Joyce and Militarism

Foreword

Foreword “Militarism” is a term used exactly once in the Joycean canon, in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards about one of the chief external forces in Joyce’s early career. “In his heart of hearts,” said Joyce of the printer who objected to Dubliners, “he is a militarist,” a term that has to be, like “epiclesis ,” as much a catnip word for Joyce critics as “paralysis” or “simony” is for the boy in “The Sisters.” The word puts everything immediately into play. “Militarism” comes to stand for all forms of parochial belligerence, whether imperial or nationalist, and Winston provides nuanced readings of Joyce’s connections with revolutionaries and pacifists in Dublin, Trieste, and Pola. Joyce’s early essay “Force” makes a welcome appearance: the fact that the survival of Joyce’s essay depends on its pages being co-opted by Stanislaus for his diary is beautifully presented as a figure for occupation itself. Winston has a way of making his readings matter: a necessary review of the schoolyard origins of Joyce’s loathing for militarism leads to a close analysis of the importance of Bloody Sunday in Joyce’s revisions of “Cyclops ,” ending in modern-day Croke Park with a garrison game played on Gaelic sod. By treating Leo Dillon’s subversive reading matter (“The Apache Chief”) at the beginning of “An Encounter” as seriously as the work that FatherButleris actuallyteaching(Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War), Winston makes a neat and perfectly Joycean point about parallel colonial histories,andabouttheimportanceofallformsofintertexts.Winstonnicely catches Joyce making the same argument through Dillon’s teacher: “This page or this page? This page? Now Dillon, up! Hardly had the day . . . Go on! What day? Hardly had the day dawned . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?” Both pages make their justifications for empire; Butler’s rebuke is an elision of genre, language, race, and history. x · Foreword A study of the sex industry in Ulysses then pays surprising dividends: the cost of Cissy Caffrey (“I’m only a shilling”) is also the king’s shilling, the horn of the cuckold is also the horney, or watchman, the frowsy whore is a “gunboat.” Surveillance is the common denominator: for Joyce, binoculars are as valuable in the brothel as on the battlefield. Winston’s binocular visionkeepsoureyestrainedonhissubjectwhileallowingustosurveyJoyce ’s world from a new and highly provocative angle. The author, like Mulligan’s drill sergeant, has sent us all “Back to barracks.” Time and again, I have been stopped in my tracks by the pervasiveness of Winston’stheme,fromthedecantersontheMorkansideboardstandinglike “sentries” to the snow that is “general all over Ireland.” These martial undertones , like the “musketry of applause” escorting Aunt Julia, nicely hint at the political tensions below the surface of “The Dead,” and provide the context for what Winston beautifully calls the “demilitarization process” of Gabriel Conroy. Of course Joyce was military minded; he could not be otherwise, coming from a country that gave the world both the Duke of Wellington andLordKitchener.Winston’spapersare right:militarismisgeneralallover Joyce. Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Series Editor ...