Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘The journey westward’
- 1 ‘Endless stories about the distillery’: Joyce and Whiskey
- 2 ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 3 ‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism
- Conclusion: Protestant Power and Plates of Peas
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is often annoying the way people will blunder on what you have elaborately planned for.
— James Joyce, ‘The Sisters’I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.
— James JoycePerhaps the most striking and, in a sense, disappointing thing about James Joyce's Trieste library as it is held today by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, is its pristine condition. While the bibliophile might enjoy the almost unmarked and near-perfect condition of the collection, the Joycean scholar longs for something messier: scribbles in the margins, turned-down pages, broken spines. But there is almost nothing there for the forensic detective to ponder. Other than the haunting and exciting experience of reading the books that Joyce read, and imagining him lifting those very same volumes down from their shelves over a century ago, there is not a great deal to be had in the way of a eureka moment. An exception to this general pattern is a well-thumbed, loose-leafed, card-covered copy of Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht published in 1905. Cóilín Owens argued with his usual flair some twenty years ago for seeing the first song in this collection, ‘If I Were to Go West’, as a hidden and oblique ghost text behind ‘The Dead’, informing, in particular, Gabriel's epiphany and realization that the time has come to journey westward. Owens’ argument is convincing, all the more so if one considers not just the song (which is narrated by a western girl wishing to leave the city where she gave her love to a man who never understood it) but Hyde's introductory remarks on the nature of the Irish spirit:
Not careless and light-hearted alone is the Gaelic nature, there is also beneath the loudest mirth a melancholy spirit […] The same man who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking and shouting, will be soliloquising by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his poor lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of death.
Could there be a neater description of Gabriel Conroy's change in mood over the course of ‘The Dead’? This possible use of Hyde by Joyce is just one in a very complex pattern of nods and winks at revivalism throughout Dublinersand his wider oeuvre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journey WestwardJoyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, pp. 122 - 158Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012