Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

6. Joyce’s “treeless hills” Deforestation and Its Cultural Resonances

95 6 Joyce’s “treeless hills” Deforestation and Its Cultural Resonances K AT H E R I N E O’C A L L AGH A N In the final passages of “The Dead” Joyce depicts a barren and wasted landscape with small fences, crooked crosses, and treeless hills. This shorn, infertile land of the west of Ireland, defined by what it lacks, bears in its geography the scars of its past. The “treeless hills” (D 225) of Gabriel Conroy ’s dreamscape represent the absent presence of the ancient forests that had covered the land, and that are now lost but long-lamented in Irish ballads, poetry, and cultural memory. The bleakness of Joyce’s description of the Connaught landscape will find literary echoes in the wasteland of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, the Connemara of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, and the desolate vistas of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Joyce’s potent vision is one of pastoral dystopia, occluded, perhaps, by the beauty and rhythm of the prose and the forgiving cover of the falling snow. The fall of the great forests of Ireland provides Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and sociopolitical resonances, which he utilizes throughout his oeuvre and most fully in Finnegans Wake. Precisely because the trope taps into a chain of historical events well rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric—the arrival of the English in Ireland; colonial exploitation of people and resources; fears concerning fertility and famine; the loss of an indigenous culture—it allies itself well with the Joycean technique of repeated motifs with multiple textual resonances. In this grand narrative of all things lapsarian, each of the numerous falls alluded to, metaphorical or literal, reverberates with the trope of the felling of the Irish forests. Joyce’s 96 Katherine O’Callaghan last work both recalls the ancient bardic tradition of lamenting the lost trees and parodies its use in nationalist discourse, the latter by contextualizing and thus depoliticizing this particular deforestation within the cyclical pattern of its repeated natural occurrence. The spectral returns of the giant oak throughout Joyce’s canon culminate in a projected reforested Ireland of the future, called into being in the ricorso of Finnegans Wake.1 TIMBER! THE FALL OF THE GRE AT TREES IN FINNEGANS WAKE Finnegans Wake rotates around multiple falls and renewals. The Wakean concept of the “fall” carries, among others, religious, political, personal, sexual, and familial connotations. Margot Norris reads the fall as being primarily the “fall of the father,” which “is expressed in three forms: the drunken or physical fall, the parricide or socio-political fall, and the moral or sexual fall” (1974, 352), while John Bishop writes that the “underlying cause of this pancosmic collapse is simply our hero’s fall into sleep” (1986, 307). The fall of the Wake’s Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker finds echoes in those of Tim Finnegan, Humpty Dumpty, Charles Stewart Parnell, Lucifer, and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Scattered throughout the book, ten “thunderwords,” expressive enactments of the fall theme, have been read as instances of Viconian thunder (see Hurd 2004), or as language in a pre- or post-Babel state. Sam Slote suggests that these words “could be characterized as painful prolongations of breath subsuming a babelian agglutination of thunder that is ultimately quite meaningless,” but notes that most critics have considered the words to align with a “patriarch’s downfall” (1997, 533). Slote adds that “there is no single word or primal scene of decrepitude to be construed here at the place of these hundred-letter words” (ibid.). Another reading of the “thunderwords” and the repeated motif of the fall is possible, however, one which suggests that there is indeed a particular primal “great fall” scene in Ireland that has infiltrated cultural memory and 1. Cheryl Herr sees the Wake as, “among other things, a document produced by Joyce as an equivalent to a history book. In fact, it is a history of the future, designed to evolve with its culture and actually to authorize the size and shape of that future’s construction of histories for the various contending groups in Irish politics” (1991, 779). Deforestation and Its Cultural Resonances 97 scarred the actual landscape of the country. The text indicates that each “thunderword” is the cacophonous earth-shaking sound of something giant crashing down, a “great fall” (FW 3.15). The first extended...