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CHAPTER 3 The Irish Writers 'To remind me of .Lffl' (628.7) Irishmen have produced works ofliterature in three mainlanguages. Irish writing in Latin is discussed later, in the chapter on 'The Fathers'; there remain Irish writing in Gaelic and English. It seems unlikely that Joyce ever had much knowledge of Gaelic, and it is fairly certain that the references to Gaelic books and the Gaelic language in Finnegans Wake are intended chiefly as a decoration without any basic structural purpose. Indeed, the Gaelic book which is most frequently mentioned, The Annals of the Four Masters, quite certainly owes its appearance to the coincidence in number between its writers and Joyce's four old men. 'The Four Masters' is the name which has been given to Michael, Conary and Peregrine O'Clery, and Fearfesa O'Mulconry who compiled the Annals in the seventeenth century. There is an English translation by J. O'Donovan, in seven volumes quarto, which was published in Dublin in 1851, but I have not been able to find any evidence that Joyce ever used this. He does, however, make use of the names of the Four Masters. They are first mentioned when Joyce makes a short paradigm ofan annals using only the dates A.D. I I32 and A.D. 566, and introduced with the words, 'annals ofthemselves timing the cycles of events grand and national' (13.31). When Joyce's annals are completed he changes the subject with the phrase, 'Now after all that tarfatch'd and peragrine or dingnant or clere .. .' (14.28). In a later chapter their names appear with less distortion: 'Conry ... Peregrine and Michael and Farfassa and Peregrine' (398.1 ... 15). The words 'the four masters' are never precisely used; but the name O'Clery occurs four times,! always in a context where Joyce's four old men are being discussed. Apart from these few references there is nothing in Finnegans Wake about Gaelic literature which deserves mentioning. The remaining, and by far the most important, section of Irish 1385.7; 386.20; 520.3; 520.I5· THE LITERARY SOURCES Literature, is that written by Irishmen in the English language. A great many English works by Irish writers are mentioned in Finnegans Wake; so many that it seems probable that Joyce's aim was to include them all. It may have been that, for reasons which I have discussed elsewhere in the present work,l Joyce intended, by this quasiencyclopaedic naming ofauthors and books, to subsume their work into his own. It may have been his intention simply to use them as decoration , and to thicken the texture of his prose. His aims are doubtful, but his practice is obvious: many of the Irish writers he is satisfied to name, for others he quotes only the title of one of their books, more rarely he gives simply a short distorted quotation from one of their books, occasionally he uses the book at some length. IRISH HISTORIANS The Irish historians present a good representative sample ofthe way in which Joyce made use.of Irish writers. Their names are brought in because Finnegans Wake is, in one sense, a history of Ireland. Most of the names are concentrated in one passage; in this case the passage is the 'Case of Conscience' (572.19-573.32) which is based on M. M. Matharan's Casus de matrimoni02 with a certain amount of borrowing from the synopses of Plautus's Comedies and the argument to Sejanus. Presumably we are to take this as being an inquiry into the facts ofIrish history, for Joyce inserts in parentheses such remarks as, 'the supposition is Ware's' (572.32), and 'a cooler blend, D'Alton insists' (572.35). The names to which the remarks are attributed are all those ofIrish historians . The two who have been cited are Sir James Ware, author ofThe Antiquities and History of Ireland, and the Reverend Edward Alfred D'Alton, author of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the PresentDay. Theothers are Charles Halidaywho wrote The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin, who is named in the phrase 'in Halliday's view' (573.2); J. T. Gilbert, author ofThe History ofDublin, is brought in with 'as Gilbert first suggested' (573.14). Giraldus Cambrensis, Welsh author of two thirteenth-century histories of Ireland, becomes plural in 'turpiter ! affinn ex cathedris Gerontes Cambronses' (573.2o)-perhaps because he wrote two books, more probably because he is here combined 1 Cf. 'The Structural Books', p...

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