Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett, by Nels Pearson (review)

"Vengo adesso di Cosmopoli," was one of Stendhal's mottoes.¹ It translates into English as "I come now from cosmopolis." The cosmopolitan travels abroad to widen his horizons, then travels elsewhere with his worldly luggage in tow behind him. The cosmopolitan sometimes returns to his native land, wherever that may be, with his air of incommunicable Weltschmerz. His sophistication, the result of his experiences as a citizen of the world, sets him apart from his peers and compatriots. As a polyglot, he utters his mottoes in Italian or French as Stendhal does. In the nineteenth century, cosmopolitan people were more often male than female, though not exclusively so. Irrespective of gender, the cosmopolitan spirit depends on a willingness to embrace foreign cultures and make them one's own. It implies dislocation and relocation as the preconditions of worldliness.

Nels Pearson's Irish Cosmopolitanism takes three modernist writers as case studies of cosmopolitan dislocation: James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett. All three writers had a vexed relation to Ireland; they all lived abroad for most of their adult lives. In fact, Bowen, who inherited a Georgian country house in County Cork in 1930, was the only one in this trio to maintain a personal residence in Ireland. Terrified at the prospect of her family home being burned to the ground during the Civil War, she closely monitored changes to Irish statehood, such as the 1937 Constitution and the neutrality of Ireland during World War II. Pearson makes the point that cosmopolitanism, for Irish writers, "is less a condition of postterritorial, terminal homelessness than a condition of perpetual movement between the unresolved homeland and the broader world, an itinerancy that can find a home neither in national nor in global abstractions" (145). In other words, the modernist Irish writer comes from a nation-state that is in formation and goes out into the wider world while maintaining some commitment, whether imaginative or actual, to the nation. Since state sovereignty in Ireland was in a formative mode in the early-twentieth century, any writer who tries to articulate a concept of the Irish nation necessarily has to hypothesize a "normative, prior place of belonging" (75), because belonging is already riddled with contradictions and paradoxes.

While immersed in international culture, Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett process their connections to Ireland, even if those connections are merely historical and vestigial. Speaking of Bowen's female protagonists, Pearson states that many of them, having "vague, unresolved ties to Ireland, typically face the problem of blending into a culture of transient modernity when they have neither a patria nor a previous life of tradition against which to contrast that transience" (8). The problem with world citizenship, of course, is that it provides no guarantees of legal or human rights. The nation-state claims jurisdiction over those domains. As much as Stephen Dedalus may hear the voices of "distant nations" at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he continues to fear the old man in the mountains with the "redrimmed horny eyes," who embodies Irish, nativist identity (P 252). With regard to Ireland, Pearson therefore concludes, quite soundly, that "the need to have an origin … and the need to contemplate wider scales of the human condition are not sequential points of view through which one matriculates, but simultaneous, interactive needs that are never easily reconciled" (13). The cosmopolitan blends local, nativist, and national perspectives with urban, foreign, and international experiences, without privileging one over the other. To place cosmopolitanism above nationalism runs the risk of sacrificing identity to internationalism that is inherently "insensitive to colonial difference" (43).

Pearson's point of departure for this study is postcolonial theory. He draws upon Homi Bhahba, Pheng Cheah, Vincent Cheng, Frantz Fanon, Rachel Lee, David Lloyd, Alejandro Vallego, and others. He speculates on the nature of "a subaltern or...