Manifest Problems with Destiny: Bret Harte and James Joyce’s Gothic Interruptions to National Narratives

The ambiguities of the “journey westward” contemplated by Gabriel Conroy at the conclusion of “The Dead” have produced competing interpretations of that story’s representations of Irish nationalism (“The Dead” 224). This essay explores James Joyce’s engagement with Irish national prospects by examining his indebtedness to the very different American version of a journey westward in Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (1876)—a novel whose language the Irish writer explicitly echoes in the final story of Dubliners. Harte’s novel, through what Eve Sedgwick helps define as its “gothic” features, offers a critique of the project of American westward expansion embodied in the annexation of Texas and in the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Joyce appropriates Harte’s spectral landscape of the American West in order to convey his sense of the failure of an Irish nationalist project in “The Dead”—only later to evoke the same landscape again in order to suggest that project’s potential success in Ulysses.

The Irish author’s interest in the American West was closely connected to his reading of Irish history. In an early meditation on the American continent, Joyce imagined the course of that nation’s westward movement as a violent process of war, subjugation, and domestication. Obliquely he describes that process as the erasure of animal “races” from the American landscape, while other more willing creatures submit to domestication:

It is generally by intercourse with man, that animals have been tamed and it is noticeable that the domestic tabby and the despised pig rage in distant lands […]. These with others are subjugated by constant war, or driven from familiar haunts, and then their race dies out as the Bison of America is dying. Gradually all common animals are subdued to man’s rule, becoming once again his servants and regaining something of former willingness, in the patient horse and faithful dog.

(Joyce, “Force” 20)

The haunting disappearance of the bison in the American West signifies, for Joyce, a loss or absence that comes about in a narrative of subjugation, the result of a long history of “constant war” and the creation of a particular group of “servants.” The analogy might seem merely idiosyncratic, were it not that a later essay, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907), describes the Irish in strikingly similar terms. Like their dying counterparts driven from their “familiar haunts” across the North American continent, the members of the Irish “race,” Joyce observes, seem headed for a similar catastrophe: “must the Celtic world, the five Celtic nations, driven by stronger nations to the edge of the continent, to the outermost islands of Europe, finally be cast into the ocean after a struggle of centuries?” (“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” 173). After suffering their own share of war and serving the crown of a distant empire, the Irish have a difficult task; if they do not hold fast to their “familiar haunts,” as Joyce sees it, they might quickly take their place in oblivion. In other words, the Irish must redefine themselves as a nation resistant to the “stronger race” of the British Empire or they will disappear off the far edge of Europe as did the American bison on the far side of its own continent.

National and Transnational Contexts

Writing about Dubliners to his brother Stanislaus on September 25, 1906, Joyce revealed how traces of the American West became associated with his thoughts on the representation of Ireland. In the letter Joyce famously explains his reservations about the collection, which in 1906 still lacked its concluding story:

Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter “virtue” so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.

(Letters II 166)

The particularly Irish virtue of hospitality becomes a central theme in “The...