Modernism, Media, and Propaganda by Wollaeger Mark;Wollaeger Mark;

Author:Wollaeger, Mark;Wollaeger, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2006-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

JOYCE AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL PROPAGANDA

TURNING FROM Ford Madox Ford to James Joyce, we move from an outsider desperate to become an insider to a voluntary exile who needed to feel like an outsider. Joyce was a connoisseur of betrayal, and when he could not find a genuine betrayer, he was always ready to invent one. Of course, Irish history provided plenty of material to work with, most notably for Joyce the story of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish parliamentary leader whose career was destroyed when the Catholic Church in Ireland denounced him for adultery and key political allies abandoned him. From an early age Joyce identified with Parnell as a man victimized by his native land, and though he had no objective grounds to fear for his life, he was afraid that a return to Ireland might end in his martyrdom. But as sensitive as Joyce was to Ireland as “the old sow that eats her farrow,” he also understood Irish self-destruction as a legacy of British colonial rule.1 Thus if Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man bitterly tells his nationalist friend Davin that “the indispensable informer” for “the next rebellion” in Trinity College will easily be found (Portrait, 202), Ulysses provides an anatomy of the colonial dynamic that made informers, betrayal, and collusion part of the texture of everyday life. It has become relatively commonplace in recent years to dismiss early modernist criticism’s image of Joyce as a disengaged aesthete, and for good reason. If debates about Joyce’s politics previously could agree on little beyond Joyce’s hostility to the apocalyptic nationalism associated with Padraic Pearse, it now seems indisputable that, as Vincent Cheng has put it, “Joyce wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial subject of an oppressive empire.”2 Over the last decade, criticism has accordingly provided new portraits of Joyce the Irishman, the anarchist, the subaltern, and the postcolonial.3

But new waves of criticism always produce an undertow of doubt: was the earlier version of Joyce as a mandarin stylist really so wrong, and if so, how could so many smart people have misread him? And if Joyce was more engaged with his historical moment than earlier criticism acknowledged, how does criticism go about redressing the imbalance without swinging too far to the opposite extreme? This chapter aims to address such questions by situating Ulysses within discursive battles over Irish identity that were exacerbated by the British recruiting poster campaign during World War I. Irish recruiting posters, aiming to interpellate a colonial subject tailored to England’s international needs, represent a particularly charged contribution to the historical process whereby, as Declan Kiberd has put it, England “invented the idea of Ireland.”4 Ulysses is one of the ways in which Ireland returned the favor. Situated within this contested field of mutually constructed national identities, the novel works toward the reversal of the rhetorical project of recruiting posters by re-problematizing the category of Irishness and the very idea of national identity at a time when the majority of Irish colonial subjects were beginning to enter a postcolonial world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.