irish Free State was still in early stages of establishing its identity and, in many ways, its government was still seen as provisional, essentially a placeholder until the underlying issues that brought on the Civil War were more substantially resolved. Bill Kissane describes this early period as one in which a “common national identity existed but intense competition over its ethos and telos continued.”20 And because of this perpetual competition—a debate exemplified by Portrait’s discussion of Ireland’s new “iron age—or it is the stone age?”—the tension of the previous war-fraught era was never fully dismantled.21 Peter and Tom function as particularly apt manifestations of these strains, with Tom serving as the Fortinbras to Peter’s Hamlet. Peter even makes several allusions to Hamlet, including a direct quotation of Hamlet’s assessment that “something is rotten in the state of—.”22 The latter assertion, with its omission of the state’s name suggests Peter’s discontent with a Free State that is not really at ease with itself in its newfound peace. Tom further exemplifies this discomfort during peace time, first by report, then in person. Before Tom even appears on stage, we are told what to expect. “Tom Hughes. Now there’s a man!” says Maggie’s sister. “[He is a] rmed, literally armed, always.”23 Furthermore, we are meant to understand that this accoutrement is still appropriate, since “goodness

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knows you’d need to be armed now-a-days. [Tom] got into the habit when he was fighting, [and now] says he wouldn’t feel dressed now without his automatic.”24 When he appears in the second act, even his costume reflects his continued war mentality. He is rigged out for a fancy-dress party with his loaded gun and attired in “genuine cowboy’s kit, belonging to a pal of mine in the West [who was] killed in a saloon shoot-up.”25 He even offers to “show [Peter] the hole in the shirt the bullet made.”26 Furthermore, Tom encourages his reputation for being perpetually armed, saying, “It’s a jolly good reputation to have these times.”27 The preceding years of violence makes Tom’s habit of wearing a gun seem natural enough, though the belief that “you’d need to be armed now-a-days” and the need for such a reputation in “these times” undercuts the assumed stability of an Ireland at peace. Tom’s general reputation, it would seem, hardly needs “bolstering up” either, according to Charlie: “[Not] after all you’ve done.”28 Following Charlie’s oblique reference to fighting in the wars with an overt declaration of his own violent involvement, Tom asks if he is referring to “all the poor beggars I’ve done in?” and then shrugs off the suggestion that he is still haunted by that violence.29 Though there is enough braggadocio in Tom’s character to suspect his feats and involvement in past armed conflicts are not exactly as people believe, he does not hesitate to embrace the fighter persona; he tells Peter that he “always fight[s] to win,” and that “I’m on the side of the gun-men every time.”30 Robinson’s use of the term “gun-men” in 1925 would have had strong contextual links to the previous violence and trauma of wartime, specifically for Abbey patrons. Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman, set during the War for Independence, was already a popular play, first performed (and produced by Robinson) in 1923. Furthermore, the November 1925 performances of Portrait were paired with The Shadow of a Gunman—both plays on the same ticket—making this instance of cultural allusion even more overt. This reference to the “gun-men” also adds credence to the possibility that Tom might be embellishing some of his involvement in the wars, or at the very least encouraging his reputation as an armed man, since, in O’Casey’s

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play, Donal Davoren allows individuals in his tenement to erroneously believe that he is an IRA gunman on the run. Tom’s wartime mentality, swearing ongoing fealty to the gunmen (and the gun) during official peace, enacts the spirit of the postwar age, described in the play as an “iron age” and defined by “action, strength, brute force.”31 But Peter despises what the culture forged in this “iron age” is shaping into. He hates the idea of having to continue to struggle and fight in this new country, not just on the larger political scale, but even in smaller daily occurrences. He reveals to Maggie his hesitation to struggle against his fellow creatures in any aspect of his life: “It’s hateful, it’s horrible.  .  .  . This pushing past, this shoving, hustling.”32 He sees this “pushing” in several aspects of his life. As a youth, he boxed, but constantly “let [Charlie] off easy” to avoid beating his brother and creating a rivalry.33 At school, examinations meant “having to beat someone or else be beaten.”34 At the office it’s “straining” and “pushing” for prominence, promotion and pay.35 But, as Peter tells Maggie, “I’m not much of a fighter . . . I won’t push . . . I can’t. I—I almost physically can’t.”36 It is therefore characteristic of Peter that, after Maggie asks him to “keep me in spite of myself,” he can only admit, “I shall never try to do that.”37 And where Tom’s “gunman” allusion evokes O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman, Peter’s psychological turmoil bears a small resemblance to Johnny Boyle’s in Juno and the Paycock (1924). Though not physically maimed like Johnny, Peter demonstrates a similar psychological wearing-­down to O’Casey’s character. Perhaps most tellingly, Johnny and Peter must both confront intrusive gramophones as part of their internal struggles. Johnny finds the gramophone distressing for its ability to remind him of the recently dead. The revival of past-recorded voices creates a ghost-like allusion in the play and the gramophone’s song is literally interrupted by the funeral procession of the fallen IRA soldier Tancred.38 Peter, on the other hand, sees the gramophone as part of the “psychological moment” of the play’s climactic act, essential to articulating his state of mind.39 When the spring motor’s malfunctions intrude into the action of the play, they create a space for Peter to voice and demonstrate his deep-rooted angst.

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Whereas O’Casey’s works famously depict the gun and the gramophone as having an impact on events during armed conflict, Robinson quietly embeds both these images in different iterations in his postconflict play. Both the gun and the gramophone are still very relevant and revealing of the Irish psyche. While the Free State struggles to find an identity that does not rely implicitly on the gun or the gunmen, the young generation of Robinson’s play seems to find the gramophone a suitably harmless substitute. But guns and gramophones both largely function on spring-based principles. The gun’s potential for violence is overt and purposeful, whereas the gramophone’s is incidental, but the coiled tension in the springs enable both machines’ actions. And in an Irish context, the parallel between the gramophone and the gun is closer still. Frank O’Connor observed firsthand the post–ceasefire tensions manifest via gramophone in Sligo. Two neighbors in the town carried on the Civil War after the cease-fire, playing “A Soldier’s Song” and “God Save the King” at one another on their gramophones with vitriolic fervor. O’Connor described it as “merely a matter of gramophones instead of machine-guns.”40 In Portrait, Robinson picks up on these telling similarities as the gun and the gramophone fight for supremacy in the final act. The play comes to its climactic gramophonic scene after Maggie breaks off her engagement to Peter because she has fallen in love with Tom. Tom then pushes into the room with Charlie, who winds up the gramophone to play “Come, Landlord, Fill the Flowing Bowl,” a traditional song that vows that “tonight we’ll merry merry be,” drinking copiously “for tomorrow we’ll be sober.” The song also hints at the underlying tensions of the play, since it suggests a delay of current pressing issues, choosing to drink now and address life’s problems another day. It is a song of waiting, of holding out, of delaying the resolution of a greater conflict. As the song plays, Maggie asks Peter to dance. Soon, however, Tom cuts in, taking Maggie away from Peter. Suddenly, the gramophone stops. Charlie again curses at the gramophone, then explains that “there’s something wrong with the winding spring.”41 This is the second intrusive “winding spring” fault, indicating a fatigue fracture and forewarning those who are familiar with the

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mechanism of its spring’s impending fatigue failure. And yet Charlie seems oblivious. He immediately winds the machine up again, but doesn’t set it going, neglecting the advice of the Irish Times article. The already strained spring is now wound to its limits and held in tension. Something must give. And while the gramophone has already alerted us to the stressed tautness and its potential for an abrupt rupture, it is not the gramophone but Peter who sees that potential through. Once the gramophone is wound, Peter announces the terminated engagement as well as the news that, though he has earned a promotion at work that would have financially enabled his marriage to Maggie, he might now decline it. Tom describes this last bit of news as “against all commonsense” while Maggie calls Peter a coward.42 And yet the more Tom and Maggie goad him, the more Peter resists: You can’t sting me into fighting for you [Maggie]. You can take her, Mr. Hughes: . . . she’s yours for the asking. That won’t please you because you like to fight for everything; but I give her to you without a struggle. You needn’t have tried to terrify me tonight by wearing that violent dress; I’m cowed. You needn’t have stuck your gun in your belt. (He darts at him and snatches it from the belt. He holds it aloft like a crucifix.) The symbol of your faith—and Maggie’s! Nearer my God, to Thee!43

The use of the gun as a substitute crucifix is a jarring condemnation of the gunmen and the die-hard mentality that drove much of the violence in Ireland’s recent history. And when Tom grows alarmed, warning Peter that the gun is loaded, Peter responds: Loaded? I should hope so. Of what use is an impotent God? Even I, now that I have it in my hand, feel its terrific power. I—the meek one . . . of course, that’s it! Do you remember, Maggie, my saying that all the meek shall inherit the earth, and wondering how the devil they could if they were meek? Why, of course, it’s true, it’s all they can inherit—six feet of it—like this. (He shoots himself.)44

Once Peter shoots himself, it is as if an excessive pressure on the gramophone spring has been removed and it functions perfectly while Tom, Charlie, and Maggie perform a macabre dance as Peter expires.

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Tom, the gunman, takes charge of the gramophone in what is perhaps Robinson’s most revealing use of the machine. In the confusion after the shot, Tom directs the others: “It may be nothing—I can’t make it out—wait till we know.”45 To hide Peter from his mother, whom they hear coming to the room in reaction to the sound of the gunshot, Tom runs to the prewound gramophone and sets it playing; “Dance, damn you,” he says to the others, seizing Charlie and dancing while Maggie supports the still upright Peter.46 In this moment, the gramophone’s mainspring functions perfectly, blaring its jolly recording as accompaniment to Peter’s death dance. We do not know for sure that Peter is actually dead before this dance begins, suggesting that the mainspring is gradually uncoiling its tension while Peter may also be gradually expiring. When Peter’s mother leaves, Tom turns the gramophone off, he and Charlie examine Peter’s body, and after a time during which they “mak[e] little exclamations, giving directions to each other,” Tom declares, “He’s done for. . . . I’ve seen it too often not to know.”47 Tom’s expertise with guns and violence make his interactions with the gramophone and Peter’s body all the more meaningful. In the original manuscript of the play, it is Charlie, not Tom, who turns on the gramophone to disguise Peter’s death scene.48 Robinson’s revision underscores the author’s evolving understanding of the gramophone’s specifically Irish capabilities to carry psychological meaning. He had used a gramophone in one of his plays three years earlier. In The Round Table (1922), a character plays Scriabine’s music on the gramophone to accompany his calisthenic exercises.49 There is no overt connection to violence in that depiction of the machine. However, only a year prior to the premiere of Portrait, Robinson produced O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, in which the previously mentioned gramophone enters the play having “nearly kilt” Juno and plays during Tancred’s funeral procession.50 In all probability, the same physical gramophone was used in all three plays: The Round Table, Juno and the Paycock, and Portrait. And perhaps because of this very tangible Abbeybased connection, Robinson’s play underwent the shift emphasizing Tom’s handling of the gramophone. Robinson highlights the tensions

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between Tom and Peter through the physical interactions with the psychological symbol. Tom releases the literal gramophone’s tension at the same time that Peter releases the metaphorical tension by using the gun to end his life. The final moments of the play depict one last interaction with the gramophone, the interaction that sparked Mitchell’s confusion about the play in her review. Maggie, left alone with Peter’s body, decides to play the gramophone one last time and run from the room: [She] goes near Peter and looks very steadily at him. . . . There is complete silence. . . . Suddenly, violently). No, no, no, it’s impossible. (She puts her fingers to her ears.  .  .  . The silence is still unbroken.) Say something, Peter! Say something, someone! (She rushes to the gramophone, switches it on, and runs out. The gramophone declares that to-night we’ll merry merry be.)51

For those unfamiliar with the spring motor, this finale may seem a bit overwrought. But the fact that the gramophone functions perfectly for this performance of Peter’s jaunty death dirge defies mechanical logic and provides the answer to Mitchell’s question of why we need this last moment. After multiple demonstrations of mainspring fatigue fracturing and after the gramophone’s continued tensile stress once Charlie winds the machine and leaves it, the logical conclusion of the scene would be a complete and violent fatigue failure in the gramophone. But instead, Peter has experienced psychological fatigue failure, has snapped and lashed out with self-destructive violence. The gramophone, on the other hand, no longer bears the symptoms of its threatened rupture and instead flawlessly blares its jarring tune. The tableau emphasizes the parallel between gramophone and the mind that Robinson has so deftly woven throughout the play. Though Portrait has not been performed at the Abbey since 1925, it remains a revealing glimpse into the war-strained psyche of the young generation in the new, at peace Irish Free State. Robinson’s work capitalizes on established analogies between the gramophone and the mind, building upon them, framing them in a uniquely Irish cultural context and using Abbey-based allusions to tie them all together. His

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“essay in psychoanalysis,” as one reviewer described it, relies heavily on a contemporary understanding of the gramophone’s inner mechanism to unlock our understanding of the tensions that pull at Peter and Tom throughout the play.52 It is his answer to the post–cease-fire Irish Times article that cautions against winding a gramophone too tight for too long. A mainspring, like the Irish psyche, can only withstand so much strain.

8 His Remastered Voice Joyce for Vinyl Damien Keane

A portrait of James Joyce as a recording artist would probably be a miniature. Taken together, the two gramophone recordings made by Joyce and circulated during his lifetime add up to just under thirteen minutes of recorded sound.1 The combined duration of these two recordings is dwarfed by the size of his published oeuvre, which is in turn dwarfed by the array of compositional materials and avant-textes (notebooks, typescripts, serial publications, page proofs, placards) that constitutes the archive of Joyce’s prepublication work. At another level, these almost thirteen minutes represent only a small fraction of the professional recordings made of Joyce’s works since their initial appearance. To take but one example, the omnibus James Joyce Audio Collection (2002) repackages on four compact discs a series of readings first released decades before as separate albums on Caedmon Records, yet Joyce’s own voice accounts for little more than 5 percent of its running time of about four hours.2 Critical writing about Joyce’s recordings is similarly slight, more often than not positioning them as epiphenomena, as addenda to the linguistic energy located at the heart of Joyce’s project. Even a recent uptick in attention to Joyce and sound has served primarily to reinforce this paratradition within Joyce studies, by tending to make, when at all, only passing reference to the two recordings and then simply as exemplifications of features in Joyce’s texts. One can indeed see this position already staked out in John Slocum’s and Herbert Cahoon’s 144

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Bibliography of James Joyce (1953), their foundational work of descriptive bibliography, in which Joyce’s two gramophone recordings are briefly mentioned in the final section, “Miscellany.”3 Sorted into this noncategory, the recordings would thus seem by definition to be extraneous to the emerging practical sense of Joyce scholars, to be items all but severed from the Joycean corpus. Having been quick to challenge and revise so much else in their critical heritage, Joyce studies have nonetheless accepted this formative assessment with little acknowledgement. This process of acceptance is crucial to any account of the reception of Joyce’s recordings, but in no straightforward manner. In the postwar years, it took form as a drama about authority, mediation, and access, one staged among a number of players who, for a variety of overlapping reasons, were concerned with the means by which Joyce’s works would be transmitted.4 This was a moment when pointed arguments over the meaning and value of modern literature subsumed less easily framed debates about how access to modern literature could be realized and managed. The formative bibliographic classification itself typifies key aspects of the mid-century modernist field, both in its specifically Joycean corner and more generally. On the one hand, it is during these years that American university libraries begin to establish special collections of Joyce materials, in response to changing disciplinary configurations and new scholarly interest in the archives of modern and contemporary authors; it should be noted in the immediate context, for example, that Slocum’s personal collection formed the basis not only of the published descriptive bibliography, but also of the James Joyce Collection at Yale University. On the other hand, these mid-century years are the moment of what Harry Levin in his influential essay “What Was Modernism?” (1960) named “esthetic appliances,” those “long-playing records” and “photographic reproductions” and paperback “reprints” that could stand for “domesticated” modernist experimentalism and the “wide diffusion of culture.”5 The interaction of these dispositions, the “specialist” and the “middlebrow,” has had crucial bearing on the fate of Joyce’s recordings. However opposed the two tendencies might at first

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seem—the former centripetal and consolidating, the latter centrifugal and dispersive—the tensions between them were less decisive for the propagation of modern literature than were the nascent divisions within each of these tendencies.6 While the concern with transmission appears to be most evident in curricular reforms, corrected and reset editions, the founding of authorial societies and newsletters, or processing newly acquired archival holdings, it was likewise manifest in the negotiations to remaster Joyce’s gramophone recordings for the LP era. Although ostensibly centered on medial considerations, these negotiations enacted and recapitulated powerful social dispositions within the literary field. Perhaps nowhere was this relationship more pronounced than in the dealings for Joyce’s rare first disc, a recording of an excerpt from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, made in 1924. As this essay will examine, the two dispositions came into partial alignment, a state of antagonistic cooperation, in the effort to secure Joyce’s voice for vinyl. Tracing his voice in shellac decades earlier had presented its own problems. The “Aeolus” recording had been made at an odd moment in the history of reproduced sound. When Joyce entered the studio of His Master’s Voice outside Paris in November 1924, the technological ability to record and play back sound had been a reality for nearly fifty years, but the recording industry was in a slump. The postwar rise of civilian radio broadcasting had suppressed demand for gramophone recordings, which could not match the dynamic range and aural presence of on-air programs produced using microphones, vacuum tubes, and signal processing.7 The market for authors’ recordings was so dry, in fact, that HMV only agreed to record Joyce if Sylvia Beach picked up the tab, for it did not foresee any financial return on the disc.8 These economic forces affected every aspect of the recording session, including Joyce’s decision about what passage from the novel he would record. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus written on March 10, 1925, Joyce indirectly describes how this factor helped determine his choice of John Taylor’s speech in “Aeolus.” This unpublished letter is in private hands, however, so the

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summary given in the Sotheby’s catalog listing its sale must here suffice: “[ Joyce] inform[s] his brother of his recent visit to the studio to make a gramophone record (which he considers a primitive instrument), and that they had tried several other extracts—such as monologue, and fragments of Penelope, Sirens, and Cyclops—before trying the speech on pp. 136–7, which came out well.”9 Although doublesided gramophone discs had been introduced in 1904 and become fairly standard for music by 1924, the cost of pressing such a small run of double-sided discs without subvention by a record company or patron was prohibitive.10 With these financial constraints on the possibilities of the format, Joyce was left to identify a passage that, when spoken aloud, would clock in at under four and a half minutes, or the maximum duration of one side of the largest, commercially standard-sized disc, yet remain comprehensible and representative as an excerpt from the novel. Facing these circumstances, a single pressing of thirty copies was made of the “Aeolus” recording, on onesided, twelve-inch 78 rpm gramophone discs. Joyce himself designed their label, and he signed and dated each of the thirty before he and Beach privately circulated them.11 The rarity of the “Aeolus” recording stemmed from its single pressing and private distribution, but two related matters of its production and handling exacerbated this condition. As a technological object, Joyce’s first gramophone recording was consigned to obsolescence almost as soon as it was made. While perhaps a handful of electrical engineers would have known it at the time, the “Aeolus” recording was cut only six months before the release of the first commercial disc to employ a microphone during the recording process.12 Adapting technical advances first realized in the field of radio broadcasting, this innovation aimed to freshen the wilted recording industry, but it effectively brought the first phase in the history of sound reproduction to an end. Spinning at this endpoint, the “Aeolus” disc is what is called an acoustic recording. Unlike electrical recordings, for which a microphone converts sound waves into electrical signals, acoustic recordings are strictly mechanical, as Jerry McWilliams explains:

8.1. James Joyce’s design for the label of the “Aeolus” gramophone discs, including Sylvia Beach’s later annotation of the sketch at top right. Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

8.2. The label of one of the thirty “Aeolus” gramophone discs, with Joyce’s signature. Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

His Remastered Voice   149 Prior to 1925, all recording had been accomplished acoustically. In that process, it was the physical power of vibrating air, set in motion by the performers, concentrated by the familiar horn device, and converted to mechanical vibration by the diaphragm, that drove the cutting stylus. This method had limitations, including a lack of sensitivity and restricted frequency response. Practically, it meant that only sonic information produced at a high-decibel level and within a limited range could be effectively recorded.13

To listeners habituated to the effects of the microphone, acoustically recorded voices can sound distant, indistinct, and tinny, with the “limitations” of the process having an especially notable impact on perceptions of intimacy and immediacy: they seem to lack presence.14 Compounding this technological issue was one quite literally of storage, for as a private, noncommercial object, the “Aeolus” recording lacked an institutional presence. Beach noted that HMV had not listed it in the company’s catalog, nor assumed any proprietary role over the recording; but this meant that the company would not function as a repository for and had no interest in maintaining the recording. Whatever autonomy this arrangement offered to Joyce and Beach, the nonrelation had real consequences, as she describes: “How I regret that, owing to my ignorance of everything pertaining to recording, I didn’t do something about preserving the ‘master.’ This was the rule with such records, I was told, but for some reason the precious ‘master’ of the recording from Ulysses was destroyed.”15 Without this source disc from which the thirty copies derived, there could be no second pressing, unless a new master was made from one of the copies. Through several turns and amplifications, these gramophone-era problems of production and presence, of circulation and preservation, would become the basis for the negotiations to include this Joycean rarity on an LP. By the time the “Aeolus” recording finally appeared as the first track on the first side of the 1971 Caedmon Records album, James Joyce Reading, plans for its inclusion on a record had been in the works for well over a decade.16 With the commercial introduction of 33 rpm, long-playing vinyl records in 1948, the market for recordings of

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literary readings had boomed. Although actors were often hired to read the works of deceased authors, demand was high for contemporary, high-fidelity recordings of authors reading their own works. Labels such as Columbia, Spoken Arts, Folkways, and Caedmon directed their albums toward segments of this expanding audience, the house ethos of each announced as much by engineering techniques, production decisions, and sleeve design as by what voices were captured to wax. Founded by Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell in 1952, Caedmon had assumed a prominent position in the field following on the success of a series of recordings made of Dylan Thomas in the years just before his death. In an interview with Renee Montagne of National Public Radio marking the fiftieth anniversary of the label’s founding, Holdridge described the kind of vocal performance Caedmon had aimed to document: I’ll tell you what we were not hoping for. We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices. We wanted them to read as though they were recreating the moment of inspiration. They did exactly that. They read with a feeling, an inspiration that came through. This is what we wanted, Renee. We wanted our authors to read to people in the same way that the bards of old read—a communication directly to receptive ears.17

While this account relies on a very specific faith in authorial charisma, the savvy use of studio engineering was largely behind this communicative effect. Eschewing both the “lo-fi,” documentary sound of the literary field recording (Folkways) and the close-miked, disembodied vocal intimacy derived from the repertoire of radio broadcasting (Columbia), Caedmon recordings rendered the author’s voice in a defined location, by using a microphone placed at a slight distance from the speaker to register the warm, reverberant acoustics of the room. During playback, listeners heard a voice sounding in a public space, but one small enough for the voice to remain squarely at its center.18 As Sarah Parry has noted, “Caedmon simulated a live reading reverberating in a public performance context and imitated the high-fidelity sound of the postwar classical music industry. However,

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its high signal-to-noise ratio also mimicked the black and white of the printed page, effectively functioning as an analogue to the written word.”19 It was in this manner that the company sought to embody with its releases what its letterhead called “the third dimension of the printed page.”20 The initial plan to rerelease the “Aeolus” recording on an LP had not originated at Caedmon, but instead took shape in yet another dimension of the printed page: the bookstore. While by the mid1950s the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan had lost its claim to being, in Joseph Kelly’s words, “the unofficial center of Joyce activity in America,” it remained a vital contact point for those interested in the transmission of Joyce’s works.21 As the place where the New York James Joyce Society was founded and met, the shop represented something of an estuarial space, where specialist and generalist, academic and enthusiast, could come together and “share authority over Joyce’s texts.”22 This practical activity encompassed a historical and even curatorial sense, seeking not only to address the hermeneutical challenges of Joyce’s works, but also to attend to more concrete questions of access posed by the legacy of the controversies that marked their initial release and reception. These endeavors were not always successful or enlightening, but they exemplified meaning in the making among people with a concern for it. As a testimonial to this spirit, Folkways issued the double-LP Meeting of James Joyce Society, which positioned Joyce’s 1929 recording of the final pages of Anna Livia Plurabelle amid a series of live recordings made of a society session in the shop’s back room in October 1951.23 To complement this set, Frances Steloff, the owner of Gotham Book Mart, and Moses Asch, the director of Folkways, then conceived of an LP that would document the legal battle to publish Ulysses in the United States, using recorded interviews with those who had seen the novel through the court system and into print, but also reproducing Joyce’s first gramophone recording. With its established connection to the bookstore and thoroughgoing commitment to making the diversity of the world’s sounds available to the public, Folkways was a seemingly natural choice to release the proposed album. Yet owing to the difficulties of tracking

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down one of the extant gramophone discs, the project languished for years. Without the recording of Joyce’s voice, it was not considered to be viable. This situation changed with Beach’s death in 1962, when a second consignment of her Joycean effects arrived at the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo. Three of the thirty rare discs were now at least locatable, if not yet entirely accessible. The move to create a new master was underway. Prompted by Steloff, Asch contacted Oscar Silverman, the director of the university libraries, in November 1963, to inquire about the status of the newly acquired discs and to offer an advance royalty of five hundred dollars, to be split between the university and the Society of Authors, if Folkways were allowed to reissue the recording.24 Six months later, in May 1964, Silverman sent Asch a copy on tape of one of Beach’s gramophone discs, along with an update of his own efforts to secure permissions for the release of the recording: I have not yet had an answer from Miss [Anne] Munro-Kerr of the Society of Authors in London about publishing the record. I quote the relevant part of my letter (now over two months old): “To piece out the short Ulysses section, I have been considering the idea of having a comment by Mr. Morris Ernst who successfully defended the Ulysses case in the New York courts, perhaps a statement by Mr. Bennett Cerf of Random House who published Ulysses, and perhaps an excerpt from Judge Wolsley’s [sic] decision. I should, of course, like to have our University’s name appear either on the face of the record or at least in the descriptive matter which goes with the record.”25

As the earlier letter quoted in this reply makes clear, plans for the documentary recording were still being entertained, although perhaps now only as a portion of an album dedicated more generally to Joyce and his works. At the same time, the exchange demonstrates the legal and custodial realities of reproduction, which not only differed from heroic myths of modernist aesthetic production but testified to the specific institutional conditions of Joyce’s mid-century

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transmission. While the tape Asch now possessed could serve, at a technological level, as the source for subsequent pressings of the recording, it could never be anything other than a duplicate, something more akin to a bootleg or unlicensed reproduction, without the requisite permissions. Lacking them, the tape could not be the new master. This relationship became plain when Caedmon entered into the negotiations to reproduce the “Aeolus” recording. Unlike Folkways’ proposed documentary album, the label planned to have Joyce’s two recordings on one side, with an actor reading Joyce’s poems on the other, in this way creating a hybrid of its two most common forms of literary recording. Having gotten permission to reproduce the “Aeolus” recording from the Society of Authors, the company then heard from the law firm of Greenbaum, Woolf, and Ernst, on March 9, 1965: We represent the Estate of Sylvia Beach which, as you know, has or may have certain rights in the original recording. A copy of the recording was transferred to The University of Buffalo under arrangements made in part by Sylvia Beach during her lifetime and in part by the administratrix of her estate. This will serve to authorize your corporation and the authorities at The University of Buffalo to make available to you the copy of the original phonograph recording now in the possession of the University for purposes of producing a new master tape or record.26

This letter’s legalese is nearly as striking as its provenance. Given that the firm’s “Ernst” was none other than Morris Ernst, whose participation in the planned documentary album was deemed essential to its success, this representation would seem to have constituted a conflict of interest.27 Yet, only a week later, Marianne Mantell had written to Silverman to request “a tape copy of your pressing of this record.”28 Silverman instead dispatched one of the rare gramophone discs to New York, where Caedmon transferred it to tape and photographed its label, which carried Joyce’s signature, for potential use on the album’s jacket. Mantell and Silverman also agreed that the album’s cover should come from among the Joyce images at Buffalo, while she thought that “two

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hundred or so words on your Joyce Collection” would work as liner notes.29 All of this happened in slightly over three weeks. Throughout these dealings, Silverman displayed a grasp of shifting relations among literary archives, aesthetic value, and technical media that remains both instructive and troubling. He clearly understood changes in the media economy not as signs of epochal transformation or ontological deliverance, but as the occasion to redraw classificatory lines within the institutional field of these interactions.30 In turn, however, this understanding recognized how transmission is a fiercely disputed social relation and not the neutral provision of content. In this, he was correct in discerning that Caedmon possessed a kind of symbolic capital that Folkways did not. With its eclectic catalog and Popular Front attitude, Folkways could never be a middlebrow label, for its countercultural ethos too readily subverted the aesthetic categories on which assumptions and designations of “brow” level depended. Like most countercultures, it had its inclinations toward righteousness, but its baggy openness tended ultimately to mitigate such turns. Caedmon, on the other hand, was the epitome of middlebrow to its detractors and many of its defenders, yet its commitment to the recorded literary word had no rival. Silverman recognized that the Poetry Collection could benefit from the publicity afforded by this particular release, as well as any institutional relationships that might accrue from it. Indeed, six months after the initial negotiations for the “Aeolus” recording, he could tell Mantell of his hope that Caedmon might “continue to think of us [Buffalo] as a repository for your tapes, etc.”31 In these terms, it is difficult to fault him for seeing the opportunity to conjoin the archival vocation of the Poetry Collection to Caedmon’s “mission to translate traditional forms of high culture into media formats associated with modern pop culture.”32 This linkage was about institutional conditions and affiliations, but also about realizing advantage. Silverman’s next letter to Caedmon bears out this point: I have just learned from Mr. Zak [sic] Bowen, who did some recordings for Folkways of his readings and music of Joyce, that Folkways has the Ulysses record ready to publish with a commentary by

His Remastered Voice   155 Bowen on the same side. Bowen says that Asche [sic] is waiting only to decide what to put on the other side. . . . Take it from here!33

While Silverman’s failure to disclose his relationship to Asch and Folkways’ tape is disconcerting, what is necessary to recognize in this situation is how the reproduction of a gramophone recording was the stage for the reproduction of social relations. The choice of record label was a decisive bid to consolidate and bank literary prestige amid new conditions of transmission. Only three days after this letter to Caedmon was written, Asch received notice that Folkways’ plan to release an album containing the “Aeolus” recording must halt. The letter was from Greenbaum, Woolf, and Ernst, who now acted as legal representatives for Caedmon: We are instructed to advise you that our client has contractual arrangements with the representatives of the Estate of James Joyce [the Society of Authors] affording it exclusive recording rights in this material. Accordingly, any manufacture or distribution of recordings of such material by others would appear to be in derogation of the rights of our client.34

Ten days later, on November 7, Asch is scathing in his reply. Stating up front that the letter from Caedmon’s new legal advisors has come as “quite a shock,” he spends the first two-thirds of his response detailing the negotiations for the disc and repeated delays in realizing the planned album. In doing so, he draws a straight line through the various hold ups and deferrals to the “letter of ‘stop and desist’” he has just received, while pointedly insinuating that Ernst has obstructed the project at Folkways from its inception. In the final third of his reply, Asch turns to the capital nexus. Feeling burned and insulted, he describes his own uncompensated work over the years on behalf of the New York James Joyce Society, noting the “irony” that it was in fact he who introduced “the Caedmon girls” to Dylan Thomas at one of its meetings. Now that they are “affluent” and can retain Ernst as legal counsel, he continues, Caedmon will be free to dominate the

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field of literary recording. Asch brusquely concludes, “I cannot afford this luxury.”35 After this letter, Folkways never released another Joycerelated album. Why did it then take over five years for Caedmon to issue James Joyce Reading? In a letter to Silverman in September 1970, the company described the circumstances behind the lapsed time: A long time ago, 1965 to be precise, you were kind enough to supply us with a copy of your recording of James Joyce reading from ulysses, which we planned to release on record. After receiving your recording, we encountered problems with other selections we planned to include on the same album which made release of the record impossible for some time. A few short months ago, everything was resolved and we began to work on the album once more. To our embarrassment, we have discovered we no longer have the recording you sent to us—and without it, there is no album. So here we are on your doorstep again with a request for an additional copy.36

In response, one of Beach’s discs was once again sent to New York, and, forty-six years after Joyce’s voice was first traced in shellac, a new master was made. When the album was released, it conformed to the label’s initial plan, packaging Joyce’s two recordings with contemporary recordings of Cyril Cusack reading Joyce’s poetry. The reproduction of the gramophone recording “made” the album, but Caedmon’s literary recording is all but silent about the role the literary archive had played, a relation most evident on the album’s back cover. Although there are two extant drafts of Silverman’s “two hundred or so words” on Joyce’s recordings, the company resolved during final preparations for the album’s release not to use his text, as it was explained to him on December 8, 1970: “We want to thank you for re-doing the Joyce article for us, and tell you that we have decided to use a portion of [Beach’s memoir] Shakespeare and Company on the back liner instead. We decided to do this in the interest of authenticity.”37 Alongside this excerpt, there is a picture of the label of the “Aeolus” disc, bearing Joyce’s signature. No miniature, this image is simply a small photograph.

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8.3. Detail of back sleeve of 1971 Caedmon recording from James Joyce Reading by James Joyce. The James Joyce Audio Collection Copyright © 1956, 1959, 1972, 1978, and 1972 by HarperCollins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

And, in truth, it is this reproduction that “makes” the album, for reasons Pierre Bourdieu spells out: “What makes the value of the work is not the rarity (the uniqueness) of the product but the rarity of the producer, manifested by the signature, the equivalent of the designer label, that is, the collective belief in the value of the producer

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and his product.”38 As the jacket makes visible, this collective belief classifies Joyce as author, not as recording artist, a determination that has nothing to do with the number of minutes he spent in the studio. Put another way, this recognition prizes the “moment of inspiration,” rather than the “physical power of vibrating air.” A new master had been made on tape, and the gramophone disc at Buffalo was now merely a superseded curio in a literary archive in the special collections at a library. In lifting the needle from this rasping end-groove, one ambivalent final note bears amplifying. With the creation of a new master, it would seem that a long-deferred process of supersession had finally been brought to completion, as an archaic technological object at last yielded to its successor, and the sound of Joyce’s voice became available to circulate on vinyl. In this familiar progressive narrative, the new media format liberates the author’s spoken words from the confines of the past and communicates them “directly to receptive ears.” As a slight modification of the McLuhanite plotline, however, this description of media innovation compresses transmission into delivery and conflates the realization of access with an attenuated process of providing content. Its libertarian promise of access is in this way a procedure of confirmation, for it reproduces dominant categories of value in the face of emergent modes of creating and classifying intellectual authority, rather than seeking to foster alternative norms of understanding and use. This is to say that it validates and enforces the separation of valued forms of knowledge production from those that are devalued, undervalued, or deemed to be altogether without value. If this claim appears to be backward, then it is worth recalling that this drama over transmission was primarily centered in the library—that is, in an institutional space of specialization dedicated to sponsoring novel intellectual formations. Although it is now more common to associate this mid-century tension of centripetal and centrifugal forces with the rise of the New Criticism and its emphasis on disciplinary professionalization, one might as well point to the rise of university library special collections as offering a similarly ambiguous testimony to the full frequency range of liberal education. As a recording artist, Joyce may now

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reside in the archive, yet the conflicted story of his first gramophone recording suggests the outline of a much broader institutional history. Indeed, in looking back at this mid-century scene, what stands out today is how the special collection remains a site that checks the mandate to segregate valued forms of knowledge production from those presumed to be outdated, marginal, or without application, even as the university itself increasingly defaults on this commitment. Reproduction continues to come at a cost.

9 Broadcatastrophe! Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama and the Aesthetics of Working It Out Jeremy Lakoff

Radio’s coming of age in the twentieth century was a thoroughly public affair, with a mass of listeners tuning in to the milestones and missteps of early broadcasting houses. As radio transitioned from an emergent technology to a dominant medium, there was a concurrent standardization of studio techniques that involved, in part, a push toward an ethos of intimacy, immediacy, and seamless professionalism. An ideal of immediacy, however, was not a foregone conclusion and many broadcasters shifted their work in the opposite direction by foregrounding their equipment and the medium in all their noisiness. At cultural institutions like the BBC—which had an indelible impact on modes of literary expression in both Great Britain and Ireland—this dispute was often taken up by writers looking to test a new medium, work out new techniques, and reach new audiences.1 The broadcasting house, as a rapidly changing social milieu and creative workshop, thus stands out as a locus in which writers could explore new forms and shape coalescing conventions—a process that included exploration of the medium’s shortcomings and the breakdown of immediacy. One such writer was Irish playwright Denis Johnston, who worked in many different roles at the adolescent BBC from 1936 to 1947.2 Having established himself in the Dublin theater world during the early 1930s, Johnston started his radio career at the BBC’s Northern Irish regional service as a feature scriptwriter and researcher. There, he 160

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gained a reputation for daring innovation with plays like Lillibulero (1938). His aim in joining the BBC, however, had been to use radio as a springboard into the fledgling television service, which had begun regular broadcasting in 1936. Working in a brand-new medium seemed a tantalizing prospect to Johnston and, in 1938, he transferred to Alexandra Palace in London to start working as a television producer.3 His initial tenure there was short-lived, as the BBC suspended television service at the outset of the war in 1939, fearing that German bombers could use television’s broadcasting signals for navigation. Working in Ireland during the war years, Johnston reported on the Republic’s neutrality and Northern Ireland’s involvement in the hostilities. By 1942, Johnston had been assigned to the BBC War Reporting Unit, traveling to North Africa, Yugoslavia, and, finally, Germany, to record features from the front. In his recent study of wartime radio, Ian Whittington gives a thorough account of Johnston’s time as a correspondent, examining both the author’s ground-breaking sound features and his multimodal memoir Nine Rivers from Jordan (1954).4 In that corpus, Whittington locates a double bind for Johnston, who was caught between his political and journalistic ideals of neutrality and the dilemma of his increasing engagement in the conflict. What is most important for my purpose here is the way that Whittington maps Johnston’s strained ideals of neutrality onto an ethos of immediacy, an ethos that was largely enabled by portable recording equipment. Embedded in “the promise of unmediated access to aural experience that radio held for its practitioners and its audience” was the promise “to move the listener at least one step closer to the war itself, so that audiences might interpret the conflict for themselves.”5 Despite occasional on-air recognition of the means of dissemination by techno-enthusiast correspondents, both the reporter and his tools were largely hidden from “view,” relegated to being mere vehicles for transporting listeners to distant theaters of war. The disposition of Johnston’s wartime journalism can thus be understood as an attempt to minimize the presence of mediating technology, promoting the façade of an impartial BBC. His work as

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a radio dramatist, however, tells a very different story. In the radio studio, away from the battlefield, Johnston’s broadcast dramas employ what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call a logic of hypermediacy: a representational method that, in contrast to immediacy, insistently foregrounds the means of dissemination.6 In a number of pre- and postwar radio plays, Johnston creates a portrait of the broadcasting house that refuses the logic of immediacy so often associated with wireless transmission. On the one hand, Johnston spoofs the enthusiastic navel-gazing of broadcasters showcasing their microphones, mixing panels, and sound effects—emphasizing, in particular, the blunders wrought by overproduction. On the other, these plays are more than mere spoofs, as he explores the aesthetic limits and opportunities of those devices: in essence, he tests the effect of his effects. In this way, Johnston’s radio oeuvre reflects a semiamateur disposition toward the emergent medium: through trial-and-error experimentation the situated practices of this haphazard, collaborative workspace, and the contours of a new art form, can be worked out.7 By turning attention back to the studio, the radio play claims and recasts one of the prized innovations of the modernist literary field. Experimentation is not the sole purview of highbrow aesthetics or the individual auteur, but a stage of artistic craftsmanship that permeates diverse technical fields, aims, outlooks, and working conditions. Traces of the gradual sedimentation of technique sometimes spilled out from behind the plastic veneer of the BBC, into the studio, and out onto the airwaves. The struggles and triumphs of the studio could become material for self-referential metafictional broadcasts. Two key components foregrounded in these self-portraits of the studio were, first, the equipment that enabled broadcasting and, second, the roles and hierarchies of the professionals who operated those machines. Audiences, in other words, tuned in to behind-the-scenes exposés of the techniques, disagreements, and self-justifications of the network.8 In this regard, Johnston’s radio work resonates with Orson Welles’s celebrated 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which also put broadcasting infrastructure on display through the trope of the interrupted transmission. The play’s verisimilitude has

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a paradoxical effect: blurring the line between fiction and reality, it creates a state of immediate terror while, simultaneously, insistently reminding listeners of the means of transmission and reception.9 Taking self-reference one step further, Johnston’s radio plays mobilize the uncertainty created by ostensible technical difficulties to blur the line between product and process, making listeners aware of the myriad tasks that go into producing fiction in this new medium. This revelation of studio technology and technique occurs most strikingly in metadramas where the studio is in a state of chaos. In a genre that I call the broadcatastrophe, the fourth wall is broken, diegesis is derailed, and institutional hierarchies are laid bare. Through the use of interference, noise, inept fiddling, and technical errors, this genre expresses both wariness and excitement about the medium’s bumpy development; it revels in calamity and “celebrat[es] disaster” arising from live broadcast, as well as the “‘try it and see’ attitudes” typical in emergent broadcasting.10 These plays make use of fantastical interventions or fumbling errors to create a rupture in the opaque and confident façade of the corporation.11 Despite sometimes coming across as critical, they illustrate the playwright’s interest in radio: it was precisely the conflict-driven “ferment of theory, experiment and trialand-error progress” that drew Johnston to broadcasting in the first place.12 These broadcatastrophes explicitly show concern about how broadcasting currently works, what it fails to do, and what producers could do differently when faced with rapidly deteriorating conditions in a less-than-perfect medium. This unparalleled foregrounding of the operations of the studio contributed to still-developing concepts of labor and artistic agency that were specific to broadcasting. In the handful of self-referential broadcatastrophes that will be the focus of this chapter (a sample of a much wider oeuvre), Johnston shows a thoroughgoing attentiveness to how the material means of dissemination condition artistic expression. Despite being sometimes viewed as nothing more than inside jokes, these metadramas reflect Johnston’s evolving conception of himself as an author, writer, creator, and—in the context of this medium—producer: one who directs a team effort, but cannot unilaterally create.13

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Indeed, Johnston’s self-conscious examination of artistic production places him within a tradition of metaliterary modernist works, from Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which Johnston adapted into a libretto for a Hugo Weisgall opera in the 1950s, to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)—a tradition that characterizes creation as polyvocal, chaotic, and combative.14 Against an individualist notion of genius and immediacy, Johnston’s broadcast work reveals a counternarrative of situated labor, institutional struggle, and inductive experimentation with new media. The impetus for Johnston’s broadcatastrophes derives from his position as a novice entering into a field that had begun to settle its aesthetic dispositions and practices by the time he had arrived. The plays reflect the attitude of a newcomer who was skeptical about the efficacy and style of dominant contemporary techniques. The most distilled example of this is his first broadcatastrophe, which aired on November 24, 1938, just as Johnston was on the cusp of leaving BBC Northern Ireland for the nascent television service and just twentyfive days after Welles’s War of the Worlds. Multiple Studio Blues or “Better Narrate than Never” (an “ad hoc radiogenic diorama”)15 is a reworking of 1937’s Duchess Street Blues, a send-up of the multiple-studio broadcasting technique that Johnston initially wrote while attending the BBC Staff Training School, which was located on Duchess Street in London.16 The 1938 version maintains the irreverence of his wideranging school project, but focuses instead on a metadramatic presentation of a botched Three Musketeers adaptation. A slapstick comedy on the surface, Multiple Studio Blues also conscientiously exposes the interior of the studio and skewers the serious, avant-garde production style championed by Lance Sieveking and Tyrone Guthrie in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Johnston’s play, in other words, takes aim at the preceding generation of broadcasters, who had experimented with sound effects, cross-fading, and orchestration to produce abstract, psychological radio dramas with epic scopes. Between the inept acting, stilted script, broken equipment, overzealous sound effects, directionless producing, pedantic narration, and a full-on mutiny by the staff, Multiple Studio Blues is a thought

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9.1. Radio Times feature on Denis Johnston. Radio Times, September 9, 1938, 17. Courtesy of Immediate Media Co.

experiment about everything that could go wrong during a broadcast, giving it “a nightmare resemblance to a typical broadcast involving multiple studios.”17 This nightmarishness is key. While a typical broadcast might be received within the logic of immediacy without a second thought, the broadcatastrophe forces recognition of the

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medium, its inefficiencies, and the various technical components of production. This kind of self-portraiture, however, runs the risk of speaking primarily to industry insiders at the expense of a wider audience of nonexperts. Famed producer D. G. Bridson observed that Multiple Studio Blues was likely a parody of his own program, Steel (1937), which Johnston had heard at the BBC Staff Training School; BBC insiders, Bridson claims, “hugely enjoyed” Johnston’s “‘in’ joke,” though he reckons “it must have baffled many listeners.”18 While the average listener might not have been privy to the detailed technical knowledge that forms the background of Johnston’s play, Bridson’s somewhat dismissive assessment glosses over the play’s sharp critique and its public exposure of the studio’s fault lines and limits. The premise of Multiple Studio Blues is that the actors in the playwithin-the-play are distributed across different studios that are linked together by the Dramatic Control Panel, a rudimentary mixing board first implemented in 1928. From his position in a centralized control booth, an actor portraying the clueless Producer (played by none other than Val Gielgud, head of BBC Productions) “flicks” from studio to studio, talks back to his crew, cues up sound effects, merges channels together, and adds echo to microphones.19 The control panel is a manifold where the various studios coexist in their potential to be heard; it is a waypoint in the network that gives shape to the studios’ collective output. The Producer gleefully experiments with this control, twisting the “knobs and things” to eavesdrop on actors’ personal conversations or to give them directions.20 The ideal of seamless diegesis (one where we would receive the Musketeers’ story without interference) gives way to a kind of studio tour, where the Producer yearns to show off his acquired know-how and exert creative control. Through his intervention, the Producer makes the broadcast more about his labor than the content he is ostensibly producing. That is, he is more concerned with explaining and demonstrating how the panel works than in operating it effectively, miming Sieveking’s “long elaborate announcement” at the opening of his panel-heavy program, Kaleidoscope (1928), which explained “what was about to happen, and how.”21 On the one hand, the Producer’s copious interjections of “interesting

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facts” about broadcasting are for self-gratification, rather than to assist the audience.22 On the other hand, they denote an initial diffidence about the technical aspects of production, providing preemptive justifications for any errors: “perhaps I had better begin by explaining— er—just how it is done, so that if anything goes wrong—er—you will understand—er—more or less just what—er—would have been done if it hadn’t been done—er—the way it was done.”23 Thus, Multiple Studio Blues both foregrounds the medium, dispelling any illusion of immediacy, and emphasizes that technological shortcomings are compounded by technicians’ mishandling of equipment. Because of the complexity of the multiple-studio technique and the sheer scale of some productions, creative work at the broadcasting house encompassed a range of collaborative activities. The success of a broadcast was often a matter of negotiation between agents with different outlooks and priorities. In Multiple Studio Blues, the Producer sees his own contribution, the “tremendous say the Producer has” over the shape of the performance, as a mark of creative authority.24 While this play’s Producer is a parody, the general consensus among practitioners was indeed that the role of Producer was one that required considerable talent.25 Not only is a radio producer the equivalent of a film director, tasked with leading actors and other crew members, he or she often operates the control panel during transmission, communicates with the engineers, coordinates with the announcers, and interacts with the administration. The role of liaison enables large-scale creative collaboration between parties with varying areas of expertise, though the catastrophe of miscommunication is exponentially increased if the producer fails in that centralized position.26 In Multiple Studio Blues, we get a glimpse of just how extensive the studio team could be, with a panoply of actors, announcers, narrators, effects men, engineers, and technical consultants. Aesthetic agency is multifold and diffuse in this hypermediated production and the Producer struggles to keep his team focused. The collapse of this production is ultimately a failure in management: the Producer faces mutiny when he sacks the Announcer, he is unable to keep the effects technician from using canned and clichéd seagull effects, the actors complain

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about the descent into farce, and he cannot convey to the players how to best balance and portray their characters.27 The catastrophe of Multiple Studio Blues reflects not only the frustration of working with a large, unwieldly crew, but also the difficulties posed by an incomplete understanding of the social dimension of the medium, of the workplace, and of the dramatic conventions that suit its specific capacities. Johnston’s play thus stands in direct contention with a contemporary narrative about BBC broadcasting in which it was smoothly coalescing as a medium, an institution, and a workplace. He is particularly interested in parodying those who claim to be “in the know,” a confident position that treats the techniques and conventions of broadcasting as established rather than emerging. Thus, among the coterie of agents depicted in this play, we see a range of attitudes about the value of experience. The Producer’s initial uncertainty about how to operate the panel gives way to familiarity with the lingo of production, a willingness to let the audience in on trade secrets, and a determination to make do in the face of utter derailment. By contrast, others in the studio fall back on an opaque posture of acquired expertise. In the opening scene, as the players prepare (unaware that the studio is live), the Technical Consultant advises the Producer with a veteran’s platitudes: “I mean, you’ve got to know, old boy. It’s no use leaving it to the Engineers . . . I mean, I’ve been in this game since the old Savoy Hill days, old boy, and believe me, you’ve got to know.”28 Here, professional know-how and technical ability are coded as expertise as much to reassure the in-group of their status as to bar the entry of newcomers. To know is to bask in a self-fulfilling prophecy, to be in a closed system of self-evident and sustained conventionality that transmits through the osmosis of experience. In this respect, to know one’s trade with the assurance of the seasoned veteran is not so different than genius or talent; to someone like Johnston, looking at the field from the position of an ambitious novice, this attitude was deserving of ridicule. Blurring the line between actuality and fiction, the broadcatastrophe’s conceit relies on the premise that we are hearing a live, genuine attempt at competent broadcasting that is falling apart without recourse to a cut or second take. Because it mimics the forms and

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techniques of regular programming, a listener tuning in to the broadcatastrophe might not know whether this is actually a botched play or a skillfully executed replica of a botched play. Ever careful of misleading listeners, the promotion for Multiple Studio Blues in Radio Times gives readers a brief history of the play’s genesis at the BBC Training School and calls the program “the BBC’s great joke against itself,” a “cod” production whose errors will delight “those who closely follow the radio shows of the various BBC producers.”29 Thus, there was no question of this program being a hoax: it was publically announced as a spoof—to readers of the Radio Times and radio aficionados, at least. Likewise, an audience member’s reaction would be, in part, determined by when they tuned in; much like The War of the Worlds, Multiple Studio Blues was bookended by announcements naming the play, the writer, and its actors—a frame that assures the audience of the orderly progression of programming and of the broadcatastrophe’s artificiality.30 However, someone tuning in to Multiple Studio Blues a few seconds late would be welcomed not with the familiar form of the BBC announcement, but rather with “a confused babel of voices speaking conversationally”: the technicians and actors, in their respective rooms, speaking all at once and putting their ignorance of the medium on display (e.g., “I wonder what that red light is for?”).31 Essentially, the play inserts an uncertain pause between the institutional frame and the content it presents, a momentary gap in which “backstage” sounds come to the fore. When the Announcer finally points out that they have been on the air for three minutes, there is “a death-like silence for about half a minute. Then a hiccough,” some bickering, and an announcement for the play-within-the-play.32 Because this rupture happens at the outset, any hope of establishing immersion is eroded. The “deathlike” silence in the studio marks the early demise of the assumption of professionalism or proficiency. Similarly, when the Producer throws in the towel at the finale, the play descends into chaos, with “a riot of muddled music and effects,” the sound of seagulls, a gong, and the Announcer apologizing for the “absolute travesty.”33 If one were to switch off one’s set in disgust at the chaotic unraveling of the play, one might not hear the actual closing

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announcement—essentially a reassurance of BBC control and professionalism. This is not to say that regular listeners would have been easily duped into taking this farce as reality or that, like a hoax, it was intended to deceive. Rather, the imitative inclusion of institutional framing devices extends the farce beyond the confines of the individual production and hints at the possible overlap of artifice and reality within the mediated form. It is in this sense that we might say that Multiple Studio Blues is experimental. Mixing middlebrow comedy with a knowing wink, it is not abstract or formally challenging like avant-garde art forms, but it does experiment with the limits of immediacy.34 The play works out, by trial and error, emergent practices and thereby tests the audience’s capacity to distinguish between actual and performed breakdowns. While Multiple Studio Blues was not broadcast a second time, its concerns and methods are reflected in some of Johnston’s other, less farcical radio plays from the same period. If Multiple Studio Blues is an exaggerated and unflattering portrait of what could go wrong inside the studio, Not One Returns to Tell: An Excursion into the Supernatural (1938) takes the broadcatastrophe out beyond its walls.35 It presents, in other words, a more encompassing view of what might count as a studio and the specific technical difficulties that new settings could create. The play simulates an outside broadcast (that is, an on-location transmission), but was produced at the broadcasting house using the multiple-studio technique. In this story, a radio team has traveled to a town on the Northern Irish coast to investigate reports of a haunting. They set up several broadcast points within O’Cahan’s Castle and a home base at a nearby hotel, which acts as a production booth with a Dramatic Control Panel. Initially, the reporters are dismissive of their assignment and pass the time commenting on the scenery and playing practical jokes on each other. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that a spectral presence in the castle is preparing to attack the reporter on the scene while the others listen helplessly from the hotel. The play climaxes as the characters frantically ring their doomed companion; ultimately, they flee in terror and the action closes with the sound of an unanswered telephone and no final resolution.

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By setting up various points of broadcast, the play establishes a degree of verisimilitude that is then leveraged to blur the line between the production and product. Not only are the various spaces in the play given distinct acoustic characteristics in order to sound like an on-location broadcast, but the station itself becomes part of the plot, creating a subtle transition between reality and fiction. In the opening announcement, the audience is told that this is “an excursion into the supernatural devised and conducted by Denis Johnston” but also, subsequently, that “for the purpose of this programme we are taking you over to a private sitting room in a small hotel somewhere on the coast of Ulster. An unusual and rather eerie experiment is being carried out there, which our Commentator on the spot will describe to you in his own words. Over to the Nine Glens Hotel.”36 There is here an unbroken continuity between the typical frame and the narrative. The actor playing the Announcer pretends to hand the transmission off to the play’s setting when, in reality, this is an in-house transfer. Similarly, at the play’s tragic conclusion, the Announcer fades back in and, sustaining the illusion, says, “And there we must leave them. As they say, there must be an explanation.”37 While listeners were certainly not expected to believe that this ghostly tale was indeed an actual report from the field, the institutional frame of the play opens up a space of uncertainty about where the fiction begins and ends, complicating a listener’s immersion.38 The external frame helps establish the verisimilitude of the fictional broadcast, but the complex communication network set up at the diegetic level also plays a role in creating the sense that this could be an actual transmission. Thus, the missteps and missed connections between characters are sites for the broadcast’s dysfunction as a whole. One way this happens is through instances of technical difficulty, a particularly worrisome reality for outside broadcasts. In the play, whispered complaints about the equipment are overlaid with a “low background hum as though coming from inferior lines,” which persists until the Assistant manages to fade it out.39 Likewise, the Observer, who reports from inside the castle, tries to take his microphone up to the roof only to be inhibited by the length of the

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cable. As he knocks about and struggles to bring it with him, the audience hears the “slap of the cable as he pulls it” and an “occasional thud in the microphone,” for which he apologizes.40 These sound effects add a dash of realism and self-consciousness to the simulated outside broadcast: while the on-location transmission of public events did provide an exciting element of liveness, they sacrificed the polish and assurance of the studio’s technical and professional resources. Johnston thus ensures that we hear the medium in all its limitations and imperfections. The figure of the broadcaster across these plays is that of an amateur unprepared for the technical difficulties that might occur on the spot. In Johnston’s portrait of broadcasting, the medium is essentially precarious, requiring just the smallest nudge to send it off the rails. A crisis of mediation can be equal parts technical and professional catastrophe; the characters of Not One Returns to Tell are not just burdened with inferior equipment, they also struggle to use it effectively. During handoffs from one speaker to the next—moments crucial for the establishment of continuity—the shakiness of the broadcast is most evident. Over and above all of the instances of the crew’s amateurishness, it is in the faltering transitions that the program’s cracks and broadcasters’ hesitation are most audible, with muttering and uncertain conversations peppering the background. The first handoff to the castle needs to be repeated several times since the Commentator is greeted by dead air at first. When they do manage to correct the fault, they hear the low background hum and a “jabber of voices” discussing various matters; in the midst of set-up, the crew is not prepared to transmit and does not recognize the “on-air” light in front of them.41 The realization that they are in fact transmitting plays out almost identically to Multiple Studio Blues, with exclamations, shushing, and an attempt to smoothly reestablish an air of professionalism. Disorganized relays and a cacophony of voices repeatedly tarnish the broadcast’s polish as it progresses, but the greatest threat is the handoff that goes nowhere: death caught live on the air. That moment of complete catastrophe occurs when the Observer realizes that he has been sharing a darkened room with the castle’s

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ghost and it has tricked him into dropping his defenses. The panicking crew at the hotel tries disparately to get the Observer on the line, but cannot reach him in time. When the connection is made at last, the Observer does not pick up, for it is too late: it is quite literally dead air.42 The ultimate danger is not just the specter, but the failure of the team’s networks of internal communication: Not One Returns to Tell is a broadcatastrophe of miscommunication where signals are misunderstood or simply missed. The faults and glitches of the technology are compounded by a lack of skill, disorganization, ignorance of standards, and illiteracy in broadcasting’s conventions. Above all else, what is needed to prevent a broadcatastrophe is an uninhibited flow of information between the agents in a production. What Johnston’s plays suggest is that this is an impossible ideal, as some incorrigible noise, inefficiency, or error will inevitable enter the lines of communication. The two aforementioned plays are radiogenic (i.e., written specifically for radio) and self-consciously reflect the conditions of their genesis. Johnston, however, also put technical issues and studio disputes on display throughout his career in his radio and television adaptations of his earlier dramas. In later iterations of these works, the studio is more than just a setting for the play, but is rather a dramaturgical tool for disrupting expectations and immersion. This is illustrated by a 1955 Radio Éireann version of his debut play, The Old Lady Says “No!” This expressionist panorama, which mocks Dublin society’s romanticization of the past, begins with a play-within-a-play where an actor portraying the rebel Robert Emmet is accidently knocked out during a simulated fight. As his fellow actors and a “doctor” from the audience tend to him, the play appears to be derailed, though the actor soon revives, dazed and conflating his assigned part with his own identity. On the radio, outside the frame of the theater, however, Johnston needed to find a way to achieve this disruption in a manner fitting this new media context.43 As in his other broadcatastrophes, Johnston uses the institutional frame as a means of signaling a break in the façade of that very institution. The broadcast version of the play begins with a chaotic announcement that sets the tone for the kind of disorder the production will

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simulate. As the Announcer tries to name the coming play, he is persistently interrupted by tramping, shouting, cheering, gunshots, and cries of dissent. After three failed attempts to get the title out, he silences the mob (though their feet can still be heard marching on, and they complete the title for him with a defiant “No!”).44 Not only does this prefigure the kind of mob that “Robert Emmet” (called the Speaker in the play and played by Micheál Mac Liammóir in the 1955 version) will struggle to control, but it establishes the trope of the broadcatastrophe: the disorder of the play’s events will spill over into the production. As we have seen, the separation of institutional paratexts, like announcements, from the narrative is generally troubled in broadcatastrophes; here, the sound of disorder sets the mood and signals further disruptions. When the stiff, baroque, and cliché-ridden play-within-a-play reaches the scene where Emmet is knocked out cold by British soldiers, the radio play’s narrative begins to diverge from the stage version. To situate listeners as recipients of a hypermediated transmission, Johnston deploys a range of effects to foreground the apparatuses of the studio. First, the Speaker’s cry of pain gives way to silence, “except for an odd static like a low mains hum which continues in the background.”45 Not only is the performance interrupted by an accidental injury, but the illusion that we are listening to an unmediated series of events is undercut by the sound of the medium malfunctioning. It hums in the background, but the transmitter and receiver are now at the foreground of the play. The dialogue that accompanies this noise reinforces the difficulties of working in broadcasting. Unlike the stage version of the play, where an actor swings the butt of his rifle too hard, here the Speaker has been brought down by the studio’s equipment: he has tripped over a cable on the floor and the microphone has fallen on top of him.46 Despite the warnings of the studio manager, the actors are evidently uncomfortable with the cramped space and still move about as though they were on a stage. This awkwardness and friction reminds us that agents frequently need to adapt to new spaces, conventions, and demands to produce their art in a technologically mediated environment.

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It takes a live crisis on the air, a sudden rupture of immersion, to reveal the amateurism of those working in the studio and the gaps in their knowledge about the medium. The gravest error following the crash in The Old Lady Says “No!” is that the crew assumes that they have been taken off the air, with the studio manager assuring an actor by saying, “How could we be on the air with the cables wrenched from the sockets and the leading man lying stunned on the floor frok [sic] a blow of the mic stand?”47 This supposed professional mistakenly believes that there is some kind of safety valve in place, that either the catastrophe would somehow trigger an announcement and a new program from another studio or that the machinery would cease to function from such a blow, denoting a naïve trust in the system’s ability to correct itself. As it is, however, the transmission continues and the audience eavesdrops on this behind-the-scenes exchange for a few moments before being switched over to an announcement that states, “We must apologize to Listeners for a break in transmission due to causes beyond our control. We hope to resume this play ‘The Old Lady says NO’ in a few minutes, meanwhile here is the recording of . . . we . . . ‘Fingal’s Cave’ played from the Bathroom at Pumpby . . . er . . . let me see now . . . I mean, of course, the Pump Room at Bath . . . And it’s played by . . . er . . .”48 Momentarily, it sounds as though the gaffe in the studio was perhaps real, that we had caught a peek of the machinery through the crack of a glitch. However, as the Announcer bungles his handoff to a new program, it becomes clear that this too is part of the performance. Paradoxically, the incompetence of the Announcer is a reassurance to the audience that broadcasting is not going to the dogs. By reaffirming the audience’s ability to pick up on the conventions and cues of competent broadcasting, there is an implied wink to audience members who have not fallen for the gag. Ultimately, the ability to see this as being clearly a joke serves to reinscribe faith in the competence of the station, the author, and the performers. This playing with immediacy and hypermediacy subtly challenges audiences to reconsider what counts as proficient transmission. Purposefully rough about the edges, The Old Lady Says “No!” intermittently brings the studio back to the surface to remind listeners of their

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assumptions about, or expectations of, the medium. While the mechanisms and methods of broadcasting do not preoccupy the entire play, they do crop up as the Speaker becomes dislocated from the diegetic setting, attempts to take on the authority of the producer, and bickers with intractable sound engineers over vague directions he has issued to them.49 Throughout the play, competing voices and disrupted hierarchies prevent the narrative from ever settling into an immersive naturalness—that is, the sense that things are unfolding as they “should.” Like the Speaker himself, listeners move through a disorienting world where one is never sure whether one is receiving frame or content, actuality or fiction. Here, immersion in the production is directly dependent on the degree to which a listener trusts in the abilities of the producers and in the medium’s capacity for self-correction, which is by no means guaranteed. In this sense, though The Old Lady Says “No!” is not as thoroughly engaged in portraying broadcasting as Multiple Studio Blues and Not One Returns to Tell—since it has a plot and characters that reach beyond the studio—it does demonstrate that the broadcatastrophe’s blunders and ruptures can make audiences aware of just how precarious the outcomes of live transmission can be. Johnston’s radio work speaks to his awareness that there are elements of each medium that practitioners unconsciously accept and reproduce, but also elements that must be consciously worked out, sometimes on the fly. In an instructional preface to his radio play Christopher Columbus, poet and radio producer Louis MacNeice stresses that while a radio play needs artistic vision, it also needs “craftsmanship”—that is, a diligent and nonspontaneous approach that may be “repulsive” to high-minded artists, but which can yield plays that are more suited to the particularities of the medium.50 Artistic creation under the auspices of an emergent technology thus comes to be seen more as labor than inspiration. To reflect on the possible mishaps that can occur on the air is to reflect on the kinds of choices faced by each producer as they craft, adapt, and transmit their work to an audience. For Johnston, who demonstrates an “acute sense” of medium specificity, one cannot take the means of transmission for granted: the author cannot presume familiarity with the conventions and dynamics of the

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studio drama, nor can he or she expect sustained intimacy with listeners.51 Johnston’s approach to the craft, then, is to run in the opposite direction, to expose the artifice and struggles of broadcasting and undermine its presumed immediacy. Broadcasting did not emerge onto the scene as a fully formed, confident medium; rather, it underwent an extended process of forging, and then breaking down, conventions, techniques, and social orientations. While much of the criticism about radio and television’s literary content eagerly plumbs these early, unsettled days, the focus has largely been on the outward-facing effects of broadcasting—how audiences were constructed as audiences, how listeners reacted to content, and what kind of aural experience radio cultivated upon reception. Emphasizing this outward orientation, however, can overshadow the internal dynamics of radio that occasionally surfaced in the plays themselves. It can also treat the site of production as secondary, favoring conceptions of broadcasting that highlight a sense of immediacy and wonder or, in other words, a kind of modern magic. This obscures the contentious, on-air process of figuring out what the studio is and how it would fit into the audience’s homes. Furthermore, some have interpreted the medium as bearing some familial resemblance to avant-garde literary modernism.52 Certainly this is the case for many productions and many producers who figured their art as novel and modern, but emphasizing these alone runs the risk of purchasing radio’s “academic respectability” at the cost of its more middlebrow moments.53 These moments often saw producer’s embracing the presence of the studio, shirking immediacy, and replacing slick presentation with comedies of error. These selfportraits of the broadcasting house run counter to narratives of aesthetic difficulty without eschewing them entirely, transposing artistic complexity into technical strain. They partake in an enthusiasm for the medium without overstating its potential or projecting overconfidence. They play, experiment, and search for novelty without losing sight of how the product is born from error and confusion. For them, the work of art, and the wireless form as a whole, remains an unfinished and emerging process.

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Johnston’s portraits of broadcasting, then, do not advance an avant-garde aesthetic theory (as some of his forerunners like Sieveking and Guthrie had attempted to establish), but rather treat production as practice: Johnston was first and foremost concerned with how radio managed to signify at all, in a technical sense. His fascination with modes of production—with the conventions, jargon, roles, and interactions of the diverse crew members and how their aptitudes meshed together into technique—led him to produce plays that do not shy away from the medium that carried them. Mediation was an unavoidable fact and the techniques a producer could possibly deploy during that mediation needed to be experimentally tested: they did not come ready-made. As “the pioneers who stumbled in this new darkness” dealt with entirely new problems and made inevitable mistakes, “there was little attempt on the part of the writers or the radio drama producers to formulate theories in advance of practice. Their initial approach was generally rather haphazard and they spent a deal of time finding out what did not and could not work.”54 While conventions, roles, and output did settle enough over time for theories to emerge, the fierce debates about technique took place on the air just as much as in the back hallways—and those two things were not always strictly distinct. In the most explicit of these portraits, the image of broadcasting is an unflattering one, which is somewhat puzzling, as Johnston delighted in working in a medium where one can innovate and selfteach.55 These portraits of bumbling, experimenting, failing amateurs, however, can be explained by Johnston’s belief that, while professionals may fear errors that disrupt the status quo, the amateur revels in risk.56 On the air, dramatic risks might snap the audience out of its immersion and remind it of the material conditions of transmission, but, in doing so, one seizes the opportunity for working out the nuts and bolts of technique. Johnston, in other words, strove to sustain a flicker of amateurism even in the midst of his professional evolution, specifically at the level of developing technique. In doing so, he posits an alternative understanding of amateurism, innovation, and disruption—disruption can be generative, innovation can be crowdsourced, and amateurism can rejuvenate moribund conventions. The

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reputation of early broadcasting need not be “rescued” from accusations of amateurism, as Jason Jacobs suggests; rather, what is needed is a revaluation of the kinds of production that align to, and question, an “amateur” or informal understanding of innovation.57 Johnston’s broadcast dramas illustrate how technique, though provisional, arises through collaborative trial-and-error engagement with the materials and spaces at the broadcaster’s disposal (and some technique comes from dealing with crisis: error without trial). In this rapidly changing media environment, modernism did not need to strictly cleave to highbrow formulations of artistry that treat creation as nearly effortless acts of individual genius. Here, the artist does not stand apart, paring his fingernails, but must get his hands dirty. Radio art is production: work hammered out alongside one’s coworkers. In other words, the professional ethos that Johnston sketched during his time at the BBC is one wherein success is measured not by the heights that a producer reaches, but by his or her adeptness at staying afloat in uncharted waters.

pa r t f o u r

 

Body Trouble

Corrigan’s Pulse, Medicine, and Irish Modernism Enda Duffy

“His heart quopped softly.”1 This may be the most beautiful sentence in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Four words, encircling Leopold Bloom’s heart. As they refer to the matter of sound, they mark the thrum of Bloom’s heartbeat, not the clip-clop of his step-by-step flânerie across the city, the base note that sounds out the rhythm of the novel’s style. “Quopped” is a real word, not a Joycean invention. It is a variant of “quap,” which appears in English as early as 1425 in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Cressida,” where it is used to signify an excited heartbeat: “Lord, so that his herte gan to quappe, Heryng hire come.”2 “Quop” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “pulsate, throb,” a regional dialect word; some dictionaries suggest that it is from Irish English. H. G. Wells called the radioactive substance at the center of the plot of Tono-Bungay, his 1909 novel on medical hucksterism, “quap,” possibly because that word also means to quiver or shake. Many words beginning with q, as a fascinating preface essay to the “Q” section of the original OED points out, refer to such trembling: “quap, quave, quaver, quiver, quop.” Yet Wells clearly also chose “quop” because it is a word redolent of modernity, a word that has a metallic edge. When Bloom’s heart quops, therefore, it beats to the echo of Chaucer’s middle English, to the thrum of a dialect word that has possible origins in Hiberno-English, and, at the same time, to the uptick of a scientificsounding, q-inflected, vibrant modernity. It does all of this “softly.” 183

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The precision of Joyce’s prose is here employed to exactly register the faintest increase in the heart rate of Leopold Bloom. The working hypothesis of this essay is that the most experimental Irish modernism, centered on the work of Joyce, is revolutionary in part because it attends with a new level of mimetic exactness not to the feelings, thoughts, or motivations of its characters, but to their physical well-being, their very aliveness, monitored moment by moment. This may most simply be exemplified by how texts such as Ulysses attend to their characters’ very heartbeats: they monitor their characters’ pulses. Many intriguing reasons may be advanced for this radically innovative turn in Irish modernist writing. In this essay, I explore one of them: that Irish writing developed a particularly medical cast because it was influenced by the internationally renowned school of Irish medicine that had flourished in the nineteenth century. The striking discoveries and advances of this group of Victorian doctors and surgeons in Dublin were centered on noting and explaining symptoms of diseases of the heart. They were also grounded in new protocols of intense observation of bodily symptoms: a Dublin doctor, for example, wrote one of the earliest texts advocating the use of the stethoscope. I will trace the entry of this medical tradition into Irish writing, and its effects. The principal conduit for this influence is the works of Joyce. Hearts are a common motif throughout Ulysses, as they are throughout Irish modernist writing of all stripes. Inevitably, the heart still appears there often, as it does in the writing of others, as a code word for warm feeling, passion, and love.3 In the poetry of W. B. Yeats from the same years as Ulysses, for example, the heart is mostly cited as the organ that signifies in the Irish people a cultural coldness, even brutality, as the site of a cold-heartedness they should abjure. In “Easter 1916,” we hear of “hearts with one purpose alone . . . Enchanted to a stone.” And then: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.”4 Later, in “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” Yeats decides that “We had fed our heart on fantasies/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”5 This fear of the cold heart interrupts continuous references to the heart as seat of fine feeling: from “the deep heart’s core”

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in “The Lake Isle of Inisfree” to a return to “the foul rag and boneshop of the heart” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”6 The heart that Yeats puts before us is a notably symbolic construct, a standard trope of love, longing, and deep feeling. Not so with Joyce. He, serial demolisher of all threadbare myths and topoi, does use heart language to which a vestige of the romantic still adheres, but mostly when he refers to place. On occasion, Joyce uses “heart” as a synonym for “center,” (as Conrad did in his title Heart of Darkness); he is reported by J. F. Power to have said that, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.”7 He parades the heart word in that sense for comic effect in “Aeolus,” Ulysses’ first avowedly experimental episode, where a key headline reads: “In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis.” (Coupling “heart” with “Hibernian” emphasizes the drollery). Yet this hollow use of the word has already been preempted by the use of “heart” as a real organ of the animal body in “Calypso.” In the paragraph introducing Leopold Bloom, the list of the “inner organs of beasts and fowls” that he “ate with relish” features “a stuffed roast heart.”8 In effect, we witness in Ulysses a demolition of the loose use of the “heart” topos as Yeats deployed it. Soon, in “Hades,” Joyce employs the heart as the governing motif, in a series of extreme and contrasting uses of the term. There is the joke-story about the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (“Not a bloody bit like the man, says he . . . Whoever done it”), told by the Glasnevin cemetery keeper (which leads Bloom to reflect that it represents an example of “heart on his sleeve”).9 There follows the observation regarding the nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell that “his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here, Simon?”10 Bloom’s own thoughts on heart iconography turn to the more macabre and depressed: “They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave.”11 And later he thinks: “They ought to have some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or a telephone in the coffin.”12 Tales of ancient persecution become tales of modern technology, circling round the heart. The episode is littered with heart language of the Yeatsian cast, but with an extra fillip: the keeper,

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Bloom notes, keeps “cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart.”13 As he walks among the tombstones he reflects upon “broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands.”14 Yet all of this is premised on a medical fact: that the actual heart of Paddy Dignam gave way, and that Bloom is at the funeral of a man who has suffered a heart attack. “Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart,” giving the cause of death, which leads Bloom to reflect on how one’s heart can in many ways be broken.15 Yet the metaphorical sense follows upon the medical one. The necessity of giving precedence to the actual physiological organ is then explicitly iterated by Bloom, in one of his own strong literalist interventions in the book. Mr. Kernan has just said “that touches a man’s inmost heart.”16 Bloom spots at once the irony of such a casual reference: Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else.17

Richard Ellmann says of this that “the deadness of the dead rouses Bloom to eloquence.”18 Not quite: it’s the cheap use of the heart metaphor that gets him going. And the rest of Ulysses—as in “his heart quopped softly”—tends to physiological literalness instead of metaphorical sloppiness. The book, “softly,” becomes a means throughout the day to continuously take Bloom’s and others’ pulse rate—to check Bloom’s heart. This culminates in the novel’s final sentence, which ends: “And first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”19 Here, at the book’s very end, Bloom’s heart returns again. No lover’s token this, but his actual physical heart. Six hundred pages earlier, in the paragraph in which Bloom is introduced, he is described through his fondness for eating an animal heart, while in the last sentence that

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mentions him, at the book’s final close, the very last thing we hear of him is that “his heart was going like mad.” It is by feeling that his heart is pounding that Molly knows what he desires: it is through his beating heart that at last he speaks. Ulysses is a book that celebrates the beating heart, refusing to entertain it as shoddy metaphor, instead replacing it with a kind of medical exactitude, an awareness of the heart as an organ. The book is determined to make the proof of its chief character’s intense aliveness be his beating heart. Tracking the novel’s renunciation of the use of the threadbare heart metaphor in favor of a focus on the beating, quopping, goinglike-mad physical organ, we quickly realize that, whatever he is up to in Ulysses, Joyce is not setting out to engender meaning or “character” through any resonance of conventional symbolism. Rather, his protocols of signification were made evident when he revealed, in the Linati schema, that he associated every episode of the novel with an organ of the body—for example, “Lestrygonians” with the oesophagus, and “Aeolus” with the lungs. While this too relies in part on a series of metaphorical associations, the device casts the relation between tenor and ground as an allegory, so that conventional metaphoric resonance is renounced. At the same time, the medical trajectory of the novel, its intent to examine character and motivation through the evidence of the physical body, is implied.20 This body, in the Linati schema, is divided into all of its organs, to be tossed around in the chapters much like the rusty pumps lying in Glasnevin upon which Bloom reflects. Yet, at the key moment, when in “Hades” life is shown to have been snuffed out, what counts is the heart. And if the heart in the book is a real organ rather than a conventional symbol, it is not the heart itself that is put on show, but rather the evidence of its beating that is noted. The novel begins to take its characters’ pulse. This heartbeat-text, then, implies a new kind of authorial gaze upon the characters, with attention to levels of excitement manifested upon their bodies. This new protocol of modernist representation, from the start, encompasses more than the heart: it notes many signs of nervousness, excitability, tension—which would later be known as stress, or, which, in another register, Yeats called

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“passionate intensity.”21 Ulysses attends more to the physiologically registered signs of tension and excitement than to the stream-of-­ consciousness thoughts of Bloom and others, although the two are carried on together. This radical turn in the literary representation of subjectivity may have been an Irish innovation. Its origins are to be found less in the usual manifestations of Irish culture, which dealt all too contentedly in the realm of symbols and their often-hackneyed resonance, than in the discourse that was most suspicious of symbolic or “magic” knowledge: that of science. The crucial modernist development of Joyce’s prose, its particular physiological cast—with its attention to nervous ticks, signs of tension, stress, and, above all, of heart rate—had as its scientific precursor Irish Victorian discoveries in cardiology, as well as the assumptions that enabled them and the conditions out of which they were made. Similarly, the attention to symptoms of physical excitement that are a remarkable feature of Ulysses was foreshadowed by the specific focus on such signs of physical excitement and agitation that was a feature of nineteenth-century innovative Irish medicine. Modernist Irish literature is in fact bracketed by the work of two famous Irish doctors, Sir William Wilde and Oliver St. John Gogarty, who turn out to share a surgical specialization: otolaryngology, or the study of diseases of the ear, nose, and throat. Wilde (1815–1876) was not only a famous and notorious doctor, the greatest eye and ear surgeon in Dublin in his day, and author of a textbook on aural surgery, but also a formidable early Irish folklore collector, an indefatigable publisher of the ancient Irish manuscript collections of the Royal Irish Academy, and the author of Irish Popular Superstitions (1852). He was honored for his work on the Irish census of 1851, itself a pioneering work in epidemiological statistics collection.22 Since this was the first census after the Famine, Wilde exemplifies how Irish Victorian medical science crossed over into medical administration of whole populations. As editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, he distributed to the doctors of Ireland in 1848 a long questionnaire on the impact of the Famine; the replies are a major source of information on the event as a public health catastrophe.23 Wilde was also the

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husband of Speranza, the early Nation newspaper Gaelic Revival poet, and both were the parents of Oscar Wilde. Since Speranza, along with James Clarence Mangan, might be thought of as the bridge between an older Irish antiquarianism and the subsequent Literary Revival, and since Oscar Wilde is almost undoubtedly the greatest Dublin writer in English before Joyce and thus the precursor to full-bore Irish modernism, William Wilde, doctor, folklorist, and medical epidemiologist stands at the entrance to the two main strands of the Revival in Ireland. Wilde’s presence at this strategic nexus suggests the medical and epidemiological realities (the attention to the fate of the human body, especially as the result of the Famine) that might have been obscured in the Celtic Revival, but never ceased to haunt it. A controversial figure in the prehistory of the Revival, he planted in the agenda of the Revival its basic interest in bodies and in the state of the national body.24 Seizing the advantages of his particular position in Irish midcentury history and culture, he rendered medicine, and its insights, as the first term of the Celtic Revival. If Wilde is positioned at the start of both the Celtic Revival and Irish modernism, Oliver St. John Gogarty may be said to have been present at its highest point, and to have accompanied it to its end.25 Like Wilde, this ear, nose, and throat surgeon became one of the most famous doctors in Dublin, known for his yellow Rolls-Royce, for his literary connections to George Moore, Yeats, and Joyce, who represents him as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Gogarty, like Wilde, was a prolific writer: his play Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin showed him to be concerned with issues of public health and the city slums. His As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1935) breathes the louche breath of late modernism; a notable figure of the new Irish Free State, he attended Arthur Griffith in his last illness and sheltered Michael Collins in his house in Ely Place. And, as we shall see, he plays a pivotal role in the first episode of Ulysses, as the figure of the doctor, the bearer of the medical gaze upon life, whose intelligence the Irish artist Stephen Dedalus must reckon with if he is to be fully modernist. If these two famous doctors bracket the Celtic Revival and Ireland’s high modernist period, they do so because of their literal proximity to the figures

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involved, and their direct influence upon them. Their presence urges us to see that the matter of medicine was strangely pivotal in modern Irish literature. James McGachie, among others, speaks of the “heyday of the Dublin clinical school between the 1820s and the 1880s.”26 This was the great era of Dublin medicine. It was, McGachie notes, the period in Dublin when the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy was replaced in the mansions of Merrion Square by the new upper bourgeoisie of barristers and doctors. It was also the era when a new regime of clinical medicine, developed in Vienna and Paris and learned by many of the Irish doctors in the medical schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was imported into Ireland, and modern medical practices were put in place. Until recently, historians have narrated this phenomenon as an unproblematic story of “the great physicians of the past.”27 The relation between the undeniable burst of medical research in Ireland, the crisis of the Famine, and the rise through the century of a national apparatus of public health, with the dispensary system, workhouses, hospitals, and institutions remains largely untheorized. Hence an opportunity presents itself: to imagine plausible frameworks for this connection, as a basis for considering how the new knowledge generated in Victorian Irish medicine is a necessary prelude, and perhaps the enabling leap forward in awareness, that made possible some of the discoveries regarding the individual physical and the social body (the new notions of individual subjective and social well-being) that would be a hallmark of the Irish modernism to come. This scientific observation was a feature of much medical work across Europe in the period, especially following the invention of the stethoscope by René Laennec in Paris in 1816. The stethoscope was a listening device, modeled on the ear trumpet: it was a technology that divined changes to the internal body through listening to it.28 At the same time, Laennec chose the name of his instrument as a compound of the Greek words for “chest” and “I view”; the listening post enabled a kind of viewing of the interior of the energetic body.29 That body’s pathologies, heard and implicitly seen, could then be seen further in the other medical practice that became common in this period: the

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autopsy, the viewing in scientific detail of the inner organs of the dead body. This was the milieu of the scientific medical gaze described by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic.30 While Foucault’s attention is focused overwhelmingly on French medicine, the autopsy, especially after the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed unclaimed corpses in workhouses and hospitals to be used for dissection, also became key to British and Irish medical advances. Gray’s Anatomy, for example, was first published in 1858.31 In the opening of Ulysses, the medical student Buck Mulligan refers to this aspect of Irish medicine when he tells Stephen: “I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else.”32 This newly clinical version of the medical gaze therefore had a notably international, or at least Western, reach. It is worth considering how, in Ireland, a provincial, even colonial territory on the edge of Europe, such innovative expertise in relation to heart disease arose. Or, to shift our inquiry: Why was there such particular attention to the beating heart in nineteenth-century Ireland? One answer: the new clinical medicine’s focus on direct observation—of pulse rates and of tremors, for example—matched not only the limited resources, especially for treating the poor, in Ireland, but also the stereotype, developed and encouraged by the colonialist perspective, of a particular kind of Irish excitability. To consider this excitability leads us directly to the fraught issue of mental illness in Irish medical and social history. Such illness too involved in the first instance the observation of unlikely tremors, gestures, impulses, and spasms. If, with the aid of such observation, scientific advances, especially in the area of heart disease, was the high point of research advances in nineteenth-century Irish medicine, then it was in the area of psychiatry that the extensive clinical and residential apparatus that was equally a feature of Victorian Irish medical practice, was set in place. However, if physiological diagnosis, through intense observation of tremors and pulse rates, led to dramatic advances in the understanding of heart diseases, the actual understanding of mental illness (as opposed to the incarceration of those judged ill) advanced hardly at all. The same medical histories that feature portraits of the

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“great doctors” also feature photographs of the enormous asylums that by the end of the nineteenth century had been built all over Ireland, from Ballinasloe in Galway to Portrane in Dublin.33 At the same time, the boundaries between psychiatry and physiology were porous. The understanding of diseases such as tuberculosis, for example, was still influenced by the old theory of “humors,” and the notion that there might be a “tubercular type.” The increasing committal rates to the “lunatic wards” of the new mid-century workhouses or the new “mental hospitals” meant that the belief that the Irish seemed to have some the highest rates of mental illness in the developed world, high rates of alcoholism, and reputedly high rates of syphilis always haunted discussions of the subject.34 Clearly, visions of Irish madness relate to the colonial stereotype of the “Irish Paddy” as savage, prone to violence, and uncontrollable.35 To the extent that the observation of Irish nervousness entered Irish modernism, the image of the mad (as well as savage) Irish person still haunts modern Irish literature. To cite some key figures in nineteenth-century Irish medicine, and the medical phenomena named in honor of each, will clarify the stakes of these developments. Consider first “Stokes-Adams Syndrome,” a sudden loss of consciousness, during which normal breathing continues, when the heart temporarily ceases to pump blood. It can last from a minute to a day and is heralded by twitching and a pumping heart. The condition is named after two Dublin doctors, Robert Adams (1791–1875) and William Stokes (1804–77). Adams was a surgeon at Jervis Street and Richmond Hospitals, and his most famous work was Diseases of the Heart.36 Stokes in 1825 wrote one of the first treatises in English on the stethoscope, which he may be said to have introduced to Ireland. In 1854 he wrote Diseases of the Heart and Aorta, which dealt especially with heart murmurs, and was soon translated into French, German, and Italian.37 His work on lung disease led to the discovery of “Stokes-Cheyne respiration,” named for him and John Cheyne of the Meath Hospital, a form of apnea in which the patient gradually breathes less and less perceptibly until she appears not to be breathing at all, followed by a “paroxysm of breathing.”38 Stokes shared with William Wilde, his neighbor on Merrion Square, a passion for Irish

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antiquities; he wrote a book on his friend George Petrie, the head of the topographic section of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, The Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie, in 1868. A friend of Stokes and fellow-pioneer in the introduction of the modern method of clinical observation to Ireland, Robert James Graves (1796–1853), after adventures in Europe, became famous for his much translated Clinical Lectures on the Practice of Medicine of 1843.39 His innovations included taking the patient’s pulse rate accurately with the aid of a watch. Noted for his observations on the relation between palpitations and thyroidism, “Graves’ Disease,” or hyperthyroidism, was named after him. Here, again, close clinical observation of physical movement—whether of the pulse rate or of palpitations—was the basis of diagnosis. Every notable advancement made by nineteenth-century Irish doctors was based on a clear-eyed clinical observation of the movements, subtle or otherwise, of their patient’s physical bodies. This modus was continued in the work of the most distinguished of this group, Sir Dominic Corrigan (1802–1880). Corrigan’s career follows a path shared by most of these figures, from training in Edinburgh to success in Dublin, a practice in Merrion Square, and a gothic villa in Dalkey. First barred from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, he became its first Catholic president in 1859. Elected to the British Parliament as a Liberal in 1870, he was celebrated for his treatment of the poor and his concern for public health, especially during the Great Famine. He too was best known for his expertise in pulmonary medicine, giving his name to a series of diagnostic signs and treatments, the most famous of which is “Corrigan’s pulse.” “Corrigan’s pulse” is a highly noticeable distention, followed by a quick collapse, of the carotid artery, visible as a strongly throbbing pulse in the lower neck. It is a sign that blood, after being pumped from the left ventricle of the heart, returns there because of a defective aorta valve.40 Also known as the “water-hammer pulse,” “Corrigan’s pulse” is the most dramatic in a long line of symptoms carefully described and understood by doctors in Victorian Ireland. In most cases, these symptoms involved changes in respiration or rate and force of heartbeat, visible as movements upon the patient’s body. Often, their meaning came

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to be understood only through autopsies. However, they were almost all symptoms of what might be thought of as an overactive aliveness: slowed breathing, a tremor of the arm, throbbing arteries. Progress in medicine in nineteenth-century Ireland, in other words, relied on a clinical attentiveness to degrees of aliveness, to subtle symptoms of changes in bodily energies interpreted as signs of disease. To the extent that this clinical mindset entered Irish literature, the obvious entry point is Joyce’s Ulysses. Consider that prior to figures such as Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, Irish nineteenth-century medicine may have been the only field for which Ireland had a truly international reputation. Joyce, who himself attempted in 1903–4 medical studies in Dublin and then in Paris, was aware of this heritage; Ulysses has more references to Dublin doctors and hospitals than almost any other Irish novel.41 “Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial bust,” for example, which Bloom notices as the funeral carriage passes it in “Hades,” commemorates another Victorian Dublin doctor, Surgeon-General Sir Philip Crampton, chair of the Famine-era Central Heath Board, which caused an outcry when it recommended that doctors treating famine fevers be paid five shillings a day.42 Joyce may even have chosen 7 Eccles Street as the home of the Blooms because at its other end is the Mater Hospital (which Bloom recalls as the place he went to have a bee sting removed). However, it is the presence of Buck Mulligan as the first character we meet in the book, which ensures that Ulysses’ attention to medicine, and specifically the clinical protocols of Irish medicine, is not merely part of the novel’s Dublin background, but utterly integral to its project of rethinking modern subjectivity tout court. If this rethinking is central to Joyce’s modernism, then the medical perspective—in particular the set of clinical protocols developed in Dublin hospitals—stands as one largely unacknowledged precursor for Joyce’s revolutionary mode. In “Telemachus,” Ulysses’ first episode, the artistic idealism of Stephen, whose successive disenchantments had been charted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are now faced off against the scientific—specifically medical and clinical—outlook of Buck Mulligan. Ulysses’ opening shows us Stephen being presented with two choices

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for his artistic path: he can become a Celtic Revival Irish poet (a path presented to him, with bitter irony, by the British liberal Haines), or he can become a complacent Irish bourgeois (a path to which he is being invited by Mulligan). The scorn heaped on Mulligan here is, interestingly, born of class resentment. This scorn should nevertheless not blind us to the fact that, as Mulligan and Stephen parry on the roof of the Martello tower, Stephen acknowledges the truth of his friend’s position. (Gogarty, far from being upset by Joyce’s representation of him, should have grasped the enormous compliment being paid to him by Ireland’s greatest writer). Mulligan, medical student, brings the earthy and fleshy note into the novel, telling Stephen decisively to “chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.”43 This retreads the most salient epiphanic moments in A Portrait—for example, when, having crossed the Tolka Bridge, the young Stephen decides not to become a priest, and to instead offer tribute to the “vegetable life” literally represented by the laborer in a market garden.44 Now, he refuses once again the spirituality and the ghost-worship represented by his dead mother, as well as the whole “cracked lookingglass of a servant” mentality of modern Irish identity.45 Instead, he embraces Mulligan’s cynical and body-centered realism: the latter’s open desire for money (“touch him for a guinea”), his class and political analysis (“his old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus”), his laughter at the Irish heritage, especially the Irish language (“Is there Gaelic on you?”), but above all his clinical attitude to life and death, to human life itself.46 Mulligan’s references to the dissecting rooms in the Mater and Richmond Hospitals mark the arrival into the novel, at its very opening, of the medical outlook, and the clinical perspective developed by the great nineteenth-century Irish doctors. This perspective is confirmed by Stephen soon after, in the denouement of the “Telemachiad,” when he declares himself committed to “the ineluctable modality of the visible,” in a phrase that may be the most brilliant defense of the clinical method ever written.47 It announces that the medical gaze will henceforth be the basis of Stephen’s art, Joyce’s style, and, therefore, the very method of Irish literary modernism.

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It is apt, then, that while the ideology of the clinical gaze is being promulgated by Mulligan and accepted by Stephen in the first episode, there is a determined effort to show it in action there as well. Here the heart returns to our story. At the very end of A Portrait, to which the “Telemachiad” of Ulysses is a sequel, Joyce had given us in a final flourish, one of his most direct—one might say, Yeatsian—uses of the shopworn heart metaphor: Mother is putting my new second-hand-clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends, what the heart is and what it feels.48

Here, the heart metaphor is attributed to Stephen’s mother; at the opening of Ulysses, we see that Stephen had listened well to his mother’s words, for, when he is insensitively broached by Mulligan about her recent death, we hear that “Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left on his heart, said very coldly. . . .”49 Those “gaping wounds,” too, push the old heart metaphor toward hints of irony (Stephen as the Sacred Heart, perhaps), yet the sentence cites the shopworn metaphor. This heart-as-metaphor here joins a long litany of the materials of his craft—the Irish language, the heritage of the Greeks, the liberalism of some British masters of Ireland, the pose of Wilde, the love of his mother—that Joyce invokes and to which he bids a ceremonial farewell in this opening chapter of the novel. Already, in this chapter, we see the heart’s use as metaphor being replaced by a new kind of scientific, medical attention to the body. As Mulligan mimics a priest at mass, he does not simply parody the priest’s Latin as he engages in the transubstantiation of the wine into the body and blood of Christ, but casts himself as transformed into a wonderworker scientist. He says, “For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble with the white corpuscles. Silence, all.”50 Here, he begins as the priest and ends as a variety-show magician-scientist. He opens with “body and soul and blood and ouns” (“blood and ouns” being archaic slang for the “blood and wounds of Christ), keywords from the language of Catholic theology,

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which also happen to be keywords for emotion, feeling, and meaning in Western literature. He then arrives at his scientific conclusion: “a little trouble about those white corpuscles.” Transforming himself from joker priest to showman scientist, Mulligan forgoes Christian transubstantiation for the making of life by means of new medical discoveries. In opening his book with this scene, Joyce is announcing that he too will move from the register of the “soul” to the register of “the white corpuscles.” A new medical gaze is to be the book’s representational baseline. How this will work itself out page by page in the novel is signaled at once. In his initial descriptions of Mulligan, as seen by Stephen, the text turns to an exaggerated metaphoricity: we hear of his “light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.”51 The simile seems excessive. It is only by the end of the first page that Joyce hits his writerly stride in the new idiom: “A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.”52 This is the kind of apparently unassuming sentence that one can skip over in Ulysses, but it epitomizes the very grain of the text, its medical gaze. It is not “He smiled,” or “He smiled pleasantly,” or even, “His face broke out in a smile.” Instead, the text attends to the exact feature where the smile broke “quietly”—his lips. This specificity about body parts and their transformation becomes the text’s hallmark and the key innovation of Joyce’s new kind of mimetic text. In it, human movements are scientifically observed. This sentence has its equivalent on many pages of the novel. It soon becomes a stylistic signature, the tendency not to describe the gesture of the whole body, but rather to exactly delineate the movement of the body part. We can see the move from whole-body description to attention to extremities in such a loose-limbed, but particular, sentence as the following in episode 5: “While his eyes still read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair.”53 This is the choreographer’s notation of Bloom’s movement in a moment of distraction. Or, in a famous later example regarding Molly: “A generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.”54 This technique owes something to the cinema camerawork that had recently been invented

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when Joyce wrote the novel: the close-up. To a criticism searching for a traditional subject, it betokens an abdication of regard for the character’s full agency. Above all, it makes the novel seem analogous to an artist’s or a medical text on human musculature, in which the limbs, in movement, have their torsion delineated and their mechanics described. This focus on specific limbs and their apparently autonomous capacity for movement—and not just the hands, arms, and ever-­ walking feet but, more subtly, Mulligan’s smile-twisted lips, Bloom’s eyes, “under their drooped lids,” and the like—merely marks, however, the first level of Ulysses’ medical gaze upon its characters.55 It matches well with the famous sensuousness of Ulysses’ style, which is to say, the book’s attention to the exact results of careful perception by each of the five senses. Consider Bloom’s extraordinarily empathetic stream of consciousness about the life without sight of the blind stripling: “Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring, the summer, smells. Tastes?”56 This is a manifesto in the text for its unprecedentedly accurate rendering of a myriad of sense impressions. When Bloom remembers his encounter with Molly sixteen years before on the Hill of Howth, for example, he can still record the exact sense impression of her lips: “soft warm sticky gumjelly lips.”57 Molly, as we’ve seen earlier, can remember that on the same occasion “his heart was going like mad.”58 This sensual exactitude, at a level never before attempted in literature, is in turn the basis on which there enters the novel a further, even more subtle record gleaned from the medical gaze. This further exact recording of the signs of bodily energy is the annotation not just of the movements of the character’s limbs, independent or otherwise, or of the record of perception of each of their senses, accurate as both are constantly in the text. It consists instead of a seam of textual attention to the tremors, shudders, and blushes, the rates of batting eyelids, of limps and lurches, shy looks, and even changes in body temperature, of every character.59 These annotations of tremors and tics richly populate the text, and are offered not as an annotation of traits

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of character, or of a rounded subjectivity, but instead as a minute-byminute annotation of what we might call the characters’ well-being. This well-being record turns out, often, to be attentive to the ebb and flow of each character’s level of human energy. Early in the novel, one can see the author experimenting with how he will represent this. For example, when Bloom is returning to his house in “Calypso,” we hear that “a cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” This leads Bloom to some depressing thoughts. Then, we get a one-word, one-paragraph sentence that may describe his state of mind, or his well-being: “Desolation.” Next, with some stream-of-consciousness interventions, the text wishes to explain this term, as follows: “Grey horror seared his flesh. . . . Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling the blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. . . . Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises.”60 This grandiloquently poetic version of how he felt (“grey horror seared”) is unmistakably attentive to his physical well-being rather than to his thoughts, yet its vehemence urges us toward an almost existential reading, rather than one that merely takes stock of Bloom’s physiological state at that moment. Moments later, however, we hear Bloom on how the weather feels—implying he sweats, if slightly, in his black suit: “Rather warm. . . . So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and hair.”61 This involuntary, unconscious movement is Irish nervousness in action, minutely described. One might suggest that this obsessive attention to recording exact human movements is the logical conclusion of a novelistic project begun in works such as Madame Bovary, continued in Victorian sensation fiction, and upheld in a line of highbrow Romantic, pre-Raphaelite and Decadent writing, from John Keats’s lyric poems to Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885), Joris-Karl Huysman’s Au Rebours (1884), and in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—all popularized by the turn of the twentieth century in new pop-culture forms such as the crime story. However, all of this does not quite account for the extraordinary encyclopedic attention to physical movement and our perception of it, to subtle physical signs, and above all to the trembles, tics, belches that are in Joyce’s novel the endless building blocks of character. To account for this relentlessly

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attentive body-movement and symptom monitoring, we have to envisage a new rapprochement between science—specifically, the value of scientific observation—and literature that is being staged in Ulysses. Joyce is not a mere post-Decadent, even if he ostentatiously acknowledges his debt to Wilde in the first pages of Ulysses. However, he does take from the Decadents their sensualism, and he reencodes it as a new way to monitor the subjectivity of every citizen (as opposed to the privileged aesthete) in modernity. He does this as a one-time medical student in Paris himself, and as the son of a person who attempted but never completed medical school, by taking his cue from the great tradition of nineteenth-century Irish medicine. The result of this inheritance is seen in Ulysses’ attention to the heart. Signs of heart malfunction that are visible in bodily tics and tremors are the key discoveries of nineteenth-century Irish medicine: witness Corrigan’s pulse. In Ulysses, the heart becomes the key to the novel in its two most important scenes. The first is that moment at the end of “Lestrygonians” when Bloom by chance sees Boylan, his nemesis, walking toward him along Kildare Street: His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right. . . . The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute. No. Didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate. My heart!62

With this scene, as Franco Moretti pointed out, everything could have changed in the story if Bloom had reacted differently—if he had confronted Boylan, for example.63 The book becomes, from this moment on, a novel about cowardice. And it sets up, in place of decisive action, the dialectic of looking (“Didn’t see me”) crossed with the excitement of heart palpitations. It is not quite Corrigan’s pulse, but it might as well be. Bloom is alive, but his well-being is shattered. He has just recently, drinking his glass of burgundy in Davy Byrne’s, been thinking of Molly and himself sixteen years before on the Hill of Howth: “Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips.”64 Yet it is at this moment

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at the end of episode 8 that Bloom’s refusal to act detaches the novel from the claims of conventional narrative and substitutes instead a full delineation of tics, heartbeats, blushes, and tremblings as the way in which we are allowed to get the measure of Bloom’s well-being. At this point, the protocols of the Irish nineteenth-century medicoclinical gaze become the literary modus of modern Irish fiction. These medical-gaze protocols also, it might be claimed, become the bedrock of Joyce’s subsequent modernist-experimental styles, which had been practiced earlier in the text, especially in the headlines of “Aeolus,” but which come into full view only after the crux scene in “Lestrygonians.” The point is this: Joyce does not merely wish to represent his characters’ physiological well-being page by page, but he wishes his readers to experience them as well, through the act of reading the text itself. Thus, the novel’s increasingly ambitious experiments in style, while they might appear to impede the intensely mimetic representation of subtle tics, signs of excitement and the shaky rhythms of a trembling limb, in fact allow the reader not only to be shown, but to actually experience, something like the symptom being described. For example, when Bloom’s mounting anger in the “Cyclops” episode is not annotated directly for us as readers but rather is transmitted to us through a two-channel double-telling that alternates between lowbrow storytelling and grandiloquent mythmaking, our own frustration at enduring these shifts, as we force ourselves to go with the flow, becomes a reading experience that matches in its irritation the irritation that Bloom also increasingly feels. Reading itself, in other words, becomes a somatic experience, just as the text is itself primarily attuned to the character’s somatic lives. This too is in keeping with the protocols of medical observation advocated by the nineteenthcentury doctors. Their medicine did not care about family romance plots, about motivations, or about storytelling—and neither does the great Irish modernist novel. By the end, Bloom’s life is not seen as a tragedy: the fact that he has maintained his well-being, as it seems has Molly, is enough. If Ulysses is the striking conduit through which much of the learning of the nineteenth-century Irish medical profession was siphoned

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into the sensibility of Irish modernist writing, we may ask whether this new sensibility and its radical outlook on life itself continue to develop in Irish writing. First, note that there were other works by Irish writers in the new century that explicitly considered medicine: George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma was first staged in 1906, and one of the founders of urban pulp modernity in fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a doctor of Irish descent. Wilde’s medical connections are also significant. However, it is through Joyce that the medical gaze most thoroughly entered Irish writing. As such, its greatest influence has been on Beckett, whose pared-down, minimalist clinical approach, focusing on the needs of the body and its movements, gestures, and desires as an antidote to any sentimental narrative, is a worthy successor to Joyce’s own. Joyce’s unwavering gaze upon the twitching and trembling body has also proved useful for the most radical Irish writers, especially writers on the lives and well-being of women, such as Edna O’Brien. That said, we must acknowledge too that much Irish poetry and fiction still looks to William Wordsworth and George Eliot rather than to Joyce. Therefore, let us end with a challenge: the legacy of Corrigan’s pulse in Irish literature still continues to beckon and still needs to be taken up.

Sassenachs and Their Syphilization The Irish Revival, Deanglicization, and Eugenics Alan Graham

In the Irish cultural context, eugenics tends to be exclusively associated with the late career of W. B. Yeats. The poet’s musings on the benefits this hazardous pseudoscience holds for his native country form the basis of the highly problematic On the Boiler, published in 1938, in which Yeats stridently argues that “since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs,” and that “many men in Irish public life should not have been taught to read and write.”1 More than senile pamphleteering, Yeats’s fascination with the discourse of eugenics increasingly informed the composition of poems and dramas during this period; “The Statues,” “A Bronze Head,” “The Old Stone Cross,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Under Ben Bulben,” and other poems mourn the “filthy modern tide” of the city and its philistine and increasingly politicized working classes and espouse the corrective need to “fill the cradles right.”2 Similarly, Purgatory, recognized as one of Yeats’s major dramatic achievements, takes as its key theme the perceived enervation of the pedigree of the poet’s beloved Anglo-Irish. In treating his interest in eugenics and his involvement in eugenicist networks as the property of the final decade of his life, scholars have tended to portray Yeats’s fascination with these dangerous ideas as a “flirtation.”3 In his influential study of eugenics and literary modernism, Donald Childs has corrected this view somewhat by demonstrating that Yeats’s engagement with international eugenic 203

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circles can be traced to the early 1900s, yet a broader dimension to a Yeatsian eugenicism, which I wish to consider here, has largely been ignored.4 Although some commentators have observed that the poet’s interest in eugenics reflects “something fundamental and relatively constant about . . . [his] conceptualization of the nation,” critics have neglected to examine not only how the toxic convictions of Yeats’s late career were shared by those with whom he constituted the firmament of the Irish Revival but, more significantly, how the emergence and growth of eugenicist thought in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, especially in Britain, shaped the cultural nationalism of the high Revival period and beyond.5 This essay explores the influence of eugenics on the ideology of the Irish Revival. In particular, I examine here the eugenically inspired rhetoric of deanglicization, the philosophy of cultural self-sufficiency developed by Douglas Hyde in the 1890s, which had a major bearing on the key Irish writers of the era, among them Yeats, J. M. Synge, and George Russell. The chapter outlines the purchase of eugenic thought in the nationally minded work of these writers and considers the ironic exposure of such thinking in James Joyce’s virulent critique of revivalism in Ulysses. I conclude by tracing the eugenic echoes of deanglicization in public policy thinking in the early decades of the Irish Free State. In this way, this chapter considers how potent narratives of Irish identity fostered since the late nineteenth century intersect with a “science” devoted to “improvement, progress, [and] the creation of superior types of humanity.”6 The multifaceted debate in Ireland concerning cultural identity at the close of the nineteenth century exemplified the rise of ethnic nationalism across the European continent. During this period, ethnolinguistic principles began to take precedence over civic and constitutional understandings of the nation, as nationalists increasingly turned to the sense of an indisputable cultural authenticity available in ethnic identity and, most especially, in native languages. This transformation of nationalist thought privileged race as the discourse by which the concept of nation was now constituted, establishing “a nationalist political ideology linked to explicit ethno-cultural

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and linguistic demands.”7 In its fetishization of the Irish language as a sign of and portal to a prelapsarian Irish identity, what came to be known as the Irish Revival facilitated the emergence of a distinctly Irish ethnic nationalism in the final decades of the nineteenth century comparable to the flowering of similar regional nationalisms across Europe. Indeed, as Mark Suzman has demonstrated, the most comparable ideological contexts for the Revival movement can be found in the development of Zionist and Afrikaner nationalisms during the same period by which socially liminal “folk” languages were relocated in nationalist thought as nuclei of national identity (one of the reasons for the especially emboldening effect of the Boer War of 1899–1902 on contemporaneous cultural and political rhetoric and activism in Ireland). As Suzman has cogently argued, the Revival similarly provided cultural debate in Ireland with a clear and concrete sense of Irish ethnicity and established “the foundations for a genuine mass, ethnic movement” in Ireland by the beginning of the twentieth century.8 The insistence on an ontology of an Irish race is the central tenet of what can best lay claim to being the manifesto of the Irish Cultural Revival: Douglas Hyde’s “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” delivered first as a speech to the National Literary Society on November 25, 1892, in Dublin’s Leinster House. In this landmark address (later published as an essay), Hyde outlined what he saw as the central malady afflicting turn-of-the-century Irish cultural consciousness: “how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house—how it continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them.”9 His clear-sighted prescription for rectifying this dysfunction rests on the recuperative facility of Ireland’s native language, its power to return Irish culture to its source: “In order to de-Anglicize ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the [Irish] language.”10 In this profession of faith in the inescapable link between language and national identity, Hyde affirms what he sees as the irrefutable truth that, “in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core.”11 He

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concludes with a passionate plea to the Irish public to awaken to the national imperative which this racial conception of identity demands: “I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best . . . to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines  .  .  . upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore—one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe.”12 Hyde’s philosophy of deanglicization, which would underwrite the cultural nationalism of the Revival period and the state that followed, facilitated the privileging of race in the Irish cultural imagination, giving birth to “the new existence of a shared ethnic consciousness amongst the Irish people,”13 and fostering a “deep racial antipathy” toward the colonial parent.14 Key to this success was not only the emphasis deanglicization placed on the cultural distinctiveness conferred by a native language, but, equally, if not more so, its identification of what the perilous condition of the language in turn-of-the-century Ireland meant for the coherence of Irish culture. In this way, the ideological positioning of the Irish language in revivalist rhetoric forcefully articulated anxieties throughout late Victorian societies concerning cultural, and also genetic, vitality. It is arguably no coincidence that the development from language preservation, the impulse behind eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish antiquarianism, to language “revival” in the late Victorian period occurred in the shadow of “one of the major intellectual changes characterizing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . the growth of social Darwinist thought.”15 The transformation of what was a “largely uncritical, often speculative” philological exercise into a charged discourse of nation is perceptible in the attitudinal shift among language activists in relation to the language itself during the course of the nineteenth century: what had been for earlier antiquarians the task of archiving and, hopefully, preserving a dying “Gaelic” had by the end of the century become the national objective of resurrecting “Irish” and the promise of cultural vitality which it harbored.16 Hyde’s lament in the “De-Anglicization” speech concerning the “decay” of the language and its cultural imprint

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on turn-of-the century Irish society metaphorizes the slow death of Ireland’s native language as the impending extinction of Irish ethnicity itself. This is indexed in the telling racial analogy he effects in his critique of the anglicization of Irish place-names, comparing this to the manner in which “vulgar English squatters treat the topographical nomenclature of the Red Indians.”17 Certainly, as Joseph Lennon has observed, Hyde’s parallel “manufacture[s] and strengthen[s]” affinities between Ireland and other colonized cultures.18 Yet, as a racial fable widely adopted in cultural debate in Ireland during the period (its currency is perhaps indicated by its use in Joyce’s juvenile essay “Force”), the comparison is especially pointed in the manner in which it evokes the specter of an annihilation that Hyde and other revivalists see Ireland facing at the close of the nineteenth century—the “west Briton­ ism . . . [that] will overwhelm us like a flood.”19 It is this fixation with cultural disintegration and extinction, reversible through the vitalization of the Irish language to civic life, that is the chief legacy of the Revival in the Irish imagination. In this, the deanglicization philosophy, and revivalism in general, directly engaged with the eugenic ideologies engulfing nationalist thought in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, most especially the discourse of “degeneration” that, by the time Hyde delivered the “De-Anglicization” speech, was reaching an apex in its purchase on public consciousness. In addition to a variety of popular eugenic publications that appeared in the years and months leading up to Hyde’s landmark address—including Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal in 1890, the English translation of Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo di genio (Man of Genius) in 1891, and the keenly anticipated second edition of Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in 1892—Max Nordau’s Degeneration, published just a few months prior to Hyde’s address in 1892, had an especial influence on political and cultural debate in turn-of-thecentury Europe in stimulating interest in the reading habits of the population as an indicator of cultural health. In particular, Nordau frames a eugenic trepidation concerning the newspaper as not only an index but a widely circulating agent of cultural and, bizarrely, genetic, decay: “If he do but read his paper . . . he takes part, certainly not by

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interference or influence, but by a continuous and receptive curiosity in the thousand events which take place in all parts of the globe . . . [which] involve[s] an effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue . . . the constant expectation of the newspaper . . . [which] costs our brain wear and tear.”20 In many respects, Hyde’s analysis of the cultural condition of turn-of-the-century Irish society and his sanitizing remedy of Gaelicization demonstrates “the remarkable grip” of the degeneracy cult on cultural thought in Europe during the period.21 One of the key complaints Hyde levels at Irish cultural behavior is the forsaking of reading classical literature, a demise in cultural standards that he sees as responsible for widespread intellectual impotency: “We must be struck by . . . [how] one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe . . . how one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary, and how the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth are now only distinguished by their hideousness.”22 The employment here of a distinctly somatic lexicon in the conviction that the “quickness,” “sensitivity,” and “artistic” veracity of the classicist has a dysgenic corollary in the “hideousness” of the “unliterary” strikingly resonates with Nordau’s insistence on the genetic damage (“the wearing of tissue”) inflicted by devotion to the newspaper. The genetic subtext of “degenerationist”23 thought is also discernible in Hyde’s assertions that “euphonious Irish names” have been reduced to “English monosyllables” and native nomenclature “shamefully corrupted” in order to “suit English ears”24 (echoed in Yeats’s later distain for the “commonest ear”).25 Hyde concludes his plea for the cultural reawakening of Ireland by launching a visceral assault on English tabloid publications of the day that excite and proliferate the degeneracy besetting Irish society, arguing for “the necessity for encouraging the use of Anglo-Irish literature instead of English books, especially instead of English periodicals. We must set our face sternly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and still more, the garbage of the vulgar English weeklies like Bow Bells and the Police Intelligence. Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis.”26 In

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the same vein, Yeats’s preface to Hyde’s hugely popular The Love Songs of Connacht (1893)—a bilingual collection of traditional Irish poems— praises the author for “writ[ing] in Irish, or in that beautiful English of the country people who remember too much Irish to talk like a newspaper.”27 Indeed, so potent was the influence of eugenic anxieties concerning the materiality of turn-of-the-century society that by the early 1900s English popular culture had become associated in revivalist thought not merely with cultural coarseness but also with genetic hygiene, Irish nationalists convinced that “the smutty postcards, the lewd plays . . . the full sewerage from the cloaca maxima of Anglicization is now discharged upon us.”28 The eugenic undercurrents of deanglicization were concretized in the work of many of the figures who would come to dominate the Irish Revival. This is traceable in a fetishization of both physical disability and capacity that Marion Quirici has identified in much revivalist writing, pointing to the iconoclastic conclusion to Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), for example, whereby the lame old woman’s transformation into a young girl with “the walk of a queen”29 provides “a revolutionary symbol of rejuvenation and rehabilitation.”30 Scholars have also identified the ideological traffic between Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and turn-of-the-century anxieties concerning heredity, discernible not only in the play’s thematic preoccupation with patricide but also in the apprehensiveness concerning the quality of offspring that might be produced by the wrong marriage: “I’d liefer face the grave untimely . . . than go peopling my bedside with puny weeds the like of what you’d breed.”31 This concern with national vitality was not always so symbolically couched. In “The Building up of a Rural Civilization” (1912) George Russell proposes that native speakers of Irish should be exhibited in town squares throughout the country in the understanding that such “beautiful and healthy persons” provide a genetic antidote to the “unhealthy and ugly” inhabitants of the urbanized and anglicized parts of Ireland. Such an exercise, it is understood, is fundamental to national self-determination: “To aspire to have a nation of people like these is the right aspiration of a great

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nationality.”32 In critical accounts of the eugenicism of the late Yeats career, scholars have neglected this markedly eugenic aspect of revivalist ideology and have focused instead on the problematic material we see the poet reading in the 1920s and 1930s. Critics have tended to agree, for example, that Raymond Cattell’s The Fight for National Intelligence (1937) was the “book on eugenics which most deeply impressed Yeats”33 and one which supplied him with “the ammunition”34 for On the Boiler, apparent in his assertion there that the cultural decay of the nation is “already visible in the degeneration of literature, newspapers, amusements.”35 Undoubtedly, Cattell’s influential book disseminates ideas that are “strikingly congruent to Yeats’s own,” yet the critical insistence on Cattell’s impact on the poet’s interest in eugenics fails to calculate the much earlier and arguably much more formative influence of late Victorian Irish cultural politics on the evolution of Yeats’s thought.36 Assertions that Yeats “found in [eugenics] a scientific diagnosis of modernity that complemented his own intuitive diagnosis” neglect the extent to which the poet’s “intuition” was forged in the eugenically marked ideological milieu of the Irish Revival.37 A revivalist eugenicism is unforgivingly parodied in the “Cyclops” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the politics of which, as Len Platt has demonstrated, revolve around resistance to revivalist narratives of identity. Yet, in adroitly arguing that “Cyclops,” and the novel in general, exposes “the national culture . . . as an ideology,” Platt fails to take account of the episode’s clear-sighted exposure of the eugenic conceptions underwriting the pieties of cultural nationalism.38 Joyce’s critique of an Irish eugenic discourse in “Cyclops” functions chiefly through the archetypal figure who dominates proceedings: “the citizen,” famously modeled on Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association (an organization praised in the “De-­ Anglicization” speech as those “brave and patriotic men” who resurrected traditional Irish games from “a most grievous condition”).39 The benefit of such cultural crusading to the masculinization of the nation provides the episode with a “most interesting discussion . . . on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture . . . for the development of the race.”40 It is, however, the citizen’s

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invective, fueled by his acolytes in Barney Kiernan’s pub, against the spiritual bankruptcy of English culture that most clearly takes its rhetorical coordinates from the philosophy of deanglicization: To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois. . . . Their syphilization . . . the curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilization they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts. . . . They’re not European. . . . You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a cabinet d’aisance.41

This diatribe rehearses the central tropes of deanglicization concerning the nobility of Gaelic civilization and the unassailable materiality of English culture and, in so doing, sardonically essentializes the eugenic thinking that informs these concepts. The citizen’s merciless characterization of English “syphilization,” and a corresponding Irish cultural purity, is charged with the fears among late Victorian and Edwardian eugenicists concerning both public sanitation and an “inherited tendency to mental defect”42 that would result in the “rapid proliferation of . . . human weeds.”43 This allusion is sustained in the calculated reference to the “cabinet d’aisance” (public toilet) that correlates, and amplifies, degenerationist thinking concerning the cultural and genetic hygiene of the newspaper and the identification in revivalist discourse of English material culture with vulgarity (“a trace of . . . their language”). Comically, the citizen’s revivalist convictions concerning the cultural preeminence conferred by the Irish language, in stark opposition to a deracinated English (a “tonguetied patios”), are undercut by his bastardization of the Irish word Sasanach, ironically revealing the “dismal catalogue of hybridization” that deanglicization seeks to reverse.44 The depth of the citizen’s fallacious narrative of Irish cultural superiority is also demonstrated in his assertion that “any civilisation they have they stole from us,” a parroting of Hyde’s certainty that “were it not for Irishmen, these islands would possess no primitive works of art worth the mentioning.”45 In fact, Bloom’s interactions with both the blind citizen in “Cyclops”

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and the lame Gerty MacDowell in the following “Nausicaa” episode operate an especial critique of the eugenic fantasies entertained by the Irish Revival. In addition to their shared debility, the pair are allusively, and tellingly, connected through the “mangy mongrel”46 Garryowen: the citizen converses with the dog in Irish and Gerty’s reverie about the family home she will oversee references, as a prized possession, “the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked.”47 Significantly, Gerty’s sense of her allure is the gift of this lineage: “She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell.”48 Bloom’s subtle defeat of the xenophobic citizen is mirrored in the sexual gratification he wins by virtue of Gerty’s extravagantly romantic self-image, a self-image constructed upon a sharp sense of racial exceptionalism (“as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see . . . Gerty’s [eyes] were of the bluest Irish blue”).49 Both encounters with these disabled and entranced figures suggest the spiritual availability of an enfeebled Irish culture to the seductive empowerment of eugenic ideology while savagely exposing the mythologies this ideology supplies. The discourse of cultural vitality would for decades be traceable in the psychopathology of an independent Irish state that derived much of its constitutional, social, and even economic identity from deanglicization: The historians who in days to come set out to measure the achievement of post-Treaty Ireland will use as their principal criterion its success or failure in the task of restoring the Irish language. Our Shannon schemes, sugar factories, and other efforts at reconstruction will bulk very small indeed in comparison to that task. If we succeed, it will be said of us that our freedom was after all worth the sacrifices men made to attain it, worth even the disunion, disillusionment and wreckage that followed in its wake. If we fail, it is not at all improbable that the discerning historian will write opposite the year 1940 or thereabouts, “Finis Hiberniae,” even though the pallid ghost of an Irish State should still continue to haunt succeeding ages.50

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It was squarely with the survival of the language that the legitimacy of the nation-state was put at stake; quite simply, “without Irish the Irish nation will cease to exist.”51 The key ideological legacy of the Revival movement—the threat of cultural extinction—was forcefully enunciated in the rhetoric of the new state, which demanded that “the language, the industries, and the very existence of a people are all interdependent,” and that it was therefore of absolute national importance that Irish was not only kept alive but reestablished as the living language of the nation.52 This anxiety is particularly perceptible in the politicization of the figure of the child as a vessel for the resurrection of the language in policy thinking in the early years of the Irish Free State, one which ensured that a coherently Irish civilization would be harbored into the future. In 1925, Professor Timothy Corcoran, government advisor and chair of education at University College Dublin, suggested a scheme, echoing Russell’s eugenically inspired 1912 proposal, whereby native Irish speakers from the most western and impoverished regions of the country would be encouraged to train as teachers in order to embed Irish language pedagogy in the new state’s educational infrastructure. Corcoran saw no reason why the state should wait until such individuals reached adulthood in order to benefit from their nativism: From the national point of view, even mediocre natural quality in a boy or a girl of 14 years, if the Irish vernacular command is present, makes that prospective teacher highly valuable . . . the national need of having all the possible “material,” of this natural type, made full use of for national ends needs no demonstration . . . Both boys and girls of that age are, in vast numbers, born teachers and they like the work in itself.53

Tellingly, Corcoran refers his readers to recent revelations concerning the use of minors as factory workers in Shanghai, stressing how, in a plant producing safety matches, “children of not more than five years of age were to be seen manipulating the boxes with great rapidity”—a typical eugenicist reduction of “the child acrobat” to a set of genetically encoded, and thus perfectible, functions that can be harnessed to

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serve national objectives.54 Such ideas were not uncommon in the early years of Irish independence as Gaelic ideologues sought to systematize the revival of the Irish language to the social and political apparatus of an independent state fashioned in the ideological likeness of the Irish Revival. Certainly, if one is committed to the understanding that “a genuinely radical and attractive humanism had fired much of the pre-­ revolutionary enthusiasm for the Irish language and its revival,” it must prove difficult to locate in the Irish cultural renaissance something as sinister and calculating as eugenics.55 It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Irish studies has assumed that “ideological geneticism or Darwinian biology were rarely invoked in the Irish separatist cause,” despite abundant evidence of both in the rhetoric of the high revivalists and the social engineering of the nation-state that they helped to inspire.56 It is undoubtedly the case that Hyde’s insistence throughout the “DeAnglicization” speech on what he sees as the redoubtable artistry and learnedness of Gaelic civilization is designed to respond to and deflect long-standing imperial portrayals of the Irish as, among other things, “a people living off beasts and like beasts,” a people “buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance.”57 Equally, as scholars have long argued, the need to assert an Irish racial vitality was especially acute in the late 1800s, given the demoralizing impact of the Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s that, in the minds of many nationalists, called into question the very “moral fiber of the people” and oxygenated the imperial racialization of the Irish (the trope of the simian Irish dates from the post-Famine period).58 Yet, in responding to such representation, the ethnic nationalism developed by the Revival movement facilitated the absorption into the Irish cultural imagination of the eugenic ideologies haunting nationalist thought in turn-of-the century Europe, as this essay has attempted to demonstrate. Indeed, it was precisely in its desire to assert the “authenticity” of the Irish race that the Revival movement inevitably reiterated imperial narratives of identity, secure in the conviction that it is “on racial lines . . . we shall best develop, following the bent of our own natures.”59

De generatione et corruptione Samuel Beckett and the Biological Chris Ackerley

Though he would not have classified himself as a scientist, Samuel Beckett had many of the requisite qualities: an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical world; a persistent curiosity; and a sustained skeptical inquiry into what the German natural biologist Ernst Haeckel had called “the riddle of the universe.”1 Yet Beckett’s impulses toward the scientific were qualified by a religious and mystical sensibility that could not always be set aside; by an allegiance to a Western tradition (philosophical, theological, aesthetic) with its roots in early Greek thought; and by a profound distrust of the scientific and technological achievements of his age. Attempts to invest Beckett with a scientific temperament run into an impasse generated by his deep distrust of the rational process that in turn entails a rejection of scientific methodology: less a rejection of the principles of uncertainty and fallibility (“Try again. Fail again. Fail better”) than of the capacity of reason and its handmaiden, hypothesis, to shape a sufficient understanding of the natural world.2 Hence, the paradox of a writer widely (and rightly) regarded as radical and innovative, but whose sympathies are aligned with a heritage that he largely distrusted. This essay examines that paradox, with passing reference to the various scientific disciplines that shaped his sentiments about the natural world, and leading to the question: Why did Beckett, who was relatively at ease with the physical advances of his age (and notably the quantum revolution), in his considerations of the organic world make scant reference to Charles 215

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Darwin’s theory of evolution (for literary reasons, he seems to have preferred Ernst Haeckel), ignore Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the laws of heredity, and remain unmoved by the great biological achievement of his lifetime—the discovery by Watson and Crick of the double-helix structure of DNA that led to the cracking of the genetic code,3 the evolutionary “missing link” that Darwin had failed to discern?4 To be sure, Beckett makes few direct references to the major events of his times.5 He barely mentions the Great War (“The Old Tune” is a rare exception) or the struggle for Irish Independence (a few touches in the Texts for Nothing, some disparaging remarks in his occasional reviews, and an ironic tribute to the Troubles in Mercier and Camier). Though he was active in the French Resistance and lost a close friend, Alfred Péron, in the concentration camps, his only direct mention of World War II may be Moran’s casual reference to Goering as his bicycle disintegrates.6 Waiting for Godot is not obviously an allegory of that war, yet the play forms an intense image of the deracination and despair it provoked, as Endgame does of the unspoken threat of nuclear  winter that followed. And if Catastrophe—Beckett’s most overtly political play—pays tribute to Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution, it too resists obvious “explicitation” of its turbulent times.7 In an earlier essay, I argued that Beckett responded by a similar mode of indirection to the radical paradigm shifts of his days.8 I suggested that contemporary concerns of physics (atomic structure, relativity, uncertainty, the quantum universe) and persistent problems of mathematics (probability, irrationality, the Liar’s Paradox from Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead through Ludwig Wittgenstein to Kurt Gödel) that trouble Beckett’s work found expression in an Aristotelian tradition, rather than in direct engagement with his own age.9 There is a simple key to this apparent contradiction, a phrase from the Ethica of Arnold Geulincx: Sum igitur nudus speculator hujus machinae (“I am merely the spectator of this machine”), which affirms the virtues of humility and of detachment from the Cartesian machine that is the physical world.10 Essentially, the physics of Beckett’s age that reset the cosmic Newtonian billiard table are seen

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through the lens of an older tradition, to ensure a more compelling vision than closer contact might permit. That tradition, for Beckett, was defined by two major influences: first, in the Big World, by the pivotal importance of Aristotle and, in particular, his Physics, which informed the accepted understanding of the material universe in the Western tradition for centuries to come; and secondly, in the little world within Beckett, by the account of that tradition in Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy, from which he took literally hundreds of pages of notes to commit its teachings to memory.11 This study, more than any other, shaped Beckett’s philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic credo (a word to subvert his profound agnosticism). These two texts warrant consideration, as befitting their role in shaping Beckett’s sense of the biological. As the editors of the Loeb edition of the Physics note, the realm of Nature for Aristotle includes all things that move or change, or that come and go, in both the sense of passing from “here” to “there” or the passing from one state to another.12 The Physics is thus a study of Nature (physis), in terms of becoming, change, and motion: a definition that for Aristotle did not exclude what we might call Psychology, as the psyche is ever in process of becoming.13 Although few of its premises now withstand skeptical inquiry, the Physics generated satellite studies by Aristotle and his followers, discussing the cosmos and all living things. De generatione et corruptione, for instance, extends a central concern of the Physics, as to whether things come into being through causes (from some prime material), or if everything is generated entirely through change.14 Beckett offers no evidence of having read either text, but reveals a fascination with their themes, and particularly with the enchanting word genesis (intimating not “in the beginning” but rather “coming into being”) and its terrifying antithesis, death, defined by Aristotle in terms of the passing away of the natural order. The phrase “come and go,” a fundamental sound that resonates through all of Beckett’s writings, carries the weight of centuries of Aristotelian speculation, as well as that added subsequently by the Catholic Church.

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Beckett’s understanding of these matters was filtered through Windelband’s History of Philosophy, which (unlike the Physics) he had read closely. Greek ethics, Windelband argues, began with a problem that paralleled the first principle of physics: the relationship between the unchanging order of things and the world of change—that is, ousia (being, ever the same with itself) and genesis (becoming, in eternal process of change), and the primary importance of one question, “What is the abiding ground of all such change?”15 Watt interrogates this question: Mr. Knott, it seems, abides; his servants come and go. Beckett accepted Windelband’s thesis that the main divide in Greek thought was not that between Plato and Aristotle but that between their schools (which affirmed the existence of the soul after death) and the Atomists (who affirmed the dissolution at the moment of passing of the atoms constituting the soul). Beckett’s lasting distrust of the romantic and the anthropomorphic has its philosophical roots in precisely this aspect of Atomist thought.16 The Greek physis (matrix of our “physics”) may be translated as “nature,” but an Aristotelian accent upon genesis distinguishes the inert world from living bodies and defines the latter with reference to the process of generation and corruption at the core of Aristotle’s scientific meditations. Windelband amplifies the further medieval distinction between the physica corporis and the physica animae.17 This split, between a philosophy of Nature that encouraged a secular science (secundum rationem), and another that saw in Theology a divine science (secundum fidem), led to the notion of “twofold truth” and “two realms,” and a late medieval dualism between natural and revealed religion (“the realm of nature” and “the realm of grace”).18 This in turn initiated the late medieval scientific revolution (Francis Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grossteste), but equally inspired monastic orders dedicated to revelation. Windelband’s sense of an attempted synthesis leading to a deeper separation is compelling, even if his rhetorical conclusion that “the spiritual and material worlds fell apart as separate spheres of the universal reality” is overstated.19 This proto-Cartesian distinction was important to Beckett, for whom the intricacies and

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absurdities of the mystical tradition were as fascinating as those of the natural world. Windelband’s History leads up to his own times (ending with a rather leaden account of Friedrich Nietzsche), and, in a certain sense (for he read widely and did not lack curiosity), Beckett’s autodidactic study of Nature followed suit. Having made Windelband’s doctrine very much his own, however, he was by no means subservient to it. Rather, the History offered him a disciplined mode of thought, a reliance on which, paradoxically, allowed him to indulge in the luxury and extravagance of outmoded systems that he much admired, but to which he ultimately could not subscribe: the Bible (an unending compendium of folly); Dante’s cosmology; medieval controversies of universals and particulars; post-Cartesian quags and absurdities (the Occasionalism of Arnold Geulincx or Monadology of Gottfried Leibniz, to nominate but two of the wackiest); Mario Praz and Romantic Agony; Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (whom he read for their narrative qualities rather than their scientific truth). Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe might be added to this list. Such distractions, intriguing though they might be, did not compromise Beckett’s allegiance to a mode of inquiry that began with the pre-Socratics and Aristotle, then passed through the Classical period and Middle Ages to the Renaissance and so-called Enlightenment, and culminated (for him) in Arthur Schopenhauer, in whose pessimism he found a voice that uncannily echoed his own. Beckett was not ignorant of Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, or Martin Heidegger (Wittgenstein came later), and Jean-Paul Sartre was his contemporary at the École Normale Supérieure, as unpleasant then as in later life; but for the purposes of his writing he typically located himself within Windelband’s tradition.20 A reliance on that tradition characterizes Beckett’s attitude to other revelations of the physical universe, which he calls in Murphy the Big World. For instance, he makes no reference to the “Big Bang” theory of cosmology, which increasingly gained acceptance during the 1930s; his is an Atomist universe, ab aeterno (or perhaps sempiternal) but there for all time.21 His sense of geology, likewise, was not

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untypical of his age. Though Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was published in 1912, it had met with wide skepticism, and Beckett shows little awareness of plate tectonics or the principles of subduction, seismology, and volcanology that radically transformed the understanding of how the earth was formed.22 Rather, his sense of this science was indebted to controversies of the previous century, such as Charles Lyell’s speculations (Principles of Geology, 1830) about the antiquity of the earth and how the fossils had contributed to Darwin’s understanding of evolution by challenging Christian stories of Creation and the Flood. Yet geology offered Beckett a prehistoric landscape of consciousness, or, in French, conscience, with the suggestion of different strata of guilt and repression but poetically conceived as a country of the mind, as in Beckett’s 1938 poem “Ainsi a-t-on beau,” or that of 1955, “bon bon il est un pays.”23 The “Beckett country” is both his childhood terrain, and a world within. Conscience implies an ethical awareness of the place of mankind within an immeasurably longer story of evolution, inviting metaphors of excavation and descent into the inner self. Since this opens shafts that delve into psychological depths far beyond the scope of this essay and intimates a curious congruence between the diverse disciplines of geology, biology, and psychology (huddling together under the one natural science umbrella), let me retreat to a day in the life of Samuel Beckett on which something of considerable note occurred. On the evening of October 2, 1935, Beckett accompanied his therapist, Wilfred Bion, to a lecture given by Jung at the Tavistock Clinic.24 Beckett found the lecture absorbing, as it focused for him several matters directly pertinent to his own writing. Jung discussed the illusory nature of unity of consciousness, given that internal complexes may appear in visions and speak in voices, emancipating themselves from conscious control and assuming identities of their own; this insight would inform not only Beckett’s interest in the schizoid mind but the central mystery of the voice, which became the compelling theme of his greatest works. Jung showed a diagram from a previous lecture, featuring ten concentric circles that represented gradations of the mind from the outer light of ego consciousness to the dark center. In Jung’s

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words: “The closer you approach that centre, the more you experience what Janet calls an abaisement du niveau mental: your conscious autonomy begins to disappear and you get more and more under the fascination of unconscious contents.”25 That diagram became for Beckett an archetype of awareness and was translated immediately into the three zones of Murphy’s mind (the light, the half-light, and the dark), thereby giving the inchoate tripartite consciousness of Belacqua in Dream of Fair to middling Women a shaping principle that it had lacked. More importantly, Jung’s diagram offered a blueprint for the trilogy to come, with its movement from an outer Freudian carapace (Moran) to a softer inner shell (Molloy), which opens upon the long “interlude” of Malone Dies, which in turn gives birth to the larval form of the Unnamable within.26 This embryonic creature embodies a third lasting detail from that Tavistock lecture: Jung’s discussion of the little girl who died young, because, he concluded, “She had never been born entirely.”27 This haunting image represented for Beckett his incipient sense of psychological incompleteness and would reappear as such in many of his later works.28 Jung’s lecture was, arguably, the moment that this embryonic figure was conceived, and its central importance thereafter in Beckett’s writings provokes an answer to the question with which this essay began, as to why Beckett neglected Darwin’s theory of evolution and apparently preferred Haeckel. Beckett was not oblivious to the historical importance of Darwin, but he had no wish to debate evolution as an issue in the conflict of religion and science, presumably having accepted the essential issue as long settled in favor of the apes over the angels. In 1932, he bought a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for sixpence but told Thomas McGreevy in a letter dated August 4, 1932, that he had “never read such badly written catlap,” much preferring Moby Dick, which he had bought next day for the same price: “That’s more like the real stuff. White whales & natural piety.” He could remember only one thing, he said: “blue-eyed cats are always deaf (correlation of variations).”29 This sentiment appears in “What a Misfortune,” closely followed by the “burrowing tucutucu” from chapter 14 of the Origin, in which Darwin indicates how some species develop or disuse certain features.30

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Specific references to Darwin are otherwise few. In “Echo’s Bones,” Lord Gall calls the law a “ginnet” (i.e., an ass), perhaps intending hinny, the offspring of a female ass and a stallion), the context of impotence echoing the discussion of hybridism in chapter 8 of the Origin.31 His account is embellished by another, that such hybrids were cursed with sterility because one of their kind (I almost wrote “ancestors”) had refused to carry Our Lord into Jerusalem. Maddy Rooney in All That Fall recalls this legend, using Darwin’s term, “hinny.”32 Another direct reference to evolution is Estragon’s comment in Waiting for Godot, “People are bloody ignorant apes,” a sentiment that is absent from the French original.33 Yet Beckett was fond of the parable of Darwin’s caterpillar, from chapter 7 of the Origin, which discusses instinct: if a caterpillar is interrupted when building its “hammock” and then put back at another stage, instinct (which Darwin likens to habit and repetition) makes it “re-perform” the different stages of its activity.34 In “Echo’s Bones,” Belacqua enlightens Doyle, the gardener: “He was working away at his hammock  .  .  . and not doing a damned bit of harm to man or beast, when up comes old Monkeybrand bursting with labour-saving devices. The caterpillar was far from feeling any benefit.”35 Beckett revisits the story in Murphy, when Miss Counihan, interrupted in her discourse, tries to go back to its beginning;36 and in Watt, when Mr. O’Meldon, spinning his yarn, is disturbed as he does so.37 One aspect of Darwinism to which Beckett obviously responds is the horror of natural selection and an evolutionary process in which to eat or be eaten is the natural order. This is marked in his early poetry:38 in “Enueg 1” the horror of TB (“my darling’s red sputum”) is magnified in the scarlet of the “bloodied rafflesia,” a huge stinking flower, pollinated by carrion flies, that resembles corrupted lung tissue.39 The nadir of evolutionary horror is reached in “Serena 1,” when the poet recoils from an adder “broaching” her rat in a “strom of peristalsis” (something Beckett had seen at the London zoo, and could not forget). In “Serena II,” the convulsions of “this clonic earth,” with its hags and quags, are recapitulated in those of an old dying dog. “Ooftisch” rails against the inadequacy of Christian piety in the face

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of suffering, offering a relentless catalog of illness, cancer, angina, TB, the whole misery: “it all boils down to blood of the lamb.” And Beckett’s best-known story, “Dante and the Lobster” (1932), ends with the “beast” about to be boiled and Belacqua’s sudden awareness of the horror of death, a process invoked, here as elsewhere, by images of mute suffering horses and the slow crucifixion of life in time.40 The most obvious Darwinian effect in Beckett’s writing may derive from quite other sources. I refer to the sentiment, almost a refrain, in How It Is, where the narrator, crawling through a landscape of “primeval mud impenetrable dark,” the sky above and the rock below, senses his life as “not all a selection natural order vast tracts of time,”41 and experiences the inevitable “loss of species.”42 The phrase had been used in Watt, of Watt’s increasing sense of alienation from his kind;43 and a similar sentiment is uttered in The Unnamable, of cage beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts, and so on until “nothing of its species left.”44 Windelband comments: “The universal is real or actual only in the particular; the particular is real only because in it the universal realises itself.” He continues: “The species exists only insofar as it realises itself in individual things as their truly existing essence and the individual thing exists only as the species comes to its phenomenological manifestation in it.”45 Thus, loss of species constitutes a loss of Being, as reiterated by the unnamed protagonist of How It Is, who tries in vain to avoid the conclusion (finally inescapable) that he is the “sole elect” and thus of necessity individual. This may be one source of the “loss of species,” but there is another. Molloy sets the scene: he lives deep down, “oh not deepest down, somewhere between the mud and the scum,” representing Beckett’s sense of the self as trapped between the light and the rock, of a consciousness denied the metamorphosis it seeks and so condemned to return to the mud from which it somehow arose.46 This is precisely the situation of the unnamed protagonist of How It Is, who raises, only to reject, the possibility of his life being “ordered” from above, the word implying both hierarchy (stratification) and command. He attempts to move to a higher synthesis, a life in the light to justify the larval stage of limited consciousness, but this image is not so much Darwinian as

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generated specifically from Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1900), which links psychic development to the different stages of embryology and metamorphosis and identifies the amniotic or embryonic soul.47 Haeckel is best known for his dictum that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,”48 which claims that embryonic epigenesis moves through stages identical to those of the ancestral race; and thus the disjunction of the connection between the ontogenesis of the individual and the phylogenesis of the ancestry constitutes what Beckett calls a “loss of species” (the phrasing may be Beckett’s own, as it does not appear in discussion of either Darwin or Haeckel, save in the primary sense of evolutionary extinction).49 Propounded thus, naked as the newly unfolded Worm in The Unnamable, the sentiment that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny seems foolish, and its espousal by Nazi propagandists would further discredit Haeckel in later years.50 But Beckett frequently drew his most provocative images from unlikely sources, and the image in The Riddle of the Universe of the larval soul, “mad or worse transformed à la Haeckel,” affected him deeply.51 It inscribes Murphy’s sense at his birth of being projected “larval and dark” into being as he tries to regain the lost coenaesthesis (the sum of all the various sensory experiences) of the embryonic stage; and Celia’s larval experience, as she sits in the rocking chair, of consciousness as a peristalsis of light worming into the dark.52 Further, Beckett, in his “German Letter” to Axel Kaun on July 9, 1937, called language “Eine Larve” (a mask) that must be torn aside to get at the Nothing behind it.53 Given these precedents, and the later predicament of the protagonist of How It Is, it is not obviously foolish to suggest, with particular reference to the figure and frustrated metamorphosis of Worm, that the narrative, structure, and personae of The Unnamable enact the stages of embryonic development (from egg to larva to imago, or as a figure never properly born) as outlined by Haeckel. This thesis is too monstrous to be more than hinted at here.54 This essay began with an apparent riddle: Why did Beckett, so scientifically literate in so many other ways, virtually ignore a major intellectual debate—over Darwin’s theory of evolution? In a widening gyre of indirection, I have suggested many possible answers, ranging

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from the facile (that the big questions of his age were those of Physics rather than Biology), through the speculative (the curious intellectual fusion of geology, biology, and psychology), to the provocative (Jung’s account of the little girl who had never properly been born), as leading to a preference for Haeckel’s embryonic awareness over Darwin’s badly written catlap, and as an expression of the “loss of species” or psychological isolation and incompleteness that he frequently experienced. This is no more satisfactory than (yet curiously equivalent to) Shem’s answer in Finnegans Wake to Haeckel’s riddle of the universe, which is rephrased thus: When is a man not a man? Many answers are proposed, from the sublime to the ridiculous, until the “correct solution” is revealed: “—all give it up?—; when he is a—yours till the rending of the rocks,—Sham.”55 A coda. Or, perhaps, a Malacoda, given that the final answer for Beckett to the riddle of existence was inevitably death. The first words of chapter 5 of Origin invite Darwin’s reader: “Now let us return to nature.” An appropriate response might be that of Vladimir: “We’ve tried that.”56 Beckett’s most celebrated play reduces nature to a tree, but while that tree offers relief from the slow crucifixion of living only if Vladimir and Estragon can hang themselves from its boughs, it also suggests the Cross, an intimation of hope (in act 2 it sprouts two or three leaves) that is finally the cruelest delusion of all. It offers no answer to the painful paradox of life generated from the plane of inert sediment and returning to that state, Beckett’s literal reading of Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Molloy’s comment seems appropriate: “Personally I just liked plants, in all innocence and simplicity. I even saw in them at times a superfetatory proof of the existence of God.”57 When is a man not a man? When he has returned to the dust from whence he came, perhaps. Beckett’s final solution to the riddle of existence acknowledges what he called elsewhere “the loutishness of learning,” a sentiment that offers little comfort but perhaps provokes in those aware of their nescience (this may be an aporia) the dubious consolation of curiosity.58 Beckett owned, he claimed, but four certainties: that we were born; that we exist; that we will die; and, more

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irrationally given the other three, the urge to express.59 Given such absurdity, the choice of Haeckel over Darwin seems less incongruous, for Haeckel offered Beckett (as Darwin could not) an image of larval consciousness to inform his writings and permit him to disturb the dust of oblivion, however briefly. The consequence was a body of works that enact the struggle of incipient form to emerge from existential formlessness, only to hesitate at the littoral threshold of a consciousness ultimately denied its apotheosis, and so destined to return to the mineral from which it somehow arose.

pa r t f i v e

 

Strange Experiments

Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett Katherine Ebury

In Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, his characters, Niels Bohr, his wife, Margrethe, and his protégé manqué, Werner Heisenberg, exist beyond the grave, conscious of being dead but still arguing about quantum theory and World War II.1 In the original productions, directed by Michael Blakemore, the set was simply a circle of white light, representing the interior of the atom: the ghostly characters are simultaneously representations of historical people and of subatomic particles. This contemporary play reflects the way that ghostliness and fractured or parallel temporalities have become central to how the so-called new physics, which encompass both relativity and quantum theory, are represented and popularized, especially in the theater.2 In fact, as I will discuss, metaphors of ghostliness and the occult in relation to the science of light and its paradoxes actually appeared in the first wave of popularizations and cultural responses to Albert Einstein from the 1920s onward, and these metaphors were as influential on theater, cinema, and other forms of visual entertainment as they were on modernist poetry and novels, as I have suggested elsewhere.3 In this

A version of this chapter was presented at the 59th International Yeats Summer School, “The Greening of Yeats,” in July 2018. My thanks are due to the organizers of this event, Dr. Matthew Campbell and Dr. Lauren Arrington, and also to Dr. James Fraser for his thoughtful comments on an earlier draft.

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chapter, I will propose a literature and science framework, inspired by Einstein’s science of light, for evaluating Irish modernist theatrical representations of the occult, especially their portrayals of ghostly apparitions. The chapter will draw together questions of the interpenetration of the science of light and the occult in that period and assert a relationship of influence between Yeats’s revivalist modernism and Beckett’s late modernism in terms of the dramatic practices of both Yeats and Beckett themselves and of the directors and set designers that interpreted their work. My comparison of Yeats’s drama and Beckett’s late plays and teleplays will offer a detailed case study of how the representation of “stage ghosts” in play scripts and in performance is radically changed in response to early twentieth-century science. Indeed, Yeats’s interest in the science of light demonstrates that he is less antiscientific than is typically perceived, while Beckett’s interest in the occult reveals that he is more Yeatsian than is expected. Writing of the relevance of the new physics for modernist views of time, Michael Whitworth notes that for most writers, the finite velocity of light was an idea first encountered in popularizations of Einstein’s theories; and  .  .  . the popularizations would have served as a reminder, and would have given the idea a patina of modernity. However, though new, the idea was easily assimilated to traditional literary metaphors and images . . . The idea that the past is preserved in travelling light rays gives a new twist to the classical and Renaissance tradition of the stellification of the dead, though, unlike their earlier counterparts, the modern dead never reach a final resting place.4

Images of light traveling through space were crucial for Einstein’s popularizers as they attempted to explain and encourage their readers to visualize the size and shape of stars, the galaxy, and the universe— indeed, to persuade them to accept relativity itself. Arthur Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expeditions used the bending of the sun’s light due to gravitational effects to vindicate experimentally Einstein’s questioning of concepts of absolute time and space. Light was also a physical constant within Einstein’s mathematics, the vital “c” in “E=mc².”

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However, in quantum theory, light itself became paradoxical, rather than, as in relativity, a constant reliable as a standard of measure: light’s behavior during the double-slit experiment led to a vision of light as a wave and particle simultaneously. To sum up, in the period’s science, light was simultaneously made mysterious and relied upon for crucial measurements: to borrow convenient literary terms, it had both surrealistic and realistic qualities. einstein , light, and drama

While I will explore Yeats’s and Beckett’s work, the key concern of the first part of my chapter is to describe how the broader theatrical culture of the 1920s and 1930s was influenced by contemporary scientific discoveries. Despite the difficulty of the new physics of relativity and quantum theory, these and related scientific developments—such as the centrality of the speed of light as a physical constant, the waveparticle duality, spectroscopy, and experiments with ultraviolet and infrared—were connected during the 1920s with both past traditions of popular entertainment and with future-oriented technologies. Alan Friedman and Carol Donley note that, after Eddington’s eclipse expeditions vindicated general relativity, Einstein was invited to give a three-week performance of the theory at the London Palladium.5 Although Einstein, and most of his followers, preferred to present his theory at widely attended university forums, the new technology of the cinema quickly whetted the public appetite for more sensational demonstrations. A 1925 review of a short film about relativity emphasizes the visual aspect of the presentation and its entertainment value: The captions are first-rate, and the tale could not have been more entertainingly told by Jules Verne himself; some of the experiments shown are fascinating, and notably so the final demonstration of how during an eclipse of the sun the stars around it appear to be pushed out of place.6

In Dublin, the La Scala cinema was proud of exclusively showing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as an “entertaining and fascinating” film.7 While Einstein’s followers and popularizers also frequently

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deployed the new technology of radio, the new physics was particularly associated with visual entertainment, and they depended upon this medium to convey the basic concepts of their scientific revolution. Throughout the 1920s, relativity had a profound effect upon theatrical practice: “serious” plays that departed from theatrical naturalism were frequently explained in reviews through references to both Luigi Pirandello and Einstein. For example, a 1926 roundup of “The Paris Theatre” argues that, “even if there had never been a war, Einstein’s relativity and the general reaction from positivism in all its forms must have led to the Pirandellian writing on the wall of our contemporary theatre: ciascuno a suo modo.”8 A review of John L. Balderston’s Berkeley Square (1926), a time-travel play based on Henry James’s unfinished novel A Sense of the Past, was also interpreted in similar terms. The play is as metaphysical as any of the mental pirouettes of Pirandello. Einstein is called in to convince us that time is like a tape-measure and is not always on the stretch. Since time may be looped and coiled as well as extended why should not a man jump lightly from one coil to another and discover that the past is going on simultaneously with the present?9

Berkeley Square also appeared a few years later at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1932 and was reviewed in similar terms, but more positively, as “a comedy of time and space, in which the theories of Einstein and Dunne are blended in a most enjoyable manner.”10 The tendency to link theatrical scenes of haunting with relativity is also found in reviews of J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose (1920), first performed at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 1921, which is likewise a tale of double temporality, but with a more explicitly ghostly element in the guise of the ageless title character, who is linked at the end of the play with starlight. A 1929 reviewer notes, “I confess that I can make neither acceptable head nor tail of the final scene, in which the poor little tired-out ghost of Mary Rose is at such figurative loggerheads with her prodigal son. Its relativity might well perplex Einstein himself, and embarrass the most plausible apologist.”11

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The new physics also had a profound effect upon more popular forms of entertainment. The 1922 revue The Peep Show “applied spectrum analysis to stage costumes and scenery,” while a 1927 performance of the pantomime The Sleeping Beauty used a pitch-black stage and ultraviolet light to create its magical effects. While both of these productions were originally based in London, as Peter Kuch notes, the Abbey’s “Irish Players” were on tour in Australia at the same time as The Peep Show and shared a theater with this production in Adelaide in July 1922.12 One of the areas in which the fashion for the new physics had its most surprising effects was in the representation of magic, ghosts, and the occult, especially in the tradition of the phantasmagoria, which I will later discuss in close connection with Beckett and Yeats. Kattelman notes that American “ghost shows”—magic shows in a direct tradition of the phantasmagoria paired with a film performance—quickly adopted ultraviolet paint in the 1920s as one of their central effects.13 Further, popular scientific demonstrations of light built deliberately upon the phantasmagoria, magic lantern, and peep show, channeling folk and occult beliefs in order to heighten the spectacular effects of their own performances. For example, a review of the London Optical Convention 1926 noted a trend for “scientific conjuring” and “scientific stunts,” discussing a light installation called “The Soldier’s Dream,” “where a beautiful ghostlike mother and child brood over the sleeping soldier.”14 The review also highlights the “Fairies’ Theatre” installation, where “bright puppets of light are shown in the round behaving with a strange unreal life as in a vision of fairies.”15 While there is less specific evidence of the use of these lighting effects in Ireland, a 1939 article in the Irish Times offers a general summary of the use of “black light” (or ultraviolet light) in the period, which suggests a fairly regular, but somewhat luxurious, use of the technique in the 1920s and 1930s: “Black light has been used in some Dublin theatres, but merely in the nature of experiment and for the novel effect: the process is rather too expensive for general use at the moment, but it opens up a whole new field of possibilities in the use of stage lighting and allegorical presentation.”16 A final context for thinking about the connection between science and spectacular apparitions

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is that the popularization of the new physics and the science of light happened at the same time as the innovation of early television, and, in articles from the 1920s, writers frequently mention relativity and television in the same breath.17 science and ghosts in ye ats and becke t t

Yeats and Beckett share a mutual influence in terms of their reading of popularizations of the new physics and its impact on their theater. In Yeats’s case, he read Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity; Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World; some Arthur Eddington, including The Domain of Physical Science; and Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity.18 Beckett also read and took notes on several popular science books, including Henri Poincaré’s La Valeur de la Science and James Jeans’s The Universe Around Us. Beckett’s notes from Jeans are recorded in what is known as his “Dream Notebook,” and are most detailed in relation to questions of light and time: there is an especially long and detailed note on spectroscopy and “redshift” versus “ultraviolet” light in relation to the expanding universe.19 There is also an equally long note on links between light and time on a cosmic scale: The more distant the object the slower its time. Time most rapid for observer wherever he happens to be. Hence, automatically, light waves from distant source slower (longer) (redder) than those from proximate source.20

John Pilling links these notes about the new physics and light to passages in More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy, and Watt; but Beckett retained and continued to refer to these notes over a much longer period, such as a note about Venus, which is eventually used in Ill Seen Ill Said.21 There are additional notes in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook on quantum physics, including the Uncertainty Principle, wave equations, and quanta.22 Yeats and Beckett also accessed more idiosyncratic responses to the new physics, including J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, and developed an understanding of the popular culture responses to the new physics and the science of light discussed in the first section of this chapter.

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In reading popular science, then, Yeats and Beckett were also consuming the connections between the new physics and occult phenomena. A 1922 article “Ghosts and the Scientist: The Aura under Physical Tests” discusses at length a new era of electromagnetic psychic research “in the lab” that would involve the use of X-rays and ultraviolet light.23 Even more serious thinkers outside of the spiritualist community, such as Russell, acknowledged that a relativistic view of connections between light and time might have metaphysical implications. Russell refers to ghosts of stars in a 1926 article reviewing J. W. N. Sullivan’s Three Men Discuss Relativity: Perhaps popularity may be achieved in time by his finite universe, in which the ghosts of stars re-visit their former haunts once in every thousand million years, and no one knows which of the stars we see are “real” and which are ghosts; this view may hereafter be utilized in India to make a bridge between religion and science.24

In The Expanding Universe, Eddington likewise refers to the “theory of ghosts,” explaining that, in a perfectly spherical universe, the ghostly images of stars that had been dead for millions of years would live on through the image created by their light, making them all but indistinguishable from “true” stars.25 In The Universe Around Us, Jeans also uses metaphors of haunting: “So far as scientific observation goes, it is entirely possible that the radiation of thousands of dead universes may even now be wandering around space without our suspecting it.”26 On the quantum scale, Jeans also blurs death in life in the language he uses of Rutherford’s atomic experiments: the atom is both “ghostly” and “very substantial.”27 In these examples, the new physics makes strange the observer’s experience of visual phenomena. Previously familiar stars become “haunted” representations of different temporalities that show the limitations of nineteenth-century positivist science. In short, ghostly metaphors were written into the new physics and how it was perceived. While John Bramble discusses a public perception that the cosmos had been “remagicalized” to apparently support an occult worldview, Yeats also deliberately “magicalizes” the new physics, particularly in relation to light, as he attempts to make them useful to A

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Vision and his poetry and drama.28 For example, in the first letter of his 1925 discussion of light, relativity, and the occult with George Moore, Yeats says that he is “deep in” Russell’s ABC of Relativity, but is inclined to “reverse the argument and see light as stationary—the divine mind is one of its aspects—and all things revolving within at so many hundred thousand miles a second.”29 These letters demonstrate Yeats’s belief in a deep connection between the new physics and occult apparitions. Yeats distorts relativity to prove the likely reality of his friend’s vision of a ghostly book as well as other cognate examples, including John Ruskin’s hallucination of a cat. Yeats also writes of ghostly apparitions in Pages from a Diary Written in 1930 that “the pictures appear to be self-luminous because the past sunlight or candle-light, suddenly made apparent, is as it were broken off from whatever light surrounds it at the moment.”30 This passage, in its mixture of light from the past and light from the present, undoubtedly appears influenced by the idea of the “ghosts” of stars mixing with “real” stars in the night sky; it also seems to bear traces of J. W. Dunne’s concept of serial time, in the sense of the parallel worlds and timelines in which the light sources exist. Yeats’s wish to incorporate insights from the new physics into his theater is signaled by the fact that his most direct reflections on reconciliations of science and occultism come from the prefaces to his dramatic writing. One reason that Yeats writes so powerfully about the occult in these prefaces is because he connects mediumship with the theater: in his preface to The Words upon the Window Pane (1930), Yeats compares the work of the actor with the work of the medium: “Because mediumship is dramatization  .  .  . and almost always truth and lies are mixed together.”31 Just as “true stars” and “ghostly stars” share the same sky and are indistinguishable, so, as Margaret Mills Harper has argued, it was the mixing of the real and the fake that appealed to Yeats within the séance, as much as the mixing of the living and the dead: Yeats was not put off by theatricality, even cheap effects. Far from it: the roles played by the self or parts of the self in exploring relationships and communication with other aspects of a single person,

Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama   237 among selves, and between living and dead souls was a topic of infinite interest.32

The context described above, in which insights from the new physics were quickly assimilated into theatrical culture, is also alluded to in Yeats’s prefaces. In the “Preface to Fighting the Waves,” Yeats uses the difficulty of recent astronomy to question the authority of the scientific observer: “All [science] can do is, after a steady scrutiny, to prove that we are lost amid alien intellects, near but incomprehensible, more incomprehensible than the most distant stars.”33 In the same essay, Yeats also wishes to link the discovery of the cathode-ray tube by Sir William Crookes, a development that eventually led to the invention of early television by John Logie Baird, with Crookes’s occult research: I once heard Sir William Crookes tell half a dozen people that he had seen a flower carried in broad daylight across the room by what seemed an invisible hand. His chemical research led to the discovery of radiant matter but the science that shapes opinion has ignored his other research that seems to those that study it the slow preparation for the greatest, perhaps the most dangerous, revolution in thought . . . a revolution that may, perhaps, establish the scientific complement of certain philosophies that in all ancient countries sustained heroic art.34

Although this seems to be a strange connection, scientific experiments on cathode rays, X-rays, and other forms of invisible light provided a justification for occult research into the unseen and the unknown. In his preface to The Resurrection, Yeats notes how the original idea came to him because of a passage in Crookes’s Studies in Psychical Research: “I took from the beating heart, from my momentary terror, from the shock of a man of science, the central situation of my play: the young man touching the heart of the phantom and screaming.”35 Here, Yeats is inspired and terrified precisely by the intersection of science and the occult: he responds physically (“momentary terror”) to his reading of Crookes and then intellectually to see this as an inherently dramatic moment, a moment that must be represented in theatrical terms.

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While it is commonplace for critics to make a sharp distinction between science and the supernatural, this distinction, even in the twentieth century, can be difficult to maintain, as in the connection between the new physics and ghosts. The period in which Yeats and Beckett lived and wrote also saw determined efforts to explore these connections: for example, Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy appeared in 1921, while Lynn Thorndike’s eight-volume A History of Magic and Experimental Science began to be published in 1923. Yeats had copies of the first two volumes of the Thorndike collection in his personal library,36 and he was particularly drawn to scientific thinkers who embraced occult beliefs (such as Crookes and Cesare Lombroso).37 Beckett and his audiences also had access to later, more famous works that are more widely read today, such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) or Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), which gloss the difficulties of contemporary physical science through reference to Eastern philosophy and a broader mysticism. Though a more practical endeavor, Eamon de Valera and Erwin Schrödinger’s joint project of the 1930s and 1940s, the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, which included both a School of Theoretical Physics and a School of Celtic Studies, reflects a similar dedication to the mixing of modern science with more traditional folk beliefs and cultures. In fact, Michael McAteer argues for a connection between Purgatory (1938) and Schrödinger’s presence in Dublin, particularly in relation to his famous 1935 “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment.38 McAteer also usefully argues for the relevance of the 1926 exchange of letters about idealism with T. Sturge Moore to Purgatory and On the Boiler, and it is likely that this argument about the occult ramifications of the new physics was also an influence upon the earlier The Words upon the Window Pane.39 The justification of his occult beliefs, and, equally, his ars poetica, was certainly one of the key uses to which Yeats put relativity, referring to Einstein’s ideas of gravitational spiral and the strangeness of light and time to vindicate his occult A Vision project throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Albright has also demonstrated the appeal of wave-particle dualities for Yeats’s poetics.40 While scientific concepts

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have more seldom been applied to Yeats’s drama, as we have seen from looking at his dramatic prefaces, the new physics and the theatrical context around it exert a shaping influence on his representation of ghosts in his late theater. Given the vogue for the new physics in both “serious” and “popular” drama noted above, we can reconstruct its powerful effect upon Yeats as an artist who would repeatedly link his work with the tradition of phantasmagoria. For example, the private discussions via Automatic Script reconstructed in Yeats’s A Vision papers see phantasmagoria in the context of occult astral light,41 while Yeats also engaged in public declarations linking poetry with the phantasmagoria tradition.42 Yeats’s early plays had no difficulty representing the supernatural in a Noh style, and indeed in “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” Yeats deliberately celebrates the lack of “studied lighting.”43 Yet after the revelations of the new physics, Yeats’s dramatic work features ghostly light with increasing prominence. Both the dialogue and staging, particularly in relation to lighting effects, reflect on the ghostly nature of light. Katharine Worth writes that “even lighting effects are not a necessity  .  .  . But, of course the dance plays were also performed with quite elaborate lighting on the Abbey Stage.”44 Yeats’s use of light and, especially, his representation of ghosts in his late theater often stretches beyond what was possible in terms of the drawing-room performance, and even beyond the Abbey Theatre’s traditional facilities and the Gate’s more innovative lighting.45 Reflecting on the history of the Abbey and Yeats’s investments in theater practice, Gerard Fay notes that Yeats was always fascinated by lighting, but very little was ever done at the Abbey to satisfy his ambitions. The first lighting was designed by Willie Fay and installed under his supervision. It was perfectly simple standard stage lighting as used in almost every theatre at the time, the only difference between one house and another being the intensity of light available: there were, of course, no movable spotlights for following players around the stage because (apart from their being nowhere to mount them) they would have offended

240  Ebury against the very foundations of Abbey acting. In the ’twenties . . . some new lighting fittings imported from Germany were put in the front of the house on unsightly metal brackets. Otherwise there was no substantial difference between the original lighting in 1904 and that which was destroyed in the fire of 1951.46

Wayne Chapman has discussed changes Yeats was forced to make to the script of The Countess Cathleen due to the limitations of supernatural theatrical effects: “Special effects such as the emanation of a host of angels . . . were impossible in Dublin’s Antient Concert Rooms in 1899, and, likewise, there were limits to renderings at the Abbey Theatre, a dozen years later, with new lighting by Gordon Craig.”47 Yeats’s scientific and philosophical investments in light and his theatrical ambitions for lighting were constrained by the realities of the Abbey’s tradition and its lack of money. This partly explains what Martin Puchner has described as “modernist diegesis” in both Yeats’s and Beckett’s theater, as the connection between ghosts, science, and light is mainly made through dialogue and textual stage directions: “Instead of visual representation . . . we now have descriptive language.”48 Representation of Yeats’s occultism on the stage is thus highly charged in relation to the question of lighting effects. How, for example, to represent the “lonely” midnight, the lantern lit and extinguished, and dawn light sources of The Dreaming of the Bones in a theatrical world that tends to minimalism (“the stage is any bare place in a room close to a wall”)?49 Yeats thereby requires that much of his dialogue is concerned with light so that the audience is compelled to imagine the haunted qualities of the symbolic light and darkness central to the play. The First Musician sets the scene of haunting, somewhat paradoxically narrating what is invisible in the landscape he describes: The hour before dawn and the moon covered up. The little village of Abbey is covered up; The little narrow trodden way that runs From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe Is covered up . . . Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass

Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama   241 Birds cry, they cry their loneliness. Even the sunlight can be lonely here, Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall— A young man with a lantern comes this way . . . Once more the birds cry in their loneliness, But now they wheel about our heads; and now They have dropped on the grey stone to the north-east.50

Yeats therefore links the arrival of Dermot and Dervorgilla, marked as ghosts by masks and “costume of a past time,” with the young man’s lantern, though they immediately blow out this light.51 Although Yeats’s stage directions suggest a lack of elaborate staging and a “drawing-room” style of production, the play was in fact performed at the Abbey Theatre (alongside short ballet pieces), with the updated 1920s full lighting rig described by Gerald Fay, in December 1931, and was regularly in performance through the 1950s and 1960s.52 While reviews of these productions do not reveal much in the way of detail of lighting decisions, a 1957 review of the Yeats Festival at Dun Laoghaire describes “lighting that was willfully erratic” being used for The Dreaming of the Bones, which suggests experimental lighting was being widely used in the play beyond Yeats’s own day.53 Long after Yeats’s death, reviews take specific productions of the play to task for their “anti-theatrical” qualities, often with reference to lighting or stylized movement.54 In the preface to The Words upon the Window Pane, Yeats gives the example of “the ruined castle lit up” in relation to haunting, as “all about us seems to start up a precise inexplicable teeming life.” It seems likely that this image was the original inspiration for the lighted window in the ruined house of Purgatory.55 Purgatory, like The Dreaming of the Bones, represents the strangeness of light through dialogue and also through the minimalist stage directions. For example, the Old Man represents the scene as one of moonlight and shadows: “The moonlight falls upon the path, / The shadow of the cloud upon the house.”56 We also see links between lighting and haunting through the stage directions, such as:

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1. [A window is lit showing a young girl.]57 2. [The light in the window has faded out.]58 3. [ Window is lit up, a man is seen pouring whiskey into a glass.]59 4. [He stabs again and again. The window grows dark.]60 5. [ The stage has grown dark except where the tree stands in white light].61 The role of the audience and stage directions are especially crucial in Purgatory to validate the Old Man’s experience of haunting and strange temporality, as the Boy does not at first witness the apparition of his ancestors: “There’s nothing but an empty gap in the wall. / You have made it up. No, you are mad!”62 The boy does not see the apparition of his grandmother, but he does witness the ghost of his grandfather by the end of the play: “My God! The window is lit up / And somebody stands there, although / The floorboards are all burnt away.”63 Similarly, neither the boy nor the audience, according to the stage directions (though individual directors might decide differently), hear the hoofbeats that also torment the Old Man: Yeats thereby grants primacy to the visual aspect of the haunting and shows us that lighting is the primary means by which the dead return within the play. Subsequent productions often do not represent the house or the ancestors, but leave them to the imagination. A review of a 1972 production of The Dreaming of the Bones combined with Purgatory and The Death of Cuchulain praises how Miller “succeeds in re-creating the kind of innocent acceptance that saw with the mind’s eye rather than demand the actual physical representation of a dream-image.”64 In 1990, Frederick S. Lapisardi writes from the perspective of a literary adviser to the Yeats Theatre Festival at the Peacock Theatre (part of the Abbey) of the difficulty of staging “the fantastic elements of poetic drama in a theater so long immersed in realistic and largely commercial traditions.”65 The bill that year included Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Purgatory. Lapisardi emphasizes James Flannery’s commitment to an expressionist style in relation to the representation of magic and ghosts in directing Yeats’s theater,

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which led to the ghosts in Purgatory being represented “naked and bathed in red light,”66 which one scandalized reviewer rejected euphemistically—here, the “drama was diffused by a succession of unnecessary and distracting images” and Flannery’s overall bill was described as “more pretentious than theatrically meaningful.”67 It would appear natural that, given the similarities of their scientific reading and the presence of ghosts in their drama, Yeats’s and Beckett’s work would be frequently compared. However, possibly due to Beckett’s early satirical responses to the Irish Revival, such as “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), the works of these dramatists have historically received little direct comparison.68 Recently, though, some excellent work has been conducted on Yeats and Beckett, by Emilie Morin, Katharine Worth, Minako Okamuro, and others. For example, Morin explores Beckett’s 1931 collaborative plays, including Le Kid with Georges Pelorson at the Peacock Theatre at the Abbey and Youth’s The Season—? with Mary Manning at the Gate, alongside a Dublin tradition of avant-garde theater. She also notes that by 1936 Manning’s and Beckett’s Youth’s The Season—? had been anthologized by Macmillan alongside Yeats’s The Words upon the Window Pane in a collection of drawing-room plays.69 Beckett particularly sought out Yeats’s haunted theater: he attended a production of The Resurrection, while McAteer shows that he attended Purgatory, as well as a new production of On Baile’s Strand that premiered with it.70 Therefore, while it is certainly true that, as critics including Anthony Roche and Victor Merriman have argued, Yeats’s Purgatory had a profound effect on Waiting for Godot, especially in terms of setting, I wish to focus instead upon its influence on Beckett’s later haunted plays.71 Equally, I’d like to argue for their shared interest in associating the difficult light of the new physics with their dramatic representations of ghosts. The Flannery experimental production of Yeats’s Cathleen, Dreaming, and Purgatory was immediately followed at the Peacock (all in early August 1990) by Sarah Jane Scaife’s bill of five late “haunted” Beckett plays, Catastrophe, Come and Go, What Where, Nacht und Träume, and Footfalls, described as a “lunar landscape of the spirit” in a positive review by Gerry Colgan.72 Beckett had a 1976 copy of

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Flannery’s W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre in his library, giving him access to this revisionist version of Yeats’s drama in writing his own late plays.73 However, by the 1990s, in the productions that Lapisardi describes, Flannery is also influenced by Beckett’s own dramatic ghosts and indeed by an awareness of sharing a theatrical space with Scaife’s Beckett production, so this narrative of influence is complicated. By the time he wrote Footfalls, in 1976, Beckett had embraced Yeats’s example of occult or holy theater sufficiently that he directly advised Billie Whitelaw to “make it ghostly” when acting her part, writing that “one could go very far towards making the costume quite unrealistic, unreal. It could, however, also be an old dressing-gown, worked like a cobweb.  .  .  . It is the costume of a ghost.”74 Beckett’s staging techniques also take inspiration from the modernist phantasmagoria discussed earlier in relation to Yeats and, as Martin Puchner has shown, from Yeats’s antitheatrical symbolist tendency. Beckett’s famous removal of all lighting, including exit lighting, in the 1973 production of Not I with Billie Whitelaw—intended to heighten the effect of “Mouth”—is a stricture shared with phantasmagoria, “ghost shows,” and black-light theater. One of Beckett’s directors, Antoni Libera, in justifying the need to put out emergency lighting and be careful with how the Auditor character is lit, notes that after barely several minutes the shining spot of Mouth becomes a “lifeline”: it becomes soothing. After another five or eight minutes the viewer experiences fascinating optical illusions. The glimmering mouth, like a phosphorescent butterfly fluttering its wings, begins to move in space  .  .  . This occurs only under one condition: that apart from the shining mouth there is no other point of reference.75

While Beckett eschewed the ultraviolet light that was fashionable in 1920s and 1930s theatrical apparitions, in his theater he wishes to use lighting techniques to provoke an experience of haunting. The same director, Libera, felt that Beckett’s stage directions meant that the ideal method of lighting Mouth would be “a laser beam.” It is striking that a contemporary director feels that Beckett’s ghosts demand the use of a technology still not widely used in the theater.76 Beckett

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also suggested the use of a hologram for the ghostly face of Bam for the English premiere of What Where, and a hologram was authorized by Beckett for inclusion in Linda Hartinian’s and Ruth Maleczech’s 1984 production of Imagination Dead Imagine.77 The latter production was remarkable in its portrayal of a scene of haunting in that it involved no live actors. Here the use of hologram technology might be said to have allowed this Beckett production to achieve the combination of theatrical minimalism and surreal experience of haunting that Yeats aspired to in his theater.78 Ultimately, and appropriately, it took two direct products of the post-Einsteinian science of light, the laser and the hologram, to finally translate from the page an experience of haunting that, as I have been arguing in this essay, was itself a product of the new physics. Beyond Not I, and throughout Beckett’s late plays, each of his ghosts is linked to a particular light source. In Play, it is the spotlight “on faces alone” that “provoke[s]” the speech of the characters held within the urns;79 in Footfalls, a strip of lighting, “parallel with front, length nine steps, width one metre,” marks the path that the ghostly May walks constantly throughout the play, and which gradually dims as the play proceeds;80 in Ghost Trio, the female voice narrates the mysterious light, as though providing stage directions, “The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous”81; in . . . but the clouds . . . Beckett recommends a circular stage with “a gradual lightening from dark periphery to maximum light at centre”;82 and in “A Piece of Monologue” the audience sees the “faint diffuse light” and the “standard lamp, skull-sized white globe” that the Speaker reflects on lighting every night.83 These examples showcase, as Gontarski argues, the way that “light often functions as a character in Beckett’s theatre,” and they emphasize the centrality of science and the occult to Beckett’s playwriting.84 Indeed, these examples also demonstrate the way that, as Puchner argues, in Yeats’s work diegesis is a central part of the effect: “Beckett’s dramaturgy and mise en scène revolve around the experience of reading plays in a manner that takes stage directions to be as important as dialogue.”85 As in the Yeats plays examined earlier, here the textual difficulty of light in these stage

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directions, and the haunting images they create in the mind of readers, is as important as their translation into lighting effects for audiences. What is more, Beckett is often more explicit than Yeats, though still cryptic and playful, about how science might be an important context for the use of lighting in his theater. For example, in . . . but the clouds . . . , a teleplay, Beckett’s M is a hybrid occultist-mathematician, who, when he is unable to call up the apparition of W, “ceased, and busied myself with something else, more . . . rewarding, such as . . . such as  .  .  . cube roots, for example, or with nothing.”86 Of course, in . . . but the clouds . . . Beckett’s sense of the symbolic value of light is also enriched by the intertextual relationship with Yeats’s use of light in “The Tower” with its references to eclipses, and its use of light as both a metaphor for imagination and also for the magical invocation of the dead: And send imagination forth Under the day’s declining beam, and call Images and memories From ruin or from ancient trees, For I would ask a question of them all.87

In fact, we frequently see a triangulation of Yeatsian influence, science, and the occult in Beckett’s work in ways that seem self-conscious. In . . . but the clouds . . . this triangulation reflects and dramatizes the way that Beckett has come around to Yeats’s example. Similarly, Embers, a play that deals directly with ghosts, science, and starlight, as Henry is haunted both by his wife Ada and by “Vega in the lyre very green,”88 also features a self-conscious reference to the phantom hoofbeats of Purgatory (“Hooves! [Sound of hooves walking on hard road]”).89 And yet both of these examples mark a distance from Yeats, since Beckett was embracing new technologies (television and radio, but also holographic technology in the productions I discussed earlier) that were not available to his precursor, but that likewise came out of the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century that inspired both men. This chapter has explored how a consideration of science, especially the science of light as understood by the new physics, offers new

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approaches to ghosts in the drama of Yeats and Beckett and reconfigures a critical heritage of influence and intertextuality between these dramatic artists. In so doing, I have demonstrated ways in which Irish theater incorporates science and technology and how specific productions have addressed and might continue to address the difficulties of “making it ghostly,” as Beckett puts it.90 These insights might well be useful beyond academia, in contemporary theatrical practice. While Beckett’s directors have tended to be more adventurous in using technology to create the atmosphere demanded of his plays, future directors of Yeats’s plays would do well to consider whether his love of Crookes and the new physics could be used to inspire a wider range of theatrical effects, such as lasers or holograms, and thereby convey more fully what Yeats called “the terror of the supernatural described by Job.”91 In the Irish Times in 2015, Fintan O’Toole, arguing for a reconsideration of Yeats’s drama, cited the director Peter Brook on the idea of a “Holy Theatre,” or “the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear.”92 O’Toole connects Beckett’s late work with Yeats’s wish to “integrate music, dance, light and a severe visual presence into contemporary drama.”93 He reminds us that the Abbey has not determinedly explored Yeats’s work since the 1980s and 1990s Flannery productions and asserts the value of both the supernatural and scientific aspects of Yeatsian theatrical magic: Yeats’s plays are serious attempts to address the situation of theatre in a modern world of disembodied imagery. His holy theatre is a response to the spread of “realistic” images through cinema and photography.94

Indeed, we might argue that embracing Yeats’s ghosts, like Beckett’s, requires determined approaches to the question of science and technology in Irish contemporary culture, just as it requires equal engagement with the new physics that inspired many of these developments in drama.

The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism Flann O’Brien and Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin Andrew Kalaidjian

Is there such a thing as Irish modernism? Surely there is.1 Is there such a thing as late Irish modernism? This seems less likely, but surely there must be. There exists a significant body of criticism on the theme of “uncertainty” in Irish literature.2 Authors turn to uncertainty, critics argue, because Ireland itself is a nebulous proposition. Uncertainty, paradoxically, becomes all too guaranteed for the Irish writer. What I want to propose, however, is that the late Irish modernist turns to uncertainty not because Ireland itself is murky, but in fact the opposite: Ireland—as a nation—is entirely too real. From the Irish revolution to the Free State to the Irish constitution to the international recognition of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, Ireland becomes increasingly defined, regulated, and protected. Historical and cultural timelines of Irish modernism differ from British and continental counterparts. Enda Duffy notes that, in addition to the “social, cultural, and technological transformations that were being charted in cosmopolitan modernist texts,” Irish modernism has the added spice of rebellion and independence, lending it “an intense intimacy with political revolution as its central energizing impulse.”3 At first glance, such a schematic presents a nice, linear progression: the “early modernism” of revivalists W. B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, the “high modernism” of James Joyce with Ulysses 248

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poised firmly at the watershed, and the “late or postmodernism” of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, John Banville, and other contemporary figures. But if the revolution lends a timeline to Irish modernism, it also confounds the aesthetic investments of its practitioners. Modernism, at its core, is not interested in the before and after of revolution, but rather revolution itself, a restless and continual remaking of art and culture. If revolution was the “central energizing impulse” of Irish modernism, a lack of revolutionary outlets for those living in independent Ireland led to new uncertainties surrounding the purpose of art. A consideration of certainty and uncertainty within the trajectory of Irish modernism complicates its linear narrative. While it would be against the spirit of this essay to give an exact definition of uncertainty, I am first of all interested in recovering positive aspects of uncertainty—for instance, its ability to question accepted truths and dogmas. In this sense, I pursue uncertainty as a generative force rather than a restrictive or paralyzing one. I take a historical approach to analyze how the new fields of relativity and quantum physics shifted scientific ideas of uncertainty in the twentieth century and to consider the ways in which scientific discourse influenced social and cultural production as it entered the public sphere. I am not, I should clarify, suggesting an easy correspondence between scientific definitions of uncertainty and political or cultural forms of uncertainty. Instead, I analyze the ways in which scientists interpreted physical uncertainty in relation to human experience and vice versa: the ways in which writers connected the uncertainties of private and public life to new discoveries taking place on both the cosmic and subatomic level. For the early modernists of the Celtic Revival, Ireland as a nation was uncertain, which led to an interest in increasingly certain ideas about Irishness drawn from Celtic mythology and an emphasis on the Irish language. Critics such as Gregory Castle and Sinéad Mattar point out the influence of the science of anthropology on the work of revivalists.4 The anthropology of the time showcased a faith in the positivity of science: the ability of humans to know things—human

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culture included—to a high degree of accuracy. This empiricism displaced another type of certainty—namely, religious faith. J. M. Synge, for example, bases his modernism on the assertion that religious art had ceded its place to a new modern investigation of nature itself.5 Yet Synge notably maintains mystery—an uncertainty—that allows his work, in Castle’s analysis, to draw on the empirical sciences while also critiquing an overly authoritarian scientific gaze.6 Striking such a balance would prove difficult for late modernists at odds with the resurgent Catholicism of the new Ireland. During the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, such a nuanced balance of certainty and uncertainty, one might argue, had no place. On the one hand, nothing is more certain than war: nowhere are convictions stronger. Yeats—famous for singing amid uncertainty7 and ending his poems with ambivalent questions—does not waffle in “Easter 1916” as he repeats, with certainty, “a terrible beauty is born.”8 On the other hand, nothing is more unpredictable than the chaos of violence: the Yeats who meditates in a time of war and civil war finds certainty for only “one throb of the artery,” in a world where “the key is turned / On our uncertainty.”9 Joyce’s eminence during this period arises in relation to aesthetic revolution—a sharp departure from the earlier revivalism—and the actual revolution of his Irish homeland, which lent his writing the weight of timely significance. Yet his genius—like Synge’s—was to maintain the gnomonic tension between certainty and uncertainty (a position perhaps made tenable only in exile from Ireland itself), to present both an all-knowing, encyclopedic method in conjunction with what Philip Herring terms an uncertainty principle: “a genuine skepticism about our ability to get at the truth except in fragments, to understand finally and completely the impressions that our senses bring us, to analyze and interpret experience with a high degree of certainty, and to express ourselves unambiguously in eel-slippery language.”10 The late modernist inherits this skepticism. Scientific and literary investigators face the poverty of their respective tools and disciplines. In mutual regard, both parties return to the questions of

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modern life, creating a revised modernism that questions the mind’s relation to time. rel atives : periodization and irish nationalism

What plagues such terms as postmodernism and late modernism, of course, is the question of relatedness. What is the relationship to modernism, critics ask ad nauseam. Why not get a new word? Where are the post-Romantics? The late Edwardians? The modernist hijacking of time continues to confound critics. Is it any surprise that such a crisis of identity arose at the same moment Albert Einstein proposed a relative universe? If the Celtic revivalists were largely influenced by anthropology and the positive sciences, from Joyce onward the new physics of relativity, probability, and quantum theory became the dominant paradigm. At the same time, for late Irish modernists, as I have suggested, Ireland itself became a certainty. No institution better embodies the tension between tradition and modernity than the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), the pet project of Éamon de Valera— himself something of an amateur mathematician—which opened in 1940 after much debate in the Dáil. The institute brought together the Schools of Theoretical Physics and Celtic Studies, odd bedfellows that nevertheless advanced de Valera’s domestic and international goals to “bring renewed glory to Ireland” and “make it a leading force in mathematics and science.”11 The institute was able to benefit from the renewed global instability of World War II by offering a position to the Austrian Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, whose opposition to Nazism set him on a path of institutional itinerancy. Schrödinger’s 1926 paper “Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem” revolutionized the field of quantum mechanics through the introduction of an elegant wave equation that determined the probability of finding an atomic particle in a specific position. In this and subsequent papers, Schrödinger notably drew on Irish physicist William Rowan Hamilton’s work on optics in order to elaborate his own ideas of wave propagation.12 Schrödinger’s approach to the strange and unexpected

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phenomena seen at the atomic level differed from contemporaries such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in that it accounted for observational data collected by scientists in order to visualize atomic states. It was Schrödinger’s wave mechanics that led Heisenberg to revise his approach to the subject and articulate the famous “uncertainty principle,” whereby pairs of physical properties (such as location and momentum) can only be known individually.13 While Schrödinger recognized uncertainty, he was unsatisfied with any system that could not be reconciled with the human senses. As a result, he sought increasingly complicated equations that would resolve the contradictions between classical and quantum physics. The newfound security of his life on the green island led to false bravura when, in 1947, Schrödinger declared the discovery of a new unified field theory, which was ultimately unsubstantiated. While his scientific work may not have achieved the heights de Valera hoped for, the relative peace in Ireland did give Schrödinger time to philosophize and publish a number of books aimed at engaging a more literary audience. Schrödinger’s institutional life in Ireland showcases the pressures that any writer faces. A certain degree of security is required for the act of writing—a “room of one’s own,” in Virginia Woolf’s iconic formulation. Yet too much comfort may equally lead to a lack of inspiration, complacency brought about by a soft existence. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett’s modern forms stem from the impulse to quit the security of home and launch into an unsure career in foreign lands. Beckett went even further by abandoning English to write in French. Through a total devotion to art, both were eventually able to achieve a degree of financial stability—Beckett especially—which allowed them to stay in cosmopolitan Paris. The literary work of late Irish modernists who stayed in Ireland, however, suffered from the lack of a direct revolutionary outlet for creative energy. At the same time, the independence of Ireland brought a resurgence of conservative dogma, religious authority, and censorship. As such, late modernists could turn a revolutionary uncertainty toward undesirable aspects of the Irish Republic itself. Late Irish modernism, in this sense, challenges what Emer Nolan terms the “post-revolutionary pursuit of security

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and authority.”14 Myles na gCopaleen’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column in the Irish Times, for example, pursued a multiplicity of voices and characters to lampoon the newly emerging Irish Republic.15 In a different fashion, Patrick Kavanagh’s stark poems of rural life also challenged the selective vision of a modern, cosmopolitan Ireland.16 The short stories of Mary Lavin, if not as revolutionary in form, presented the lives of women in ways that destabilized the increasingly patriarchal republic of Ireland.17 This late Irish modernism emerging amid the security of Ireland itself is at odds with the prevailing picture of late modernism at large painted by Tyrus Miller and others. Joe Cleary notes the influence of “post-revolutionary conservatism”18 on late Irish modernists, but he nevertheless largely adopts Miller’s narrative of late modernism as “a fissile crisis of modernism  .  .  . that no longer looks to art to restore significance to a broken universe but strives rather to express ‘a world in free fall.’”19 The free fall that Miller references, of course, is the late 1930s and World War II, yet Ireland during World War II was arguably more stable than ever before. Its position of neutrality during the war was adopted, as Damien Keane and other critics contend, to ensure self-preservation and independence. Keane notes the insular and indeed utopian image of Ireland during this period, quoting from de Valera’s 1943 St. Patrick’s Day broadcast. De Valera’s ideal Ireland, with its “right living, frugal comfort, leisure of the spirit, sounds of industry, sturdy children, comely maidens and serene old age,” achieves stability through the declaration of neutrality in the face of an increasingly chaotic international arena.20 As Keane argues, “The ‘Ireland which we dreamed of’ represents not the idealist renunciation of the realities of the world, but a momentary inward ‘turn’ toward alternative possibilities that is itself necessitated by those realities.”21 Irish neutrality, in short, exemplifies Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle itself: the less precisely Ireland defined its alliances in World War II, the more precisely it could define itself as an independent nation. Given these unique local and global conditions, late Irish modernism, alternately given short shrift as a rider of coattails or a one-trick

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pony, may indeed have much more to say about a whole range of issues of interest to modernist scholars. Keane’s focus on “alternative possibilities” signals a defining mode for the late Irish modernist as well as the breakdown of linear or teleological accounts of Irish modernism. This focus on potential introduces an uncertainty that is not restricting or hampering but rather generative. Margot Norris, for example, argues for the “possible worlds” theory as the most fruitful approach to exploring Finnegans Wake because it avoids schematic and determined readings of the material.22 Is Irish late modernity a world in which, as Beckett’s Unnamable quips, “all is possible, or almost”?23 Perhaps, but what seems significant is the way in which writers and artists responded to this new horizon of possibility. Beckett railed against it, making possibility an endless iteration of failure (“any colour, so long as it’s grey”). If “all is possible” for the Unnamable, so is “all change to be feared, incomprehensible uneasiness.”24 Here lies the endgame of endless relativity: morass, waffling, paralysis. The challenge for writers still living in Ireland was to critique undesirable aspects of the republic without renouncing completely the progress and prosperity brought by independence. pseudos : embracing uncertaint y to question authorit y

Brian O’Nolan (as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen) finds decidedly more play in this land of possibility. For reasons literal, metaphoric, and biographical, O’Nolan seems most emblematic of a late Irish modernism, unsure of itself yet also vehement about the importance of the writer in a postwar world. As Anthony Cronin points out, O’Nolan’s was “the first generation to be educated and to become possible critics of the society they confronted in an independent Ireland.”25 Yet Cronin is also quick to note that this generation existed in ambivalent relationship to Ireland, hesitant to stray too far or be too openly critical for fear of losing the benefits of the new republic, however compromised. Unlike Joyce and Beckett, O’Nolan stayed in Ireland, writing under pseudonyms in order to enjoy the security of the civil service for some eighteen years, before parting ways for a decidedly precarious final act.

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O’Nolan’s position in the civil service gave him a unique vantage on the emerging Irish nation. His writings take on a variety of themes political, economic, and, most pertinent for the scope of this essay, scientific. There is a high degree of critical uncertainty surrounding the role of science in relation to O’Nolan’s writings, yet there is a consensus that both O’Brien and Myles had it out for the hard sciences. Cronin points out a libel suit between the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Irish Times after Myles’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column questioned the legitimacy and motives of the newly formed institute with the quip that its learned men were attempting to “show there are two Saint Patricks and no God.”26 While the offending comment appeared in 1942, Cronin ties this column to Schrödinger’s lectures on “Science and Humanism,” which did not take place until February of 1950, subsequently published in 1951.27 Paul Halpern claims the comment refers back to lectures Schrödinger gave in 1939, with the subsequent notion that the newly formed School of Theoretical Physics heavily influenced The Third Policeman and the character de Selby.28 Andrew Spencer further details the overlap between Schrödinger and O’Nolan in Dublin’s literary circles and provides a convincing reading of sections of The Third Policeman as a “dramatization of quantum theory.”29 Both critics point to scenes such as the Sergeant’s discussion of atomics and the intermingling of atoms that renders the locals “half people and half bicycle,” yet the influence of science can be seen not only in subject matter but perhaps more crucially in the aesthetic choices that lend this novel experimental qualities.30 In this vein, Charles Kemnitz claims that it is Einstein’s theory of relativity that holds the key to the narrative structure of the novel.31 Val Nolan identifies the “de” in de Selby with the “de” in de Valera,32 while Anthony Adams suggests the “pataphysics” of Alfred Jarry as a more likely touchstone.33 While it seems safe to suppose, as Halpern does, that de Selby emerges as a sort of constellation between Einstein, Schrödinger, and de Valera, the character’s persuasiveness lies in his elusiveness, flitting around the text of The Third Policeman in a series of winding and digressive footnotes, which draw attention to the futility of academic nitpicking and squabbles.

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If a timeline of influence is difficult to nail down, even more varied are critical responses to O’Nolan’s relationship to the new sciences. While Spencer and Halpern see a line of direct influence, Lanta Davis claims that O’Brien was “fiercely skeptical of science’s attempt to answer the questions he thought only faith could answer.”34 It may seem de rigueur that the writer should be at odds with the scientist, yet there is also evidence of a greater sympathy between the two. Schrödinger continues to appear in “Cruiskeen Lawn” throughout the 1940s and 1950s, mostly as an amicable aside for scientific gusto (i.e., “Get me Schroedinger on the telephone!”).35 A more extensive treatment comes in 1947, where Myles seems to defend Schrödinger from Einstein’s attack on his unified field theory. “What,” he writes, “does Einstein know of the use and meaning of words?”36 While ostensibly a defense of Schrödinger, the column is also an attack on theoretical physics—a “department of speculation”—and on the notion that the scientist can unravel the mysteries of mind, being, and death, going so far as to deem sinful the rational investigation of the causation of life. His point that “the human mind . . . cannot be investigated as a preliminary to reform, owing to the absence of extra-human investigators,” however, is precisely one of Schrödinger’s tenets on the limitations of scientific observation.37 Here Myles’s attitude to Schrödinger differs somewhat to his castigation of Einstein. While Schrödinger is a firm member of the department of speculation, he also, Myles must admit begrudgingly, does know something about words. Despite all of the attention to science in O’Nolan’s various pseudonymous writings, what literary critics often overlook—perhaps counterintuitively—are the popular writings from scientists that take a humanist bent.38 The spectacular implications of the new physics led to a boom in the popular science genre during the twentieth century, and those who could articulate its mysteries stood to position themselves as new shamans, priests, and meaning makers for an indeterminate world. While examples run the gamut, most interesting—for the present discussion, at least—are works by scientists themselves. What happens when the mind moves from the beauty and simplicity of mathematical language to the murky world of words? Perhaps

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receiving a contact high from literary Dublin, Schrödinger ended up faring better than most, giving numerous lectures and publishing three books meant for a more general audience. There is evidence that O’Nolan read or attended the lectures that led to the first two, 1944’s What Is Life? and 1951’s Science and Humanism. It is not impossible that he might also have read 1959’s Mind and Matter. In each of these works, Schrödinger explores scientific approaches to broad themes such as life, matter, and free will, only to continually open the door to skepticism and uncertainty. While What Is Life? proposes provocative concepts such as “negative entropy”—a process whereby organisms suck order from their surrounding environments—the book ultimately determines that the processes of life remain elusive to explanations from the science of physics.39 Myles took some delight in this conclusion, writing that “Schroedinger himself has confessed his obligation to us [na gCopaleens] in respect of his attempted comprehension of the life-cell.”40 Where science fails, Myles points out, the humanists of the world enter. 1951’s Science and Humanism ventures even further into the realms of uncertainty in discussing all matter. Schrödinger does not agree with Bohr and Heisenberg that objects have “no existence independent of the observing subject”; instead, he suggests that “there is a fully determined physical object in existence, but I can never know all about it.”41 Based on this discussion of indeterminacy and intermingling between subjects and objects, Schrödinger ends this work with a meditation on free will through the figure of St. Augustine. “Could perhaps the declared indeterminacy,” he writes, “allow free will to step into the gap in the way that free will determines those events which the Law of Nature leaves undetermined?”42 This very question, of course, animates the opening pages of O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive, where mad scientist De Selby interrogates St. Augustine through a time portal created by the chemical DMP. An acronym for Dublin Metropolitan Police, DMP—as Maebh Long points out—is also similar to Myles’s invented “cruscalon,” a “cosmic vapour” designed to assist humanity by “throwing the earth into neutral.”43 This cry to slow the earth down came on the heels of the first hydrogen bomb tests. It

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is not until 1959, Long notes, that the cruscalon appears as a “botulin toxin  .  .  . for destroying everything in the world.”44 The arrival of atomic weapons goes some way toward explaining the shift from the indexical “de Selby” of The Third Policeman—a somewhat whimsical and provocative thinker—to the comic villain “De Selby” of The Dalkey Archive, whose plan for the DMP, of course, is to annihilate time, and, consequently, all those who exist in time’s flux. The humble Michael (Mick) Shaughnessy—often read as a stand in for O’Nolan himself—takes it upon himself to thwart De Selby’s plan. Along the way, he discovers James Joyce alive and well, working as a bartender in Skerries. While this all seems random enough, Mick’s plan to put the two into contact serves as an interesting comment on the increasing distance between scientists and humanists in the postwar era. Creating a mental list, Mick wonders whether bringing the two together might result in mutually assured nondestruction: “Could the contretemps . . . be resolved by bringing together De Selby and Joyce and inducing both to devote their considerable brains in consultation to some recondite, involuted and incomprehensible literary project ending in publication of a book which would be commonly ignored and thus be no menace to universal sanity? Would Joyce take to De Selby, and vice versa? Does a madman reciprocally accept a dissimilar madness? Could the conjunction of the two conceivably bring forth something more awful even than D.M.P.?”45 O’Brien’s characterization of the modernist writer as a sort of mad scientist aligns literary experimentation with the speculative work of theoretical physics. Funnily enough, Myles did seemingly extend the olive branch at least once to Schrödinger, in a column in which he invites an ostensibly random group of people listed in the phone book after the “Scotch House,” his erstwhile “office,” to join him at said establishment for a sup. The middle name on the list happens to be Schrödinger. “We could have a little Feier for ourselves,” he writes, “Everything on me bar the tonic water, which I would expect Dr. Schweppes to bring along.”46 The German feier as well as the “Dr.” title for Schweppes both seem to point to Schrödinger. We may assume this rendezvous was not meant to be, and, in similar fashion, the meeting between De

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Selby and Joyce never comes to pass. De Selby realizes the error of his ways and retreats to a peaceful existence with his wife in Buenos Aires, while Joyce attempts to join the Jesuits for a life of ecclesiastical reflection. As for the rather anticlimactic end of The Dalkey Archive, it does at least provide two provocative images of security. The first is Mick’s transfer of the DMP to the safety-deposit system in the Bank of Ireland, where a Mr. Heffernan assists him. Assuaging Mick’s concerns over the safety of the object, Mr. Heffernan assures him that “from the beginning of the world banking has been a business which entailed risk.”47 If the cask of DMP is read metonymically for the actual police force, this transfer from a physical, corporeal security to abstract, financial security seems surprisingly prescient for the financial faith that would lead to Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years. His business concluded, Mick meditates on the weighty turn his life has taken, comparing himself to the prime minister. To retire from the world as he intends to do as a Carthusian monk would secure his own life and soul, yet his bank transaction secures “the human race, in existence and to come.”48 In the end, Mick chooses a middle path, neither renouncing the world nor acting as its guardian; instead, he opts for domestic security by marrying Mary and displacing his mother in the family house. “There’s nothing like a roof over your head,” Mary reflects, “a roof means security—for ourselves and the family.”49 As to Mick’s surprise that he may be a father, Mary responds that she is “certain” she will have a baby. revolutions : potentialit y, temporalit y, and generational influence

While critics remain underwhelmed by The Dalkey Archive and an ending that employs a pedestrian resolution in the form of—gasp!— a marriage plot, for the purposes of this essay the focus on life as a process of one generation replacing another does nicely return to a discussion of temporality and revolutionary potential.50 What the ending showcases is that the best-laid plans of certainty always succumb to the unknown. Mary’s moment of absolute certainty and security is

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equally the point of uncertainty for the next generation of Shaughnessys. Yet it is also too simple to reduce aesthetic permutations throughout the twentieth century to merely generational anxiety of influence. While such readings might hold up for a look at the shift from Joyce to Beckett, a passage such as the following from John Banville’s Eclipse, published in 2000, confounds such linear progressions: “I have come to distrust even the solidest objects, uncertain if they are not merely representations of themselves that might in a moment flicker and fade. The actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality. Everything is poised for dissolution. Yet never in my life, so it seems, have I been so close up to the very stuff of the world, even as the world itself shimmers and turns transparent before my eyes.”51 Late Irish modernism, I suggest, reveals just such a state, no longer the Johnny-come-lately to the revivalists and the eminent Joyce, but a “fuddled middle state” between the two, a “transcendent tipsiness.”52 Yet, on further inspection, might not this passage be from Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? The unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman? One of Beckett’s nebulous vagabonds? This passage from Eclipse shows both a profound skepticism of the real as well as a yearning for a direct access to reality. Rather than locating the passage in time, Banville seems interested in accessing a revolutionary time, where dissolution reveals the very stuff of the world. Revolution, whether political, scientific, or aesthetic, ruptures the everyday perception of life, the rhythms enforced by institutions and governing bodies. One defining feature of the late Irish modernist, however, is the questioning of revolution itself, whether such a radical shift is in fact possible. In The Third Policeman, we learn that “de Selby likens the position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination known conventionally as ‘life’ with its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies.”53 Part of this limitation stems from biology: humans can only know the world through physiological receptors and as such are limited by their senses and genetic dispositions. Much of what made

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the new sciences of relativity and quantum physics so revolutionary was the positing of phenomena and worlds outside of the sphere of human experience. But another major part of this limitation is social and political: history and convention continue to straitjacket the individual within certain prescribed paths. Revolution would seem to be the way out of such control and restriction; however, once the chaos of revolutionary fervor settles, the question remains whether the change it has brought is absolute or if it has merely traded one tightwire for another. As Flann and Myles, Brian O’Nolan struggled against the “restricted orbit” of the civil service through writings that revealed the confines and strictures of the emergent Irish republic. What unites scientific and literary discourse of the postwar era is an emphasis on the limitations of humanity, whether biological, spiritual, or imaginative. This focus on limitations is perhaps paradoxical at a time when human innovation was reaching unprecedented levels. Schrödinger notably borrows from an artistic tradition when faced with the inherent blind spot of human existence. As Robert Pogue Harrison explains, “Schrödinger does not use Heidegger’s language of Being. Instead, without resolving the paradox or dispelling the blindness it condemns us to, he says that sometimes a painter will smuggle into a painting an unobtrusive self-portrait, as Michelangelo did in his Last Judgment fresco. Or a poet will do something similar, as when Homer gives a discrete portrait of himself in the blind bard who sings of the Trojan War in the halls of the Phaikans.”54 Or—we might add to this list—as Flann O’Brien breaks down the frame of the novel in 1939’s At Swim-Two-Birds. In presenting a layered system of writers and narrators, O’Brien’s debut interrogates systems of knowledge. Much could be said of the place of science in relation to the villain John Furriskey, whose knowledge of physics is first-rate. Yet Furriskey exists only as the successful realization of Dermot Trellis’s theories of “aestho-autogamy,” the spontaneous generation of a “living mammal from an operation involving neither fertilization nor conception.”55 With the psycho-eugenics of aestho-autogamy, the book ultimately presents an exploration of the mind, yet not in a strictly Cartesian fashion. The narrator defines the parameters: “I closed my eyes, hurting

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slightly my right stye, and retired into the kingdom of my mind. For a time there was complete darkness and an absence of movement on the part of the cerebral mechanism.”56 The offhand reference to the stye maintains the importance of the corporeal side of life. As an exercise in epistemology, the novel is constantly inviting the reader to question perception and to feel the aberrations and itches that confound any system that seems too smooth to be true. The interiority of the mind in At Swim-Two-Birds parallels the vast realm of possibility that relativists and quantum theorists were exploring at both macro- and microscopic levels. The resulting view of revolution may be seen not as a decisive or absolute vision for the future, but rather as recognition of the potential for change behind any existing political structure. At the same time, the ideals and possible worlds of revolution developed in the mind must go through a period of reconciliation as change begins to affect lived human experience. What remains important is the critique of new institutions with the same revolutionary spirit that led to their creation. O’Brien and other writers of a late Irish modernity accomplish this critique through an attention to the styes and material contradictions that accompany the idealized vision of the Republic of Ireland. Where O’Brien began his literary speculations, Erwin Schrödinger ends his. Retired from DIAS, 1959’s Mind and Matter finds him in Cambridge. Taking stock of the global situation, he writes, “Though we are still pretty vigorous egoists, many of us begin to see that nationalism too is a vice that ought to be given up. . . . Each one of us is threatened by the terrific new weapons of aggression and is thus induced to long for peace among the nations.”57 Schrödinger is no doubt referencing the overt nationalism of World War II and the growing Cold War arms race, yet one also wonders whether his time in nationalist Dublin might inform such a sentiment. As an alternative to political dogma, Schrödinger suggests a sustained interrogation of consciousness, objectification, and temporal existence. He returns to some of the questions he pursued in What Is Life?, claiming that “consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution.”58 Both Schrödinger’s interest in the mechanics of evolution and O’Brien’s

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psycho-eugenics seem to return, in a refracted manner, to the anthropological debates that energized the Celtic Revival. Yet, instead of pinning down the human through the new worldview of science, these late investigations reveal that “the world of science lacks, or is deprived of, everything that has a meaning only in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving and feeling subject.”59 In the increasingly rationalized life of the postwar era, such a position leaves much needed room for a degree of uncertainty in the temporal existence of humans. Toward the end of Mind and Matter, Schrödinger outlines a “statistical” theory of time that reads remarkably like the vision of suspended time that De Selby presents to Mick in The Dalkey Archive. While such a philosophy of time is not of use to the practical scientist or mechanical engineer, it does present a revolutionary horizon: “What we in our minds construct,” concludes Schrödinger, “cannot have dictatorial power over our mind.”60 One is reminded of the fate of Dermot Trellis, of At Swim-Two-Birds, whose literary inventions usurp his role as writer in barbaric fashion. Revolution begins in the mind but once it enters the world it takes on a life of its own. Aesthetic and political revolutions can prove equally liberating and confining. Though not as politically revolutionary as the revivalists or as aesthetically revolutionary as the high modernists, late Irish modernists maintained modes of uncertainty in order to question what revolutionary minds had brought into the world, and to push the nascent Ireland toward a more just and sustainable future. At Swim-Two-Birds ends with the gift of a watch—a macabre welcoming of the unnamed narrator into the world of record, while the postmortem offered in the final pages suggests that “numbers . . . will account for a great proportion of unbalanced and suffering humanity.”61 Revolution cannot be properly so called if it leads merely to the gift of a shiny watch to mark new forms of human suffering. The late Irish modernist knows this with certainty. Instead, what remains crucial for the late Irish modernist is to retain the potential that inheres in revolution: to draw on revolutionary energy to continue pushing society forward in a progressive vein rather than blindly following new edicts and authorities.

John Banville, Long Form, and the Time of Late Modernism Cóilín Parsons

When, it seems appropriate to ask at the end of this collection of essays, was modernism? The question is an age-old one and can be answered dozens of different ways. Irish modernism, whatever that may mean, has its own temporality, marked for some by an early Irish passage to modernity through the social and economic shocks of the nineteenth century, or by an experimentation in writing that began with James Clarence Mangan, Sydney Owenson, W. B. Yeats, or Augusta Gregory (depending on the chosen indicators of modernism). The contributors to this collection offer yet another new interpretation of Irish modernism that links modernist writing to technological and scientific change, starting with Tom Greer in the 1880s and ending with Elizabeth Bowen’s and Flann O’Brien’s postwar late modernism. The essays cover a literary period bracketed by the invention of dynamite and the cultural dissemination of the uncertainty principle. But even with this highly original, materialist definition of Irish modernism comes what we might call an “on or about” proposition: modernism and/or modernity began (or ended) on or about a certain year. Years are not themselves stable markers of historical time: 1885 marks not only the publication of Tom Greer’s novel, but also the Treaty of Berlin, both of which resulted in their own forms of cultural newness; 1922 saw not only the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land, but also the inauguration of the Irish Free State. “1885” and “1922” are meaningless unless grounded in a particular place or discursive 264

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field. Because of its orientation to newness and change, however complicated that may be, modernism as a movement (or assemblage) is fatally indebted to periodization, and so every new definition seeks to expand, contract, or police its temporal boundaries. Above all others, one definition of what was not yet called modernism sticks in the mind, for its audacity and remarkably casual tone: “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1924, “human character changed.” “I’m not saying that one went out,” she continues, “as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that.”1 The date, Woolf admits, is somewhat arbitrary, but the change is not. We might sum up Woolf’s sense of a new fiction with this one phrase that captures so elegantly the phenomenon that scholars of modernism labor again and again to describe and to date: “We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failure and fragments.”2 But how long is the season? Is it already ending at the time of its proclamation, as we see the dialectical emergence of late and high modernism? Does the impossible formlessness of Woolf’s Between the Acts, occasioned by the onset of World War II, inaugurate the season’s end (another form of dialectical simultaneity)? Or does it keep going, limping on past its prime, like some endless autumn that never yields to winter? In this chapter I look (as Andrew Kalaidjian does in the previous chapter) at late modernism, the modernism that proclaims itself both timely (it is modern, after all) and unseasonal. Taking John Banville’s “science tetralogy”—Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter (1982), and Mefisto (1986)—as the object of analysis, I argue that Banville’s untimeliness in clinging to the remains of modernist aesthetics in this novel series (particularly in Kepler) is structured by an understanding of modernity that appeals to astronomical, not human, scales of time. While the novels recount recognizable historical moments, they produce the effect of being out of time—they are curiously ahistorical, cementing Banville’s reputation as a novelist whose work stays above the fray of the political disagreements of his moment. But his ahistoricism is not motivated by apoliticism. For the science tetralogy, with its publication extending over ten years, and

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its action extending over centuries, the span of a human life comes as a mere gadfly in the life of the universe, troubling deaf heaven. If, for György Lukàcs, the realist novel is haunted by a “‘bad’ infinity,” that can only be countered by an artificial adherence to a biographical time frame, Banville’s four novels give in to the infinity that the realist novel avoids, unchaining themselves from the constraints imposed by the limits of a human life, even while they are mostly biographical.3 They do so by stretching and challenging conventional narrative time. The tetralogy is, fundamentally, a series of four novels about time in the wake of the scientific revolution, or how the novel form’s relentlessly progressive time and human scale clashes with the infinity of time(s) in the universe. The tetralogy is also, crucially, about how to respond to the crisis of time through longer forms, unfolding over ever longer times. By taking on the question of the novel form’s incapacity to capture increasingly complicated notions of time, Banville’s late modernism trades in and rejects the very temporality of lateness, questioning our received ideas of the time of modernism. Banville’s modernist flourishes have been noted by critics since the beginning of his writing career; they are hard to miss, for he announces them at every opportunity. His debts are acknowledged in the first pages of Doctor Copernicus, which tie Stephen Dedalus’s wrestling with the gap between words and their meaning to Copernicus’s career of straining to match the observed and the imagined universe. “Yes, I said, yes” to modernism, The Newton Letter’s narrator affirms, in a novel that evokes brilliantly the ennui and terror of Elizabeth Bowen’s big houses and echoes the last words of Ulysses with the ironic geography of “Dublin—Iowa—Dublin.”4 Mefisto is in many ways the most indebted of the science tetralogy to Banville’s Irish modernist forebears, announcing its refracted Beckettian legacy on the first page—“I could go on. I shall go on” (which itself echoes “I can’t go on” from The Newton Letter)—and sticking to it throughout, with the sounds of Molloy and Malone Dies in particular echoing through the novel.5 Yet Banville has also disavowed modernism, as we see in a lecture he gave at the University of Iowa in 1980:

John Banville, Long Form, and Late Modernism   267 Modernism has run its course. So also, for that matter, has postmodernism. I believe, at least I hope, that we are on the threshold of a new ism, a new synthesis. What will it be? I do not know. But I hope it will be an art which is honest enough to despair and yet go on; rigorous and controlled, cool and yet passionate, without delusions, aware of its own possibilities and its own limits; an art which knows that truth is arbitrary, that reality is multifarious, that language is not a clear lens.6

While Banville spreads rumors in this lecture of modernism’s demise, he also borrows from one of his abiding influences, the poet Wallace Stevens, to illustrate the linguistic homelessness of the Irish: “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place / That is not our own, and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.”7 Banville’s admiration for the homelessness that Stevens’s poem captures is part of the complex of Banville’s embrace and rejection of modernism—he finds himself in a place not his own and not himself. The sentiment echoes Theodor Adorno’s dictum that “it is a part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”8 Banville’s flirtation with and rejection of modernism that we see here in the gesture of borrowing from Stevens just as he proclaims his irrelevance does not arise because some great historic shift has taken place to ensure that modernism has “run its course.” On the contrary, the passage assures modernism’s continued relevance, even if under the guise of lateness. To speak of Banville as a late modernist is already to claim that he is out of joint, first because of the belated temporality signaled by the term itself, but also because the time of late modernism is usually taken to be the 1930s, immediately after the high-water mark of formal innovation in the 1920s. Tyrus Miller’s influential definitional work on the subject sees Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, and Djuna Barnes as the characteristic figures of an ironic laughter in the face of high modernism’s formal excursions. While they may have cast skeptical glances at the primacy of form, they were not yet dismantlers of the world-making designs of modernism—that would emerge in the aftermath of World War II. The writers are marked by

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their “unseasonable forms,” Miller writes (borrowing the term from Fredric Jameson), which indicate not just a reaction to high modernism, but a proleptic figuring of a later, more widespread rejection and reformulation.9 The “late” of late modernism carries a taint of death— “these works reflected a closure of the horizon of the future”—and yet it is also charged with “contemporaneity.” “Late” signals both the end of the project of modernism and the announcement of its continued relevance.10 For Miller, “late modernist writers energetically sought to deflate the category of form as criterion for judging literary works . . . their works reveal how contingent was the modernist buildup of form and formal mastery.”11 How can we square Banville’s attention to form with Miller’s definitive statement? It is on this issue that Banville shows perhaps most clearly his late modernism; the science tetralogy oscillates between an admiration for pure form and a rejection of formalism. Reading the four books as a series allows us to appreciate the paradoxes, played out over a decade, created by a conversation between Kepler’s formal rigidity and the dilatory narrative of a book not being written in The Newton Letter. The long form of the tetralogy—a conscious extension of the novel, as we shall see later—allows Banville to explore a dialectic of form and formlessness, to perform high modernism in the two astronomy novels and simultaneously (to use the term with the looseness appropriate to this discussion of anachronism) respond to it in Mefisto with a version of what Miller calls “the disruptive, deforming spell of laughter.”12 In one sense, Banville’s long form can disrupt the time lines of modernism/late modernism/postmodernism, refusing the stageist assumptions of that progression. Miller himself has rethought his categorical argument for a late modernism that flourished between the wars and transitioned into postmodernism, agreeing with Anthony Mellors that “if modernism dissolved, its solution was more modernism.”13 Now Miller believes that we occupy “nothing other than a highly differentiated ‘late modernist’ field” that began with the birth of high modernism and continues to develop even today.14 Thomas S. Davis disagrees with Miller’s initial assessment that late modernism is marked by an inward turn,

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arguing instead that the newly expanded field engages overtly with its world, addressing a crisis in the world system. Late modernism is, in Davis’s formulation, a deep and extended engagement with a new postwar world system that continues into the present.15 The “late” in late modernism, then, is the “post” in postcolonialism—a marker of heightened complexity rather than achieved ends. The field of late modernism and Banville’s science tetralogy have this in common: that they are marked by an understanding of time not passing but existing, of synchrony rather than the diachrony that is so central to modernism’s sense of its newness. It is in this sense that Banville’s tetralogy begins to approach the understanding of spacetime prevalent in modern astronomical investigations. From our position at the beginning of the new century, the minute distinctions of the twentieth century come into focus as pressures within a single paradigm rather than paradigm shifts. And, from Banville’s perspective, even paradigm shifts such as Copernicus’s revelations that the earth is not the center of the solar system are mere personal events in the long and varied history of the emergence of the modern understanding of the universe. All of these questions of simultaneity and distance, of time and space, are played out on the plane of Banville’s interest in form. There is no other place to begin, then, but with his own “on or about” statement, which self-consciously echoes Woolf’s: Fiction is too imprecise a discipline to experience the kind of upheaval that relativity theory caused in physics, but all the same, something is happening, there are rumblings. The old certainties are going. In their place can come a new poetic intensity, once the form is freed of its obligations to psychologize, to spin yarns, to portray “reality.” How the change will come about no one yet knows. But as science moves away from the search for blank certainties it takes on more and more the character of poetic metaphor, and since fiction is moving, however sluggishly, in the same direction, perhaps a certain seepage between the two streams is inevitable.16

Sixty-one years after Woolf’s manifesto, Banville repeats in different words much of what Woolf said, but he points to a cause of all

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this change, which is missing from Woolf’s accounting: “science,” it appears, is to blame.17 What has changed in the world since Woolf’s assertions is the demise of science as the discourse of certainty, the supersession of Baconian methods and assumptions by an expanding consciousness of the relativity of scientific knowledge. Fiction slouches along behind, in Banville’s telling, whereas for Woolf it was at the vanguard of representing the new thing in the world—the instability of “reality.” Banville’s pronouncement on physics and fiction is a late resurrection of that most modernist of forms, beloved by the proponents of the new: the manifesto. As a recognizable manifesto, it announces its continued interest, even if tempered by irony, in modernism’s mania for projects and pronouncements, but its proclamation about timeliness is itself belated, making a claim about altered realities that seems sixty years too late. Banville is describing something that happened at least as early as 1919, when Arthur Eddington, using a lens ground at the Grubb telescope company in Dublin, proved that Einstein was not mistaken when he made the wild claim that an object’s gravity could warp spacetime. Banville is a modernist out of joint, hanging on for dear life to a manifesto now too old to make sense of or in the world. And yet there is a way to upend this entire discourse of belatedness, by rescaling our frame of analysis and taking on board the implications of Eddington’s work for our understanding of time. Eddington, a great popularizer of Einstein’s ideas, describes the concept of spacetime by pointing out that “events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.” Our human sense of time being divided into past and future (and the ever-impossible present), he writes, is “closely associated with our ideas of causation and freewill,” so that when the human sense of the progression of time is proven to be a work of fiction, all notion of causality collapses, decentering the human entirely from the events which she or he encounters as having been caused by her or him. Implausibly, “there is nothing to prevent a person from being aware of an event before it happens; and an event may cause other events previous to it.” The principle is astounding, but an example from Eddington’s own life illustrates

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it clearly: “The eclipse of the Sun in May 1919 caused observers to embark in March.”18 We could say that Eddington’s idea that events are always there, just waiting for us to encounter them, means that there is nothing new under the sun, but that idiom is too time-worn to capture the discovery. All time, humans discovered in the course of the twentieth century, is now. As Stephen Kern puts it, there was a realization in the wake of Einstein that “the present moment could be filled with many distant events.”19 Kern’s accompanying literary example is from the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, which stages simultaneity of action throughout, but Kepler’s narrator offers another, more mundane, image: “The past was marching through his head into a limitless future.”20 This is not a messianic realization—that we have reached the end of time itself—but an astronomical constant that plays at the edges of Banville’s science tetralogy and undercuts his “on or about” proposition by positing the continuity and simultaneity of time, not its rupture. And it is this astronomical constant that Banville faintly discerns in his science novels: I have tried in my novels on Copernicus and Kepler not only to portray the men and their times, but, more importantly, to illustrate something of their ideas by an orchestration of formal movement and rhythm in the prose. It is not for me to say how well, or how little, I have succeeded. Much more needs to be done. I think I can discern, very faintly, a new kind of novel, a new definition of fiction. Large efforts will be required, on the part of readers no less than writers. We all have a fondness for the novel, that comfortable old ragbag.21

Here too Banville stakes out a position as a modernist, valuing form as the first principle of scientific prose, abandoning character and plot, and making uncompromising demands on the reader. The mania for form has one ancestral foot in modernism’s obsessions and the other in a scientific controversy that spans Kepler’s time and our own: whether form is intrinsic or arbitrary. Early in Kepler, we learn that the astronomer “was after the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world,” searching for the forms

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that would reveal the truth of a harmonious world.22 His home life in disarray, Banville’s Kepler holds on desperately to the idea that there is some order in the universe that must only be discovered. His guide in this is Copernicus, who had so radically reordered the imagined structure of the solar system. But Copernicus’s new system was flawed: “Dissatisfied with the Ptolemaic conception of the world, Copernicus had devised a better, a more elegant system, which yet, for all its seeming radicalism, was intended only, in the schoolman’s phrase, to save the phenomena, to set up a model which need not be empirically true, but only plausible according to the observations.”23 Copernicus’s system described a cosmos according to limited observations, but did not explain it, which Kepler takes to be the ultimate task of the scientist. The struggle between form and observed formlessness in the universe is an historical struggle in the early modern period between scholasticism and science; this philosophical contest also appears in an aesthetic struggle in the modern period between form and content—whether fiction should be governed by seemingly external factors such as imposed structures (as poetry might be seen to do) that do not organically arise from the content. During his studies, Kepler is consumed with the search for forms in the world around him, seeking a recognizable shape to the universe: “The world abounded for him now in signature and form. He brooded in consternation on the complexities of the honeycomb, the structure of flowers, the eerie perfection of snowflakes.”24 His search is ultimately fruitless, as he realizes that the universe does not conform to rules easily visible or pleasing to the human eye. And yet the newly complex universe can be constrained by its description—Kepler devises an elegant schema to tame the story he is about to tell: Since, as I believe, the mind from the first contains within it the basic & essential forms of reality, it is not surprising that, before I have any clear knowledge of what the contents will be, I have already conceived the form of my projected book. It is ever thus with me: in the beginning is the shape! Hence I foresee a work divided into five parts, to correspond to the five planetary intervals, while the number of chapters in each part will be based upon the

John Banville, Long Form, and Late Modernism   273 signifying quantities of each of the five regular or Platonic solids which, according to my Mysterium, may be fitted into these intervals. Also, as a form of decoration, and to pay my due respects, I intend that the initials of the chapters shall spell out acrostically the names of certain famous men.25

Kepler does not, of course, describe any of his own books here, rather Banville’s all-too-clever and painstakingly structured Kepler.26 Rüdiger Imhof writes that the “mathematical precision” of the structure of the novel “may seem sterile, even a mild form of lunacy,” but at the same time, it is “unobtrusive” and seemingly effortless.27 In that case, why go to the trouble of doing it at all? For Imhof, this is all further evidence of Banville’s genius and his “tenacious storytelling ability,” but the key to the invisible structure lies deeper than just a cleverness on Banville’s part.28 On the one hand, it is clear that Banville tasks the reader with holding order and chaos together, as both Kepler himself and the novel aggregate chaotic times and spaces, and chaotic characters, using a rigid structure. This is also, of course, the flaw at the heart of both Kepler and Copernicus that Banville identifies—the desire to account for the messiness of the universe is hampered by the imperative to “save the phenomena,” or to prove the elegant theory, whether that theory bears any resemblance to the observed universe. On the other hand, the structure of Banville’s novel is entirely external to the unfolding of narrative time (in the guise of Kepler’s life) that it purports to represent. Narrative time, the heart of the novel form, is a mere epiphenomenon on the cosmic shape of the universe—in planetary scale, the novel is all phenomenon and no reality. Kepler’s ideas of the universe being formed according to the Platonic solids, which he outlines in his Mysterium Cosmographicum, were wrong, but of course that is the point for Banville—to build a formal architecture for a book on a shaky foundation, while insisting on the primacy of form. This laughter in the face of form is, above all, what marks Banville’s work as late modernist. The extraordinary series of letters at the heart of Kepler, which recount the discoveries that are mostly absent from the rest of the book, mark the high point of Banville’s elaborate structure. They are

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hypotactical in revealing eventually his discovery that the planets move in ellipses, but paratactical in placing discrepant times and places and correspondents beside each other with no attempt at subordination—the letters appear to be included in no particular order at all, jumping from date to date and correspondent to correspondent with no clear order. The final letter in the sequence that we read includes the dramatic discovery to which the letters have been slowly building: “The planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus.”29 The climactic and triumphal announcement of Kepler’s first law of planetary motion might comprise the last words of this section of the novel, but this order does not mirror the letter’s time in the life of Kepler—the letter is dated 1605, but other letters in the sequence are dated as late as 1612. Scientific discovery does not emerge in concert with the orderly passing of human days and hours but in the rearrangement of questions and ideas. On the one hand, the letters are out of order, but their order in the pages of Banville’s novel leads to a climax of discovery. At the same time, their seeming randomness masks a clever elliptical structure, as the dates of the letters begin in 1605 and progress to 1612, then regress to 1605, but not at a uniform pace (not all years are covered, and some are represented by more than one letter). The novel yields to what seems like a random and disorganized succession of years, upending the assumed linear (if jagged) relationship in a novel between narrative time and discourse time, and yet it also builds to a climactic discovery. It is as if Banville’s Kepler has encountered an already existing event, with the 1612 letters counterintuitively foreshadowing a discovery of 1605. As we know from Eddington, “An event may cause other events previous to it.”30 While Banville may be committed to rigid structure, his theory of scientific discovery cleaves more closely to Eddington’s notion of event as encounter: Kepler propped himself against the wall and watched the goatish dancers circling in a puddle of light from the tavern window, and all at once out of nowhere, out of everywhere, out of the fiddle music

John Banville, Long Form, and Late Modernism   275 and the flickering light and the pounding of heels, there came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle of uniform velocity is false.31

Kepler’s arbitrary but rigid form recalls one of the twentieth century’s (and late modernism’s) great efforts to, among other things, find a via media between C. P. Snow’s two cultures: Oulipo. The Ouvroir de la Littérature Potentielle was cofounded by a writer attracted to science, Raymond Queneau, and a chemical engineer drawn to the promise of literature, François Le Lionnais.32 Rather than seek a writing that avoids all constraints (which modernist experimentation implies, but which the Oulipians thought impossible), the Oulipians set for themselves rules “in order to be totally free.”33 By creating frameworks and rules for writing, and inventing arbitrary constraints (as in Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969), which avoided the letter e entirely), Oulipians exposed the preexisting constraints on writers and revealed the poverty of Romantic ideas of genius and invention. They also annexed literature to the world of rules as recognized by science, which Banville does in Kepler, but in a way that did not negate the deeply inventive aspects of recognizing and playing within a system of rules. The Oulipian imperative is not so much to “save the phenomena” as to recognize the effects of the phenomena, to experiment with the rules and invent new ones, testing the power of the imagination to work with and not against the constraints of its environment. By structuring Kepler around the observed shape of the solar system and the names of the observers, Banville plays with the idea of a dialectic of necessary and self-imposed constraints that characterized the work of Oulipo. In doing so, he gestures to the impossibility of understanding the universe except through the structures and forms imposed on it by its observers. The result is both Einsteinian and Yeatsian—we cannot tell the dancer from the dance—and it collapses the conceits of the idea of two cultures. Form, in this reading, is the stage on which science and literature merge; the new fiction of which Banville writes in “Physics and Fiction” is one of form over content, but a form that

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has lost its high modernist authority, always troubled by its potential collapse into arbitrariness and by its human limits—troubled and yet invigorated. This paradox of form echoes Raymond Williams’s stillgenerative claim that literature evokes the “structure of feeling” of a particular epoch.34 With its combination of the hard shell of structure and the soft interior of feeling, or experience, Williams’s phrase captures the dual aspects of science and literature that Banville’s novels express in their unremitting attention to form even as they pit the experience of the scientist against the anonymous discoveries of science. While this primacy of form is most obvious in Kepler, the science tetralogy as a whole offers an experiment in what I have been calling “long form.” What follows borrows loosely from the work of Peter Hitchcock, whose book The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form argues that a number of postcolonial writers (Assia Djebar, Nuruddin Farah, Wilson Harris, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer) carve out emerging time and space configurations in their novel series (trilogies and tetralogies). These experiments in story-time and discoursetime, which stretch narrative out over time and space, challenge the temporal and spatial orthodoxies of colonialism, decolonization, development, and globalization.35 The resulting “long space” challenges the boundaries of the novel and the nation, arresting and dilating time by disaggregating the time of the novel from the time of the nation. For Banville, what is troubled is not primarily the novel/nation bind, but the connection between the novel and the unfolding of human time, or between humans and time. The “long space” of the science tetralogy enacts a dialectical relationship between the novel form’s drive to totality and late modernism’s inward turn, a microscopic and macroscopic relationship that offers a refraction of the relationship of the human body to astronomical time. In “Physics and Fiction,” Banville claims that what has changed in the novel since the nineteenth century is that “breadth has gone”—the novel can no longer claim to represent a whole world of experience that is “commonplace.” What is left, he writes, is depth: “Down we must go, with Kafka down in the burrow, out of the big world and into

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the dark underground of our selves.”36 In this formulation the novel retreats from the world and also from its earlier claims of expansiveness; its journey down the rabbit hole narrows both the focus and the claims of the novel. “I am a little creature,” says Kepler, “my horizons are near.”37 Banville’s argument seems disingenuous when we take his tetralogy into account. Yes, each novel burrows into the minds of the character (though Doctor Copernicus and Kepler retain plenty of breadth too, with their eyes on the heavens), but the effect of the entire tetralogy is to capture five centuries at once, spanning Poland and Ireland, as well as astronomy, astrology, religion, mathematics, and historiography. Taken as a whole, the tetralogy is wildly expansive, exploding the time and space of the novel. To write and read novels in series rather than as stand-alone literary objects is to experiment with the time of the novel and to delink it from the limits (even if constantly stretched) of possibility of a single novel. Banville’s late modernism seems a prodigious anachronism, a deliberate slight to the expectations of progress and time we have come to use as a crutch in describing our world. It also thumbs its nose at the very idea that there should be any necessary correlation between form and history; the causal relation between form and its historical moment dissolves and slips out of joint. Making a claim for Banville as a late modernist (in the way he seems to do himself) is to reach for anachronism as critical principle—lateness comes with the implication that it is a tired repetition of a more vital moment. Perhaps Banville is merely (if such a move can ever be dismissed like this) breathing old life into an Irish literary scene in the 1970s and 1980s that seems to be caught up in a neonaturalism, having overcome its modernist phase.38 But this too limits the achievement of Banville’s work, doing no justice to the bravura performance of a tetralogy structured by scientific ideas. Banville captures time’s folds and wrinkles in a long novel form that requires the reader to pay special attention to the tetralogy’s own time of writing, publication, and consumption, as it unfolds over ten years. Arguments about the time of late modernism dissolve in the face of the scale of the universe. 1970s Ireland becomes 1930s Britain and vice versa, loosening the already tenuous historical relationship

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between late and modernism, and between the 1930s and late modernism. It is the counterintuitive discovery of quantum physics that then and there is simultaneously here and now, rendering these deeply important (in human scale) distinctions meaningless. As Cornelius Castoriadis writes of the social institution of time: “It is obviously the illusion of the historian—our illusion, necessary to all of us—to measure eternity on the basis of his own life expectancy and to consider that whatever does not change for three centuries is ‘stable’. But change the scale of time, and the stars in the heaven will step to a dizzy dance.”39 While the astronomy of which Banville writes is decidedly pre-Einsteinian, the moment in which he writes it, and which he identifies in “Physics and Fiction,” has been disabused by the new physics of its uniqueness. My claim for Banville’s interest in the deeper structures of scientific knowledge comes at the end of a collection of essays that have made similar claims for all of their objects of study, countering constant suspicion that science in Irish modernism is merely a stand-in for other concerns more properly historical and political. For early Banville in particular, the debate becomes somewhat circular, with even sympathetic and thoughtful critics insisting on the essentially analogous nature of Banville’s writing. Thus, we read that the novels in the science tetralogy “are above all else analogies for the artistic process,” or that his work in the 1970s and early 1980s “articulates the zeitgeist of Ireland’s newly minted relationship to Europe.”40 In these two common positions, what is lost is Banville’s interest in the history and philosophy of science, and in a novel’s capacity to capture what was at stake in the long scientific revolution from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. We can, of course, agree that Banville is interested in art (the subject of his second tetralogy), or that he cares about representing Ireland in his novels (clearly visible in The Newton Letter’s commitment to the Big House novel as historical hermeneutic), but to limit Banville’s science tetralogy to these time-worn ways of reading Irish writing is to discount the story of Irish literature in the twentieth century that Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism tells. Banville’s work is the culmination (but surely not the end) of a long and complex

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tradition of writing about and with science and technology that has been submerged in the course of the last century in favor of a critical emphasis on nation and history. The science tetralogy does not avoid nation and history but situates them within a longer time frame, casting a jaded eye on obsessions that seem petty in the face of astronomical or geological time. There is, of course, a danger that the result will be an evacuation of history and politics from literature altogether, but this is not Banville’s purpose here—he effects instead a rescaling of Irish literature. Perhaps Banville’s place in all of this furor over Irishness and modernism can be best understood through the planetary thrust of a passage from The Book of Evidence, published three years after the last book of the science tetralogy, Mefisto:41 I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to some cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us?42

Arguments about placing and dating, about late and high modernism, are situated in planetary space, becoming moot. This question, about the “baffled and homesick,” is perhaps the last sentence of the science tetralogy. Fittingly, it arrives late.

Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. W. B. Yeats, “Poetry and Science in Folklore,” in Uncollected Prose, vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 174. See Dorinda Outram, “Heavenly Bodies and Logical Minds,” in Science and Irish Culture, vol. 2, ed. David Attis and Charles Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 2004), 21–23; John Wilson Foster, “Natural Science and Irish Culture,” Éire-Ireland 26, no. 2 (1991): 92–103; and James Bennett, “Why the History of Science Matters in Ireland,” in Science and Irish Culture, vol. 1, ed. David Attis and Charles Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 2004), 1–15. 2. W. B. Yeats, “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art,” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, by John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 35, 37. This essay was published first in 1898 in the Daily Express. Yeats’s attitude was also shaped by an interest in Standish O’Grady’s veneration of a heroic Irish past in The History of Ireland (1878–81) as well as Arthur Symons’s praise of symbols and beauty in his edited collection, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). O’Grady, History of Ireland. Vol. 1, Critical and Philosophical (London: Sampson Low, Searle, Marston & Rivington), 1881; Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Archibald Constable), 1908. 3. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (London: Macmillan, 1903), 13. 4. See Ronan 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 Wittman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), 18–30. 5. See, for instance, Donald F. Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997); and Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). 6. See, for instance, Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2009); Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Sinéad Garrigan

283

284   Notes to Pages 2–9 Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004; Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010); Cóilín Parsons, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016); and Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2010). 7. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 7:493. 8. Joyce, Ulysses, 7:553–54. 9. Explored in detail in Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939, ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007). 10. Eve Patten, “Ireland’s ‘Two Cultures’ Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival,” Irish University Review 33, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2003): 9. 11. John Wilson Foster, “Nature and Nation in the Nineteenth Century,” in Nature and Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. Foster and Helena Chesney (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997). In “Encountering Tradition,” Foster suggests that the Irish developed a more instinctual and folkloric approach to the land. See Foster, “Encountering Tradition,” in Nature and Ireland, esp. 45–47. 12. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 3. 13. See Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 3–4. 14. Prakash, Another Reason, 12. 15. In a colorful example of this, there was an ironic attempt by a Zambian schoolteacher in the 1960s to build a national space program that would signal Zambia’s place among the developed and free nations. See Namwali Serpell, “The Zambian ‘Afronaut’ Who Wanted to Join the Space Race,” New Yorker, March 11 2017, https://www .newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-zambian-afronaut-who-wanted-to-join-the -space-race. 16. “The trouble de l’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun mal might name. It is to burn with a passion . . . No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no ‘mal de’ can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 91. 17. Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland, 225. 18. Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016); Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information (College Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2014).

Notes to Pages 9–15   285 19. See recent works such as Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2009); and Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics, and the BBC (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2018). 20. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7. 21. Maren Tova Linett, Bodies of Modernism (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2016); Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 22. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 2–3. 23. The most compelling account of the discrepant time spaces of Irish modernity can be found in David Lloyd, Irish Times: The Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008). 24. For an excellent recent analysis of the “emergency” as an active “process” and not a static “posture,” see Anna Teekell, Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018), 5. 25. For a series of excellent essays on these experiments and resurrections, see Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Paige Reynolds (London: Anthem, 2016). 26. Joe Cleary, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), 3. 27. Relatively recent monographs on modernism and the new science (broadly conceived) include Jeffrey S. Drouin, James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: “The Einstein of English Fiction” (London: Routledge, 2014); Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003); Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology; and Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). 28. For recent overviews of these developments, see The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (London: Routledge, 2010); Mark S. Morrison, Modernism, Science, and Technology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). 29. On the centrality of art to scientific knowledge, see, for example, Omar W. Nasim, Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014). 30. Gillian Beer, Darwin and the Novelists, quoted in Devin Griffiths, “Darwin and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018), 67.

286   Notes to Pages 15–21 31. Morrison, Modernism, Science, and Technology, 7. 32. Morrison, 6. 1. NATURAL HISTORY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL

1. The Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club was founded in 1886, Cork in 1892, Limerick in 1893. As Sean Lysaght notes, regional archaeological societies whose activities overlapped substantially with those of the field clubs were also founded at this time in Kildare (1891), Cork (1891), Waterford (1893), and Galway (1900). See 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 Univ. Belfast, 1997), 158. See also Timothy Collins, “A Victorian Phenomenon: Amateur Naturalists’ Field Clubs in the North of Ireland,” Linen Hall Review 4, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 10–11. 2. This estimate is taken from the Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1904) and is quoted in Diarmid A. Finnegan, Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 42. 3. David Elliston Allen characterises the natural history field club in Britain as an “early Victorian invention.” The original was the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club, formed in 1831. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), 142. 4. Juliana Adelman, Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 36–38. 5. “The project of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), xv. 6. Enda Leaney, “Vested Interests: Science and Medicine in Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland,” Field Day Review 2 (2006): 286. 7. See Papers of John Millington Synge, Trinity College Dublin, TCD MS 4370, f. 43. I am grateful to the Board of Trinity College, the Univ. of Dublin, for permission to quote materials from the Synge and O’Sullivan Papers. 8. For an account of this correspondence, see E. Charles Nelson, “Emily Lawless and Charles Darwin: An Irish Mystery,” Archives of Natural History 43, no. 1 (2016): 148–51. 9. W. B. Yeats, “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1989), 491. 10. John Wilson Foster, “Natural History in Modern Irish Culture,” in Science and Society, ed. Bowler and Whyte, 119–33, 127. 11. Taken from Lawless’s obituary in the Irish Times. Quoted in Heidi Hansson, Emily Lawless, 1845–1913: Writing the Interspace (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 2007), 3.

Notes to Pages 22–26   287 12. Quoted in Hansson, Emily Lawless, 49–50. 13. Emily Lawless, The Book of Gilly: Four Months Out of a Life (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), 169. 14. Lawless, 180. 15. Lawless, 253–54. 16. Lawless, 181. 17. Heidi Hansson, “Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science,” Journal of Literature and Science 4, no. 1 (2011): 60. 18. Lawless, Gilly, 175–77. 19. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), 131; Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 5. 20. Emily Lawless, “An Entomological Adventure,” Traits and Confidences (London: Methuen, 1898), 4, 10–11. 21. J. M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume II: Prose, ed. Alan Price (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 5. 22. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: Penguin, 2006). 23. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies: Memories and Reflections (London: Bracken, 1995), 115–16. 24. David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 8. See also Papers of John Millington Synge, TCD MS 4370. 25. Deirdre Toomey, “‘Killing the Da’: Synge and The Golden Bough,” in Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence, ed. Robert Fraser (London: Macmillan, 1990), 157. 26. Edward Hirsch, “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” PMLA 106, no. 5 (October 1991): 1126. 27. Daniel J. Casey, “John Millington Synge: A Life Apart,” in A J. M. Synge Literary Companion, ed. Edward A. Kopper Jr. (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 12. 28. Synge, Works, vol. 2, 12. 29. Synge, 7. 30. Synge, 7. 31. Synge, 9. 32. Synge, 9. 33. Jason Willwerscheid, “Migratory Movements: Evolutionary Theory in the Works of J. M. Synge,” Irish Studies Review 22, no. 2 (2014): 131–32. 34. It is worth noting here that Synge’s own chronology may be more narrative device than biographical truth. W. J. McCormack, for instance, thinks it more likely that Synge’s crisis with Darwinism did not occur until his mid-twenties. See Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2000), 42–43.

288   Notes to Pages 27–34 35. Synge, Works, vol. 2, 9–10. 36. Greta Jones, “Contested Territories: Alfred Cort Haddon, Progressive Evolutionism, and Ireland,” History of European Ideas 24, no. 3 (1998): 205. 37. Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 85–86. 38. TCD MS 4351, f. 34. 39. TCD MS 4370, f.18. 40. See W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, 73–74. 41. TCD MS 4351, f. 41. 42. Synge, Works, vol. 2, 23–24. 43. Synge, 24. 44. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 1–44. 45. Richard H. Roberts, “‘Nature,’ Post/Modernity and the Migration of the Sublime,” Ecotheology: Journal of Religion, Nature & the Environment 9, no. 3 (2004): 316. 46. Papers of Seumas O’Sullivan, Trinity College Dublin, TCD MSS 4550-1. 47. See, for example, AE, “A Note on Seumas O’Sullivan,” in Imaginations and Reveries (Dublin: Maunsel, 1915), 29–33. 48. Jane Russell, James Starkey / Seumas O’Sullivan: A Critical Biography (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1987), 40. 49. See Seumas O’Sullivan, Poems (Dublin: Maunsel, 1912). 50. Sean Mannion, “Celtic Gaslight: Urban Material Culture in the Writings of Seumas O’Sullivan,” Éire-Ireland 46, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2011): 45. 51. Seumas O’Sullivan, Collected Poems (Dublin: Orwell, 1940), 41. 52. W. B. Yeats, “The Autumn of the Flesh,” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, by John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 69. 2. JOHN EGLINTON

1. AE (George Russell), Imaginations and Reveries (Dublin: Maunsel, 1915), 20. 2. Austin Clarke, Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: C. Smythe, 1995), 79. 3. Quoted in William M. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), 40. Yeats scribbled this note on a flyleaf page of his 1905 edited collection, Some Essays and Passages by John Eglinton, Selected by William Butler Yeats (Dublin: Dundrum Dum Emer, 1905). 4. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings: Including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and “A Portrait of the Artist,” ed. Walton A. Litz, John Whittier-Ferguson, and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 112. 5.  James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 1:555–57. This event was inspired by an actual encounter between Joyce, Eglinton,

Notes to Pages 35–38   289 Best, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 155. 6. Joyce, Ulysses, 9:46–53. 7. Joyce, 9:1017–19. 8. John Eglinton and Frederick Ryan, “Introductory,” Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought 1, no. 1 (1904): 1. 9. John Eglinton, “Dublin Letter,” Dial 73 (1922): 619. 10. Ernest A. Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: John Lane, 1916), 234. 11. Declan Kiberd, “Nationality or Cosmopolitanism?” in Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 156. 12. John Eglinton, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, by John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 9. 13. W. B. Yeats, “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art,” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 36; W. B. Yeats, “A Note on National Drama,” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 19; AE (George Russell), “Literary Ideals in Ireland,” in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 53. A. Norman Jeffares notes that Yeats, at this time, rebuffed the material world in an effort to locate a path to “disembodied ecstasy”; in Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Kyle Cathie, 1996), 109. 14. George Moore, Hail and Farewell: Vale (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 238. 15. Eglinton, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?,” 11. 16. Eglinton, “National Drama and Contemporary Life,” 27. 17. John Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” Bards and Saints (Dublin: Maunsel, 1906), 38, 42, 36. 18. George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity (London: Constable, 1879), xxxiv. 19. Moore, Hail and Farewell: Vale, 191. 20. Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A New Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), 92–93; James Joyce, “Gas from a Burner,” in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), 243. 21. James Joyce, “James Clarence Mangan,” in Mason and Ellman, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 81. 22. Eglinton, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?,” 12. I believe Joyce knowingly riffs on Eglinton’s words here once in Portrait and twice in Ulysses. See Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Paul Riquelme (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 178–79; and Ulysses, 15:4473–4 and 16:1157–65. See also endnote 79. 23. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 43. 24. Eglinton, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?,” 12.

290   Notes to Pages 39–41 25. Yeats, “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art,” 36; AE, “Literary Ideals in Ireland,” 53. 26. John Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” in Eglinton et al., Literary Ideals in Ireland, 42–43. Eglinton’s endorsement of epics and ballads might seems at odds with his disdain of legends, folklore, and history. Natasha Moore, however, offers a counterpoint that illuminates Eglinton’s late Victorian interest in epic poetry. She assures that for Victorians, the genre served as a “repository” for history and cultural knowledge. They were attracted to the form’s ability to encapsulate knowledge and were curious if the epic could be “fus[ed]” with the novel, a less-restrictive form that might accommodate the complexities and trivialities that characterized their age and dizzied their sensibilities. Such a synthesis, too, they speculated, could grant their literature a “dignity, cohesion, and sheer importance” often attributed to epic poetry. Moore adds an anecdotal account of Thomas Carlyle in which he purportedly claimed that if a modern epic is composed, it would showcase “‘the Business of Life as it actually is. . . . A poem, whether in verse or prose, conceived in this spirit, and impartially written, would be the epic of the age.’” Both Eglinton and Carlyle (whom Eglinton admires as an ideological compatriot in his essay “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry”), draw on this plastic “spirit” of the epic. Natasha Moore, “Epic and Novel: The Encyclopedic Impulse in Victorian Poetry,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68, no. 3 (2013): 396–422. Eglinton also argues on this point that if classical forms are to “live again,” they must have “something new added to them out of the author’s age and personality.” With this “transforming element,” technological epics or ballads may produce more reflective mirrors of their ages (“Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 44). 27. Eglinton, 44. 28. Ernest A. Boyd, “John Eglinton,” North American Review 198, no. 696 (1913): 687. 29. Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 44. 30. Vicki Mahaffey, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), ix–x. 31. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 90; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 52; emphasis in original. 32. Marinetti, “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine,” 89; Marinetti, “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine,” Marinetti: Selected Writings, 91. 33. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Battles of Trieste,” In F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 161. 34. Marinetti, “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine,” Futurism: An Anthology, 89.

Notes to Pages 41–45   291 35. Marinetti, 91. 36. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Futurism: An Anthology, 120, 122. 37. Lawrence Rainey, “Introduction: F. T. Marinetti and the Development of Futurism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, 15. 38. Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” in Futurism: An Anthology, 65. 39. Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 42. 40. Joyce, Ulysses, 10:821–27. 41. Rainey, “Introduction: F. T. Marinetti and the Development of Futurism,” 1. 42. Marinetti, “The Battles of Trieste,” 161. 43. Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 45. 44. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 42. 45. Perhaps Eglinton also thought of elements included occasionally during the mid-sixteenth century—for example, as Jane Bennett lists, “oil, salt, sulphur, and spirit.” Bennett, “The Elements,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 106, 109, 11; emphasis in original. 46. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 39. An example of a repeated trope in nationalist narratives includes depictions of Irish people waiting for a messianic hero to rise up and deliver Ireland from England; see Patrick Pearse’s “The King,” “The Master,” and “The Singer”; Maud Gonne’s “Dawn”; and Alice Milligan’s Hero Lays. 47. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 43. 48. Boyd, “John Eglinton,” 687. 49. Eglinton was dubbed both “the Irish Emerson” and “the Irish Thoreau” (Boyd, “John Eglinton,” 675, 680). 50. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 5; Henry David Thoreau, “Wild Apples,” in Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays, ed. William Rossi (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2002), 140–65. 51. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition (New York: Modern Library, 1993). 52. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 6; emphasis in original. 53. Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 46, 45. 54. Eglinton, 42, 44, 45. 55. Eglinton, 45–46. Perhaps Eglinton’s comments on Shakespeare inspired Joyce’s Hamlet theory, which Stephen and Eglinton discuss in Ulysses. 56. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 40.

292   Notes to Pages 46–50 57. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 14. 58. Eglinton’s writings overlook the fact that many technologies were already politically charged and were viewed as instruments of the British empire. This acknowledgment is likely left out of his criticism because he was a Unionist and did not find such entanglements problematic. 59. Eglinton, “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?,” 10, 12. 60. AE (George Russell), “Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Literature,” in Eglinton et al., Literary Ideals in Ireland, 82. 61. Eglinton, “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 42. 62. Eglinton, 42. 63. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 505. 64. Richard Fallis, The Irish Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1977), 12. 65. I offer a more detailed example in “From ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’ to ‘Hibernian Metropolis’: A Vision of the City through the Tramways of Ulysses,” Joyce Studies Annual (2015): 28–54. 66. Joseph V. O’Brien, “Dear Dirty Dublin”: A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 68. 67. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 120. 68. James Joyce, “The Dead,” In Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes and Walton A. Litz (New York: Penguin, 1996), 212, 216. 69. Joyce, Ulysses, 7:1043–47. 70. Michael J. Shiel, The Quiet Revolution: The Electrification of Rural Ireland, 1946– 1976 (Dublin: O’Brien, 1984), 15, 250–52. Shiel writes that even in 1976, Ireland had not reached total electrification, as an estimated 1–2 percent of households had no access to electricity due to their remote locations. 71. Joyce, “The Dead,” 216. Michael Rubenstein and Luke Gibbons also corroborate the streetlamp’s use of gaslight in Rubenstein, “Aquacity,” Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 82; and Gibbons, “‘Ghostly Light’: Spectres of Modernity in James Joyce’s and John Houston’s ‘The Dead,’” in A Companion to James Joyce, ed. Richard Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 363. 72. Joyce, “The Dead,” 219. 73. Rubenstein, “Aquacity,” 83. 74. Joyce, “The Dead,” 222, 223. 75. Joyce, 223. 76. Joyce, 189, 190. 77. Joyce, 223.

Notes to Pages 50–53   293 78. Rubenstein, “Aquacity,” 84–85. 79. Eglinton and Joyce share a unique history, with Joyce likely feeling a certain indebtedness toward the essayist. As a young writer, Joyce asked Eglinton to publish a poem. Eglinton obliged, even paying the writer a small sum. Eglinton also served as an early (albeit unfavorable) reader of his essay “A Portrait of the Artist,” after Joyce approached him in the hopes of having the manuscript published in Dana. John Eglinton, “The Beginnings of Joyce,” Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1935; reprinted, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1967), 135–36. Eglinton’s criticisms, in part, spurred Joyce to transform the text into the version of the novel we know today. Michael Patrick Gillespie adds that Eglinton was one of the few “essayists whom Joyce read.” Joyce was drawn to Eglinton’s writings because they were a “counterforce” to Yeats’s “ideas.” Gillespie also notes that Joyce’s library in Trieste included Eglinton’s Anglo-Irish Essays. Gillespie, Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 42. For more, see endnote 22. 80. Eglinton, “The Beginnings of Joyce,” 144, 139, 148. 81. AE, “Literary Ideals in Ireland,” 53. 82. Upon Eglinton’s death, the Guardian wrote that he was “in the Irish literary movement . . . but was never quite of it” (“John Eglinton, Critic and Essayist,” Guardian, May 12, 1961). Boyd suggests that he is “the least known” of the revivalists due to his primary medium—the essay—rather than the more commonly studied genres of poetry, drama, or fiction. Nonetheless, Eglinton’s influence extended beyond Joyce and included George Moore, who featured him prominently in Hail and Farewell. Boyd adds that Moore’s introduction to the Tauchnitz edition of The Untilled Field attributes Eglinton as coming up with the text’s concept. He also served as Moore’s cheerleader while he wrote it (Ireland’s Literary Renaissance, 281). See Ernest A. Boyd, Appreciations and Depreciations: Irish Literary Studies (Dublin: Talbot, 1917), 51–52. 83. John Eglinton, “Life and Letters,” Irish Statesman 1, no. 27 (1919): 648. 3. THE EASTER RISING AS MODERN EVENT

1. L. G. Redmond-Howard, Six Days of the Republic: A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase in Irish Politics (Dublin: E. Ponsonby & Maunsel, 1916), 22–23. 2. Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound (Dublin: Anvil, 2002), 40. 3. Redmond-Howard, Six Days of the Republic, 15. Such incidents were also noted by the Illustrated Sunday Herald: “When the fighting started all the hooligans of the city were soon drawn to the spot in search of loot. Half the shops in Sackville Street were sacked. Children who have never possessed two pence of their own were imitating Charlie Chaplin with stolen silk hats in the middle of the turmoil and murder.” Cited in Donal Fallon, “The ‘Denizens of the Slums’ and Looting during the

294   Notes to Pages 54–57 Easter Rising,” https://comeheretome.com/2015/10/04/the-denizens-of-the-slums-and -looting-during-the-easter-rising/. 4. Denis Condon, “Creating Great Trouble in a Most Laughable Manner: Chaplin in Dublin in 1914,” in Film Ireland, February 4, 2015, http://filmireland.net/2015/02 /04/early-irish-cinema-creating-great-trouble-in-a-most-laughable-manner-chaplin -in-dublin/. 5. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), 74. Benjamin’s thinking on this was influenced by Georg Simmel’s concept of “the ur-phenomenon,” derived from Goethe, in which things exhibit the principles that inform them: “The highest thing would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory” (72). 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 264. Such effects were noted even in Ireland: “At a meeting of the Cork County Council, the chairman complained that the large amount of money spent on technical education was wasted because ‘the people for whom it was intended showed no disposition to profit by it.’ Instead, the popularity of Charlie Chaplin and picture houses were proof, he believed, of the failure of the art classes provided to raise the public taste.” Cited in Denis Condon, “The Constant Watchfulness of Irish Cinema in March 1916,” Early Irish Cinema— What’s On in Irish Cinema—100 Years Ago, https://earlyirishcinema.wordpress.com /category/film-distributors-in-ireland/london-agents-in-ireland/ruffells-exclusives/. 7. Bulmer Hobson, “The Confession of Faith of an Irish Nationalist,” in The Voice of Freedom: A Selection from “Irish Freedom,” 1910–1913 (Dublin: Freedom Office, 1913), 100, 111. 8. R. R. Madden, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times, 3rd series, 2nd ed. (London: Catholic/J.Mullany, 1860), 287, 478, cited in W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1976), 216. 9. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition, 219. 10. Stanford, 220. 11. Quoted in Austin Clarke, Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe), 25. 12. Eimar O’Duffy, The Wasted Island (Dublin: Martin Lester, 1919), 43. O’Duffy was a leading military figure in the training of Irish Volunteers in the 1914–16 period, but disagreed with the conspiratorial tactics of the Easter Rising. 13. O’Duffy, The Wasted Island, 44. 14. O’Duffy, 460. 15. Desmond Ryan, The Man Called Pearse (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), 70–71. 16. Róisín Ni Gairbhí, Willie Pearse (Dublin: O’Brien, 2015), 138. Mary Brigid Pearse also adapted Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth for the Leinster Stage Society

Notes to Pages 57–60   295 at the Abbey Theatre, February 23–25, 1911 (100). Based in Trieste, James Joyce also wrote an essay on Dickens in Italian to mark the occasion. James Joyce, “The Centenary of Charles Dickens” (1912), in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 183–86. See also Darrell Figgis, later a leading Irish Volunteer, “Charles Dickens. February 7, 1812–1912,” in Nineteenth Century and After 71 (February 1912): 274–84. 17. I am grateful to Brian Crowley, director of the Pearse Museum at Rathfarnham, Dublin, for bringing these to my attention. 18. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003), 390. 19. Gustave Flaubert, “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,” in Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2005), 320. 20. Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1991), 134. 21. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), 13:417. 22. James Joyce, Ulysses, 18:1054–57. 23. Jim Cooke, “The Dickens Fellowship of Ireland,” in Charles Dickens’s Ireland: An Anthology (Dublin: Woodfield, 1999), 198. Martin Harvey told his visitors that “actors owed a great deal to the novelist. He personally owed a debt which could never possibly be repaid. He said that the character of Sydney Carton exemplified the very prototype of Christianity. It had made him many friends and brought him into contact with humanity at large” (198). The reworking of Christianity in a French republican setting prefigures the multiple narratives informing the 1916 Rising. 24. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 618, n. 126. 25. Foster, W. B. Yeats, 413. Characteristically, recoil from the modern “Abyss” is registered in distinctively modern terms of “jarred” and “broken.” Stephen Watt also cites Shakespearean echoes in an 1899 review of The Only Way: “The consummating sacrifice of his (Sydney Carton’s) life for the life of his successful rival is an episode as dramatic, as heart-moving, as any in all of literature, outside the magic pages of Shakespeare himself” (Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, 135). The Easter Rising also had its Shakespearean affinities: its timing coincided with the four hundredth anniversary of the playwright’s death. 26. Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, 137. 27. The English Republican hero Algernon Sidney was sentenced to death in 1683 by the notorious Judge Jeffreys, to whom Carton is compared in his early drunken career. Andrew Sander, “Introduction,” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), x, 83. 28. “The Last Howley of Killowen,” Household Words, July 15, 1854; “Old Stories Retold: The Battle of Vinegar Hill,” All the Year Round, February 23, 1867. For

296   Notes to Pages 60–66 coverage of Irish material in Dickens’s periodicals, see Cooke, Charles Dickens’s Ireland, chapters 4 and 8–10, and especially chapter 12 (“Stories of Irish Rebellion”). 29. Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (London: Penguin, 1991), 125–26. It was while helping Wilkie Collins to write The Frozen Deep that Dickens first conceived the main idea of A Tale of Two Cities. 30. Rex Ingram, A Long Way from Tipperary, 188, cited in Ruth Barton, Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2015), 24. Martin-Harvey starred eventually in the film version The Only Way, directed by Herbert Wilcox in 1926. 31. Alexander Dumas’s story “The Corsican Brothers,” popularized by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault in his melodramatic adaptation in 1852, prefigures Dickens’s Tale: See Joss Marsh, “Mimi and Matinée Idol: Martin-Harvey, Sydney Carton and the Staging of a Tale of Two Cities, 1860–1939,” in Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities” and the French Revolution, ed. Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh, and Jon Mee (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 130, 138. 32. Kevin Rockett, “Emmet on Film,” History Ireland 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 46–49. 33. W. J. McCormack, Dublin 1916: The French Connection (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012), 12–13. 34. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 263–64. 35. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), 213–14. 36. Michael Farrell, Thy Tears Might Cease (London: Arrow, 1968), 263, 267. 37. Farrell, 265. It is noteworthy that Martin does not notice, or overlooks, the invocation of God in the Proclamation. 38. Roisín Higgins, “‘The Irish Republic was Proclaimed by Poster’: The Politics of Commemorating the Easter Rising,” in Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Politics of Memory in Ireland, ed. Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016), 51. 39. W. B. Yeats, “The Statues,” Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Papermac, 1989), 461. 40. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 269. 41. Max Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion (London: Four Square, 1965), 272. 42. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 61. 43. Joyce, Ulysses, 3:20–21, 2:9–10. 44. Orla Fitzpatrick, “Photography, Dublin and 1916,” in Reflecting 1916: Photography and the Easter Rising, ed. Trish Lambe and Tanya Kiang (Dublin: Gallery of Photography, 2016), 22.

Notes to Pages 66–72   297 45. Hidden Histories: WWI’s Forgotten Photographs, directed by Nick Maddocks, aired May 21, 2015, BBC Four. 46. Patrick J. Kelly, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement, W.S. Ref No. 781, 63, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0781.pdf#page=64. 47. James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1996), 171. 48. Fintan Cullen, Ireland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 97–124; Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama, and Moving Slide Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011), 70–71. 49. Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012), 256–60. 50. W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 42. 51. Elaine Sisson, “Masculinity and Citizenship: Boyhood and Nationhood at St Enda’s,” in The Life and After-Life of P. H. Pearse—Padraic Mac Piarais: Saol agus Oidhreacht, ed. Roisín Higgins and Regina Uí Choillatáin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 215. 52. Joanna Lowry, “History, Allegory, Technologies of Vision,” in History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, ed. David Green and Peter Seddon (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000), 98. 53. James W. Harkins Jr., Sydney Carton: A Tale of Two Cities (Mount Holyoke, MA: Shea Dramatic Series, 1900), 81. 54. See Dickens’s letter (in French) from Paris to his friend John Forster in the year of revolutions, 1848: “I find that I like the Republic so much that I must renounce my own language and only write in the language of the French Republic—the language of gods and angels—the language, in a word, of the French people.” Cited and translated in Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Redemptive Powers of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens,” in Jones et al., Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities” and the French Revolution, 57. 55. Jones, “The Redemptive Powers of Violence?,” 56. 56. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 389. 57. For Ernest Bloch, “visual montage is an appropriate vehicle for representing utopianism since its juxtaposition of fragments allows for a blossoming of allegory— providing multiple jumping off points in the present from which to imagine a better future.” Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, cited in Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 53. 58. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 81. 59. Steve Coleman, “Mobilized Sound: Memory, Inscription, and Vision in Irish Traditional Music,” Irish Journal of Anthropology 13, no. 1 (2010): 28. 60. The fraying of the narrative is already apparent in the earlier fictional scenes: an unmotivated spatial cross-cut to George Washington reviewing his troops is

298   Notes to Pages 72–79 inserted, and outtakes from the story also throw the story off course—for example, the unmotivated intertitle “historical church window” describes a window in the background at Glendalough, in front of which Michael Dwyer’s insurgents raise arms in the manner of David’s Oath of the Horatii. 61. Quoted in “the lord mayor of cork,” “soldiers’ irish coup,” Times (London), September 20, 1920, 12. 62 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N2, 6, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 461. Writing on Dickens and film, Eisenstein argues that structures of montage are situated in the society they articulate: “The question of montage imagery is based on a definite structure and system of thinking; it derives and has been derived only through collective consciousness, appearing as a reflection of a new (socialist) stage of human society and as a thinking result of ideal and philosophic education, inseparably connected with the social structure of that society” (“Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” 245). 63. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N2, 6. 64. Sean Healy, Bureau of Military History Witness Statement, Ref No. 1479, 35, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS1479.pdf#page=36. 65. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: Penguin, 2003), 280–81; Manus O’Riordan, “Larkin in America: The Road to Sing Sing,” in James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, ed. Donal Nevin (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998), 72–73; Donal Nevin, “Miscellany,” in James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, 473. 4. INFERNAL MACHINES

1. See, for instance, Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2011); Brandon Kerschner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989); John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changing Art (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1993); Stephen Morton, States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2013); Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Francis X. Newman, “A Source for the Name ‘Dedalus’?,” James Joyce Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Summer 1967): 271–74. 2. Brandon Kerschner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 194. 3. Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), 8. 4. Clinton B. Sears, “The Legitimate in Warfare,” United Service: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs 2, no. 3 (March 1880): 35–66, as quoted in Niall

Notes to Pages 80–83   299 Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 146. 5. Irish World, April 16, 1881, as quoted in Whelehan, 139. 6. Citizen, December 22, 1883, as quoted in Shane Kenna, War in the Shadows: The Irish-American Fenians Who Bombed Victorian Britain (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2014), 94, emphasis in original. Some of the suggestions for application of “science” in such contexts include the dropping of dynamite from hot-air balloons and the targeting of British seafaring vessels with submarines (Whelehan, 138–41). 7. Whelehan, Dynamiters, 139. 8. Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2011). 9. See especially Whelehan, Dynamiters; Kenna, War in the Shadows; Joseph McKenna, The Irish-American Dynamite Campaign: A History 1881–1896 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012); and Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985), especially chapter 1 (“Infernal Machines”) and chapter 2 (“Resources of Civilisation”). 10. Whelehan, Dynamiters, 141. 11. Jeffory Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7. 12. This genre includes such novels as Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van der Grift Stevenson’s More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885), Donald Mackay’s The Dynamite Ship (1888), Edward Jenkins’s A Week of Passion or the Dilemma of Mr George Barton the Younger (1884), Coulson Kernahan’s Captain Shannon (1896), Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus (1885), and others. See Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel; Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature; Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature; and Sarah McLemore, “Homeland Insecurity: Dynamite Terror and the Textual Landscape of London,” http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/subaltern/events/dissworkshops /McLemore_Chap1.doc. 13. Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 65. 14. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. 15. Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 36. 16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7. 17. Caroline Holmqvist, “Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare,” Millennium: The Journal of International Studies 41 (2013): 539. 18. Joachim Schummer has argued that the “mad scientist” arose “because in this period scientific knowledge, produced by experimentation and published in the newly founded journals, proliferated and became increasingly fragmented due to the

300   Notes to Pages 84–86 formation of separate disciplines that defined their own cognitive and practical goals. Unlike in the earlier period of natural philosophy, there was no longer a metaphysical system to provide an overall framework and orientation, and nor was it any longer acceptable for religious ideas to interfere in scientific matters. Furthermore, compared to the rapid growth of the sciences, the humanities considerably lost influence and reputation. . . . Many nineteenth-century writers, frequently with a background in the humanities, in law, or in theology, observed these tremendous changes with great concern. Not only were the approaches and methods of the new sciences alien to most of them, but they also worried particularly about the fragmentation of knowledge and the loss of any unifying metaphysical, moral or religious framework.” Joachim Schummer, “Historical Roots of the ‘Mad Scientist’: Chemists in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” Ambix 53, no. 2 (July 2006): 124. 19. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008), xviii. 20. “Review of A Modern Daedalus,” in The Dublin Review, ed. Nicholas Patrick Wiseman (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1885), 235. 21. Tom Greer, A Modern Daedalus (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1885), v. 22. Greer, A Modern Daedalus, vi. 23. See Richard K. Morris, John P. Holland, 1841–1914, Inventor of the Modern Submarine (Annapolis: US Naval Institute, 1966); Robert Gordon, “Paterson’s ‘Fleet’ Honors Sub Inventor,” New York Times, July 1, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973 /07/01/archives/patersons-fleet-honors-sub-inventor-a-watery-miscalculation.html; and “Fenian Ram,” Historic Naval Ships Association, https://web.archive.org/web /20071014043444/http://hnsa.org/ships/fenian.htm. 24. The ongoing story of the Fenian Ram was circulated in several papers, from the New York Times to local papers in the United Kingdom, throughout the 1880s; the discovery of the Holland submarine, often referred to as a “torpedo boat,” was reported widely in 1881, and theft and rediscovery of the Ram was the subject of articles throughout the spring and summer of 1883. The British government first discussed the Holland submarine in Parliament in 1900, and made arrangements to pursue a contract in the same year. See United Kingdom, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons Debate vol. 81 (April 6, 1900): c1402, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com /commons/1900/apr/06/submarine-torpedo-boats#S4V0081P0_19000406_HOC_96. 25. Greer, A Modern Daedalus, vi. 26. The “resources of civilization” to which Greer here refers is a direct quotation of the euphemism used by Irish American Fenians to describe dynamite in the highly circulated justification of their campaign, the February 1885 “Fenian Manifesto to the British Cabinet” (cited in Melchiori, 46), and thus threatens that, if the political status quo continues, the Fenians may indeed gain ground.

Notes to Pages 86–95   301 27. Greer, A Modern Daedalus, 1. 28. Greer, xiii. 29. Greer, 120. 30. Greer, 13–14. 31. Luke Gibbons, “‘Empire of the Air’: Ireland, Aerial Warfare and Futurist Gothic,” in Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations and Transformations, ed. Catherine Wynne (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 141. 32. Greer, 211, 238, and 235, respectively. 33. Greer, 135. 34. Greer, 85. 35. Greer, 85. 36. Greer, 238–39. 37. Greer, 259. 38. Greer, 254. 39. Greer, 258. 40. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989). 41. For analysis of Romantic metaphysics and scientific knowledge, see especially James Brooks-Smith, “‘A great empire falling to pieces’: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge,” Configurations 20, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 299–325; Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008); and Schummer, “Historical Roots of the ‘Mad Scientist.’” 42. W. B. Yeats, “Poetry and Science in Folklore,” in Uncollected Prose, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 174. 43. Yeats, “The Cutting of an Agate,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4, ed. Richard Finneran and George Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007), 199. 44. Greer, 120. 45. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 179. 46. Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), 3:154. 47. Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 277. 48. Jay Jin, “The Physics of Voice in Joyce’s ‘Ithaca,’” Joyce Studies Annual 21 (November 2013): 239. 5. MACHINIC YEATS

1. W. B. Yeats, “Introduction,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 5, Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 204. 2. For Yeats, the equation is simple: “Culture, unity of being” (“On the Boiler,” in Later Essays, 235).

302   Notes to Pages 95–99 3. Yeats, “Poetry and Tradition,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4, Early Essays, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finnegan, (New York: Scribner, 2007), 185–86. 4. According to Ian Buchanan, the French term agencement, which Deleuze and Guattari’s translators render with the English word assemblage, “encompasses a range of meanings that include ‘to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to order.’ It could therefore just as appropriately be translated as arrangement, in the sense of a ‘working arrangement,’ provided it was kept clear that it describes an ongoing process rather than a static situation.” Ian Buchanan, “Assemblage Theory and Schizoanalysis,” Panoptikum 13 (2014): 126. I use “arrangement” throughout this chapter in this sense of an on­ going process. 5. Yeats, “Poetry and Tradition,” 185. 6. Richard Allen Cave, “On The Siting of Doors and Windows: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Irish Stage Design,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 93. Of Yeats’s dramatic production Cave writes, “Design, of necessity, had in practice to be minimal so the accompanying aesthetic focused on minimalism” (93). 7. Cave, “On The Siting of Doors and Windows,” 95–96. 8. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 93. 9. Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 189. 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 285–86. 11. Yeats, Poems, 260. 12. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), 254. 13. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 110. 14. Agamben, The Man Without Content, 107. 15. Standish O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain: A Critical Edition, ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2016), 50. 16. O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 43, 52. 17. O’Grady sought “readableness” of style and a harmony of views between the historian and the “prevailing humour and complexion of his contemporaries” (Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 48). 18. W. B. Yeats, “Review of O’Grady’s Flight of the Eagle,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 9, Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written between 1886 and 1890, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (New York:

Notes to Pages 99–103   303 Scribner, 2004), 342. On bardic literature, see O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 43–49. 19. W. B. Yeats, ed., Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (New York: MacMillan, 1986), 6 (emphasis mine). This attitude remained consistent into Yeats’s final years, when he praised Berkeley’s “subjectivity of space” over a form of mechanism that “substitut[es] for the old humanity with its unique irreplaceable individuals [radical particularity] something that can be chopped and measured like a piece of cheese” (On the Boiler, 237). 20. W. B. Yeats, preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, by Lady Augusta Gregory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 1. 21. Yeats, preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 1. 22. O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 64. 23. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5. 24. Deleuze and Guattari, 44. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, 43. 26. Deleuze and Guattari, 42. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, 106. For a view of literature that in this context would be “mechanical,” see Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). 28. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 164. 29. See Clare Hutton, “Joyce and the Institutions of Revivalism,” Irish University Review 33, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2003): 117–32. 30. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 36, 42. The term habitus comes from Pierre Bourdieu and refers to a social field of production and reproduction, a mobile structure of “durable, transposable dispositions” that function “as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 53. 31. Quoted in Patrick Maume, “The Irish Independent and Empire, 1891–1910,” in Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, ed. Simon J. Potter (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 136. 32. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 42. The phrase appears in Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 208. 33. Yeats, “Circus Animal’s Desertion,” in Poems, 347. 34. Yeats, “The Reform of the Theatre,” in Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8, The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), 28.

304   Notes to Pages 103–9 35. Richard Taylor, The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese Noˉ (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), 8. 36. Yeats, preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 11. 37. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959), 69–70. 38. W. B. Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” in Early Essays, 163. 39. Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” 166. 40. In his preface to Four Plays for Dancers, Yeats gives the order of the Cuchulain plays (which is followed in the Collected Plays of 1934): “‘At the Hawk’s Well’ and ‘The Only Jealousy of Emer’ are the first and last plays of a series of four dealing with Cuchulain’s life. The others are ‘Green Helmet’ and ‘Baile’s Strand’” (vii). 41. Yeats, Plays, 297. 42. O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 84. 43. Yeats, Plays, 302. 44. Yeats, 304. 45. Yeats, 306. 46. Cave, “On the Siting of Doors and Windows,” 107. 47. O’Grady’s History does not include this episode, but Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne does, under the title “Bricriu’s Feast, and the War of Words of the Women of Ulster.” 48. Yeats, Plays, 244–45. 49. Yeats, 247. 50. Yeats, 254. 51. Yeats, 255. 52. The beheading motif is not unusual in legend, and the Irish tale of Bricriu’s feast is often cited as a source for the beheading scene in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. Yeats’s play both follows in this tradition and puts beheading to a new tactical use as a trope for a machinic understanding of desire divorced from a traditional notion of the body and its relation to the mind and the community at large. 53. Yeats, Plays, 161. 54. Yeats, 152. 55. Yeats, 153. 56. Yeats, 156. 57. According to Cave, Robert Gregory’s set design, “two gigantic doors decorated with shields,” frames “the psychological developments which move the drama inexorably toward tragedy” (“On the Siting of Doors and Windows,” 98). 58. Yeats, Plays, 164. 59. Yeats, 167. 60. Yeats, 172.

Notes to Pages 109–14   305 61. Yeats, 173. 62. Yeats, 322. On Bricriu’s role in the composition of the play, see Richard Allen Cave’s commentary in W. B. Yeats, Selected Plays, ed. Richard Allen Cave (New York: Penguin, 1997), 336n9. The Only Jealousy of Emer differs greatly from Gregory’s version, while retaining most of the principle characters. The chief difference is that, in the latter, Fand, rather than Bricriu, is the representative of the otherworld. 63. Yeats, Plays, 325–26. 64. Yeats, 326. The offer of immortality is couched in the terms of Yeats’s A Vision, for the Woman of the Sidhe suggests that she needs Cuchulain to complete a turn of the Great Wheel (“all my round”), which marks the phases of the moon. 65. Yeats, Plays, 328. 66. Yeats, 545–46. 67. Cave, “On the Siting of Doors and Windows,” 106. On style and temporality, see Cave’s commentary, in Yeats, Selected Plays, 380–81. 68. Yeats, Plays, 549. 69. Yeats, 549–50. 70. Yeats, 552. 71. Yeats, 552. 72. Yeats, 306. 73. O’Grady, Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain, 84. On “creative joy,” a permutation of “shaping joy,” see Yeats’s letter to Dorothy Wellesley, on August 15, 1938, in which he writes that Cuchulain “seemed to me a heroic figure because he was creative joy separated, from fear.” See W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, InterLex Electronic Edition, vol. 4, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Shuchard (Charlottesville, VA: InterLex Corporation, 2002), acc. no. 7290. 74. Yeats, “The Statues,” in Poems, 336–37. 75. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli,” in Poems, 294. 6. ACCELERATE

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1958), 1. 2. Arendt, Human Condition, 2. 3. Arendt, 2–3. 4. The sense that technology was eroding human will and purpose was a commonplace in nineteenth-century Western Europe and has its roots, it would appear, in German Romanticism: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, in which mechanical dolls or microscopes take on demonic powers to which human beings submit, already points in this direction. One of the strongest such statements is made by the young Karl Marx of money in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1843: “Everything

306   Notes to Pages 114–22 which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.” Quoted in Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 110. 5. See Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 141–49; and Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, ed. Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian Truskolaski (London: Verso, 2016). 6. See, for example, Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (London: Zone Books, 2014). 7. Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 2003). 8. Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Failure of Technology: Perfection without Purpose (Hinsdale, IL: Henry Regnery, 1949), 45 and 118. 9. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 109–11. 10. This information is drawn from the Salter Report and from J. E. Allen’s “Road and Rail,” in Nineteenth Century and After 112 (1932): 573–83. 11. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 17. 12. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 224. 13. Eric Partridge, “Best-sellers in Fiction,” in Nineteenth Century and After 112 (1932): 105–17. 14. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 45. For Boris Groys, see On the New (London: Verso, 2014). 15. Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (London: Penguin, 1996). All further references are to this edition and are given in-text. 16. Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Love’s Civil War: Letters and Diaries, 1941–1973, ed. Victoria Glendinning and Judith Robertson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 23. 17. György Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–48. 18. Jessica Gildersleeve, Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 23. 19. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1903). 20. See Paul Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1979), 294. 21. Moore, Principia Ethica, 13. 22. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 99. 23. Ellmann, 164.

Notes to Pages 123–34   307 24. See Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977– 1978), trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007); and Maurice Blanchot, “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 298–306. 25. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 63–64. 26. Ellmann, 244. 27. Ellmann, 244. 28. Ellmann, 245. 7. GRAMOPHONIC STRAIN IN LENNOX ROBINSON’S PORTRAIT

1. “Gramophones: How to Keep Them in Good Condition,” Irish Times, July 24, 1923. 2. “Gramophones,” 2. 3. “Gramophones,” 2. 4. Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Years of O’Casey, 1921–1926 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992), 270. 5. Hogan and Burnham, Years of O’Casey, 270. Others have also identified Robinson as particularly adept at representing this particular era of Irish culture. For instance, in 1922, Norreys Jephson O’Conor wrote, “No Irish writer more faithfully interprets this time” than Robinson; see “A Dramatist of Changing Ireland,” Sewanee Review 30 (1922): 277. More recently Kurt Eisen described Robinson as having “a keen sense of what kind of plays and which themes were worth trying at crucial points in the development of Irish drama” (see “Lennox Robinson,” in Irish Playwrights, 1880–1995, ed. Bernice Schrank and William W. Demastes [London: Greenwood, 1997], 315). 6. “New Play at the Abbey Theatre: ‘Portrait’ by Mr. Lennox Robinson,” Irish Times, April 1, 1925. 7. Hogan and Burnham, Years of O’Casey, 270. 8. Andrew E. Malone, “From the Stalls: Propaganda and Melodrama,” Dublin Magazine, 1925, 633. 9. Susan L. Mitchell, “‘Portrait’ at the Abbey Theatre,” Irish Statesman, April 4, 1925. 10. Lennox Robinson, Portrait, in The White Blackbird and Portrait (Dublin: Talbot, 1926), 112. 11. Robinson, Portrait, 127. 12. Robinson, 104. 13. “Gramophone Recital at Abbey Theatre,” Irish Times, December 9, 1924. 14. The plays include The Round Table (1922), Portrait (1925), Ever the Twain (1929), Church Street (1934), and Bird’s Nest (1937).

308   Notes to Pages 135–36 15. Jean-Marie Guyau, “Memory and Phonograph,” in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ed. Freidrich Kittler (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 30–31. Guyau provides a detailed explanation of his analogy: Upon speaking into a phonograph, the vibrations of one’s voice are transferred to a point that engraves lines onto a metal plate that corresponds to the uttered sounds—uneven furrows, more or less deep, depending on the nature of the sounds. It is quite probably that in analogous ways, invisible lines are incessantly carved into the brain cells, which provide a channel for nerve streams. If, after some time, the stream encounters a channel it has already passed through, it will once again proceed along the same path. The cells vibrate in the same way they vibrated the first time; psychologically these similar vibrations correspond to an emotion or a thought analogous to the forgotten emotion or thought. This is precisely the phenomenon that occurs when the phonograph’s small copper disk, held against the point that runs through the grooves it has etched, starts to reproduce the vibrations: to our ears, these vibrations turn back into a voice, into words, sounds, and melodies. If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory. 16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 74. Freud writes, “In the photographic camera [man] has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory.” 17. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 89. 18. Malone, “From the Stalls,” 634. 19. Robinson’s use of the gramophone to articulate a specific cultural anxiety is also noteworthy, since it in fact predates one of the most famous examples of gramophonic anxiety in modernism, depicted by Virginia Woolf in her pre–World War II novel Between the Acts (1941). Woolf’s gramophone similarly stops and starts in spurts that draw attention to the mechanization of a distinctly British mentality. The setting is an English garden party and pageant that celebrates British history. The attendees face down their individual and collective fears of their country’s impending engagement in another global war. Woolf’s use of gramophones in her works has garnered significant critical attention (and rightly so), but Robinson’s work sets an impressive precedent that has thus far been unacknowledged.

Notes to Pages 136–41   309 20. Bill Kissane, “‘A Nation Once Again’?” in After Civil War: Division, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Contemporary Europe (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 50–51. 21. Robinson, Portrait, 107. 22. Robinson, 119, 116. 23. Robinson, 96. 24. Robinson, 96. 25. Robinson, 121. 26. Robinson, 121. 27. Robinson, 106. 28. Robinson, 106. 29. Robinson, 106. 30. Robinson, 106, 108. 31. Robinson, 107. 32. Robinson, 101. 33. Robinson, 102. 34. Robinson, 102. 35. Robinson, 102. 36. Robinson, 103. 37. Robinson, 111. 38. The gramophone in Juno and the Paycock plays the song “If You’re Irish (Come into the Parlor),” which is a decidedly ironic choice of music, given its message of inclusivity of the Irish identity during a civil war; see Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber, 2000). Portrait similarly uses a jarringly malapropos song choice for the gramophone, highlighting the somber events in contrast with its joviality. 39. Robinson, Portrait, 113. 40. Frank O’Connor, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught (London: R. Hale, 1950), 255. 41. Robinson, Portrait, 122. 42. Robinson, 124, 123. 43. Robinson, 124. 44. Robinson, 125. 45. Robinson, 125. 46. Robinson, 125. 47. Robinson, 126. 48. Lennox Robinson, “Heritage of the Meek [mms],” Lennox Robinson Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale. While rehearsing the play, Robinson realized that Tom was the right character choice for such action. In the staging draft of the play, Robinson crossed out the lines

310   Notes to Pages 141–46 and actions that were attributed to Charlie in obfuscating Peter’s death and replaced them with Tom. To suit word to action, Tom is also the one who turns the gramophone on and off for the death dance. See Abbey Theatre, Portrait [staging draft]. Abbey Theatre Digital Archive. National Univ. of Ireland, Galway. 49. Lennox Robinson, The Round Table (New York: P. G. Putnam, 1924), 46–47. 50. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, 101, 117–19. 51. Robinson, Portrait, 127. 52. Cited in Hogan and Burnham, Years, 272. 8. HIS REMASTERED VOICE

1. A general note on terminology: in what follows, “gramophone disc” or “gramophone recording” is used to refer to a recording pressed as a 78 rpm shellac disc, while “record,” “album,” or “LP” refers to a 33 rpm long-playing vinyl disc. 2. The James Joyce Audio Collection (Caedmon Audio/HarperCollins, 2002), compact disc. In this context, “professional” is meant to signal recordings made under the imprimatur of a record company, rather than to mark the status or types of voices being recorded. 3. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), 173. 4. In the case of Joyce, this mid-century concern with modes of dissemination is closely linked to the full entry of his works to the literary canon; as John Guillory notes, “Canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission, its relation to other works in a collocation of works.” John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 55. 5. Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?,” Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 614–15. 6. My thinking here is influenced by Evan Eisenberg’s discussion of the effects of recordings on the development of the blues, in particular by its complication of the modernist (or Greenbergian) tension between high art and kitsch: “[Recordings] meant that later blues musicians were less free to use formulaic phrases as elements of a common vocabulary, because many formulas were now identified with classic records. Instead of simply using a formulaic guitar lick or metaphor, one had either to quote its canonic form or consciously vary it. Depending on who was doing it, that kind of conscious variation kept the blues straining in two opposite directions, towards high art and towards kitsch. One might say ‘towards jazz’ and towards ‘pop,’ but that would not be fair; the tension continues within jazz and within pop.” Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 116, italics in original. 7. Roland Gelatt’s comparison is useful here: “The radio receiver of 1924, for all the inadequacies of its amplifier and loud-speaker, gave a quality of sound reproduction

Notes to Pages 146–49   311 that the phonograph could not even approach. Suddenly people came to realize that machine-made music need not sound tinny and muffled and scratchy. The radio might not give you Galli-Curci, but what you did hear sounded more like real music than anything the phonograph could offer.” Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), 218. 8. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991), 170–71. 9. Sotheby’s, English Literature, History, Children’s Books, Illustrations, and Photographs: Including Highly Important Books and Manuscripts by James Joyce (London: Sotheby’s, 2004), 133. The names of the episodes are italicized in the catalog. The estimated range of opening bids for this letter was £3,000 to £5,000 or €4,450 to €7,500. In the same catalog, one of the “Aeolus” discs is offered for auction, with bids having been estimated to start at £1,000 to £1,500 or €1,500 to €2,500. The description suggests that it was intended to be presented to Stanislaus Joyce (127). I am grateful to Ronan Crowley for bringing this catalog to my attention. In Joyce’s published letters, moreover, there is evidence suggesting that the “Aeolus” excerpt was not even initially considered for the recording. Writing to Valery Larbaud a week before entering the studio, for example, Joyce notes only that he is set to record a portion of the “Sirens” episode. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 111. 10. Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1959), 145, 257. 11. Four discs from the pressing are held in the James Joyce Collection of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo. Three are whole, while the fourth is a roughly pentagonal piece of shellac with an intact label. For the gramophone discs, see XVIII.E2, Folder 8, PCMS-020, James Joyce Collection, 1900–1959, Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. For Joyce’s sketch of the disc’s label, see XVIII.E2, Folder 7. The three images for this chapter follow the progression of the label for Joyce’s first recording from design to production to reproduction, and they were created with permission from items owned by the Poetry Collection of SUNY Buffalo. All further archival citations are to items in the James Joyce Collection. 12. Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph, 308–9. 13. Jerry McWilliams, The Preservation and Restoration of Sound Recordings (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 9. For additional information on acoustic recording and its differences from electrical recording, see Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph, 208–44; Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, esp. chapter 18; and Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 6–18. For the intersection of radio broadcasting and phonography, see Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010), 77–114.

312   Notes to Pages 149–51 14. The physical constraints involved in making an acoustic recording of a speaking voice are worth mentioning. Because speakers had to stand very close to the horn of the recording apparatus, it could be difficult to position reading-texts in clear sight. Given the fact that Joyce was suffering from eye trouble in late November 1924, to the point of having postponed an eye operation in order to make the recording session, he would not have been easily able to read the passage from the Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses even without these constraints. One is thus left to wonder if, in fact, he read the passage at all. If he did not and instead spoke the passage from memory, it would be more precise to think of his “reading” as a recital. (In her account, Beach treats these as synonyms.) While this aside can only remain at the level of conjecture, it might help to explain the slight variations in word order between the printed and recorded versions of the passage. 15. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 173. At the end of her discussion of Joyce’s recordings, however, Beach notes that she deposited a copy of the “Aeolus” recording in the Musée de la Parole in Paris. In another register, it is worth observing that much of the “Joyce archive” owes its existence to Beach. 16. James Joyce Reading, Caedmon Records TC 1340, 1971, LP. Prior to this point, the “Aeolus” recording had appeared once on an album: see James Joyce Spricht, RheinVerlag Zurich, 1960, LP. Only available for sale outside the United States and the United Kingdom, this album is notable for reproducing a different disc than Caedmon. It used the copy belonging to Harriet Shaw Weaver, and its reproduction is much brighter and has better articulation than that made by Caedmon. 17. Renee Montagne, “Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration,” Morning Edition, NPR, December 5, 2002, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php ?ID=866406. 18. The technique is not uniform across Caedmon’s releases: for example, it can be heard quite distinctly in its recording of W. H. Auden, and less so in that of Robert Frost. In a more problematic way, it can also be heard in the recording of Siobhán McKenna reading “Penelope”: listeners hear the voice of “Molly” in a reverberant room. Since Molly’s words are those of an unspoken internal voice, of thought, a “realistic” version would seem to have called for McKenna to be placed extremely close to the recording microphone, which would have resulted in something like the “intimate,” disembodied voice favored for postwar radio announcers. This room reverb is especially present on the original vinyl incarnation of the recording: Ulysses: Soliloquies of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Caedmon Records TC 1063, 1956, LP. For the recording’s rerelease on compact disc (as part of the James Joyce Audio Collection), the room reverb was removed during the digital remastering process: it is audible “around” certain words before it is severely clipped. This was likely done to reduce tape hiss. 19. Sarah Parry, “The LP Era: Voice-Practice/Voice Document,” ESC 33, no. 4 (December 2007): 175. In addition, see her “The Inaudibility of ‘Good’ Sound

Notes to Pages 151–55   313 Editing: The Case of Caedmon Records,” Performance Research 7, no. 1 (2002): 24–33. For more on Caedmon, see Jacob Smith, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2011), 49–78; and Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2016), 185–216. 20. On Caedmon sleeves, this tagline is most often given as the less definitive “a third dimension for the printed page.” 21. Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1998), 194. 22. Kelly, Our Joyce, 195. 23. Meeting of James Joyce Society, Folkways Records FP 93–94, 1955, LP. 24. Moses Asch to Oscar Silverman; November 5, 1963, unpublished, XVI, Box 2. 25. Oscar Silverman to Moses Asch; May 29, 1964, unpublished, XVI, Box 6. 26. Richard Ader to Caedmon Records; March 9, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 1. 27. In late October 1959, Ernst had sent Silverman the transcript of a dictated statement on the Ulysses trial, “which,” he indicated, “might some day be part of a Caedmon Record Album on Joyce.” Having been asked for editorial suggestions, Silverman appears to have given them and sent back the transcript, for no copy remains with the letter. See XVI, Box 3: Morris Ernst to Oscar Silverman; October 30, 1959, unpublished, XVI, Box 3. Six years later, Ernst published his text in the James Joyce Quarterly, but makes no mention of Caedmon in the note accompanying the piece: “In June 1959 I was asked to put on a record some of the stories of the trial of James Joyce’s ulysses. I never made the record. This is the transcript.” Morris L. Ernst, “Reflections on the Ulysses Trial and Censorship,” James Joyce Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Fall 1965): 3–11. 28. Marianne Mantell to Oscar Silverman; March 17, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 5. 29. Marianne Mantell to Oscar Silverman; March 23, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 5. 30. “The struggles over definition (or classification) have boundaries at stake (between genres and disciplines, or between modes of production inside the same genre) and, therefore, hierarchies. To define boundaries, defend them and control entries is to defend the established order in the field.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 225. 31. Oscar Silverman to Marianne Mantell; October 18, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 6. 32. Rubery, Untold Story of the Talking Book, 189. 33. Oscar Silverman to Marianne Mantell; October 25, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 6. Zack Bowen had just completed his doctorate at Buffalo (and would go on to become a renowned Joycean scholar), but he also enjoyed a professional relationship

314   Notes to Pages 155–61 with Asch and Folkways, which had resulted in three albums devoted to episodes of Ulysses, released between 1961 and 1965. 34. Richard M. Ader to Moses Asch; October 28, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 1. 35. Moses Asch to Richard M. Ader; November 7, 1965, unpublished, XVI, Box 2. 36. Barbara Zimmerman to Oscar Silverman; September 11, 1970, unpublished, XVI, Box 8. 37. Barbara Zimmerman to Oscar Silverman; December 8, 1970, unpublished, XVI, Box 8. 38. Pierre Bourdieu, “But Who Created the ‘Creators’?,” Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993), 147. 9. BROADCATASTROPHE!

1. Studies of Irish radio range in scope from the regional (Cathcart, Keane “Contrary”), to Anglo-Irish literary cross-currents (Bloom), to international information networks (Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information). Building on a trend in the literature that shifts focus away from radio work within the strict boundaries of Irish national space, my argument centers the studio space as a site, and mechanism, for spreading the work of Irish producers. See Rex Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland, 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984); Damien Keane, “Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences: The BBC in Northern Ireland circa 1949,” Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (2015): 26–43; Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016); and Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2014). For a historical overview of radio in Ireland, see Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). 2. For accounts of Johnston’s BBC career see Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (Dublin: Lilliput, 2002); and Joseph Ronsley’s foreword to The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol. 3, The Radio and Television Plays, ed. Joseph Ronsley (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992). 3. Johnston wrote extensively about his leapfrog strategy. See, for instance, Denis Johnston, Orders and Desecrations: The Life of Playwright Denis Johnston, ed. Rory Johnston (Dublin: Lilliput, 1992), 96–97. See also Denis Johnston’s diaries from the 1930s, TCD MS 10066/57–59, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin. 4. Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics, and the BBC, 1939– 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2018), 117–52. 5. Whittington, 120, 125.

Notes to Pages 162–64   315 6. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 34. 7. For more on the culture of interdisciplinary cooperation, see Ian Rodger, Radio Drama (London: Macmillan, 1982), 59. See also Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 21. 8. Official and unofficial print organs also introduced readers to technical knowledge, making them feel like “privileged insiders.” D. L. LeMahieu, Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 194. See also Debra Rae Cohen, “Intermediality and the Problem of The Listener,” Modernism/modernity 19, no. 3 (2012): 569–92. 9. Immediacy and hypermediacy go hand in hand. They are two contradictory cultural imperatives in the oscillating dialectic of the “double logic of remediation.” Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5. 10. John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 55. Johnston, in an early essay about radio, similarly calls this “the delightful possibility that at any moment something real may happen.” Denis Johnston, “The World We Listen In,” in The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol. 3, 31. 11. The phenomenon was not isolated to the BBC or Johnston’s output. Orson Welles, Walter Benjamin, Hans Flesch, Norman Corwin, Lance Sieveking, Ronald Knox, and Archibald MacLeish all made varying use of broadcatastrophe in some of their radio work. 12. Adams, Denis Johnston, 188–89. 13. Reflecting on his tendency to write plays that “stage a deliberate technical hitch” as part of the performance, he writes that “you nearly always get into a tangle with the technicians whose aid you need to make fun of themselves.” Denis Johnston, typescript for a Radio Éireann broadcast talk, October 25, 1955, Box 4, Folder B.2 (ii), Denis Johnston Collection, Ulster University, Coleraine. 14. Recording of opera adaptation of Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Denis Johnston and Hugo Weisgall, nd, TCD MS 10066/260/1–3, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin. 15. Denis Johnston and John Cheatle, Multiple Studio Blues, in The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol. 3, 78. The subtitle of the play is explained by Johnston in a Radio Éireann talk: “Better narrate than never” was an “old maxim in the schools” that prohibited the overuse of narration. Denis Johnston, typescript for a Radio Éireann broadcast talk, October 11, 1955, Box 4, Folder B.2 (ii), Denis Johnston Collection, Ulster University, Coleraine. 16. The project was presented to his fellow students on March 23, 1937. Manuscript for Duchess Street Blues by Denis Johnston, 1937, TCD MS 10066/361/15, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin.

316   Notes to Pages 165–69 17. But also one of the “wittiest legpulls in the history of broadcasting.” Press clipping of Warrington Guardian preview, 1938, Box 1, Folder A.1. Denis Johnston Collection, Ulster University, Coleraine. 18. D. G. Bridson, Prospero and Ariel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), 61. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff echo Bridson’s assessment in a passing endnote (the only other mention of the play in critical literature), labeling it an “affectionate” inside joke. See Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1, 1922–39 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 137, 233, 395n9. 19. Johnston and Cheatle, Multiple Studio Blues, 79. 20. Johnston and Cheatle, 79. 21. Lance Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio (London: Cassell, 1934), 21. Val Gielgud decried the kind of on-air abstraction that required producers to make such announcements, accusing them of treating the medium as a plaything. See Val Gielgud, British Radio Drama, 1922–1956 (London: George G. Harrap, 1957), 60–61. 22. Johnston and Cheatle, Multiple Studio Blues, 79, 81. 23. Johnston and Cheatle, 78–79. 24. Johnston and Cheatle, 86. 25. This view persisted long after those early days. See Peter Lewis, introduction to Radio Drama, ed. Peter Lewis (London: Longman, 1981), 6; John Tydeman, “The Producer and Radio Drama: A Personal View,” in Radio Drama, 23; and David Hendy, Radio in the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 111. 26. Felix Felton, The Radio Play: Its Techniques and Possibilities (London: Sylvan, 1949), 20–21. 27. Johnston and Cheatle, Multiple Studio Blues, 78, 82, 84, 88–89. 28. Johnston and Cheatle, 77, ellipsis in original. 29. “Multiple Studio Blues,” Radio Times 61, no. 790 (November 18, 1938): 72. 30. The BBC saw the announcements of all programs as “an integral part of the show itself.” Notes from BBC Staff Training School by Denis Johnston, 1937, TCD MS 10066/218, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin. 31. Johnston and Cheatle, Multiple Studio Blues, 77. 32. Johnston and Cheatle, 77–78. 33. Johnston and Cheatle, 92. Evidently these feelings reflect Johnston’s diffidence about his exercises at the Staff Training School, right around the time of Duchess Street Blues. These words appear handwritten on the back of his class schedule: “If this happens to be recorded please remember that what you hear is a travesty—an absolute travesty.” BBC Staff Training School course lecture timetables belonging to Denis Johnston, 1937, TCD MS 10066/361/12, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin.

Notes to Pages 170–76   317 34. Indeed, as Rodger points out, “it has sometimes been the case that plays with no intellectual pretensions have pioneered the use of new technical devices.” See Rodger, Radio Drama, 3. 35. The play had a trial broadcast on December 24, 1937, before its regional broadcast in February 1938 (it was repeated in 1946 and 1948 and revived in 2017 on BBC Radio Ulster). 36. Typescript of Not One Returns to Tell by Denis Johnston, 1938, Script Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, 1. A script for the February 14, 1946, production on the Northern Ireland Home Service is also stored at Trinity College, Dublin, TCD MS 10066/10. 37. Johnston, Not One Returns to Tell, 36. The script, in isolation, does not tell us whether or not this play would have been bookended by nondramatized announcements. However, many play scripts in the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) do indeed contain the station’s announcements within them. This is the only announcement present in the BBC WAC’s copy of Not One Returns to Tell. 38. A promotion for the 1938 production appeared in the February 11 issue of Radio Times. In addition to advising that listeners “prone to nervousness” not listen, it is playfully ambiguous about the simulated veracity of the broadcast. “‘Not One Returns to Tell’: A Ghostly Adventure,” Radio Times 58, no. 750 (February 11, 1938): 79. 39. Johnston, Not One Returns to Tell, 4. 40. Johnston, 9. 41. Johnston, 4–5. 42. Johnston, 35. 43. Johnston expressed confidence that the expressionist style of the play “usually makes excellent material for a radio programme.” Letter to George Barnes from Denis Johnston, January 27, 1947, TCD MS 10066/360/208, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin. 44. Typescript of The Old Lady Says “No!” by Denis Johnston, 1955, Box 4, Folder B.10, Denis Johnston Collection, Ulster University, Coleraine, 1. This is one of the rare cases where one can listen to an older radio drama as well. See audiocassette recording of The Old Lady Says “No!” by Denis Johnston, 1955, TCD MS 10066/256, Denis Johnston Papers, Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Dublin. 45. Johnston, The Old Lady Says “No!”, 6. 46. Johnston, 7. 47. Johnston, 7. 48. Johnston, 7–8, ellipses in original. 49. Johnston, 11–13. Johnston notes that he always feels a bit of embarrassment parodying the studio crew with the help of a real studio crew since they are “far from

318   Notes to Pages 176–84 being rough and ready comedy characters.” In this case, he found that, despite his apprehension, they did not object to the portrayal and actually “invented most of the comic effects themselves.” Thus, the actual studio was more harmonious than what is portrayed here. Denis Johnston, typescript for a Radio Éireann broadcast talk, October 25, 1955. 50. Louis MacNeice, “Some Comments on Radio Drama,” in Christopher Columbus: A Radio Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), 13. 51. Christopher Morash, “Denis Johnston’s Swift Project: ‘There Must be Something Wrong with the Information,’” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 33, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 57. 52. See, for instance, Angela Frattarola, “The Modernist ‘Microphone Play’: Listening in the Dark to the BBC,” Modern Drama 52, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 449–68; Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and John Drakakis, introduction to British Radio Drama, ed. John Drakakis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 1–36. There have also been numerous efforts to trace the connections between leading literary figures and radio, especially in collections like Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2009); Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and in monographs like Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 53. Lewis, Radio Drama, 10. 54. Rodger, Radio Drama, 26, 148. 55. Ronsley, The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol. 3, 23. 56. Professional settings, as Guthrie put it, create “every incentive to play safe and none to stick your neck out” while “artistic, or, for that matter, administrative achievements are only to be had by sticking your neck out as far as ever it will go.” Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre (New York: Limelight, 1985), 58. See also the typescript for a BBC broadcast talk, “Theatre or Cinema,” by Denis Johnston, September 3, 1935, Talk Reel, Script Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham. 57. Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 25. 10. CORRIGAN’S PULSE, MEDICINE, AND IRISH MODERNISM

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), 8:1169. References to the novel will cite this edition, giving episode and line number. 2. Larry Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 57. 3. On the heart as metaphor in earlier English literature, see Robert Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 4. W. B. Yeats, The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 76–78.

Notes to Pages 184–91   319 5. Yeats, Yeats Reader, 95. 6. Yeats, 13, 150–51. 7. Arthur Power, From the Old Waterford House: Recollections of a Soldier and Artist (Waterford: Carthage, 1940), 64–65. 8. Joyce, Ulysses, 4:1–2. 9. Joyce, 6:730–31, 954. 10. Joyce, 6:443–44. 11. Joyce, 6:347. 12. Joyce, 6:868. 13. Joyce, 6:787. 14. Joyce, 6:929–30. 15. Joyce, 6:305. 16. Joyce, 6:670. 17. Joyce, 6:472–76. 18. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 50. 19. Joyce, Ulysses, 18:1609. 20. On Joyce and medicine, see Vike Martina Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2010). Plock explores many aspects of Joyce’s medical ambitions, such as the gynecological focus of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, that I do not mention here. 21. Yeats, Yeats Reader, 80. 22. James McGachie, “Wilde’s Worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland,” Irish Journal of Medical Science 185, no. 2 (May 2016): 303–7. 23. See James McGachie, “‘Normal’ Development and ‘Abnormal’ Place: Sir William Wilde and the Irish School of Medicine,” in Medicine, Disease, and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, ed. Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1999), 85–101. 24. William Wilde’s libel trial, after he was accused of rape by one of his female patients, also put the issue of the exploitation of women at the beginning point of the Celtic Revival. 25. Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Poet and His Times (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963). 26. McGachie, “‘Normal’ Development,” 85–90. 27. The phrase is from J. Oliver Woods, “The History of Medicine in Ireland,” Ulster Medical Journal 51, no. 1 (1982): 44. 28. Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 23–45. 29. Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology, 25. 30. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994).

320   Notes to Pages 191–96 31. For a magisterial British history of medicine, see Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 32. Joyce, Ulysses, 1:205–7. 33. See Brendan Kelly, Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2016). 34. This is a topic famously confronted much later in Nancy Shepherd-Hughes’s controversial book Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979). 35. L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1971). 36. Robert Adams, Cases of Diseases of the Heart, Accompanied with Pathological Observations (Dublin: Dublin Hospital Reports, 1827), 4, 353–453. 37. O. Mulcahy, “‘Diseases of the Heart and Aorta’ by William Stokes (1854): A Modern Clinical Review,” Irish Journal of Medical Science 350 (1955): 53–66. 38. Eoin O’Brien, Conscience and Conflict: A Biography of Sir Dominic Corrigan, 1802–1880 (Dublin: Glendale, 1983), 150–51. 39. Eoin O’Brien, “Dublin Masters of Clinical Expression: Robert Graves,” Journal of the Irish College of Physicians and Surgeons 4, no. 4 (1975): 161–63. 40. See “The Cardiovascular System,” in Hutchinson’s Clinical Methods, 20th ed., ed. M. Swash (London: W. B. Sanders, 1996), 165–205. 41. Fergus Shanahan and Eamonn M. M. Quigley, “Medicine in the Age of Ulysses: James Joyce’s Portrait of Life, Medicine, and Disease on a Dublin Day a Century Ago,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49, no. 2 (2006): 276–85. Doctors have also become fine Joyce critics. See J. B. Lyons, Joyce and Medicine (Dublin: Dolmen, 1973). See also J. B. Lyons, Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell and Other Rejoyceana: Studies in the Borderlands of Literature and Medicine (Dublin: Glendale, 1988). On Joyce and syphilis, see Kathleen Ferris, James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995); and Hugh Kenner’s rebuttal, “Review of James Joyce and the Burden of Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 2 (1996): 328–29. These debates have been resurrected plausibly in Kevin Bermingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Penguin Books, 2014). See also Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 42. Dominic Corrigan aroused his fellow doctor’s ire for his role in this controversy. 43. Joyce, Ulysses, 1:231–32. 44. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 1993), 176. 45. Joyce, Ulysses, 1:483. 46. Joyce, 1:156, 156–57, 427. 47. Joyce, 3:1. 48. Joyce, A Portrait, 275.

Notes to Pages 196–205   321 49. Joyce, Ulysses, 1:216–17. 50. Joyce, 1:21–23. 51. Joyce, 1:15. 52. Joyce, 1:33. 53. Joyce, 5:20–22. 54. Joyce, 10:222–23. 55. Joyce, 5:22. 56. Joyce, 8:1120–23. 57. Joyce, 8:919. 58. Joyce, 18:1609. 59. On Bloom’s walk compared to that of Charlie Chaplin, see Louise Hornby, Still Modernism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016). On somatic representations and gesture in modernism, see Abby Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2013); and Carrie Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). 60. Joyce, Ulysses, 4:218, 229–34. 61. Joyce, 5:19, 27–28. 62. Joyce, 8:1169–79. 63. Franco Moretti, “The Long Goodbye: Ulysses and the End of Liberal Capitalism,” in Signs Taken For Wonders, trans. S. Fischer, D. Forgras, and D. Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 186–208. 64. Joyce, Ulysses, 8:914. 11. SASSENACHS AND THEIR SYPHILIZATION

1. W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), 425, 411. 2. W. B. Yeats, “The Statues” and “Under Ben Bulben” in Collected Poems, ed. Augustine Martin (London: Vintage, 1992), 350, 342. 3. David Grant, Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England, and the Poetic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), 17. Also see Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981); according to Cullingford, “Yeats’s version of eugenic theory owes little to ideas about breeding Aryan supermen, much to the Irish passion for breeding race-horses” (229). 4. See Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). 5. Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 208. 6. F. C. S. Schiller, Social Decay and Eugenical Reform (1932), quoted in Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 3. 7. Mark Suzman, Ethnic Nationalism and State Power: The Rise of Irish Nationalism, Afrikaner Nationalism, and Zionism (London: Macmillan, 1999), 16.

322   Notes to Pages 205–10 8. Suzman, Ethnic Nationalism and State Power, 24. 9. Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” in Language Lore and Lyric Essays and Lectures, ed. Brendán Ó’Conaire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 153–70, 154. 10. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 160. 11. Hyde, 169 (Hyde’s emphasis). 12. Hyde, 170. 13. Suzman, Ethnic Nationalism and State Power, 25. 14. L. M. Cullen, “The Cultural Basis of Modern Irish Nationalism,” in The Roots of Nationalism: Studies in Northern Europe, ed. Rosalind Mitchinson (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980), 91–106, 95. 15. Greta Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 18. 16. Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development, and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1996), 405. 17. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 166. 18. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2004), 39. 19. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 169. 20. Nordau, quoted in William Greensdale, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel: 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 18. 21. Greensdale, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 16. 22. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 153 (Hyde’s emphases). 23. Greensdale, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 8. 24. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 153, 166. 25. Yeats, “The Fisherman,” in Collected Poems, 123. 26. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 169. 27. Quoted in Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1996), 135. 28. The Catholic Bulletin (1913), quoted in Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish, 12. 29. W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays (London: Papermac, 1982), 88. 30. Marion Quirici, “Cathleen ni Houlihan and the Disability Aesthetics of Irish National Culture,” Éire-Ireland 50, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2015): 74–93, 75. 31. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 140. See Nicholas Crawford, “Synge’s Playboy and the Eugenics of Language,” Modern Drama 51, no. 4 (2008): 482–500. 32. Quoted in Catherine Nash, “Embodying Nation—The West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity,” in Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis, ed. Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1993), 86–112, 104.

Notes to Pages 210–14   323 33. Paul Scott Stanfield, Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 160. 34. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “‘Live Lips upon a Plummet Measured Face’: Eugenics in Yeats’s Love Poetry,” Harp 9 (1994): 9–27, 11. 35. Quoted in Stanfield, Yeats and Politics in the 1930s, 164. 36. Stanfield, 160. 37. Stanfield, 162. 38. Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish, 99. 39. Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 168. 40. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 12:897–901. 41. Joyce, Ulysses, 12:1190–205. 42. Havelock Ellis, The Problem of Race-Regeneration (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911), 31. 43. F. C. S. Schiller, quoted in Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 3. 44. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 101. 45. Joyce, Ulysses, 12:1200; Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 156. Hyde’s bourgeois classicism is also knowingly alluded to in the episode when the mysterious narrator refers to “those delightful lovesongs with which the writer who conceals his identity under the graceful pseudonym of the Little Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world” (Ulysses 12:724–27). The reference here is to the pen name An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, under which Hyde published Love Songs of Connacht. 46. Joyce, Ulysses, 12:119. 47. Joyce, 13:231–32. The narrator of “Cyclops” identifies Garryowen as “old Giltrap’s dog” (12:753). 48. Joyce, 13:81–83. 49. Joyce, 13:80–81, 107–8. 50. Michael Tierney, “The Revival of the Irish Language,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters Philosophy and Science 16 (1927): 1–10, 1. 51. Tierney, “The Revival of the Irish Language,” 4. 52. Kevin B. Nowlan, “The Gaelic League and Other National Movements,” in The Gaelic League Idea, ed. Seán Ó’Tuama (Cork: Mercier, 1972), 49. 53. Timothy Corcoran, “The Irish Language in the Irish Schools,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, Philosophy and Science 14 (1925): 377–88, 383–84. 54. Corcoran, “The Irish Language in the Irish Schools,” 384 (author’s emphasis), 381. 55. Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 57.

324   Notes to Pages 214–16 56. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), 4. 57. From the twelfth-century Topographia Hibernica, by Giraldus Cambrensis, and David Hume, History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1788), both quoted in Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 35, 65. 58. Mary Lowe-Evans, Crimes against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1989), 19. 59. Hyde, “The Necessity for the De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 169. 12. DE GENERATIONE ET CORRUPTIONE

1. Joseph McCabe’s title of his translation (1900) into English of Ernst Haeckel, Die Welträthsel (1895–99); the phrase derives from Friedrich Nietzsche, who applies it widely to “the natural order” and the meaning of life. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: Watts, 1900). 2. Samuel Beckett, The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett, vol. 4 (New York: Grove, 2006), 471. Cited here from near the beginning of “Worstward Ho,” these words that have become almost Beckett’s signature. 3. Compare Moran’s jubilation when he considers the dance of his bees, concluding that this was something he could study all his life and never understand. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 163. The “waggle dance” had been decoded by Karl von Frisch in 1927, but his account (accurately described by Moran) was still disputed when Beckett was writing the trilogy. By contrast, Beckett could not have been unaware of the importance of the 1953 DNA breakthrough, which renders his failure to acknowledge it the more curious. 4. This despite a persistent but unverified urban myth to the effect that Darwin had on his desk at the time of his death an unopened letter from Mendel. 5. As Beckett, like many of his fellow Irish, tended to say at moments of uncertainty. 6. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 137. 7. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 483. 8. C. J. Ackerley, “Samuel Beckett and the Physical Continuum,” Journal of Beckett Studies 25, no. 1 (2016): 110–31. 9. A fleeting reference to Einstein appears in Dream of Fair to middling Women, but nowhere does Beckett mention Ernest Rutherford, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, nor any other celebrated physicists of the age; his writings, however, offer ample instances of his informed awareness of them. Beckett, Dream of Fair to middling Women, 212. 10. Arnold Geulincx, 1891–93. Opera Philosophica, recognivit J. P. N. Land. 3 vols. (Hague Comitum: Martinum Nijhoff, 1891–1893), I.II.ii §8, 33.

Notes to Pages 217–19   325 11. Windelband’s Geschichte der Philosophie (Freiburg) appeared in 1892, a revised edition following in 1900; the translation into English of the first edition by James H. Tufts appeared in 1893, and the revised edition in 1901, with frequent republications thereafter. Beckett drew on the revised English text. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy: With Especial Reference to the Formation and Development of Its Problems and Conceptions, trans. James H. Tufts (New York: Macmillan, 1901). 12. Aristotle, Physics, trans. and ed. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press), I.xv. Consider, accordingly, Malone’s sentiment, “In order not to die you must come and go, come and go” (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 225). 13. Aristotle, Physics, I.xvi. Broadly speaking (indeed, sweepingly so), psychology was considered a branch of philosophy rather than an autonomous discipline until the early twentieth century (when William James insisted otherwise). For example: “I therefore consider psychology to be a branch of natural science” (Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 73). 14. Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away (De generatione et corruptione), revised Greek text with introduction and commentary by Harold H. Joachim (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926). 15. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 32. 16. For better or worse, the Hellenist tradition prevailed: the moral force of Socrates, the eloquence of Plato, and the learning of Aristotle ensured its triumph in Western thought, as did its adoption by Christianity—first Neoplatonism, then the Aristotelian synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. Blend into this the dictum of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” and the dispensation by God to Adam of dominion over flesh, fish, and fowl, and “every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth” (Genesis 1:26), and the consequence is what Beckett calls in Watt an “anthropomorphic insolence” (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 1, 334). 17. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 304. 18. Windelband, 320, 323. 19. Windelband, 323. 20. James Knowlson, Doomed to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 66. 21. That is, having beginning but no end, like Dante’s “rosa sempiterna.” Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy, trans. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), Paradiso, XXX.124. Compare the Unnamable (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 289–90): “I am obliged to assign a beginning to my residence here, if only for the sake of clarity. Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here for ever, but not as having been here for ever.” In his “dream

326   Notes to Pages 220–22 notebook” of the early 1930s Beckett recorded several entries (#1040 to #1067) from Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us (1929). Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), 145–50. Jeans was a resolute defender of the steady-state universe and an eloquent opponent of the new subversive theory; the entries in Beckett’s entries show no disagreement with his cosmological constant. A curiosity: Borges’s “The Library of Babel” derives its dimensions from the very pages of The Universe Around Us that Beckett references. 22. Alfred Wegener published his theories of continental drift in three articles in Petermanns Geographischen Mitteilungen (1912), then as Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg u. Sohn, 1929). This edition was the basis of John Biram’s translation, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (New York: Dover, 1966), which marked the wider acceptance of tectonic plate theory. 23. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 57, 64. 24. For an earlier discussion of this lecture (the third in a series of five, but the only one that Beckett attended), see C. J. Ackerley, “Samuel Beckett: The Geometry of the Imagination,” in Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, New Critical Essays, ed. Peter Fifield and David Addyman (London: Methuen Drama, 2013), 96–97. 25. Knowlson, Doomed to Fame, 176, quoting Carl Jung, “The Tavistock Lectures,” in Carl Jung, The Collected Works, XVIII: The Symbolic Life, Miscellaneous Writings, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 74. 26. That the two parts of the novel appear in the reverse order does not affect this sentiment; Moran must find the Molloy within. 27. C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove, 2004), 321. 28. For example: the “little girl” recalled by Mrs. Rooney from a lecture by “one of these new mind doctors” in All That Fall (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 181–82); the “tiny little girl” of Not I, born “before her time” (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 401–2); Fox’s fetal twin of “Rough for Radio II” (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 319), a self not born; and the inadequate anagrammatic pairing of “Amy” and “May” in Footfalls (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 421–28). 29. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 111. 30. Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 592. 31. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 15, 17. In his annotation to this passage (76), Mark Nixon notes that this exchange is echoed by a later entry in the “Whoroscope” Notebook, “loosely” quoting Darwin’s chapter on hybridism (an unusual instance of writing preceding note-snatching). This, to my recollection, is the only citation of Darwin in Beckett’s notebooks; however, one confirmed late sighting might yet suggest a species.

Notes to Pages 222–24   327 32. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 156. 33. Beckett, 7. En attendant Godot reads: “Les gens sont des cons”; assonance and obscenity offer some consolation for the loss of species. Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1952), 19. 34. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 208. 35. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 42. Darwin’s precise words are: “far from feeling the benefit of this” (Darwin 1859, 208). Monkey Brand [sic] was a soap used for washing pans; one advertising poster depicted an exceptionally anthropomorphic ape (dressed in collar and tie) looking at its image in a newly-scrubbed frying pan, with the slogan: “For bright and happy reflections.” See https://www.gettyimages.de/detail /nachrichtenfoto/monkey-dressed-in-butlers-uniform-admires-its-nachrichtenfoto /3133563#/monkey-dressed-in-butlers-uniform-admires-its-reflection-in-the-of-a -picture-id3133563. 36. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 1, 130. 37. Beckett, 327. 38. All references to the poetry in this paragraph originate in Echo’s Bones (1935), reprinted in Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 11–35. 39. Beckett’s cousin and first love, Peggy Sinclair, had recently died (May 3, 1933) of tuberculosis. The image, repeated in The Unnamable (Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 311), is recorded in the “dream notebook” (#656, Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, 94), but drawn from Max Nordau’s study, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1898), which Beckett had read closely and that perhaps entered (with an assist from Haeckel) into the tripartite ontogeny of the “Not I” (Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 408, 412). Beckett was not much interested in the social Darwinism of his times, but the origin of some of his formative ideas in “degenerate” texts (which might include Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe) is a matter not yet widely admitted nor explored. 40. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 86–88. 41. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 411. 42. Beckett, 427. 43. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 1, 236. 44. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 380. 45. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 140, 142–43. 46. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 10, 47. There is an allusion to Haeckel’s title in chapter 7 of Finnegans Wake, when Shaun derides Shem’s “first riddle of the universe.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 170. In chapter 9 of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan refers to God as “the gaseous vertebrate.” James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 9:489. The phrase appears twice in The Riddle of the Universe, the first on p. 10

328   Notes to Pages 224–30 anticipating the more detailed anthropomorphic mockery on p. 235. My thanks to Pat McCarthy for alerting me to the Wake reference. 48. Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 242. 49. Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 219. 50. Haeckel, 109. Haeckel invokes the unfolding of the fetus from the ovum in terms of the etymology of “e-volution” (literally an unrolling); the German Entwicklung better suits this pseudoreasoning (something may have been lost in translation). 51. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 439. 52. Beckett, 110, 43. 53. Beckett, Letters, 514. 54. More honestly, it is (in my opinion) an exciting notion that is impossible to prove, if only because Beckett when writing in haste (as with The Unnamable) is coming from somewhere dark within himself, where the normal signposts of intention are largely obscured. Much of The Riddle of the Universe is patent nonsense: the cell-soul, the implied perfectibility of “the ascent of man,” and Haeckel’s belief that he had effectively solved the universal riddle, to name but a few features that Beckett could never have ascribed to; but common sense and provocative images do not necessarily have much in common, as many of Beckett’s other sources reveal. 55. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 170. 56. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 3, 53. 57. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 2, 94. 58. In his poem “Gnome,” a quatrain in imitation of Goethe’s “Xenien” as a farewell to reason, which might be read, against the grain, as endorsing the Socratic principle that a first step toward knowledge is the recognition that one knows nothing. Beckett, Selected Works, vol. 4, 9. 59. Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 128. 13. SCIENCE, THE OCCULT, AND IRISH DRAMA

1. Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (London: Methuen Drama, 1998). 2. For another contemporary play that reflects this tendency, see Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber, 1993). For critical work on contemporary theater and science, see Michael Vanden Heuvel, Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), and Paul Johnson, Quantum Theatre: Science and Contemporary Performance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012). 3. See Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4. Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 178.

Notes to Pages 231–35   329 5. Alan Friedman and Carol Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989) 12. 6. “Picture Theatres,” Manchester Guardian, April 7, 1925. 7. “La Scala Theatre,” Irish Times, May 8, 1925. 8. John Palmer, “The Paris Stage: Conclusion,” Times, May 4, 1926. 9. “berkeley square: Mr. Squire Collaborates in a Curious Play,” Observer, October 10, 1926. 10. “Berkeley Square,” Irish Times, April 27, 1932. 11. H. H., “Last Night’s Play: ‘Mary Rose’ at the Haymarket,” Observer, May 12, 1929, italics mine. 12. Peter Kuch, “The ‘Abbey Irish Players’ in Australia—1922,” Irish Theatre on Tour, ed. Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash (Dublin: Carysfort, 2005), 82–83. 13. Beth A. Kattelman, “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?: American Ghost Shows of the Twentieth Century,” Theatre and Ghosts, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101. 14. “Scientific Conjuring,” “our london correspondence,” Manchester Guardian, April 9, 1926. 15. “Scientific Conjuring,” “our london correspondence.” 16. Quidnunc, “Black Light,” Irish Times, October 24, 1939. 17. Joyce would later link the new physics with early television in Finnegans Wake, II.3. 18. Yeats also read works by some lesser-known popularizers, such as Lyndon Bolton’s Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and A. V. Vasiliev’s Space, Time, and Motion, and owned popular astronomy atlases such as Thomas Heath’s version (1922). 19. John Pilling, Beckett’s Dream Notebook (Reading: Univ. Press of Reading, 1999), note 1046. 20. Pilling, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, note 1061. 21. Pilling, note 1065. 22. See Angela Montgomery, “Beckett and Science: Watt and the Quantum Theory,” Comparative Criticism 13 (1991): 171–81. 23. “psychical research in the ‘lab’: ghosts & the scientist. The ‘Aura’ Under Physical Tests,” Manchester Guardian, October 26, 1922. 24. Bertrand Russell, “Relativity in Dialogue Form,” Observer, January 17, 1926. 25. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933), 76. 26. James Jeans, The Universe Around Us (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1929), 332. 27. Jeans, The Universe Around Us, 107.

330   Notes to Pages 236–39 28. John Bramble. Modernism and the Occult (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 97. 29. W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge, 1953), 59. For more information on this exchange of letters in the context of science and the new physics, see Katherine Ebury, “‘A new science’: Yeats’s A Vision and Relativistic Cosmology,” Irish Studies Review 22, no. 2 (2014): 167–83. 30. W. B. Yeats, “Pages from a Diary Written in 1930,” Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), 331. 31. W. B. Yeats, “Preface to The Words upon the Window Pane: Appendix A,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 2, The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), 719–20. 32. Margaret Mills Harper, “Yeats and the Occult,” In The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 157–58. 33. Yeats, “Appendix A: Prefaces,” “Fighting the Waves,” in Yeats, The Plays, 706. 34. Yeats, “Fighting the Waves,” in Yeats, The Plays, 704. 35. Yeats, “Preface to The Resurrection: Appendix A,” Yeats, The Plays, 726. 36. Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York: Garland, 1985), 284. 37. See Katherine Ebury, “Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats’s Art and Philosophy,” In Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult, ed. Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2016). 38. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 181. 39. McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 180–81; Ebury, “A new science,” 167–83. 40. See Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). 41. See, for example, George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script, vol. 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1987), 79. 42. For example, in “A General Introduction for My Work.” 43. W. B. Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4, Early Essays, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2007), 165. 44. Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 216. 45. For accounts of the Gate’s competition with the Abbey in terms of modern lighting and scenery in the 1930s, see Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish

Notes to Pages 240–43   331 Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1997), 113–38. See also Mary Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 46. Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre (Dublin: Bryers & Walker, 1958), 89–90. 47. Wayne Chapman, “The ‘Countess Cathleen Row’ of 1899 and the Revisions of 1901 and 1911,” Yeats Annual 11, ed. Warwick Gould (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 1995), 121. 48. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002), 25. 49. W. B. Yeats, “The Dreaming of the Bones,” Yeats, The Plays, 307. Lapisardi notes that each individual performance of the run of plays he was involved with was subtly different: “We experimented with certain lighting effects . . . right through previews and into the run” (“A Task Most Difficult: Staging Yeats’s Mystical Dramas at the Abbey,” In Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (London: Greenwood, 1992), 34). 50. Yeats, “The Dreaming of the Bones,” Yeats, The Plays, 308. 51. Yeats, 308. 52. “abbey theatre ballet: the dreaming of the bones,” Irish Times, December 7 1931. 53. M. K., “yeats festival in dun laoghaire,” Irish Times, May 18, 1957. 54. See, for example, David Nowlan, “Yeats: His Own Worst Enemy in the Theatre?” Irish Times, January 19, 1972. 55. Yeats, “Preface to The Words upon the Window Pane,” Yeats, The Plays, 722. 56. Yeats, “Purgatory,” The Plays, 537. 57. Yeats, 541. 58. Yeats, 542. 59. Yeats, 542. 60. Yeats, 543. 61. Yeats, 543. 62. Yeats, 541. 63. Yeats, 542. 64. Kane Archer, “Finding an Audience for Yeats,” Irish Times, August 17, 1972. 65. Lapisardi, “A Task Most Difficult,” 31. 66. Lapisardi, 40. 67. David Nowlan, “Drama Diffused by Distracting Images,” Irish Times, August 9, 1990. 68. See also John P. Harrington, “That Red Branch Bum was the Camel’s Back: Beckett’s Use of Yeats in Murphy,” Éire-Ireland 15, no. 3, (1980): 86–96. 69. Emilie Morin, “Odds, Ends, Beginnings: Beckett and the Theatre Cultures in 1930s Dublin,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2014), 219.

332   Notes to Pages 243–46 70. McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 176. 71. Anthony Roche, “The Revival from O’Casey to the Death of Yeats,” in The Irish Dramatic Revival, 1899–1939, ed. Trish McTighe and David Tucker (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 158–59; Victor Merriman, “Postcolonial Parables: Repositioning Waiting for Godot,” in Beckett and Ireland, ed. Seán Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 114–30. 72. As Anthony Roche notes, the series was likely promoted by Beckett’s recent death in December 1989. Roche, “Beckett at the Abbey 1967–1990,” in Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, ed. Trish McTighe and David Tucker (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 21. 73. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, “Appendix: A Catalogue of Samuel Beckett’s Library,” in Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 270. 74. Mary Luckhurst, “Giving Up the Ghost: The Actor’s Body as Haunted House,” in Theatre and Ghosts, 163. 75. Lois Oppenheim, ed., Directing Beckett (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), 111. 76. Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, 111. 77. S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000, ed. Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (New York: Rodopi, 2001), 174. 78. For a detailed account of this production, see Jessica Silsby Brater, “Mabou Mines’s Staging of Imagination Dead Imagine Revisited: Ruth Maleczech, Samuel Beckett and Holographic Visualization,” in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L’Innommable / The Unnamable, ed. David Tucker, Mark Nixon, and Dirk Van Hulle (New York: Rodopi 2014), 269–82. 79. Samuel Beckett, “Play,” in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 2006), 307. 80. Samuel Beckett, “Footfalls,” in The Complete Dramatic Works, 399. 81. Samuel Beckett, “Ghost Trio,” in The Complete Dramatic Works, 408. 82. Samuel Beckett, “ . . . but the clouds . . . ,” in The Complete Dramatic Works, 418. 83. Samuel Beckett, “A Piece of Monologue,” in The Complete Dramatic Works, 425. 84. S. E. Gontarski, “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre,” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 138. 85. Puchner, Stage Fright, 168. 86. Samuel Beckett, “ . . . but the clouds . . . ,” 421. 87. Yeats, “The Tower,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 199. 88. Samuel Beckett, “Embers,” in The Complete Dramatic Works, 255. 89. Beckett, “Embers,” 251; Yeats, “Preface to The Resurrection: Appendix A,” in The Plays, 726.

Notes to Pages 247–51   333 90. Luckhurst, “Giving Up the Ghost,” 163. 91. Yeats, “Preface to The Resurrection,” 726. 92. Fintan O’Toole, “No W. B. Yeats, No Samuel Beckett? Fintan O’Toole on Why We Mustn’t Forget the Poet’s Plays,” Irish Times, June 10, 2015, https://www .irishtimes.com/culture/books/no-wb-yeats-no-samuel-beckett-fintan-o-toole-on -why-we-mustn-t-forget-the-poet-s-plays-1.2241559. 93. O’Toole, “No W. B. Yeats.” 94. O’Toole. 14. THE UNCERTAINT Y OF L ATE IRISH MODERNISM

1. See Joe Cleary, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). 2. See, for example, John Brannigan’s discussion of the “epistemological uncertainty of modernism” in Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2009), 112; Anne MacCarthy’s discussion of irony and uncertainty in Irish writing in English in Identities in Irish Literature (n.p.: Netbiblo University Institute of Research in Irish Studies, 2004), 99; Terence Brown’s discussion of the 1920s as a “period of intense uncertainty” in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 37. 3. Enda Duffy, “Critical Receptions of Literary Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, 196. 4. Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); Sinéad Matter, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). 5. J. M. Synge, Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Alan Price (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 351. For a longer discussion of Synge and science, see Andrew Kalaidjian, “Synge and Synge: Science and Irish Modernism,” Modernist Cultures 10, no. 2 (July 2015): 178–200. 6. Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, 134, 98. 
 7. W. B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 29. 8. W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: Scribner, 1996), 85. 9. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays, 92, 113. 10. Philip Herring, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 3. 11. Paul Halpern, Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 154. 12. Erwin Schrödinger, Collected Papers on Wave Mechanics (New York: Chelsea, 1978), ix, 13–18.

334   Notes to Pages 252–55 13. For more on the timeline of quantum mechanics, see Andrew Whitaker, Einstein, Bohr, and the Quantum Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 138–52. 14. Emer Nolan, “Modernism and the Irish Revival,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 168. 15. Flann O’Brien, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2000). 16. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh (London: Martin Brian & O’Keefe, 1972). 17. Mary Lavin, The Stories of Mary Lavin (London: Constable, 1964). 18. Joe Cleary, “European, American, and Imperial Conjunctures,” In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, 46. 19. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 46. 20. Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2014), 2. 21. Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information, 3. 22. Margot Norris, “Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly 50, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2012–Winter 2013): 413–32. 23. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 2009), 353. 24. Beckett, Three Novels, 289. 25. Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton, 1989), 47. 26. Myles na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” Irish Times, April 10, 1942. 27. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 177. 28. Halpern, Einstein’s Dice, 163–64. 29. Andrew Spencer, “The New Physics in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman,” Éire-Ireland 30, no. 1 (1995): 146. 30. Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (New York: Walker, 1967), 85. 31. Charles Kemnitz, “Beyond the Zone of Middle Dimensions: A Relativistic Reading of The Third Policeman,” Irish University Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 56–72. 32. Val Nolan, “Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 31, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 178. 33. Anthony Adams, “Butter-Spades, Footnotes, and Omnium: The Third Policeman as ‘Pataphysical Fiction,’” Review of Contemporary Fiction 31, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 107.

Notes to Pages 256–63   335 34. Lanta Davis, “Calmly Making Ribbons of Eternity: The Futility of the Modern Project in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman,” Renascence 64, no. 4 (2012): 344. 35. na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” June 8, 1949. 36. na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” March 10, 1947. 37. na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” March 10, 1947. 38. Keith Hopper goes some distance in tracing a lineage of influence from Democritus to Aldous Huxley, citing in particular a trilogy of books by J. W. Dunne that popularized Einstein’s theories, yet he considers only texts from nonscientists. See Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 2009), 202–7. 39. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1944), 73. 40. na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” March 31, 1948. 41. Erwin Schrödinger, Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1951), 50. 42. Schrödinger, Science and Humanism, 60. 43. Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 219. 44. Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien, 219. 45. Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1993), 118. 46. Myles na gCopaleen, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” May 1, 1950. 47. O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive, 169. 48. O’Brien, 170. 49. O’Brien, 204. 50. It should be pointed out that this critical dismissal is rapidly changing, and Maebh Long’s discussion of O’Brien’s archival work in The Dalkey Archive is particularly compelling. 51. John Banville, Eclipse (New York: Vintage, 2002), 47. 52. John Banville, Eclipse, 47. 53. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 94–95. 54. Robert Pogue Harrison, “Schrödinger on Mind and Matter,” in What Is Life? The Intellectual Pertinence of Erwin Schrödinger, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Robert Pogue Harrison, Michael R. Hendrickson, and Robert B. Laughlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011), 30. 55. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (New York: Walker, 1951), 55. 56. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, 15. 57. Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959), 4. 58. Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter, 13. 59. Erwin Schrödinger, 66.

336   Notes to Pages 263–69 60. Erwin Schrödinger, 87. 61. O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, 316. 15. JOHN BANVILLE, LONG FORM, AND THE TIME OF L ATE MODERNISM

1. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf, 1924), 4. 2. Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 22. 3. György Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (London: Merlin, 1971). 4. John Banville, The Newton Letter (London: Minerva, 1992), 10, 81. 5. John Banville, Mefisto (Boston: David R. Godine, 1989 [1986]), 3; Banville, The Newton Letter, 70. 6. John Banville, “A Talk,” Irish University Review, 11, no. 1 (1981): 17. 7. Banville, “A Talk,” 14–15. 8. Theodore W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39. 9. For Jameson, writers like Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges “had the misfortune to span two eras and the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 305. See also Peter Fifield, Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 10. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 13. 11. Miller, Late Modernism, 18. 12. Miller, 19. 13. Tyrus Miller, “The Continuities of Late Modernism: Before and After Beckett,” in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 7, British and Irish Fiction since 1940, ed. Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), 146. Banville makes a cameo appearance here, but as the author of The Sea rather than his earlier works, which seem to belong more comfortably to the newly expanded late modernism that Miller allows. David James also points to The Sea as Banville’s enduring modernist novel. David James, “Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation,” in Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Paige Reynolds (London: Anthem, 2016), 176–77. 14. Miller, “The Continuities of Late Modernism,” 147. 15. Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016). 16. John Banville, “Physics and Fiction: Order from Chaos,” New York Times, April 21, 1985.

Notes to Pages 270–78   337 17. Though it is not a feature of Woolf’s argument in this essay, Holly Henry has proven convincingly Woolf’s long fascination with science. Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003). 18. Arthur Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921), 51. 19. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003). 20. John Banville, Kepler (New York: Vintage, 1993 [1981]), 31. 21. Banville, “Physics and Fiction.” 22. Banville, Kepler, 19. 23. Banville, 25. 24. Banville, 49. 25. Banville, 148. 26. The descriptions of the structure of the book that follow are indebted to Imhof’s impressive reconstruction of the novel’s shape. Rüdiger Imhof, John Banville: A Critical Introduction (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1989), 131–38. 27. Imhof, John Banville, 138. 28. Imhof, 138. 29. Banville, Kepler, 152. 30. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, 51. 31. Banville, Kepler, 72. 32. Queneau, incidentally, wrote a short novel about the 1916 Rising in Dublin, influenced by his deep reading of Ulysses, On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes, or We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947). 33. Georges Perec, quoted in Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012), 13. 34. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 128–35. 35. Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009). 36. Banville, “Physics and Fiction.” 37. Banville, Kepler, 96. 38. For an expert appraisal of this argument, see Emer Nolan, “Modernism and the Irish Revival,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 157–72. 39. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 186. 40. John Kenny, John Banville (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 2008), 29; Derek Hand, “Ireland and Europe after 1973,” in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 7, 518.

338   Notes to Page 279 41. I mean “planetary” here in the sense in which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has used it, to stand for an ethical, proleptic, and emergent opposition to the “global” of globalization. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), 73. 42. John Banville, The Book of Evidence (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), 26–27.

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Contributors

Chris Ackerley is emeritus professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has annotated Beckett’s Murphy and Watt, and with S. E. Gontarski is author of the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett. He has edited Watt for Faber (2009) and was part of an international team that edited for the University of Ottawa Press several texts by Malcolm Lowry, including the recently rediscovered In Ballast to the White Sea (2014). He is currently writing a study of Samuel Beckett and science.

Susanne S. Cammack is a faculty associate in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She received her PhD in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and held the 2017–18 post of Fulbright Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work explores the intersections of thing theory, media culture, and trauma studies, identifying ways in which media objects become “things” (rather than conduits) that can metonymically bear the weight of cultural traumas. She has published along these themes in Journal of Modern Literature, New Hibernia Review, and Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Gregory Castle is professor of English and Irish Literature at Arizona State University. His books include Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (University Press of Florida, 2006), and Literary Theory Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); he has edited A History of the Modernist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and (with Patrick Bixby) Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain: A Critical Edition (Syracuse University Press, 2016) and A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2018). At present, he is writing mainly on Joyce, Yeats, and the Irish Revival. 371

372  Contributors

Kathryn Conrad is associate professor and chair of English at the University of Kansas. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Cultural Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, and Surveillance and Society, and in edited collections such as Collaborative Dubliners and Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. She is the author of Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and is currently at work on a monograph on technology and Irish modernism.

Enda Duffy is professor and chair of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Subaltern Ulysses (University of Minnesota Press, 1994) and The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Duke University Press, 2009). The Speed Handbook was cowinner of the 2010 Modernist Studies Association Book Award as the best book in modernist studies. Prof. Duffy is coeditor of Joyce, Benjamin, and Magical Urbanism (European Joyce Studies, vol. 21, 2011), of an edition of Ulysses, and of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, and is the author of numerous articles on Joyce, Irish modernism, and postcolonial and modernist literature and culture.

Simon During is professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne. His books include Foucault and Literature (Routledge, 1991); Patrick White (Oxford University Press 1994); Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, 2002); Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge, 2010); and Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (Fordham University Press, 2012). He has worked in postcolonialism, British literary history, literary theory, and cultural studies. He is currently writing a book with the provisional title “The Humanities: An Introduction.”

Katherine Ebury is senior lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology (Palgrave, 2014) and the coeditor, with James Fraser, of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction (Palgrave, 2018). Her articles on literature and science have appeared in journals including Joyce Studies Annual, Irish Studies Review, and Journal of Modern Literature. She is currently working on a new book project,

Contributors  373 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, about modernist cultures of the death penalty.

Luke Gibbons has taught as professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland, and at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Charles O’Conor: His Life and Works, coedited with Kieran O’Conor (Four Courts, 2015); Limits of the Visible: Representing the Great Hunger (University of Quinnipiac/Cork University Press, 2014); Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge University Press, 2003; Gaelic Gothic (Arlen House, 2004); The Quiet Man (Cork University Press, 2002); Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996); and Cinema and Ireland, coauthored with Kevin Rockett and John Hill (Routledge, 1987). His interests include modernism, film, visual culture, cultural history, and aesthetic theory.

Alan Graham publishes regularly on Beckett, Joyce, and Irish cultural history. Recent publications include “‘So Much Gaelic to Me’: Beckett and the Irish Language” ( Journal of Beckett Studies); “Place, Nation, and Spatial Crisis in Beckett’s Fiction and Drama” (Irish Studies Review); and the proceedings of the Beckett and the State of Ireland conference series held at University College Dublin between 2011 and 2013. He teaches at Gonzaga College, Dublin.

Seán Hewitt is Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He received his PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2017 and previously read English at Girton College, University of Cambridge. His recent articles have been published in Review of English Studies and International Yeats Studies. He is currently working on a monograph entitled “J.M. Synge, Modernism, and Political Protest.” His research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Andrew Kalaidjian is assistant professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Recent publications include “Synge and Synge: Science and Irish Modernism,” in Modernist Cultures; and “Positive Inertia: D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Generation,” in Journal of

374  Contributors Modern Literature. He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2015. He is also an active participant in the Southern California Irish Studies Colloquium.

Damien Keane is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published articles and chapters on radio broadcasting, intelligence monitoring, and Irish poetry and recorded sound and is the author of Ireland and the Problem of Information (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for best book on literature by the American Conference of Irish Studies.

Jeremy Lakoff was recently appointed professor of instruction at the University of Tampa. His dissertation, “Intermediation: Technology, Immediacy, and Noise in Modern Literature,” focuses on how literature from 1895 to 1955 participated in shaping dispositions toward emergent communication technologies. Previous publications include essays on prosthesis in The Secret Agent, which appeared in the Conradian, and on Virginia Woolf’s radiophonic aesthetics, which appeared in Virginia Woolf Miscellany. He is also the recipient of numerous national and institutional fellowships, including a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship and the Morris Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Cóilín Parsons is associate professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for best book on literature by the American Conference of Irish Studies and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize; and a coeditor of Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (University of Cape Town Press, 2015). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Journal of Beckett Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a monograph on astronomy, scale, and modernist literature.

Julie McCormick Weng is assistant professor of English at Texas State University. Her published work focuses on the rise of the machine and new sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been

Contributors  375 featured in Journal of Modern Literature, Éire-Ireland, Joyce Studies Annual, and elsewhere. Her current research project examines gender politics associated with transportation technologies in Irish modernist literature.

Index

Italic page numbers denote illustrations. Abbey Theatre, 133, 134, 238–40, 241, 247 ABC of Relativity (Russell), 234, 236 abject feminism, 118, 122 acoustic sound recordings, 147, 149, 312n14 Adams, Anthony, 255 Adams, Robert, 192 Adelman, Juliana, 19 Adorno, Theodor, 267 AE (George William Russell): “The Building up of a Rural Civilization,” 209–10; on the common man, 39; on cultural self-sufficiency, 11; deanglicization and, 204; Eglinton and, 34–35, 36–38, 46–47, 51–52; eugenics and, 213; O’Sullivan and, 31; public debate on Irish literature and, 36–38 “Aeolus” episode (Joyce), 2–3, 9, 10, 185–88, 201 “Aeolus” recording (Joyce), 9, 10, 144–59; acoustic recording of, 147, 149, 312n14; Beach and, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156, 312n15; gramophone recording of, 9, 10, 146–49, 153, 158; on James Joyce Reading, 149, 156–58, 157, 312n16; label of, 147,

148, 156, 311n11; legal battle about, 151–56; letter to Stanislaus Joyce on, 146–47, 311n9; master of, 149; original pressing of, 147, 311n11; planned documentary recording of, 152, 153; rarity of, 147, 311n11; remastering of, 146, 152, 158; tape copy of, 152–53, 158; vinyl (LP) recording of, 10, 149, 151–52 aerial warfare, 79, 299n6 Afrikaner nationalism, 205 Agamben, Giorgio, 98, 100 agencement, 302n4 “Ainsi a-t-on beau” (Beckett), 220 Albright, Daniel, 238 aliveness, 184, 187, 194 Allen, David Elliston, 286n3 All That Fall (Beckett), 222 All the Year Round, 60 amateurism, 178–79, 318n56 American Civil War, 78–79 American Transcendentalism, 44 Anatomy Act of 1832, 191 Anglo-Irish Essays (Eglinton), 293n79 Anna Livia Plurabelle (Joyce), 151–52 anthropology, 249–50, 251 anthropomorphism, 218, 325n16, 327n35, 327–28n47

377

378  Index Antient Concert Rooms, 240 antimaterialism, 2, 97 Aran Islands, The (Synge), 25, 30 archive fever, 7, 284n16 Arendt, Hannah, 113–14 Aristotle: Beckett and, 12, 216, 217, 218, 325n12; De generatione et corruptione, 217; Physics, 217, 218, 325n12, 325n13; on psychology, 325n13; Western thought and, 218, 325n16 Armstrong, Tim, 11 Arnold, Matthew, 1–2 artistic expression: flow of ideas and, 14–15; radio broadcasting and, 163–64, 176, 178–79, 318n56; science, technology, and, 6, 14 artists: Eglinton’s futurism and, 51–52; muses for, 39, 40–41; shaping joy by, 95, 96, 111–12, 305n73; Yeats on, 39–40 Asch, Moses, 151, 152, 153, 155–56, 313–14n33 Ashe, Thomas, 68 As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (Gogarty), 189 assemblages: definition of, 302n4; desiring machines and, 101, 102; networked, 8, 83, 91, 92; shaping joy in, 95; of war, 83, 84, 91, 92 astronomy, 237, 265, 271–76, 278. See also new physics Atomists, 218, 219 At Swim-Two-Birds (O’Brien), 164, 261–62, 263 At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 96, 104, 105–6, 107, 109, 111–12, 302n40 Auden, W. H., 312n18 aura, 98–99, 100 Au Rebours (Huysman), 199

Austen, Jane, 117, 119 authenticity: cultural, 8, 97, 204; forms of, 98–99; of Irish race, 214; transmissibility and, 97–98; Yeats on, 99, 303n19 “Autobiography” (Synge), 24–26, 28–29 Automatic Script, 239 automobiles: in 1930s, 115–16; normalization of, 116, 117; To the North (Bowen) on, 114, 117, 119, 121, 124, 125–27 autopsies, 191 avant-garde modernism, 96, 177, 178, 243, 318n52

Baird, John Logie, 237 Balderston, John L., 232 ballads, 39, 290n26 Balzac, Honoré de, 103 Banville, John, 264–79; The Book of Evidence, 278; Doctor Copernicus, 265, 266, 277; Eclipse, 260; on fiction, 269–70; form and, 268, 271–75; Kepler, 265, 268, 271–76, 277; late modernism and, 13, 249, 267–68, 277; long form by, 268; Mefisto, 265, 266, 268, 278; on modernism, 266–67; The Newton Letter, 265, 266, 268, 278; “Physics and Fiction,” 275–77, 278; science tetralogy by, 14, 265–66, 268, 271, 276, 277, 278–79; The Sea, 336n13 bardic stories, 98–99, 110, 150, 261 Barnes, Djuna, 267–68 Barrie, J. M., 232 Barthes, Roland, 123 BBC: Johnston and, 160–61, 168, 179; on program announcements, 170,

Index  379 316n30; studio techniques for, 162, 315n8 BBC Staff Training School, 164, 166, 169, 315n16, 316n33 BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), 317n37 Beach, Sylvia, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156, 312n15 Beck, Ulrich, 46 Beckett, Samuel: “Ainsi a-t-on beau,” 220; All That Fall, 222; Aristotle and, 12, 216, 217, 218, 325n12; on the body, 12; . . . but the clouds . . . , 246; Catastrophe, 216, 243; Come and Go, 243; “Dante and the Lobster,” 223; Darwin and, 215–16, 221–26, 326n31, 327n39; death of, 332n72; “Dream Notebook,” 234, 325–26n21; Dream of Fair to middling Women, 221, 324n9; “Echo’s Bones,” 222, 327n35; Endgame, 216; “Enueg 1,” 222; evolutionary theory and, 215–16, 221–26, 326n31, 327n33, 327n39; Footfalls, 243, 244, 245; four certainties of, 225–26; “German Letter,” 224; ghostliness and, 13, 243–47; Ghost Trio, 245; “Gnome,” 328n58; Haeckel and, 216, 219, 221, 224, 225, 226, 327n39; How It Is, 223–24; Ill Seen Ill Said, 234; Imagination Dead Imagine, 245; Jung lecture and, 220–21, 326n28; Krapp’s Last Tape, 101; late modernism and, 249; leaving Ireland, 252; Le Kid, 243; lighting and, 244–45; on major events, 216; Malone Dies, 221, 266, 325n12, 326n26; medical tradition and, 202; Mercier and Camier, 216; Miller on, 267–68; Molloy, 266; More Pricks than Kicks,

234; Murphy, 219, 222, 234; Nacht und Träume, 243; nature study by, 12, 219; new physics and, 216–19, 225, 234–35, 324n9; Not I, 244, 245, 327n39; occult and, 230, 243–47; “The Old Tune,” 216; “Ooftisch,” 222–23; “A Piece of Monologue,” 245; Play, 245; psychology and, 220–21; “Recent Irish Poetry,” 243; science and, 12, 215–26; “Serena 1,” 222; “Serena II,” 222; technology and, 12, 52; Texts for Nothing, 216; on “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” 215, 324n2; The Unnamable, 223, 254, 327n39, 328n54; Waiting for Godot, 216, 222, 243, 327n33; Watt, 223, 234, 325n16; What Where, 243, 245; “Whoroscope” Notebook, 234, 326n31; Windelband and, 217, 218–19, 325n11; “Worstward Ho,” 215; Youth’s The Season—? 243 Beckett, Technology, and the Body (Maude), 12 Beer, Gilliam, 15 bees, dance of, 324n3 beheading motif, 107, 109, 111, 304n52 Benjamin, Walter: on aura, 98; on Easter Rising, 6; on language, 114; on media technologies, 55, 62; on montage, 54, 72–73, 294n5; on photographs, 65; on transmissibility, 97–98 Bennett, Jane, 23, 43, 291n45 Bergson, Henri, 102 Berkeley Square (Balderston), 232 Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club, 286n3 Best, Richard, 34, 288–89n5 bestsellers, 116, 117 Between the Acts (Woolf), 265, 308n19

380  Index Bibliography of James Joyce (Slocum and Cahoon), 144–45 billboard advertising (posters), 63, 64, 70 Bion, Wilfred, 220 bird imagery, 105 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 191 black (ultraviolet) light, 233, 244 Blakemore, Michael, 229 Blanchot, Maurice, 123 Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin (Go­ garty), 189 Bloom, Emily, 9 blues music, 310n6 Boccioni, Umberto, 41 body, the: Beckett and, 202; beheading motif and, 304n52; Joyce and, 187, 196–97, 202; modernism and, 11–12; Noh drama and, 104. See also medical tradition Boer War, 205 Bohr, Niels, 252, 257 Boland, Harry, 68 Bolter, Jay David, 162 Book of Evidence, The (Banville), 278 Book of Gilly: Four Months Out of a Life, The (Lawless), 22–23 Borges, Jorge Luis, 328n21 Boucicault, Dion, 61, 296n31 Boundary Commission, 132 Bourdieu, Pierre, 157–58, 303n30, 313n30 Bowen, Elizabeth, 8–9, 113–27; The Last September, 9; late modernism and, 264; on technology, 7, 123. See also To the North Bowen, Zack, 154–55, 313–14n33 Boyd, Ernest A., 36, 44, 293n82 Boy Deeds of Cuchulain, The, 69 Bramble, John, 235

Breuer, Josef, 135 Bricriu’s Feast, 106–7, 108, 109, 304n47, 304n52, 305n62 Bridson, D. G., 166, 316n18 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 3 broadcatastrophe, 163, 164, 315n11. See also radio plays “Bronze Head, A” (Yeats), 203 Brook, Peter, 247 Buchanan, Ian, 302n4 Budgen, Frank, 93 “Building up of a Rural Civilization, The” (Russell), 209–10 Burke, Thomas Henry, 66 Burnham, Richard, 133 . . . but the clouds . . . (Beckett), 246

cabalism, 30, 32 Cadava, Eduardo, 65–66 Caedmon Records: James Joyce Audio Collection, 144, 310n2; James Joyce Reading, 156–58, 157, 312n16; negotiations on “Aeolus” recording, 153–56, 313n27; recording technique used by, 150–51, 312n18, 313n20; sleeve by, 151, 313n20 Cahoon, Herbert, 144–45 cameras, 66–68. See also photographs canonicity, 101, 310n4, 310n6 Capra, Fritjof, 238 Cardiff, David, 316n18 cardiology, 188, 190. See also heart metaphors Carlyle, Thomas, 71, 290n26 cars. See automobiles Carton, Sidney (fictional character), 58, 60, 70, 295n23, 295n25, 295n27 Casey, Daniel, 25

Index  381 Castle, Gregory, 249, 250 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 278 Catastrophe (Beckett), 216, 243 caterpillars, 222, 327n35 Cathleen, Dreaming (Yeats), 243 Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 242 cathode-ray tube, 237 Cattell, Raymond, 210 Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúailnge), 95, 105 Caulfield, Max, 65 Cave, Richard, 96, 106, 110, 302n6, 304n57 Cavendish, Frederick, 66 Cecil, David, 117 Celebrities of the Stage, 57 Celtic Revival. See Irish Revival Celtic studies, 4 Celtic Tiger, 259 Celtic Twilight: Easter Rising and, 55; natural history and, 21, 29, 33; O’Sullivan and, 30, 31; vs. spiritualism, 30; Yeats and, 32 “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” (Yeats), 104, 239 certainty, 250, 270 Chaplin, Charlie: films by, 55; impersonations of, 53, 54, 62, 73, 293–94n3 Chapman, Wayne, 240 Chelsea Householder, A (Lawless), 21 Cheyne, John, 192 Childs, Donald, 203–4 Christopher Columbus (MacNeice), 176 Chrome Yellow (Huxley), 117 Cicero, 56, 57 cinema. See films “Circus Animals’ Desertion, The” (Yeats), 185 Civil War (Irish), 132–33, 250

Clarke, Austin, 34 classical literature, 208 Cleary, Joe, 253 climate change, 5 Clinical Lectures on the Practice of Medicine (Graves), 193 Clymer, Jeffory, 81 Cold War, 262 Coleman, Steve, 72 Colette, 118 Coliseum Theatre, 63–65, 64, 65 Collected Plays of 1934 (Yeats), 302n40 Collected Poems (O’Sullivan), 31 Collins, Michael, 67–68, 72, 189 Collins, Wilkie, 60, 295n27 colonialism, 3–4, 11, 284n11. See also decolonization; postcolonialism Colum, Padraic, 31 Come and Go (Beckett), 243 comedy of manners, 117–18 communication technology, 9, 10, 374 Condon, Denis, 54 connectedness, 9, 25 Connolly, James, 68 Conrad, Joseph, 185 consciousness: of artists, 37, 41; cultural, 205; ethnic, 206; larval, 223–24, 226; prehistoric landscape of, 220–21 continental drift, 220, 326n22 Copenhagen (Frayn), 229 Copernicus, 14, 269, 272, 273 Corcoran, Timothy, 213–14 Corrigan, Dominic, 193–94, 320n42 “Corrigan’s pulse,” 193–94, 200, 202 Corry, Thomas, 20 “Corsican Brothers, The” (Dumas), 296n31 Cosmic Anatomy (Wallace), 238

382  Index cosmopolitanism, 7, 42–43, 44, 45, 46–47 Costello, Maurice, 60, 61 Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats), 240 Craig, Gordon, 96, 240 Crampton, Philip, 194, 320n42 creative joy, 111–12, 305n73 Crick, Francis, 216, 324n3 Cricket on the Hearth, The (Dickens), 294–95n16 Criminal, The (Ellis), 207 Cronin, Anthony, 254, 255 Crookes, William, 237, 238, 247 “Cruiskeen Lawn” (Myles), 253, 255, 256 Cuchulain legends, 69, 95, 97–98, 112 Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Gregory), 99–100, 304n47 Cuchulain plays (Yeats), 8, 95–100, 102–12; At the Hawk’s Well, 96, 104, 105–6, 107, 108, 111–12, 302n40; authenticity and, 97–98; The Death of Cuchulain, 96–97, 103–4, 110–12, 242, 305n73; The Green Helmet, 106–7, 109, 302n40, 304n47, 304n52, 305n62; On Baile’s Strand, 96, 103, 106, 107–9, 111, 302n40, 304n57; The Only Jealousy of Emer, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 302n40, 305n62; sequence of, 96–97, 103–4, 302n40; states of the machine and, 97; theater technology and, 96 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 321n3 cultural anxiety, 135, 308n19 cultural authenticity, 8, 97, 204 cultural identity, 204–7 cultural nationalism, 7, 35, 43, 102, 204 cultural self-sufficiency, 11, 204 culture. See Irish culture

Curran, Sarah, 58, 60, 61 Cusack, Cyril, 156 Cusack, Michael, 210

Dalkey Archive, The (O’Brien), 257–60, 263, 335n50 Dancing Wu Li Masters, The (Zukav), 238 Dante Aligheri, 326–28n21 “Dante and the Lobster” (Beckett), 223 Darwin, Charles: Beckett and, 215–16, 221–26, 326n31, 327n39; on caterpillars, 222; disenchantment and, 30; humanistic writings of, 15; Lawless and, 6, 20–21; Mendel and, 324n4; On the Origin of Species, 26, 221, 222, 225; on religion, 24; Synge and, 24–25, 26–27, 287n34 David, Jacques-Louis, 70, 297n60 Davis, Lanta, 256 Davis, Thomas, 37–38, 46, 56–57, 268–69 dead, the: communication with, 236–37; deadness of, 186; light and, 230, 242, 246 “Dead, The” (Joyce), 47–51, 292n71 deanglicization: eugenics and, 204, 207–12; Hyde’s philosophy of, 205–7, 208–9, 214; Irish identity and, 11, 205–6; Irish language and, 12, 205–7 death, Jung lecture on, 221, 326n28 Death of Cuchulain, The (Yeats), 96–97, 103–4, 110–12, 242, 305n73 Decadents, 199, 200 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 117 decolonization, 4, 102, 276, 284n15. See also deanglicization

Index  383 Dedalus, Stephen (fictional character), 34, 77, 92–93, 260 “De-Davisisation of Irish Literature, The” (Eglinton), 37–38 Defence of the Realm Act, 66 degeneracy, 207–8, 211, 327n39 Degeneration (Nordau), 207–8, 327n39 De generatione et corruptione (Aristotle), 217 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 95, 97, 101, 302n4 Der Perfektion der Technik (Jünger), 114 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 284n16 desiring machines, 100, 101–2 de Valera, Éamon: Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and, 4, 238, 251; Ireland, A Nation on, 72; Schrödinger and, 252; St. Patrick’s Day 1943 broadcast, 253; The Third Policeman (O’Brien) and, 255 DIAS (Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies), 4, 238, 251, 255 Dickens, Charles: The Cricket on the Hearth, 294–95n16; dramatizations of, 57, 294–95n16; films and, 61, 298n61; on French Revolution, 71, 297n54; “The Last Howley of Killowen,” 60; narrative techniques of, 62; “Old Stories Retold: The Battle of Vinegar Hill,” 60. See also Tale of Two Cities, A Dickens Fellowship of Ireland, 58, 295n23 Diseases of the Heart (Adams), 192 disenchantment: the Enlightenment and, 19, 27, 286n5; modernity and, 30, 33, 55 distinctiveness, Irish, 35 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 326–28n21 Djebar, Assia, 276

DNA, 216, 324n3 DNFC (Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club), 19, 20, 24, 30, 286n1 Doctor Copernicus (Banville), 265, 266, 277 Doctor’s Dilemma, The (Shaw), 202 Domain of Physical Science, The (Eddington), 234 Donley, Carol, 231 Douglas, Norman, 117 Dowling, Frank, 69 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 202 dramatization. See plays; theater Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats), 240–41, 331n49 “Dream Notebook” (Beckett), 234, 326–28n21 Dream of Fair to middling Women (Beckett), 221, 324n9 Dubliners (Joyce), 68 Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), 4, 238, 251, 255 Dublin Magazine, 133 Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (DNFC), 19, 20, 24, 30, 286n1 Duchess Street Blues (Johnston), 164, 315n16 Dumas, Alexander, 296n31 Duncan, Isadora, 97 Dunne, J. W., 234, 236, 335n38 Dwyer, Michael, 297n60 dynamite: in aerial warfare, 299n6; as explosive “resources of civilization,” 85–86, 300n26; invention of, 79; media technologies and, 81; message sent by, 82–83 dynamite novels, 81, 88, 299n12. See also Modern Daedalus, A (Greer) Dynamiter, The (Stevenson and Stevenson), 82–83

384  Index Dynamite War (London, 1881–85), 66, 77

early modernism, 248, 249–50, 264 Earth-Lover and Other Poems (O’Sullivan), 31 “Easter 1916” (Yeats), 184–85, 250 Easter Rising of 1916, 53–73; billboards and posters in, 63, 64; dramatizations of, 63; films and, 53, 61, 72–73, 297n60; French Revolution and, 57, 61–62; literary depictions of, 57, 63; looters during, 53, 55, 293–94n3; media technologies and, 6, 53, 55–63; motives for, 55–57; O’Duffy and, 57, 294n12; photographs of, 63–69, 64, 65, 67; Proclaiming a Republic: The 1916 Rising exhibition, 54; Queneau on, 337n32; Shakespearean affinities of, 295n25; tableaux vivants and, 69–72; time and, 63–69; uncertainty and, 250; Yeats on, 63, 112 “Echo’s Bones” (Beckett), 222, 327n35 Eclipse (Banville), 260 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 305–6n4 Eddington, Arthur: The Domain of Physical Science, 234; on event as encounter, 273; The Expanding Universe, 235; on relativity, 231; science of light and, 230; on spacetime, 270 Edison, Thomas, 48 Eglinton, John, 6, 34–52; Anglo-Irish Essays, 293n79; birth name of, 34; cosmopolitanism and, 42–47; “The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature,” 37–38; on elements, 43, 44, 291n45; futurism of, 35–36,

39, 40–43, 46, 47, 51–52; influence of, 52, 293n82; Joyce and, 34–35, 51, 288–89n5, 289n22, 293n79; on machines, 42; “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” 39–40, 290n26; on patriotism, 36–38, 46; on realism, 45–46, 51–52; on Shakespeare, 45, 291n55; technology and, 35–36, 39–40, 46, 51, 52, 292n58; on universalism, 44–45; “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?” 36–37, 289n22; Yeats and, 34, 36–38, 39–40, 288n3, 289n23, 290n26 Einstein, Albert: Beckett on, 324n9; “Cruiskeen Lawn” column on, 256; The Meaning of Relativity, 234; popular science and, 335n38; on relativity, 250, 255; science of light and, 229, 230–32; on spacetime, 270–71 Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (film), 231–32 Eisen, Kurt, 307n5 Eisenberg, Evan, 310n6 Eisenstein, Sergei, 62, 298n61 electrical sound recordings, 147, 149, 150–51, 312n14, 312n18 electrification, 47–51, 292n70, 292n71 elements, the, 43, 44, 291n45 Eliot, George, 45, 117, 202 Eliot, T. S., 116, 117, 264 Ellis, Havelock, 207 Ellmann, Maud, 8, 114, 122 Ellmann, Richard, 186 embryonic development, 224, 328n50, 328n54 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 44 Emmet, Robert: on ancient Romans and Greeks, 56; Curran love story

Index  385 and, 58, 60, 61; Farrell on, 63; in Ireland, A Nation, 61; The Old Lady Says “No!” ( Johnston) on, 173 empire, 3–4, 7–8, 86, 87, 292n58 enchantment, sense of, 23, 25 Endgame (Beckett), 216 English language, 211 Enlightenment, 6, 19, 27 “Entomological Adventure, An” (Lawless), 23–24 Entomologist’s Weekly, 21 “Enueg 1” (Beckett), 222 epic poetry, 39, 290n26 Ernst, Morris, 153, 155, 313n27 Ethica (Geulincx), 216 ethics: Greek, 218, 325n16; of warfare technology, 8, 79, 80, 84 ethnicity, Irish, 205, 206, 207 ethnic nationalism, 204–5, 214 eugenics, 11–12; cultural nationalism and, 204; deanglicization and, 204, 207–9; ethnic nationalism and, 214; Irish Revival and, 203–14; Joyce and, 210, 211–12; psycho-eugenics, 261–62, 263; publications on, 207–8; Russell and, 213; Yeats and, 11, 203–4, 210, 321n3 evolutionary theory: Beckett and, 215– 16, 221–26, 326n31, 327n33, 327n39; primitive and, 27; Schrödinger on, 262–63; Synge and, 24–25, 26–27, 287n34 exceptionalism: racial, 212; scientific, 4 excitability (nervousness), 187–88, 191–92, 198–200 exile, of Irish writers, 16, 37–38 Expanding Universe, The (Eddington), 235 experimental writing, 116–17, 118, 120

Experiment with Time, An (Dunne), 234 explosive devices, 80. See also dynamite

“Fairies’ Theatre,” 233 Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (Yeats), 99, 303n19 Fallis, Richard, 47 Famine, the, 11, 189, 194, 214, 320n42 Farah, Nuruddin, 276 Farrell, Michael, 62–63, 296n37 Faulkner, William, 116 Fay, Gerard, 238–40, 241 feminism, abject, 118, 122 “Fenian Manifesto to the British Cabinet,” 300n26 Fenian Ram, 85, 300n24 Fenians: dynamite and, 80–81, 85–86, 300n26; Dynamite War and, 66, 77; submarines for, 8, 85, 300n24 Fenollosa, Ernest, 104 fiction: Banville on, 269–70; challenging, 40; four sectors of, 116, 117; 1930s modes of, 117–18; Woolf on, 265, 269–70, 337n17. See also novels Fiction and the Reading Public (Leavis), 116 field clubs, 6–7, 19, 20, 286n1, 286n3 Fight for National Intelligence, The (Cattell), 210 Fighting the Waves (Yeats), 237 films: Benjamin on, 62; by Chaplin, 55; Easter Rising of 1916 and, 53, 61, 72–73, 297n60; of funerals, 68; on relativity, 231; republicanism and, 61–62; tableaux vivants and, 68–72; of A Tale of Two Cities, 60–61, 62, 296n30 Finerty, John, 80, 299n6

386  Index Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 225, 254, 327–28n47, 329n17 Firbank, Ronald, 117 Fisher, Philip, 23 Fitzgerald, Edward, 60 Fitzpatrick, Orla, 66 Flannery, James, 242–43, 247 Flaubert, Gustave, 58 folklore, 31, 32, 97–99, 100 Folkways, 150, 151–52, 154, 155–56, 313–14n33 Footfalls (Beckett), 243, 244, 245 “Force” (Joyce), 207 form: Banville and, 268, 271–75; content and, 272, 275–77; vs. formlessness, 272; history and, 277; unseasonable, 268, 336n0 formalism, 96, 107, 268 Forster, E. M., 118 Foster, John Wilson, 3, 21, 284n11 Foucault, Michel, 191 Four Plays for Dancers (Yeats), 104, 302n40 fragments, unity of, 103, 303n32 Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley), 84 Frayn, Michael, 229 free will: Schrödinger on, 257; technology and, 113–14, 115, 127, 305–6n4; time and, 270 French Resistance, 216 French Revolution, 57, 61–62, 71, 295n23, 297n54 Freud, Sigmund, 135, 308n16 Friedman, Alan, 231 Frost, Robert, 312n18 Frozen Deep, The (Collins), 60, 295n27 funerals, films of, 68 Fuseli, Henry, 70

futurism: Eglinton and, 35–36, 39, 40–43, 46, 47, 51–52; Italian, 40–41, 42, 46, 51; Joyce and, 51

Gaelic Athletic Association, 210 “Gas from a Burner” (Joyce), 38 gaslight, 47–51, 292n71 Gate Theater, 232, 239, 243 Gelatt, Roland, 310–11n7 “General Introduction to My Work” (Yeats), 95 genesis, 217, 218 Genesis (Book of the Bible), 225 genetics, 209, 216, 324n3. See also eugenics Genlis, Pamela de, 60 geology, 219–20 “German Letter” (Beckett), 224 German Romanticism, 305–6n4 Geulincx, Arnold, 216 ghosts and ghostliness: Beckett and, 13, 243–47; in Copenhagen (Frayn), 229; haunting metaphors of, 13, 235, 242, 243–47; light and, 13, 229, 246–47; in Mary Rose (Barrie), 232; new physics and, 235–36, 238; phantasmagoria and, 233, 239, 244; theory of, 235; Yeats and, 13, 236–37, 239, 241–43, 244 “Ghosts and the Scientist: The Aura under Physical Tests,” 235 Ghost Trio (Beckett), 245 Gielgud, Val, 166, 316n21 Gildersleeve, Jessica, 121 Gillespie, Michael Patrick, 293n79 Gitelman, Lisa, 82 “Gleam, The” (O’Sullivan), 31–32 “Gnome” (Beckett), 328n58

Index  387 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 188, 189–90, 288–89n5 Gonne, Maud, 68 Gontarski, S. E., 245 goodness, in To the North (Bowen), 121–23, 124, 127 Gotham Book Mart, 151 gramophone recordings, 9–10, 146, 147, 310n1. See also “Aeolus” recording gramophones, 9–10, 131–43; cultural anxiety and, 135, 308n19; guns and, 139; in Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey), 138–39, 141, 309–10n48; mechanism of, 131–32, 132, 134–35, 139–40, 142; memory formation metaphor and, 135, 308nn15–16; mind analogy and, 135–36, 142–43, 308nn15–16; in Portrait (Robinson), 10, 133, 134– 35, 138–42; postwar generation and, 9–10, 132–33, 139; psychology and, 135–36, 142, 308nn15–16; recitals of, 134; in The Round Table (Robinson), 141 Graves, Robert James, 193 Gray’s Anatomy, 191 Greek ethics, 218, 325n16 Greenbaum, Woolf, and Ernst (law firm), 153, 155 Green Helmet, The (Yeats), 106–7, 109, 302n40, 304n47, 304n52, 305n62 Greer, Tom: vs. Elizabeth Bowen, 9; early modernism and, 264; A Modern Daedalus, 8, 77–78, 84–91, 90, 93; technology and, 7, 77–78 Gregory, Augusta: Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 99–100, 304n47; Cuchulain plays (Yeats) and, 103,

105, 107, 305n62; early modernism and, 264 Gregory, Robert, 96, 304n57 Griffith, Arthur, 189 Griffith, D. W., 62 Groys, Boris, 116 Grusin, Richard, 162 Guattari, Félix, 8, 95, 97, 101, 302n4 Guillory, John, 310n4 guns and gun-men, 137–38, 139, 140–41 Guthrie, Tyrone, 164, 178 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 135, 308n15

habitus, 102, 303n30 Haeckel, Ernst: Beckett and, 12, 216, 219, 221, 224, 225, 226, 327n39; The Riddle of the Universe, 219, 224–25, 327n39, 327–28n47, 328n50, 328n54; on universe, 215, 324n1 Halbert, J. M., 20 Halpern, Paul, 255, 256 Hamilton, William Rowan, 251 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 59, 136 Hansson, Heidi, 23 Harkin, James J., 70–71 Harper, Margaret Mills, 236 Harris, Wilson, 276 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 261 Hartinian, Linda, 245 Hassall, John, 70, 70 haunting metaphors, 13, 235, 242, 243–47. See also ghosts and ghostliness Havel, Václav, 216 Healy, Sean, 73 heart disease, 192–93

388  Index heart metaphors: in Ulysses (Joyce), 11, 183–84, 185–88, 196, 200–201; in Yeats’s work, 184–85 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 185 Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, 219, 261 Heisenberg, Werner, 252, 253, 257 Henry, Holly, 337n17 heredity, 209, 216. See also eugenics heroic, the: Cuchulain plays (Yeats) and, 100, 105, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 112, 305n73; Easter Rising and, 53, 55; the past as, 39, 100, 283n2 Herring, Philip, 250 Higgins, Roisín, 63 highbrow literature, 116, 162, 179, 199 high modernism, 248–49, 265, 267–68, 279 His Master’s Voice (HMV), 146, 149 historiography, 98–99, 302n17 History of Ireland (O’Grady), 98–99, 283n2 History of Magic and Experimental Science, A (Thorndike), 238 History of Philosophy (Windelband), 217, 218–19, 325n11 Hitchcock, Peter, 276 HMV (His Master’s Voice), 146, 149 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 305–6n4 Hogan, Robert, 133 Holdridge, Barbara (Cohen), 150 Holland, John, 8, 85, 300n24 Holmqvist, Caroline, 83, 84 holograms, 245 homelessness, 267 Homer, 39, 261 Hopper, Keith, 335n38 Houen, Alex, 81 House, Humphry, 117 Household Words, 60

How It Is (Beckett), 223–24 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 113–14 humanities, vs. science, 16 humanity, 42, 45, 46, 204, 261 human-material assemblage of war, 83, 84, 91, 92 human will. See free will Husserl, Edmund, 219 Huxley, Aldous, 117 Huysman, Joris-Karl, 199 hybridism, 222, 326n31 Hyde, Douglas: on cultural selfsufficiency, 11, 204; degeneracy cult and, 208–9; The Love Songs of Connacht, 209; “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” 205–7, 211, 214, 323n45 hydrogen bomb tests, 257

Icarus, 92–93 identity. See Irish identity “If You’re Irish (Come into the Parlor)” (song), 309–10n48 Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett), 234 Imagination Dead Imagine (Beckett), 245 imagined community, 50, 102 Imhof, Rüdiger, 273 impersonations: of Chaplin, 53, 54, 62, 73, 293–94n3; Dickens and, 61 Indemnity Act, 132 India, colonialism in, 4 individualism, 84, 92, 164 Industrial Resources of Ireland, The (Kane), 3 Ingram, Rex, 60–61 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 303n32 Insurrection (drama series), 63 intransmissibility, 98–99, 100

Index  389 Invincibles, 66 Ireland, A Nation, 61, 72, 297n60 Irish Coleoptera (Halbert and Johnson), 20 Irish culture: classical literature and, 208; decay of, 11–12; defining feature of, 9; eugenics and, 212; gramophones in, 133; Hyde on, 211, 323n45; identity and, 204–7; Irish language and, 205, 206; purity of, 211; science and technology in, 2; transmissibility of, 98; Unity of Being and, 95 Irish distinctiveness, 35 Irish Freedom, 56 Irish Free State: borders of, 132; deanglicization and, 212–13; early stages of, 136; identity and, 11, 139; inauguration of, 264; Ireland as nation and, 248; Irish language and, 213–14 Irish identity: cultural, 204–7; deanglicization and, 11, 205–6; ethnic nationalism and, 204–5; eugenics and, 204; exile of writers and, 16; gramophones in, 309n38; Irish Free State and, 11, 139; Irish language and, 12, 205–7; servant mentality of, 195 Irish language, 12, 205–7, 208, 211, 213–14 Irish modernism: avant-garde, 96, 177, 178, 243, 318n52; decline of, 12–13, 268; definition of, 264–65; early, 248, 249–50, 264; experimental, 117, 118, 120; high, 248–49, 265, 267–68, 279; Irish Revival and, 2–3, 5–7, 230; rejection of, 267; as revolutionary, 14; timeline for, 248–49, 264–65. See also late modernism

Irish Naturalist, 20, 31 Irish Popular Superstitions (Wilde), 188 Irish race, 12, 19, 38, 45, 205–7, 214 Irish Revival: anthropology and, 249–50; antimaterialism and, 2; authenticity and, 98–99; Beckett’s satire on, 243; cultural nationalism and, 7; Eglinton and, 34, 46, 51–52; eugenics and, 203–14; exploitation of women and, 319n24; Irish language and, 213; Irish race and, 214; vs. late modernism, 230; materialism and, 2, 6; medical tradition and, 189; modernism and, 2–3, 5–7, 230; natural history and, 19–33; politics of, 6–7; Romanticism and, 30; spokesperson of, 1 Irish Statesman, 133–34 Irish Times: “Cruiskeen Lawn” column, 253, 255, 256; on gramophones, 131–32, 133, 140, 143; on “Holy Theatre,” 247; on Lawless, 21; on Portrait (Robinson), 133; on ultraviolet light, 233 Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, 80 “iron age,” 136, 138 Italian futurism, 40–41, 42, 46, 51 “Ithaca” (Joyce), 93–94

Jacobs, Jason, 179 James, David, 336n13 James, Henry, 45, 117, 119, 120, 232 James, William, 325n13 James Joyce Audio Collection, 144, 310n2 James Joyce Collection (Yale University), 145 James Joyce Reading, 149, 156–58, 157, 312n16

390  Index Jameson, Fredric, 268, 336n0 Japanese Noh drama, 104–5, 239 Jarman, Frances, 60 Jarry, Alfred, 255 Jeans, James, 234, 235, 328n21 Jeffares, A. Norman, 289n23 Jin, Jay, 93 “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art” (Yeats), 1, 39, 45 Johnson, W. F., 20 Johnston, Denis, 10, 160–78; broadcatastrophe by, 164; career of, 160– 62; Duchess Street Blues, 164, 315n16; impact of radio plays by, 162, 163; Multiple Studio Blues or “Better Narrate than Never,” 164–70, 172, 176, 315n15, 316nn17–18, 316n21, 316n30, 316n33; Nine Rivers from Jordan, 161; Not One Returns to Tell: An Excursion into the Supernatural, 170–73, 176, 317n35, 317nn37–38; The Old Lady Says “No!”, 173–76, 317nn43–44, 317–18n49; as producer, 163–64, 178, 315n13; Radio Times feature on, 165, 169; “The World We Listen In,” 315n10 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 71 Jones, Greta, 27 Joyce, James: Anna Livia Plurabelle, 151–52; the body and, 187, 196–97, 202; character of Stephen Dedalus and, 34, 77, 92–94, 260; The Dalkey Archive (O’Brien) on, 258; “The Dead,” 47–51, 292n71; on Dickens, 294–95n16; Dubliners, 68; Eglinton and, 34–35, 51, 288–89n5, 289n22, 293n79; eugenics and, 210, 211–12; Finnegans Wake, 225, 254, 327–28n47, 329n17; “Force,” 207; futurism and, 51; “Gas from

a Burner,” 38; Gogarty and, 189; Hamlet theory of, 291n55; heart metaphors by, 11, 183–84, 185–88, 196, 200–201; high modernism and, 248–49; “Ithaca,” 93–94; leaving Ireland, 38, 252; medical tradition and, 11, 183–84, 185–88, 194–202, 319n20; mimetic text and, 184, 197, 201; A Modern Daedalus (Greer) and, 77, 78, 92–93, 94; new physics and, 234; on the particular, 46–47; “A Portrait of the Artist,” 293n79; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 92–93, 194–95, 260; on technology, 7, 8, 47–51, 292n71; transmissibility of his works, 145, 146, 310n4; vinyl (LP) recordings of, 10, 144, 149, 151–52, 156–58, 157, 310n2, 312n16; Work in Progress, 116. See also “Aeolus” recording; Ulysses Joyce, Stanislaus, 146–47, 311n9 Jung, Carl, 220–21, 326n28 Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 114 Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey), 9, 138–39, 141, 309–10n48

Kafka, Franz, 101 Kaleidoscope (Sieveking), 166 Kane, Robert, 3 Kattelman, Beth A., 233 Kaun, Axel, 224 Kavanagh, Patrick, 253 Keane, Damien, 9, 253, 254 Kelly, Joseph, 151 Kelly, Patrick, 67–68 Kemnitz, Charles, 255 Kepler (Banville), 265, 268, 271–76, 277 Kern, Stephen, 271 Kershner, Brandon, 77, 88

Index  391 Kiberd, Declan, 36 Kiernan, Barney, 211 Kissane, Bill, 136 Kleinfeldt, Walter, 66–67 knowledge: first step toward, 328n58; fragmentation of, 299–300n18; indigenous systems of, 4; locations of, 16; networks of, 93 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 101 Kuch, Peter, 233

La Disparition (Perec), 275 Laennec, René, 190 “Lake Isle of Inisfree, The” (Yeats), 185 land management, 3, 284n11 language: English, 211; experience and, 114, 115; inadequacy of, 114; Irish, 11–12, 205–7, 208, 211, 213–14; of science, 113 Laoghaire, Dun, 241 Lapisardi, Frederick S., 242–43, 331n49 “Lapis Lazuli” (Yeats), 112 Larkin, James, 73 Larminie, William, 36–38 La Scala cinema, 231–32 “Last Howley of Killowen, The” (Dickens), 60 Last September, The (Bowen), 9 late modernism: Banville and, 13, 249, 267–68, 277; Beckett and, 249; Elizabeth Bowen and, 264; Thomas Davis on, 268–69; Irish Revival and, 230; Miller on, 267–69; new physics and, 251–54; Flann O’Brien and, 13, 14, 249, 254, 264; O’Nolan and, 254–59; revolution and, 14, 249, 252–53, 259–63; science

tetralogy and, 14, 265–66, 268, 269; uncertainty and, 248–63 La Valeur de la Science (Poincaré), 234 Lavin, Mary, 253 Lawless, Emily, 5–6, 20–24; The Book of Gilly: Four Months Out of a Life, 22–23; A Chelsea Householder, 21; “An Entomological Adventure,” 23–24; Major Lawrence, F.L.S., 21; natural history and, 5–6, 20–24, 30; obituary of, 21; taxonomy and, 23, 32–33 Leaney, Enda, 20 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 44 Leaving Mr Mackenzie (Rhys), 118 Leavis, F. R., 114 Leavis, Q. D., 116, 117, 118 “Legitimate in Warfare, The” (Sears), 79 Leinster Stage Society, 57, 294–95n16 Le Kid (Beckett and Pelorson), 243 Lennon, Joseph, 207 Levin, Harry, 145 Levine, George, 29 Lewis, Wyndham, 267–68 Liammóir, Micheál Mac, 174 Libera, Antoni, 244 “Library of Babel, The” (Borges), 328n21 Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie, The (Stokes), 193 light and lighting: Beckett and, 244– 45; black (ultraviolet), 233, 244; the dead and, 230, 242, 246; “The Dead” (Joyce) on, 47–51, 292n71; ghostliness and, 13, 229, 246–47; invisible, 237; occult and, 229–47; science of, 229, 230–31, 246–47; time and, 234, 235; Yeats and, 13, 230, 239–43, 245–46, 331n49. See also ghosts and ghostliness

392  Index Linett, Maren Tova, 11 Lionnais, François Le, 275 literary archive, 116–17, 154, 156 literature: bestsellers and, 116, 117; classical, 208; classification of, 118; cosmopolitanism and, 46–47; highbrow, 116, 162, 179, 199; middlebrow, 116, 117, 145–46, 154, 170, 177; public debate on, 36–38, 289n23; science, technology, and, 7, 15; structure of feeling and, 276. See also fiction; novels Lombroso, Cesare, 207, 238 London Optical Convention (1926), 233 Long, Maebh, 257–58, 335n50 Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form, The (Hitchcock), 276 looters, 53, 55, 293–94n3 Love Songs of Connacht, The (Hyde), 209 Loy, Mina, 267–68 LP recordings. See vinyl (LP) recordings Lukács, György, 120, 265 L’uomo di genio (Man of Genius) (Lombroso), 207 Lyell, Charles, 220 Lysaght, Sean, 286n1 Lyster, Thomas, 34

machines: desiring, 100, 101–2; Eglinton and, 35–36, 45–46; futurism and, 41–43; Joyce on, 47–51, 292n71; literary, 101; as muses, 39, 41; states of, 97. See also technology; warfare technology MacNeice, Louis, 176 MacSwiney, Terence, 72

Madden, R. R., 56 “mad scientist” trope, 83–84, 88, 258, 299–300n18 Magee, William Fitzpatrick. See Eglinton, John magic shows, 68, 69, 196, 233 Mahaffey, Vicki, 40 Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (Lawless), 21 Maleczech, Ruth, 245 Malone, Andrew, 133, 135 Malone Dies (Beckett), 221, 266, 325n12, 326n26 Mangan, James Clarence, 38, 189, 264 Manning, Mary, 243 Mannion, Sean, 31 Man of Genius (L’uomo di genio) (Lombroso), 207 man of science, 1, 16, 91–92 Mansfield, Katherine, 118 Mantell, Marianne (Roney), 150, 153–54, 313–14n33 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 40–43, 114, 123 Marius the Epicurian (Pater), 199 Martin-Harvey, John, 58–60, 59, 61, 70, 295n23, 296n30 Marx, Karl, 305–6n4 Mary Rose (Barrie), 232 masks, 104, 105, 106 mass media, 81, 116. See also media technologies materialism: cosmopolitanism and, 45–46; deanglicization and, 211; Eglinton and, 35–36, 52; natural history and, 27; revivalism and, 6; Yeats on, 1–2, 5, 8 Mattar, Sinéad, 249 Maude, Ulrika, 12 McAteer, Michael, 238, 243 McCormack, W. J., 61–62, 287n34

Index  393 McDowell, Gerty, 58 McGachie, James, 190 McGreevy, Thomas, 221 McKenna, Siobhán, 312n18 McLemore, Sarah, 81 McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 65, 83 McWilliams, Jerry, 147, 149 Meaning of Relativity, The (Einstein), 234 mechanical wings, 77–78, 86–87, 88 media technologies: Benjamin on, 62; classification boundaries and, 154, 313n30; definition of, 81–82; dynamite and, 81; Easter Rising and, 6, 53, 55–63; mass media and, 81, 116; networks of, 94; role in modernism, 9; tableaux vivants and, 69–72; time and, 63–69, 73; transmissibility, access, and, 158. See also films; photographs; sound recordings medical tradition, 183–202; of excitability or nervousness, 187–88, 191–92, 198–200; the Famine and, 11, 189; heart metaphors and, 11, 183–88, 196, 200–201; Joyce and, 11, 183–84, 185–88, 194–202, 319n20; science and, 188, 200, 201 medicine: key figures in, 188–89, 192–94; post-Famine research in, 11, 189; scientific observation and, 190–94, 200, 201; in Victorian Ireland, 184, 188–94 “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (Yeats), 203 “medium is the message,” 10, 83 Meeting of James Joyce Society, 151–52 Mefisto (Banville), 265, 266, 268, 278 Melchiori, Barbara, 80, 81 Mellors, Anthony, 268

memory, gramophone metaphor of, 135, 308n15, 308n16 Mendel, Gregor, 216, 324n4 mental illness, 191–92 Mercier and Camier (Beckett), 216 Merriman, Victor, 243 metaphysics, 92, 232, 235, 299–300n18 Michelangelo, 261 microphones, 146, 147, 150–51, 312n18 middlebrow literature: Caedmon Records and, 154; comedy, 170; description of, 116; literary, 117; radio broadcasting and, 177; specialist publications and, 145–46 military checkpoints, 63 military technology. See warfare technology Miller, Tyrus, 253, 267–68, 336n13 Milligan, Alice, 20, 68, 69 mimetic text, 184, 197, 201 mind, the: gramophone metaphor of, 135–36, 142–43, 308n15, 308n16; interiority of, 262 Mind and Matter (Schrödinger), 257, 262–63 Mise Éire, 72 Mitchell, Susan L., 133–34, 142 Moby Dick (Melville), 221 Modern Daedalus, A (Greer), 8, 84–91, 90; ending of, 91, 93; flight in, 77–78; influence on Joyce, 77, 78, 92–93, 94; on media technologies, 94; narrator of, 86; networks in, 83, 92; plot of, 86–88; politics of, 84–85; preface to, 85; on print media, 89–91; title of, 84; violence in, 88–89 modernism. See Irish modernism Molloy (Beckett), 266 money, Marx on, 305–6n4

394  Index montage: of desiring machines, 101; fragments and, 71–72, 297n57; functions of, 54, 294n5; history and, 72–73; structures of, 298n61; time and, 71–72, 297n57 Montagne, Renee, 150 Moore, George: Eglinton and, 293n82; Gogarty and, 189; goodness and, 127; on Ireland, 38; leaving Ireland, 37; new physics and, 236; Principia Ethica, 121 Moore, Natasha, 290n26 Moore, T. Sturge, 238 morality: fragmentation of knowledge and, 299–300n18; “mad scientist” trope and, 83–84, 88, 299–300n18; realism and, 123–24; technology and, 78. See also ethics Moran, D. P., 216, 324n3 Morash, Christopher, 9 More Pricks than Kicks (Beckett), 234 Moretti, Franco, 200 Morin, Emilie, 243 Morrígan (goddess of fury), 105 Morris, Catherine, 68 Morrison, George, 72 Morrison, Mark, 15–16 “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry” (Eglinton), 39–40, 290n26 Multiple Studio Blues or ‘Better Narrate than Never’ (Johnston), 164–70; ending of, 169–70, 316n33; inside jokes in, 166, 316n18; Not One Returns to Tell and, 172; vs. The Old Lady Says “No!”, 176; producers role in, 166–67, 316n21; program announcements for, 169, 316n30; promotion for, 169; reviews of, 316n17; subtitle of, 315n15 Munro-Kerr, Anne, 152

Murphy (Beckett), 219, 222, 234 Murphy, J. J., 20 Murphy, William Martin, 102 muses, 39, 40–41 Myles na gCopaleen: “Cruiskeen Lawn” column, 253, 255, 256; invention of “cruscalon,” 257; late modernism and, 254; Schrödinger and, 258; on science, 255 mysticism, 23, 29, 30, 33, 238

Nacht und Träume (Beckett), 243 nationalism: Afrikaner, 205; cosmopolitanism and, 46–47; cultural, 7, 35, 43, 102, 204; ethnic, 204–5, 214; eugenics and, 204, 207; flight and, 77; narratives of, 43, 291n46; physical-force, 86, 88; primitive and, 27; of World War II, 262 National Museum of Ireland, 54 National Public Radio, 150 natural history, 5–6, 19–33; Celtic Twilight and, 21, 29, 33; Lawless and, 5–6, 20–24, 30; materialism and, 27; O’Sullivan and, 5–6, 20, 30–33; Synge and, 5–6, 20, 24–30, 33; Yeats and, 20 naturalists, writers as, 20–21 natural selection, 222–23 nature, 7, 12, 217, 218, 219 Nature (journal), 6, 21 “Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland, The” (Hyde), 205–7, 211, 214, 323n45 nervousness (excitability), 187–88, 191–92, 198–200 networks: as cunning nets, 93; humanmaterial assemblage of war as, 8, 83, 91, 92; of knowledge, 93; of

Index  395 media technologies, 94; of print media and weapons, 83; of technology, 91, 94 New Criticism, 158 Newnes, George, 57 new physics: Banville and, 278; Beckett and, 216–19, 225, 234–35, 324n9; Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and, 4; ghostliness and, 229, 235–36, 238; late modernism and, 251–54; occult and, 235; O’Nolan and, 256; popular science and, 256–57, 335n38; revolutionary aspects of, 261–62; television and, 234, 329n17; theatrical culture and, 13, 231–34; time and, 230; uncertainty and, 249; Yeats and, 234–43, 247, 329n18. See also quantum theory; relativity Newton Letter, The (Banville), 265, 266, 268, 278 New York James Joyce Society, 151, 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28–29, 44, 219, 324n1 Nine Rivers from Jordan (Johnston), 161 Nixon, Mark, 326n31 Nobel, Alfred, 79 Noh drama, Japanese, 104–5, 239 Nolan, Emer, 252 Nolan, Val, 255 Nordau, Max, 207–8, 327n39 Norris, Margot, 254 Not I (Beckett), 244, 245, 327n39 Not One Returns to Tell: An Excursion into the Supernatural (Johnston), 170–73, 176, 317n35, 317nn37-38 novels: dynamite, 81, 88, 299n12; form of, 268, 271–77; “mad scientist”

trope in, 83–84, 88, 299–300n18; realistic, 265; time and, 276–77. See also fiction; literature

Oath of the Horatii (David), 70, 297n60 Oath of the Rutli (Fuseli), 70 O’Brien, Charlotte Grace, 20 O’Brien, Edna, 202 O’Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds, 164, 261–62, 263; The Dalkey Archive, 257–60, 263, 335n50; late modernism and, 13, 14, 249, 254, 264; psycho-eugenics of, 261–62, 263; on science, 255, 256; The Third Policeman, 255, 258, 260–61 O’Casey, Sean: Juno and the Paycock, 9, 138–39, 141, 309–10n48; natural history and, 20; The Shadow of a Gunman, 137–38 occult, 13, 229–47; Beckett and, 230, 243–47; haunting metaphors and, 13, 235, 242, 243–47; light and, 229–47; new physics and, 234–37; phantasmagoria and, 233, 239, 244. See also ghosts and ghostliness O’Connell, Daniel, 185 O’Connor, Frank, 139 O’Conor, Norreys Jephson, 307n5 Ó Donghaile, Deaglán, 80, 81, 82 O’Duffy, Eimar, 57, 63, 294n12 O’Grady, Standish: on chaotic archives, 100; Cuchulain plays (Yeats) and, 103, 105, 107; Eglinton on, 37; on historiography, 98, 302n17; History of Ireland, 98–99, 283n2 Okamuro, Minako, 243 Old Lady Says “No!”, The (Johnston), 173–76, 317nn43–44, 317–18n49 “Old Stone Cross, The” (Yeats), 203

396  Index “Old Stories Retold: The Battle of Vinegar Hill” (Dickens), 60 “Old Tune, The” (Beckett), 216 O’Leary, John, 69 O’Malley, Ernie, 53 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats), 96, 103, 106, 107–9, 111, 302n40, 304n57 Only Jealousy of Emer, The (Yeats), 104, 106, 108–9, 110, 302n40, 305n62 Only Way, The (Wills and Wills), 60–61; Martin-Harvey and, 58, 59, 296n30; posters of, 70, 70; review of, 295n25 O’Nolan, Brian, 254–59 On the Boiler (Yeats), 203, 238, 243, 303n19 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 26, 221, 222, 225 ontogeny, 224, 327n38, 328n50 “Ooftisch” (Beckett), 222–23 Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 3 organic community, traditional, 125, 127 Ó Riada, Sean, 72 O’Sullivan, Seumas, 5–6, 30–33; Collected Poems, 31; Earth-Lover and Other Poems, 31; “The Gleam,” 31–32; natural history and, 5–6, 20, 30–33; positivism and, 23; The Twilight People, 31; Verses Sacred and Profane, 31 O’Toole, Fintan, 247 Oulipo, 275 Ouvroir de la Littérature Potentielle, 275 Owenson, Sydney, 264

Pages from a Diary Written in 1930 (Yeats), 236

Paine, Thomas, 71 Pall Mall Gazette, 21–22 pantomimes, 233 Parry, Sarah, 150–51 Partridge, Erik, 116 past, the: heroic, 39, 100, 283n2; time and, 270; transmissibility of, 98–99 Pater, Walter, 199 patriotism, 36–38, 39, 46 Patten, Eve, 3 Peacock Theatre, 242 Pearse, Mary Brigid, 57, 294–95n16 Pearse, Patrick, 56–57, 68–69 Peep Show, The, 233 Pelorson, Georges, 243 “Penal Colony, The,” 101 “Penelope” (McKenna), 312n18 Perec, Georges, 275 Péron, Alfred, 216 Petrie, George, 193 phantasmagoria, 233, 239, 244 photographs: of Easter Rising, 63–69, 64, 65, 67; memory and, 308n16; tableaux vivants and, 69–72; threat created by, 66–68; time and, 63–64, 65–66; during World War I, 66–67 phylogeny, 224, 328n50 physical disabilities, 209–12 physical-force nationalism, 86, 88 Physics (Aristotle), 217, 218, 325nn12–13 physics, classical, 252. See also new physics “Physics and Fiction” (Banville), 275–77, 278 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 199 “Piece of Monologue, A” (Beckett), 245 Pilling, John, 234

Index  397 Pirandello, Luigi, 164, 232 place-names, Irish, 207 planetary space, 278, 338n41 Plato, 218, 325n16 Play (Beckett), 245 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 209 plays: influence of science on, 231–34; material constraints of, 8, 96; Noh drama, 104–5, 239; occult and, 13, 229–47. See also Cuchulain plays (Yeats); radio plays; theater Plock, Vike Martina, 319n20 poetry, epic, 39, 290n26 poets, 1, 20, 95 Poincaré, Henri, 234 popular science, new physics and, 256–57, 335n38 Portrait (Robinson), 10, 133–43; on cultural anxiety, 135, 308n19; death scene in, 140–41, 142, 309–10n48; gramophones in, 10, 133, 134–35, 138–42; gun-men in, 137–38, 140– 41; on “iron age,” 136, 138; on psychological stress, 132–33, 142–43; reviews of, 133–34; song choices in, 139, 309–10n48; traumatized mind and, 135–37; on violence, 135–37, 140–41, 142 “Portrait of the Artist, A” (Joyce), 293n79 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 77, 92–93, 194–95, 260 positivism, scientific, 32–33, 92, 97, 249–50 “possible worlds” theory, 254 postcolonialism, 4, 269, 276 posters (billboard advertising), 63, 70 postmodernism, 249, 267. See also late modernism

postwar period: gramophones and, 9–10, 132–33, 139; late modernism and, 269; Portrait (Robinson) on, 133; psychological stress and, 132–33, 142–43; radio broadcasting during, 146, 310–11n7; Robinson and, 10, 133, 307n5; tensions during, 132–33; violence and, 132–33, 135–37 Pound, Ezra, 104 Power, J. F., 185 Prairie Farmer, 80 Prakash, Gyan, 4 Preston, Carrie, 97 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 119 primitive, the, 27, 29–30 Principia Ethica (Moore), 121 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 220 print media: as alternative medium of expression, 82; dynamite novels on, 81; human-material assemblage of war and, 83; A Modern Daedalus (Greer) on, 89–91; for publicity by terrorists, 81; on science and technology, 80–81; warfare technology and, 81, 82, 83, 89–91 Proclaiming a Republic: The 1916 Rising (exhibition), 54 Proclamation of the Republic, 55–56, 57, 296n37 professionalism, vs. amateurism, 178–79, 318n56 Protagoras, 325n16 Proust, Marcel, 103, 303n32 provincialism, 102 pseudonyms, security of, 254 psycho-eugenics, 261–62, 263 psychology: Aristotle on, 325n13; Beckett and, 220–21; gramophones and, 135–36, 142, 308nn15–16; Portrait (Robinson) on, 132–33, 142

398  Index Puchner, Martin, 244, 245 Purgatory (Yeats), 203, 238, 241–43

quantum theory, 231, 249, 251, 261–62, 278 Queneau, Raymond, 275, 337n32 Quirici, Marion, 209 quop (quap), 183–84

race, Irish, 205–7, 214 racial exceptionalism, 212 radio broadcasting: artistic expression and, 163–64, 176, 178–79, 318n56; audiences for, 162, 169, 177, 315n8; broadcatastrophe and, 163, 164, 315n11; early development of, 177; experimental, 163–64, 170, 177–78, 315nn10–11, 317n34; hypermediacy of, 162, 175–76, 315n9; immediacy of, 160, 162–63, 167, 175–76, 177, 315n9; innovation in, 178–79; multiple-studio, 164, 165, 167, 170, 315n16; postwar period rise in, 146, 310–11n7; producers of, 163–64, 166–67, 178, 315n13, 316n21; studio team for, 167–68, 317–18n49; studio techniques for, 160, 162, 163, 167, 173, 314n1, 315n8; during World War II, 161–62. See also radio plays Radio Éireann, 173 radio plays, 10, 160–78; Duchess Street Blues (Johnston), 164, 315n16; experimental, 170, 177–78, 317n34; immediacy of, 175–76; inside jokes in, 166, 316n18; Multiple Studio Blues (Johnston), 164–70, 172, 176, 315n15, 316n17, 316n18, 316n21, 316n30, 316n33; Not One Returns to

Tell: An Excursion into the Supernatural (Johnston), 170–73, 176, 317n35, 317nn37–38; The Old Lady Says “No!” (Johnston), 173–76, 317nn43–44, 317–18n49; War of the Worlds, The (Welles), 162–63, 169 Radio Telefís Éireann’s, 63 Radio Times, 165, 169, 317n38 Rainey, Lawrence, 41, 42 readability, 100, 302n17 realism, 45–46, 51–52, 123–24, 265 “Recent Irish Poetry” (Beckett), 243 Redmond, John, 54 re-enchantment, 29–30, 31, 32 relativity, 231–32, 234, 249, 250, 255, 261–62 religious beliefs: fragmentation of knowledge and, 299–300n18; rejection of, 31; Synge and, 24, 25, 26, 250 republicanism, 55–57, 61–62 Republic of Ireland, 53, 248, 253, 262 Resurrection, The (Yeats), 237, 243 revivalism. See Irish Revival revolution, late modernism and, 14, 249, 252–53, 259–63 Rhys, Jean, 118 Riddle of the Universe, The (Haeckel), 219, 224–25, 327n39, 327–28n47, 328n50, 328n54 Ritchie, Charles, 119 Robert Emmet (Boucicault), 61 Robinson, Lennox, 10, 133–43, 307n5. See also Portrait Roche, Anthony, 243, 332n72 Rodger, Ian, 317n34 Romans, 56–57 Romanticism, 30, 92, 305–6n4 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 68 Round Table, The (Robinson), 141

Index  399 Rubenstein, Michael, 50, 292n71 Ruskin, John, 123, 236 Russell, Bertrand, 234, 235, 236 Russell, George William. See AE (George William Russell) Rutherford, Ernest, 235 Ryan, Desmond, 57

sacrifice, 55–56, 57, 58, 110 Salter Committee, 115–16 Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (Tajiri), 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 219 Sasanach, 211 Scaife, Sarah Jane, 243, 244 Scannell, Paddy, 316n18 scenography, 98, 106 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 219 Schrödinger, Erwin: “Cruiskeen Lawn” column on, 256; Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and, 238; Harrison on, 261; late modernism and, 14; Mind and Matter, 257, 262–63; Myles and, 258; popular science and, 257; “Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem,” 251–52; Science and Humanism, 257; “Science and Humanism” lectures, 255; What Is Life? 257, 262–63 Schrödinger’s cat, 238 Schummer, Joachim, 299–300n18 science: artistic production and, 6, 14; Beckett and, 12, 215–26; as certainty, 270; colonialism and, 3–4; decolonization and, 4, 284n15; evidence and, 5; flow of ideas and, 14–15; vs. the humanities, 16; in Irish culture, 2; language of, 113; literature and, 15; man of, 1, 16,

91–92; medical tradition and, 188; popular, 256–57, 335n38; positivity of, 92, 97, 249–50; print media on, 80–81; transcendental, 1; in Victorian medicine, 190–91; Woolf and, 270, 337n17; Yeats on, 1–2, 16, 91–92, 283n2. See also new physics; technology Science and Humanism (Schrödinger), 257 “Science and Humanism” lectures (Schrödinger), 255 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 234 science tetralogy (Banville), 14, 265–66, 268, 271, 276, 277, 278–79 Scientific American, 80 scientific and literary societies, 19 scientific exceptionalism, 4 scientific positivism, 32–33, 91, 97 scientists, mad, 83–84, 88, 258, 299–300n18 Scrutiny (journal), 116, 117 Sea, The (Banville), 336n13 séance, 236–37 Sears, Clinton, 79 security, 252–54, 259–60 self-sacrifice, 56, 57 Sense of the Past, A (James), 232 “Serena 1” (Beckett), 222 “Serena II” (Beckett), 222 Shadow of a Gunman, The (O’Casey), 137–38 Shadowy Waters, The (Yeats), 28 Shakespeare, William, 45, 59, 136, 291n55 Shakespeare and Company (Beach), 156 shaping joy, 95, 96, 111–12, 305n73 Shaw, George Bernard, 20, 37–38, 202 Shelley, Mary, 84

400  Index shellshock, 135–37 Sheppard, Oliver, 112 Shiel, Michael J., 292n70 Sidney, Algernon, 60, 295n27 Sieveking, Lance, 164, 166, 178, 316n21 Silverman, Oscar Silverman, 152–55, 313n27, 313–14n33 Simmel, Georg, 294n5 Sinclair, Peggy, 327n39 Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, 304n52 Sisson, Elaine, 69 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 164 Sleeping Beauty, The, 233 Slocum, John, 144–45 Smithson, Annie P., 61 Snake’s Pass, The (Stoker), 3 Snow, C. P., 16, 275 social Darwinism, 206, 327n39 Society of Authors, 152, 153 Socrates, 56, 57, 325n16, 328n58 “Soldier’s Dream, The,” 233 Sotheby’s, 147, 311n9 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 116 sound recordings, 9–11; acoustic, 147, 149, 312n14; blues development and, 310n6; Caedmon Records technique for, 150–51, 312n18, 313n20; electrical, 147, 149, 150–51, 312n14, 312n18; as esthetic appliances, 145; terminology of, 310n1. See also gramophone recordings; vinyl (LP) recordings South Wind (Douglas), 117 space: planetary, 278, 338n41; subjectivity of, 303n19

spacetime, 269, 270–71, 276–77 Spencer, Andrew, 255, 256 Speranza, 189 Spinoza, 102 spiritualism, 19, 23–24, 28–29, 30–33 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 338n41 Spurgeon, Caroline, 120 stage design, 96–97, 103, 242. See also light and lighting Stanford, W. B., 56 Starkey, James. See O’Sullivan, Seumas “Statues, The” (Yeats), 112, 203 St. Augustine, 257 Steel (Bridson), 166 Steloff, Frances, 151, 152 St. Enda’s School, 56–57, 69 stethoscopes, 190 Stevens, Wallace, 267 Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift, 82–83 Stevenson, Robert, 82–83 Stoker, Bram, 3 Stokes, William, 192–93 Stokes-Adams Syndrome, 192 Stokes-Cheyne respiration, 192 stream-of-consciousness, 188, 199 Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer), 135 Studies in Psychical Research (Crookes), 237 submarines, 8, 85, 300n24 Sullivan, J. W. N., 235 superaddition, 99, 101, 302n17 supernatural. See ghosts and ghostliness; occult Suzman, Mark, 205 Swan, Joseph, 48 Sydney Carton: A Tale of Two Cities (Harkin), 70–71

Index  401 symbolism, 32, 96, 187, 283n2 Symons, Arthur, 283n2 synchrony, time and, 269 Synge, J. M. (John Millington), 5–6, 24–30; The Aran Islands, 25, 30; “Autobiography,” 24–26, 28–29; cultural self-sufficiency and, 11; deanglicization and, 204; early modernism and, 248; evolutionary theory and, 24–25, 26–27, 287n34; natural history and, 5–6, 20, 24–30, 33; The Playboy of the Western World, 209; positivism and, 23; publications of, 20–24; religious faith and, 250; “Vita Vecchia,” 25, 29; When the Moon Has Set, 28–29; Yeats and, 107 syphilization, English, 211

tableaux vivants, 68, 69–72 Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley), 95, 105 Tajiri, Yoshiki, 12 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens): American version of, 70–71; Carton in, 58, 60, 295n23, 295n25, 295n27; Wilkie Collins and, 60, 295n27; “The Corsican Brothers” (Dumas) and, 296n31; dramatizations of, 58, 60–61; films of, 60–61, 62, 296n30; impersonations and, 61; self-sacrifice and, 57; treatment of French Revolution by, 71, 297n54 Tao of Physics, The (Capra), 238 taxonomy, 23, 32–33 Taylor, Richard, 103 technology: artistic expression and, 6, 14; authenticity and, 98; Beckett

and, 12, 52; Elizabeth Bowen on, 7, 123; communication, 9, 10, 374; critique of, 113–14, 115; Eglinton and, 35–36, 39–40, 46, 51, 52, 292n58; enslavement by, 113; free will and, 113–14, 115, 127, 305–6n4; futurism and, 41–43; Greer and, 7, 77–78; in Irish culture, 2; Joyce on, 7, 8, 47–51, 292n71; literature and, 7, 15; lived experiences of, 6; morality and, 78; networks of, 91, 94. See also warfare technology telegraphs, 65, 78 television, 161, 234, 237 Ternan, Ellen Lawless, 60 Ternan, Thomas Lawless, 60 terrorists, use of print media by, 81 Texts for Nothing (Beckett), 216 theater: avant-garde, 243; haunted, 13, 235, 242, 243–47; influence of science on, 231–34; new physics and, 13, 231–34; The Only Way in, 58; stage design and, 96–97, 103, 242; technologies of, 96, 302n6. See also light and lighting; plays theology, vs. nature, 20, 196–97, 218 Third Policeman, The (O’Brien), 255, 258, 260–61 Thomas Aquinas, 325n16 Thomas, Dylan, 150, 155 Thoreau, Henry David, 44 Thorndike, Lynn, 238 Three Men Discuss Relativity (Sullivan), 235 Three Musketeers, 164 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 44 Thy Tears Might Cease (Farrell), 62–63, 296n37

402  Index time: free will and, 270; light and, 234, 235; media technologies and, 63–69, 73; montage and, 71–72, 297n57; new physics and, 230; photographs and, 63–64, 65–66; scale of, 278; Schrödinger on, 263; science tetralogy by Banville on, 265; serial, 236; space and, 269, 270–71, 276–77; synchrony and, 269 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 24 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 276 Tono-Bungay (Wells), 183 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 116 To the North (Bowen), 8–9, 113–16, 118–27; on automobiles, 117, 119, 121, 124, 125–27; characters in, 119–21; decision to drive scene in, 125–27; goodness in, 121–23, 124, 127; innocence in, 122; on language, 115; Leavisite tradition and, 118; plot of, 118–19; tea scene in, 124–25; on technology, 123; on transportation, 52, 114; year of publication, 115–16 “Tower, The” (Yeats), 246 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 116 trains, 78, 115 transmissibility: of Cuchulain legends, 97–99, 100; interruption of, 162–63; of Joyce’s works, 145, 146, 310n4; media technologies and, 158; of the past, 98–99 transportation, 9, 114, 115–16. See also automobiles trauma, postwar generation and, 135–37 Treaty of Berlin (1885), 264 “Tree of Life, The” (Yeats), 92 tuberculosis, 222, 327n39

Turda, Marius, 11 Twain, Mark, 45 Twilight People, The (O’Sullivan), 31

ultraviolet (black) light, 233, 244 Ulysses (Joyce): “Aeolus” episode, 2–3, 10, 185–88, 201; on autopsies, 191; bodily energy in, 198–200; character of Stephen Dedalus in, 93–94; “Cyclops” episode, 201, 210, 211–12; Easter Rising and, 55; on Eglinton, 34–35, 288–89n5; “Eumaeus” episode, 66; gramophones and, 10; heart metaphors in, 11, 183–84, 185–88, 196, 200–201; high modernism and, 248–49; “Lestrygonians” episode, 187, 200–201; on lighting, 48; on machines, 42; on Martin-Harvey, 58; medical tradition in, 183–84, 185–88, 194–202; “Nausicaa” episode, 212, 271; publication of, 264; Queneau and, 337n32; on revivalism, 204; stream of consciousness in, 188, 199; on technology, 52; “Telemachus” episode, 194–95, 196; on time, 66. See also “Aeolus” recording uncertainty, 248–63; vs. certainty, 250; The Dalkey Archive (O’Brien) on, 259–60; definition of, 249; late modernism and, 248–63; O’Nolan’s writings and, 255; Schrödinger on, 257 uncertainty principle, 250, 253 “Under Ben Bulben” (Yeats), 203 universalism, 44–45, 47 universe, the: Kepler (Banville) on, 272–74; riddle of, 215, 219, 224–25,

Index  403 324n1, 327n39, 327–28n47, 328n50, 328n54 Universe Around Us, The (Jeans), 234, 235, 328n21 university library special collections, 158 University of Buffalo, Poetry Collection, 152 Unnamable, The (Beckett), 223, 254, 327n39, 328n54 ur-phenomenon, 294n5

Velvet Revolution, 216 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 78 Verses Sacred and Profane (O’Sullivan), 31 Victorian period: crisis of faith in, 25; ethical debates during, 78; eugenics and, 210, 211; Irish language and, 206; medicine in, 184, 188–94; nervousness in, 199; warfare technology in, 78–84 Vile Bodies (Waugh), 117–18 vinyl (LP) recordings: “Aeolus” recording (Joyce), 10, 149, 151–52; as esthetic appliances, 145; James Joyce Audio Collection, 144, 310n2; James Joyce Reading, 149, 156–58, 157, 312n16; Meeting of James Joyce Society, 151–52; popularity of, 10; remastering for, 146; terminology of, 310n1 violence, 132–33, 135–37, 140–41, 142 Virilio, Paul, 91 virtus, 57, 70 Vision, A (Yeats), 235–36, 238, 239 Vitagraph Company, 60–61 “Vita Vecchia” (Synge), 25, 29

WAC (BBC Written Archives Centre), 317n37 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 216, 222, 243, 327n33 Walk of a Queen, The (Smithson), 61 Wallace, Lewis, 238 warfare, 91, 250 warfare technology: aerial, 79, 299n6; ethics of, 8, 79, 80, 84; networked assemblages of, 8, 83, 84, 91, 92; print media and, 81, 82, 83, 89–91; science and, 80, 299n6; submarine development and, 85, 300n24; Victorian period development of, 78–84. See also dynamite War of Independence, 73, 250 War of the Worlds, The (Welles), 162–63, 164, 169 Washington, George, 297n60 Wasted Island, The (O’Duffy), 57, 63, 294n12 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 264 Watson, James, 216, 324n3 Watt (Beckett), 223, 234, 325n16 Watt, Stephen, 58, 295n25 Waugh, Evelyn, 117–18, 119 wave mechanics, 238, 251–52 Waves, The (Woolf), 116 W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre (Flannery), 244 weapons technology. See warfare technology Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 312n16 Wegener, Alfred, 220, 326n22 Weisgall, Hugo, 164 Welles, Orson, 162–63, 164, 169 Wells, H. G., 183 Westropp, Thomas, 67 What Is Life? (Schrödinger), 257, 262–63

404  Index “What Should Be the Subjects of National Drama?” (Eglinton), 36–37, 289n22 “What Was Modernism?” (Levin), 145 What Where (Beckett), 243, 245 Whelehan, Niall, 79, 80 When the Moon Has Set (Synge), 28–29 White, Hayden, 72 Whitehead, Alfred North, 234 Whitelaw, Billile, 244 Whitman, Walt, 44 Whittington, Ian, 161 Whitworth, Michael, 230 “Whoroscope” Notebook (Beckett), 234, 326n31 Wilde, Oscar, 37, 58, 189, 199 Wilde, William, 188–89, 192–93, 319n24 Williams, Raymond, 276 Wills, Freeman, 58, 59, 295n25 Wills, James, 58, 59, 295n25 Willwerscheid, Jason, 26 Windelband, Wilhelm, 217, 218–19, 325n11 Wind that Shakes the Barley, The, 61 Wings of a Dove, The (James), 119 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 71 women, exploitation of, 319n24 Woolf, Virginia: Between the Acts, 265, 308n19; on fiction, 265, 269–70, 337n17; Leavisite tradition and, 118; on modernism, 265; on a “room of one’s own,” 252; To the Lighthouse, 116; To the North (Bowen) and, 120; The Waves, 116 Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 20 Words upon the Window Pane, The (Yeats), 236, 238, 241, 243 Wordsworth, William, 24, 202 Work in Progress (Joyce), 116

World War I, 66–68, 216 World War II, 12–13, 161–62, 216, 253, 262 “World We Listen In, The” (Johnston), 315n10 “Worstward Ho” (Beckett), 215 Worth, Katharine, 239, 243 writers: leaving Ireland, 16, 37–38, 252; muses for, 40–41; patriotism and, 36–38 writing: experimental, 116, 118, 120; highbrow, 116, 162, 179, 199; humanistic, 15; security needed for, 252–54; uncertainty and, 255. See also literature

Yale University, James Joyce Collection, 145 Yeats, Jack B., 68 Yeats, W. B.: antimaterialism and, 97; on artists, 39–40; At the Hawk’s Well, 96, 104, 105–6, 107, 109, 111– 12, 302n40; “A Bronze Head,” 203; Cathleen, Dreaming, 243; Cathleen ni Houlihan, 242; Celtic Twilight and, 32; “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” 104, 239; “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” 185; Collected Plays of 1934, 302n40; on commonest ear, 208; The Countess Cathleen, 240; on Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Gregory), 99–100; deanglicization and, 204; The Death of Cuchulain, 96–97, 103–4, 110–12, 242, 305n73; The Dreaming of the Bones, 240–41, 242, 331n49; early modernism and, 248, 264; “Easter 1916,” 184–85, 250; on Easter Rising, 63, 112; Eglinton and, 34, 36–38, 39–40, 288n3,

Index  405 289n23, 290n26; eugenics and, 11, 203–4, 210, 321n3; excitability and, 187–88; Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 99, 303n19; Fighting the Waves, 237; Four Plays for Dancers, 104, 302n40; “General Introduction to My Work,” 95; ghostliness and, 13, 236–37, 239, 241–43, 244; Gogarty and, 189; The Green Helmet, 106–7, 109, 302n40, 304n47, 304n52, 305n62; heart metaphors in, 184–85; human-technology relationship and, 7; “John Eglinton and Spiritual Art,” 1, 39, 45; “The Lake Isle of Inisfree,” 185; “Lapis Lazuli,” 112; lighting and, 13, 230, 239–43, 245–46, 331n49; The Love Songs of Connacht (Hyde) and, 209; on man of science, 1, 16, 91–92; on Martin-Harvey, 59; on materialism, 1–2, 5, 8; “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” 203; natural history and, 20; new physics and, 234–43, 247, 329n18; on O’Grady, 99; “The Old Stone Cross,” 203; On Baile’s Strand, 96, 103, 106, 107– 9, 111, 302n40, 304n57; The Only

Jealousy of Emer, 104, 106, 108–9, 110, 302n40, 305n62; On the Boiler, 203, 238, 243, 303n19; Pages from a Diary Written in 1930, 236–37; on Patrick Pearse, 68–69; on the primitive, 30; public debate on Irish literature and, 36–38, 289n23; Purgatory, 203, 238, 241–43; on religion, 24; The Resurrection, 237, 243; on science, 1–2, 16, 91–92, 283n2; The Shadowy Waters, 28; on stage design, 103; “The Statues,” 112, 203; “The Tower,” 246; “The Tree of Life,” 92; “Under Ben Bulben,” 203; A Vision, 235–36, 238, 239; The Words upon the Window Pane, 236, 238, 241, 243. See also Cuchulain plays Yeats Festival (1957), 241 Yeats Theatre Festival (1990), 242 Youth’s The Season—? (Beckett and Manning), 243

Zambia, 284n15 Zionism, 205 Zukav, Gary, 238