Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

12. “Old Haunts” Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory

187 12 “Old Haunts” Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory LU K E GI BBONS Joyce had decided that 1916 was a lucky year for him . . . —JJI 419 In his early review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ezra Pound noted in passing that Joyce’s work acquired an additional currency for readers in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916: “If more people had read A Portrait and certain stories in Mr Joyce’s Dubliners there might have been less recent trouble in Ireland. A clear diagnosis is never without value” (Pound 1970, 83). For Pound, it is as if Joyce is writing in the prose of counter -insurgency, diagnosing the ills that should have been redressed to prevent revolution, but for others his writing was a symptom of the rebellion. According to H. G. Wells, one of the underlying principles in A Portrait “is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated.” There are no hints of moderation or Home Rule, “an absolute absence of the idea of a discussed settlement”: “It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself” (Wells 1970, 88). Wells sees A Portrait as, in effect, a literary proclamation of an Irish republic in that it removes all common ground between Irish and British culture: “No single book has shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel” (ibid.). In a later letter to Joyce, he 188 Luke Gibbons spelled out these differences once more: “[Y]ou and I are set on absolutely different courses. Your training has been Catholic, Irish, insurrectionary; mine, such as it was, was scientific, constructive, and, I suppose, English . . .” (JJI 620).1 Both Pound’s and Wells’s different responses to Joyce have to be placed in the immediate contexts in which they were writing. Pound had been the prime mover in advancing Joyce’s claims for a British Civil List pension in 1916, a series of representations that led to direct contact with the office of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, who had just executed the rebels. It is hardly likely that Joyce’s previous pro–Sinn Féin or even Fenian connections would have endeared him to the British establishment in these circumstances . On being contacted by Asquith’s office to give his opinion of Joyce, George Moore replied, “Of his political views I know nothing. He was not in Ireland during the sowing of the Sinn Féin seed and I hope he is not even a home ruler” (JJI 418). By contrast, H. G. Wells at this time was to the forefront of an overt “literary patriotism” that led to his participation, with John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, in a cultural mission to the United States in 1917 to counteract the effects of the Easter Rising and, specifically, to curtail anti-British and possibly pro-German sentiments among Irish Americans following the executions (Baldick 1987, 87). That Joyce’s work both drew on and helped to articulate the energies that coalesced in the Easter Rising and the struggle for independence was apparent not only to Wells but also to many of the insurgents themselves. Much is made of the complex nature of Joyce’s engagement with Irish nationalism but little has been written on the equally complex responses of Irish nationalists to Joyce. Joyce offered cold comfort, it is true, to those holding on to the vestiges of “romantic Ireland” fostered by the Revival, but perhaps his writing was valued for precisely this reason: its candor, comic deflation, 1. Wells’s further elaboration throws light on his political sympathies: “And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility. It remains a fine thing for you to defy and break up. To me not in the least” (JJI 620–21). For an insightful discussion of Pound’s and Wells’s approaches to Joyce, see Brooker 2004, 9–18. Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory 189 and capacity to instill hope in dark times.2 As if...