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
2 - ‘Their friends, the French’: Joyce, Jacobitism and the Revival
- 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
Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed?
— W. B. Yeats, ‘September 1913’Forget not the felled! For the lomondations of Oghrem!
— James Joyce, Finnegans WakeBy the autumn of 1930 Joyce's artistic reputation was secure, Ulysses had catapulted him into the first rank of world writers, and his ‘Work in Progress’, which would eventually become Finnegans Wake in 1939, had begun to appear – albeit to puzzlement – in an array of literary journals. The portrait painters had started to eye posterity – the most recent to seek a sitting with Joyce was Augustus John, one of the great artistic chroniclers of the Irish Literary Revival. Joyce, as keen to layer his painted image as he was his several books, had mischief in mind. Writing to Mrs Herbert Gorman in London shortly before the sitting was to begin, we see him thinking about his wardrobe: ‘Do you know a Scotch shop in London which sells plaid ties? If so I should like you to buy me one and send it. The plaid I prefer (I think it is the Murray) has a lot of red in it as a ground and of course blue and white and yellow all over it.’ The request, at first glance stressing a simple sartorial preference, had profounder intent, as Joyce made clear to Herbert Gorman a week later: ‘A.J. started my portrait a few days ago with that highly treasonable Stuart royal tie.’ This awareness on Joyce's part of the deposed Stuart royal family should not come as a surprise given a series of clues left behind in his writings, and yet to come in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, the Ireland of Joyce's birth and early manhood was a country that had exhibited a lasting and peculiar attachment to the Stuart or Jacobite cause, a hangover inaugurated in the late seventeenth century on the battlefields of the Boyne and Aughrim, yet still both painful and inspirational over two hundred years later.
Joyce's interest in the lost cause of Jacobitism has been passed over by critics and general readers alike. This chapter will suggest that such failure to recognize a consistent strain in his work leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Joyce's attitude to Irish nationalism and his engagement with Irish history and historiography.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journey WestwardJoyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival, pp. 62 - 121Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012