Editor’s Introduction: Irish Modernism

This issue has a strict focus on Irish modernism, represented by three of its most distinguished authors: Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. Such a convergence does not generate a monolithic assessment for all that. Irish writers’ role in the twentieth century was to launch a “local” modernism that kept engaging with the concerns of a global modernity, as Salvatore Pappalardo reminds us. These writers have gone beyond the values of the Irish Renaissance and remained our contemporaries thanks to a constant “Renascence,” as Janina Levin shows in her review of essays on Joyce. What stands out in those pages is a diversity of approaches, ranging from the historical to the theoretical while traversing issues of aesthetics. Two main axes can be distinguished: readings presenting new historical contexts, or interpretations of texts via concepts deriving from philosophy or aesthetics. At times, those axes may clash, as Sheldon Brivic remarks when he reviews Andrew Gibson’s hyper-politicized reading of the Joyce’s works, approving the remarkable effort at historical contextualization while wondering whether considerations of aesthetics have been left from sight. However, this is never the case with the contributors gathered here: they all keep a balance between history and aesthetics.

When Leona Toker analyzes the startling presence of concentration camps in Ulysses, she remains alert to the oblique modes of presentation deployed by Joyce. When David Rando rethinks the proper agency of Joyce’s narrator or the “arranger” of Ulysses, he links neo-Marxist views of the alienation of workers, Walter Benjamin’s theory of the narrator, and Joyce’s games with narratology. When Erik H. Schneider discovers hitherto unknown allusions to Frederic W.H. Myers’s spiritist Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death in Joyce’s 1904 “Portrait of the Artist,” he not only proves that Joyce heard of the Freudian case of Anna O. much earlier than we thought, but also inserts these discoveries in a Lacanian framework that situates the supernatural return of “spirits” in the realm of the Real. Similarly, Bernard McKenna and Kevin Reil keep moving between documentary and formal considerations of Yeats’s writing when they highlight precise moments in his career, like the controversy about different modes of British censorship in England and in Ireland triggered by a disputed play by Shaw, or the ambivalent praise for a fallen hero like Robert Gregory in the context of nationalist politics.

That Irish modernist writing should be both embodied and historically contextualized is confirmed by the way in which most contributors exhibit a concern for a phenomenology of art, which leads to considerations of its own perception. Thus, Roy Benjamin studies Joyce’s shift toward the non-visual in his later work, and Amanda Dennis demonstrates that Beckett’s demented logic in Watt requires a sensory poetics in line with themes developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Graham Fraser launches the concept of “vaguening” to define Beckett’s tendency to blur his objects and subjects as strictly and rigorously as possible; “vaguening” allows him to rethink what was called too glibly “abstraction” or “minimalism.” In a different way, but with a converging effect, Nathaniel Davis presents Beckett’s efforts at dismantling and then upholding the illusion of a “fourth wall” in his plays as an evolution in his mastery of the stage. Having rejected a Brechtian mode of direct address to the spectators, Beckett played with theatrical conventions more ironically, as meta-scenic props more than as hindrance.

One common theme in these essays is the intense pleasure evinced by Irish writers in playing with ideas. Hence the prevalence of philosophers in the discussions. I have named Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin, but there is the work of Deleuze to consider when he appropriates Beckett, or the enormous impact of Adorno, later relayed by Alain Badiou, in current discussions of Beckett—two topics treated by Michelle Rada and Paul Ardoin. Rada discusses Adorno’s worries about the positivity or negativity of laughter, while Ardoin provides a philosophical genealogy of the issues of movement, paralysis, and exhaustion.

Indeed, there are more essays and reviews devoted to Beckett than to Joyce or Yeats. In the last decade...