All on Show: The Circus in Irish Literature and Culture by Eleanor Lybeck (review)

As portrayed in the recent Irish film Fortune's Wheel: The Life and Legacy of the Fairview Lion Tamer, cinemagoers who watched the film Jungle Stampede in Fairview, Dublin, in the early 1950s were in for a surprise when they left the matinee: a lioness was running through the streets outside, having already mauled a teenager.¹ The lioness had escaped its cage that was constructed by a local self-made lion-tamer, Bill Stephens, whose talents led to his becoming a star attraction of Fossett's Circus. Stephens's daring proved his undoing, however, when he lost his life in a savage attack by another lion some years later. The circus had indeed come to town but, as Eleanor Lybeck contends in All On Show: The Circus in Irish Literature and Culture, it is the porous boundaries between performance and reality, painted stage and "those things that they were emblems of," that mark the colorful and sometimes disturbing role of the circus as a cultural imaginary in both literature and life.²

The vitality of the circus presented itself as an alternative to the drabness of the everyday world from Charles Dickens's Hard Times to John Banville's Birchwood and Neil Jordan's film The Miracle but, as Lybeck points out, it is not clear whether this provided a genuine alternative or acted as a safety valve defusing tensions that might have found more radical outlets in political action.³ The diversionary appeal of "bread and circuses" in the modern era went back to Philip Astley's original Amphitheatre in the mid-eighteenth century and, on its opening in Dublin, the assurance felt by the authorities "that they could depend on Astley and his circus acts to promote loyalty to the crown" through the inclusion of performances such as All for Their Country, or, the Loyal Volunteers, on their program (97).⁴

The prospect of merely inverting rather than subverting the order of things is raised by the extension of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque" to the circus, but in the main body of the study, Lybeck's close readings of texts and artworks, ranging from ones by James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, George Moore, Brian Friel, and Jack B. Yeats, to lesser known works such as Pádraic O'Conaire's Deoraíocht and Edward Seago's Sons of Sawdust; with Paddy O'Flynn's Circus in Western Ireland, complicates this view.⁵ A model of archival research and critical acuity, Lybeck's study shows how much of the appeal of the circus lies in the fantasy of a home away from home: the nomadic lifestyle of traveling players, moving from town to town, is only matched by the intense family bonds of the owners, most memorably exemplified in Ireland, as Lybeck notes, by the Duffy and Fossett families.

Pride in family heritage underlies the use of the circus motif in Ulysses when the novel Molly is reading, Ruby: The Pride of the Ring, based probably on Amye Reade's Ruby; or How Girls Are Trained for a Circus Life (34-38), turns on the re-uniting of a father with his lost daughter, the circus-girl Ruby: "'I half guessed you were her father,' the clown Tom says, 'As I looked at you, the eyes seem alike.'"⁶ As Lybeck perceptively shows, it is loss of this kind that haunts Bloom's response to the apparition of his dead son Rudy at the end of "Circe," as if his eyes could still see beyond death or through a mask: "Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. … My son. Me in his eyes" (U 6.74-76). This textual eye for detail is also developed at an intertextual level in finely wrought discussions of the circus motif in Paul Muldoon's "Duffy's Circus," Seamus Heaney's "Wheels Within Wheels," Banville's Birchwood, and...