“Building Up a Nation Once Again”: Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

It is true that advanced capitalist orders need to ward off alienation and anomie with some kind of collective symbolism and ritual, complete with group solidarity, virile competition, a pantheon of legendary heroes and a carnivalesque release of repressed energies. But this is provided by sport, which conveniently combines the aesthetic aspect of Culture with the corporate dimension of culture, becoming for its devotees both an artistic experience and a whole way of life. It is interesting to speculate what the political effects of a society without sport would be.¹

In Terry Eagleton’s account of the role played by sports in contemporary society, athletics offers a collective ritual that can give meaning to the dreadful banalities of life under the sign of late-stage capitalism while avoiding the violence that religion in its most sectarian aspect cultivates. This description invites us to consider the relationship between the rise of organized sports as a collective cultural practice in the West and both the gradual fading of religious belief and the ascendancy of nationalism as a political ideology. In place of religion, organized team sports provide the kind of collective belonging Mathew Arnold envisioned for the arts; we might imagine that Arnold would be dismayed to find that soccer trumps the long poem as one of the dominant cultural practices of our time.

Although the “corporate dimensions” of sports that Eagleton identifies are seemingly as enmeshed in globalization as any other industry (Chinese basketball players in the NBA, African soccer players in Europe), the spectacle of athletic events nonetheless serves as a powerful synecdoche for the community of the nation. The visceral experience of sports allows both participant and spectator to embody a type of national belonging, as in the singing of the national anthem at the opening of sporting events. The ostensible rivalry of the two teams being pitted against one another resolves into a larger symbolic narrative of nationhood as the very contest becomes an expression of national unity and triumph. Concomitant with the performance of national allegiance embedded in the popular culture of sports, the “virile competition” mentioned by Eagleton embodies a distinctly gendered social phenomenon (although in post Title IX America it is becoming less so). Organized team sports have often served as a powerful rite of initiation for the male adolescent into the patriarchal order of the nation, giving corporeal substance to its imagined community.

The connection between organized sports and national belonging ensured that athletics became a locus for the contested politics of sovereignty in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Born two years before the founding of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884, James Joyce could hardly have been unaware of the cultural and political import of organized group sports in colonial Ireland. Joyce’s fictions reveal the significance of the native sports revival within the larger context of political nationalism, and they theorize the connection between nostalgia and violence in these allied discourses. Furthermore, Joyce’s often satiric meditations on the culture of Irish athletics at the turn of the last century shine light on the social construction of the male subject at a time when “Irish-Ireland” nationalism promoted an increasingly rigid conception of Irish masculinity. The playing field, the boxing arena, and the gymnasium were all venues for the coordinated production of national and gender identities in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Judith Butler’s claim that the fictional nature of gender is “obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them” suggests how the bodily violence and even bloodshed integral to contact sports serves to give the “contest” credibility as a performance of innate masculinity, as well as to authenticate the identities of those male spectators who participate vicariously in the violent spectacle.² In the discourse of organized team sports, a game is always “more than just a game,” because to acknowledge that it is no more than a game is to...