A Committee Room. A Table. Evening: Using Beckett's Waiting for Godot to Read Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"

This essay deploys Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a method of reading James Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." In this reading, Charles Stewart Parnell is recast as Godot, the ever-absent, ever-arriving catalyst of a vague salvation. Waiting for Godot asks us, as readers of "Ivy Day," to consider Joyce's story as an investigation into "the pathos of inaction as it relates to a greater existential absence." The topicality of the canvassers' political language, their investment in particular political attitudes, is a kind of performance designed to obfuscate the stagnancy of a colonial history they can neither deny nor transcend.