Inventing Ireland (46 page)

No matter how brilliant Joyce's use of English, it would always run the risk of being seen as his way of serving his colonial master: English would be the perceptual prison in which he realized his genius, and the greater his achievements, the greater the glory reflected on the master language. In
A Portrait,
Stephen goes on to complain to a Gaelic Leaguer: "My ancestors threw off their language and took another . . . They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made".
¹¹
The hatred in that sentence is not so much for the Irish language as for the fact of its humiliation and repression: but pay the debt Joyce does. Shreds of Irish would turn up repeatedly in
Ulysses:
and by the time he wrote
Finnegans Wake,
Joyce had learned to emphasize the ways in which Irish caused its speakers to rework English, so that the book's underlying idiom is his own idiolect of Hiberno-English. But his treatment of the language and its speakers is never confident or final:
beneath the pose of disdain lies a real fascination and an even deeper fear.

In the treatment of Mulrennan's peasant in Stephens diary at the close of
A Portrait,
split-mindedness has grown to near-hysteria:

I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through the night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till . . . Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.

Joyce turned his back on Gaelic Ireland with mixed feelings, and no final certainty that silence, exile and cunning were answers to the challenge posed by the native tradition. And well might he have been afraid:

Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:

– Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.
¹²

This is not just a caustic parody of Synge's peasants, but a terrified recognition that Joyce's liberation from Ireland was more apparent than real: it haunted him forever in the form of his wife. He knew in his heart that the writing of a post-colonial exile is a satanic pact, a guilty compromise, a refusal of a more direct engagement. As he wrote in near-confessional mode much later in
Finnegans Wake
: "he even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through a hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea".
¹³

Joyce may well have left Ireland because he sensed that it was a country intent on using all the old imperialist mechanisms in the name of a national revival. In
Dubliners
he offered the people a look at themselves in his nicely-polished looking-glass: but his enraged audiences broke the mirror, only to find their rage fruitless, since they were left with a fragmented mirror and a broken image of themselves. The gesture of revolt merely deepened the crisis of representation. Salman Rushdie has said that the exiled writer is "obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost".
¹⁴
For Joyce, writing was a measure of his own exile from Ireland, but also of that Ireland from its past, of Hiberno-English from standard languages, and of writing itself as a fall from oral culture – emigration simply emblematized these denials. Yet Joyce struggled hard with censorious printers in order to publish
Dubliners
in Ireland, because he was
convinced that it represented a necessary first step "in the spiritual liberation of my country".
¹⁵
He was well aware of what happens when a colonial writer loses contact with his native audience and writes only for an international élite: he wanted to mediate between Ireland and the world, but most of all to explain Ireland to itself.

If
Dubliners
was Joyce's
exposé
of an Ireland frozen in servitude,
A Portrait
was his exploration of the revivalist illusion. It offers one of the first major accounts in modern English literature of the emergence of a post-colonial élite. The fat young man in the final chapter who rapidly listed off the results of the examinations for "the home civil" and "the Indian" was for Joyce the living incarnation of those forces which made it imperative for him to emigrate.
¹⁶
The emerging middle class did not see literature as something which might be made an element of daily vision: for them an education was a means to an administrative post. In this, too, Ireland had much in common with the experience of other emerging nations, where traditional codes often accommodated themselves happily enough to administrative mechanisms. In his 1907 essay tided "Home Rule Comes of Age", Joyce painted a devastating picture of the new comprador middle class, the constitutional nationalists whom he portrayed as working hand-in-glove with the imperial exploiters:

. . . the Irish parliamentary party has gone bankrupt. For twenty-seven years it has talked and agitated. In that time it has collected 35 million francs from its supporters, and the fruit of its agitation is that Irish taxes have gone up 88 million francs and the Irish population has decreased a million. The representatives have improved their own lot, aside from small discomforts like a few months in prison and some lengthy sittings. From the sons of ordinary citizens, peddlers, and lawyers without clients they have become well-paid syndics, directors of factories and commercial houses, newspaper owners, and large landowners. They have given proof of their altruism only in 1891, when they sold their leader, Parnell, to the Pharisaical conscience of the English Dissenters without extracting the thirty pieces of silver.
¹⁷

Joyce was scathing about the kind of revival which would be possible under such leadership at home: more torpor, more betrayal, more unconfessed self-loathing. He foresaw the plight of an "independent" state under the constraints of neo-colonial economics: "the Irish government about to be born will have to cover a deficit ably created by the British treasury". Nobody should be fooled or persuaded by "the
fact that Ireland now wishes to make common cause with British democracy".
¹⁸

In essay after essay written in the first decade of the century, Joyce asserted his conviction that the Irish were understandably disloyal to the British monarch because they were the victims of
misrule. "When a victorious country tyrannizes over another, it cannot logically be considered wrong for that other to rebel",
¹⁹
he told Triestine readers, adding that nobody could any longer believe in purely Christian motives for such policies. "A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the
Congo Free State ..." Joyce astutely predicted that the same divide-and-rule policy which had carved up Africa would lead British conservatives to incite Ulster Unionists to rebel against any settlement with the leadership in Dublin (this was one of the most accurate predictions of partition). Ireland remained poor, he averred, because English laws were designed systematically to ruin the country's industries. The Irish Parliamentary Party might pursue reconciliation with unionists for its own Home Rule purposes, but ordinary Irish men and women could never forget the centuries of broken treaties and industrial sabotage: "can the back of a slave forget the rod?"
²⁰
Nor was Joyce at all convinced by the good intentions of enlightened British liberals: in an essay called "Fenianism" in 1907 he brutally declared: "any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet".
²¹

All this is worth reviewing, because Joyce has too often been portrayed as a cosmopolitan humanist with an aversion to militant Irish nationalism. However, when it came to prescriptions, he parted with the irreconcilables, seeing in their ideals nothing but a point-for-point contradiction of English Tory thinking.
²²
If the constitutional nationalists were in danger of being co-opted by empire, the militants were at grave risk of embracing the imperial psychology in a reworked form. Joyce heaped repeated mockery on the imitation of English models by Irish
revivalists.

The closing sections of
A Portrait
raise sharp, difficult questions about the meaning of a Gaelic culture which had been "lost", a loss which can be established by the revivalists only in terms of a valued English scheme of things. What the revivalists sought to rediscover was merely a projection of imperial fantasy, eventually embodied in the person of Haines in
Ulysses.
The mistake of the revivalists would be repeated in Africa and India in later decades: too often an "African" or
an "Indian" culture would simply be one which could be easily translated into forms comprehensible to European imperial minds. The revivalists failed to recognize that
tradition in that sense is always syncretic: only a "tradition" which was the invention of the colonizers could
so
facilely disintegrate
to
be supplanted by a ready-made modern equivalent.
²³
The question put by Mazzini to the Irish – what distinctive civilization justifies your separatist claim? – would be raised again and again. Joyce had his own reply and it was not the expected one: "if an appeal to the past in this manner were valid, the
fellahin
of Cairo would have all the right in the world to disdain to act as porters for English tourists".
²⁴
His claim would base itself not on the past but on the future: Ireland's conscience was yet "uncreated". Stephen Daedalus in
A Portrait
rejects all calls to a loveliness which has long faded from the world and prefers to seek a loveliness which has not yet come into the world. In Joyce's hands, the
bildungsroman
was an instrument with which to investigate the Irish experience, and the ensuing self-understanding was a discovery of the real Ireland of the present. After the famines and the decline of the Irish language, the autobiographical narrative became doubly important in explaining to a baffled people who they were.

What Mulrennan's encounter with the peasant told them was not comforting: it would be impossible
to
reclaim whatever had been lost. The very construction of a
Gaeltacht,
a zone of pristine nativism, might itself be an effect of colonialism rather than an obvious answer to it. In Joyce's texts, there is a double exposure: he indicts colonialism, as do the revivalists themselves, but then he proceeds to indict the native culture for not living up to expectations of it, for not being an authentic
elsewhere.
The revivalists feel this lack, too, but they respond by making the peasant the embodiment of sacred values which the peasant himself would never claim to uphold, converting him into a fetish of unsatisfiable desire.
²⁵
The revivalist thus comes to know the "melancholy of the collector", the tantalizing hope that the next salvaged lyric, the next native speaker, will perhaps reveal the holy grails that he seeks. Yet these cultural trophies can offer no more than a fleeting charm, for to linger over any for too long would be to confront in them the selfsame emptiness which led the revivalist, in desperation, to evoke them. The tragic knowledge which awaits the revivalist is that also which attends the imperialist, who comes to the native quarter in search of the authenticity of the exotic. Desiring a pristine experience, Mulrennan is thwarted: hoping to recover the scope of an ancient culture from which he was cruelly separated, he finds instead a peasant
whose inheritance is as broken as his own. There is no absolute
elsewhere
to be found, not even a final frontier where the theory of Irish innocence and the discontents of English civilization could come to a competitive point.

This was Joyces perception: that Ireland is just another of those modern places, where there is no
there
any more. The nationalists who denounced England were, more often than not, denouncing an England inside each one of themselves. Their search for a pristine "Ireland" was a quintessentially English search, because it involved them in the search for a corresponding "England" as well, if only so that they might repudiate it. Since "Ireland" in such a construction was largely an English invention, those who took upon themselves the burden of having an idea of Ireland were often the most Anglicized of the natives. The devising of the ludicrous category
un-Irish
was among their weird achievements, though, in actual practice, nothing could have been less typical of the Irish than the attempt to make an ideology out of Irishness.

The problem of the Irish was not so much rootlessness as the fact that they had roots in too many different places at once – Scandinavia, Normandy, Spain, England and so on. "To tell the truth, to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible", Joyce wrote. In the face of such variousness, a unitary racial nationality could never be more than "a convenient fiction", and that fiction would only be convenient if it could evolve a form hospitable to the many strands that made up Irish experience.
²⁶

Mulrennan's encounter had shown that the architects of Ireland could not know it except as a possibility, glimpsed from the perceptual prison of imperial fantasy, whose ideal peasant was indeed "a man who does not exist, a man who is but a dream".
²⁷
This representational debacle arose from the impossibility of rendering a consciousness which, being uncreated, did not exist as such. Yet Joyce knew that the men most ignorant of a country were invariably the ones to believe that they could represent it. Even the leaders of political nationalism early this century had, in effect, to bluff the new state into being, proclaiming unification in the name of an Ireland or an India yet to follow. The more scrupulous among them, like Mahatma Gandhi, realizing that the unity which had proved invaluable in the struggle against empire might become a denial of difference after liberation, urged that the national congress should liquidate itself after independence.