The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow (review)

Richard Barlow's The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture is the most sustained and detailed treatment to date of James Joyce's engagement with Scottish history, culture, and literature. Whereas Willy Maley in his seminal essay on Joyce and Scotland had suggested a largely negative depiction of Scotland and Scottishness, Barlow's book explores a more productive view, especially in relation to Finnegans Wake. The Celtic Unconscious takes its cue from recent archipelagic criticism to make the case for 'a "devolved" and unpacked reading of Joyce and Scottish culture' (p. 3). Barlow cites the growth in recent years of Irish-Scottish Studies in particular, and more generally the burgeoning confidence of Scottish political nationalism, as important contexts in which to read how Joyce represented, learned from, and influenced, Scottish writing. This marks a decisive turn away from earlier efforts in Joyce Studies to look across the Irish Sea which have almost invariably focused on England, or more problematically Britain. As Barlow's book demonstrates, however, in impressive detail and meticulous analysis, Joyce's work evinces an assiduous interest in Scottish literature and philosophy, which even occasionally took on more farcical aspects, such as the Murray tartan tie he wore for the photograph which adorns the book's cover.

With some haste in chapter one, Barlow gives some attention to Joyce's references to Scotland in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, summarising that prior to Ulysses, 'Scotland is presented as a source of "decadent" romantic fiction and as a potential economic escape-route' (p. 41). Late in Ulysses, the appearance of a character called Crotthers marks Joyce's first significant depiction of Scottishness, although his significance for Barlow is really as a portent of Joyce's later interest in associating Scottishness with crossing, amalgamation, and duality. Thus, with almost audible relief, the second chapter announces that having established the links between Scotland and Ireland in Joyce's previous work 'we can go on to consider the role of Scottish culture in the Wake itself' (p. 62). The Celtic Unconscious is fundamentally a book about Finnegans Wake and Scottish culture, and does not dally in dispensing with Joyce's earlier works. This is a minor complaint, of course, and the book rewards its readers in the next five chapters with insightful and knowledgeable accounts of the uses that Joyce made in the Wake of the philosophy of David Hume (chapter two), the writings of Hogg and Stevenson (chapter three), historiography of Scotland (chapter four), Macpherson's Ossian (chapter five), and Burns (chapter six).

In themselves, each of these chapters is a significant contribution to understanding Joyce's literary and philosophical intertexts. Barlow reads Joyce's debt to Hume in his embrace of scepticism and incertitude as the philosophical basis underpinning the Wake, and argues that Joyce conceived of Hume as a 'Celtic' philosopher, aligned with a Celtic rejection of empiricism and certainty. Split personalities in Hogg's Confessions and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provided Joyce with literary models for his depiction of fractured identities in the Shem/Shaun characters. The theme of duality is continued in the next chapter which argues that Joyce learned of the tangled histories of Scotland and Ireland, and the duality of Pictish/Scottish identities, from his readings of Irish historiography (in which Scotland is repeatedly figured). Chapter five, on Macpherson and Joyce, is perhaps the strongest chapter in the book. Barlow begins by tracing the influence of Macpherson on romanticism and modernism, before demonstrating that Joyce found Macpherson's work valuable for its 'connotations of discovery, forgery, and the recycling processes of textual, mythological, and mental "matter"' (p. 179). It was specifically the controversy caused among Irish scholars about Macpherson's forging or inventing materials, however exaggerated were these accusations, which made his use of Celtic mythology important for Joyce. Like Macpherson, Burns is another figure of crossing between Scottish and Irish cultures, and...