Reading Joyce in the Age of Trump

The famous christmas dinner scene in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents an especially polarized moment in the politics of metrocolonial Ireland—when the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell divided the populace as to whether politically strong or morally pristine leadership was of paramount importance.¹ The Daedalus family recapitulates this debate along gendered fault lines, the Ireland-first men for Parnell, the church ladies against him. At a heated point in the dispute Mr. Daedalus invokes the anticlerical spirit of Whiteboyism. He directs his friend John Casey's attention to a picture of his grandfather hanging on the wall, the first of many portraits mentioned in A Portrait. "Do you see that old chap up there, John? […]He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a Whiteboy."² This ancestor of Stephen Daedalus really existed as an ancestor of James Joyce, invoked by Joyce's father, John, as he was by Simon Daedalus. As a secret society militating against tithes, rent increases, and evictions, the Whiteboys wore white cockades and introduced a revolutionary tradition at odds with the nationalist practice approved by the Catholic church. Throughout the colonial era, the alliance of church and parliamentary party continued to represent the dispossessed nation of Ireland both to her own citizens and to the outside world. But bodies like the Whiteboys and their revolutionary progeny began to identify a sector of the dispossessed as a grassroots Irish nation within the Irish nation—a truer Irish nation, because a more truly dispossessed one, lodged within a relatively comfortable sociopolitical establishment. This imagined nation within a nation (to paraphrase Benedict Anderson) might reasonably be likened to Donald Trump's "real America" inundated by the establishment "swamp" in Washington, DC.

Simon Dedalus's grandfather was assigned to that dispossessed tribe in A Portrait: "a good Irishman when there was no money in the job." But he crowns his grandson's memory less for the patriotic stand he might have taken against colonial occupation than for the resistance he offered to the Irish-Catholic establishment, whose clerical leaders he would not allow at his table.³ Simon's tribute to him follows a series of aspersions on the prelates of Ireland for indulging worldly appetites that have turned them into fat cats; the tribute proceeds, in turn, with John Casey's catalogue of betrayals of the Cause by a Catholic hierarchy collaborating with British rule. The new nationalist establishment is thus portrayed as allied with the settler class in being an elite, self-aggrandizing force inimical to the interests of the true Irish people-nation. In a similar vein Trump celebrates his "base" mainly to weaponize them. Like Simon Dedalus, he practices a form of populist ventriloquism, giving "the people" a voice strictly as a megaphone for his own.

Joyce's canniest political insight in the Christmas-dinner scene centers on the means and the psychology whereby populist attitudes enter mainstream political discourse and exert a transformative impact. With the example before us today, populist sentiments, including those identified with Trumpism, do not grow and spread organically as the grassroots metaphor conveys, but neither do they cover the ground through artificial, top-down implantation as the neologism of astroturf(ing) imports. Rather, the seeds of populism are disseminated by a process of middle-class identification and appropriation; an identification with the grievances of "the people," defined as the working or peasant classes; and an appropriation and reshaping of those grievances to the more empowered agenda of the middle, professional, and moneyed classes. The progress of populism, which is to say its incorporation in a national(ist) program, thus tends to defy the binaries of grassroots/astroturf or organic/artificial to which it has given rise. It makes itself available to disaffected factions of the bourgeois and middle-class establishment without losing the effective appearance of broadcasting a distinctly plebeian voice. To extend the horticultural metaphor, populism advances as a grievance creeper. Selected journalistic organs supply the channels whereby grievances are...