Joyce and Militarism by Greg Winston (review)

Greg Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is an exemplar of that continually surprising genre, the study that takes a Joycean topic we thought we knew well and re-opens it in an illuminating investigation that changes our understanding of Joyce’s writing. Winston begins with a sensitive analysis of Richard Moynan’s painting, Military Manoeuvres, which encapsulates some of the tensions in Britain’s militarized colony.¹ Each of Joyce’s major works appeared in a year of significant armed conflict in Ireland or the Continent; yet, as Winston shows, his oeuvre goes far beyond merely registering these conflicts. Winston takes as his subject Joyce’s fictional investigation of the pervasiveness of militarism in cultural fields such as “education, athletics, marriage and family life, sexual commerce, and public space” (5). In his introduction, he situates the adolescent essay “Force”/“Subjugation” (CW 17-24) as an overture to Joyce’s lifelong exploration of this topic. He grounds the term “militarism” (parallel to “terrorism” today) in the cultural context of the early twentieth century. His main argument advances through six chapters focusing on the militarism debate and exploring the ties between militarism and athleticism, British/Irish school curricula, patriarchal domestic life, and the British Army garrison and Dublin’s red-light district. The final chapter examines how Joyce’s fiction reappropriates Dublin from the historical structures of force and subjugation characterizing it at the fin-de-siècle.

Chapter 1, “Joyce and Ideas of Militarism,” commences with the one-sided debate over “Two Gallants” that Joyce set up with his publisher Grant Richards’s printer, whom he cast as an unconscious adherent of old-fashioned notions of gallantry and thus as “a militarist” (ix). Winston contextualizes the contradictory meanings of the term “militarism” in European public discourse prior to and during the Great War. A history of militarism, from the term’s coinage by a critic of Napoleon’s regime, leads to Guglielmo Ferrero’s writings on the subject.² Winston’s analysis of this signal influence on Joyce as a young man is succinct and yet rich. Residing in Pola and Trieste, Joyce saw the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s militarism in action as it competed in the arms race among Europe’s great powers. The most insidious effect of this ideology, apart from war, was its pervasiveness in everyday life. Winston observes that Ferrero’s discussion of the diverse aspects of culture permeated by militarization—”domestic life, sport and leisure activities, architectural and urban space” (37)—echoes throughout Joyce’s work. Even a detail such as Patrick Morkan’s plan to drive to “a military review in the Park” (D 207) points to the salience in British/Irish civilian life of military displays and organizations. Among the latter in Ireland were long-established county militias that drilled and held marksmanship contests and public parades. Joyce saw Queen Victoria’s visit in 1900 as a recruiting expedition among what he called in “After the Race” the ranks of “the gratefully oppressed” (D 42). He also scorned militant nationalists such as the Irish Volunteers, the Catholic counterpart to the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force. Both groups had an aptitude, Winston remarks, for infusing martial values into their members’ lives. He concludes with an illuminating exploration, especially through the lives and writings of Francis Sheehy Skeffington and Thomas Kettle, of the deaths of three of Joyce’s friends due to military violence.

Chapter 2, “Violent Exercise,” which reenacts Winston’s basic method of deep research and thoughtful contextualization, also plunges into brilliant close readings of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Again he uncovers commonalities across the Irish Sea: English imperialism and Irish nationalism both extended the reach of “the war machine by cultivating the healthful habits of followers” (61). His discussion of the physical-culture movement broadens our understanding of Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown’s School Days), Michael Cusack, and Eugen Sandow.³ Especially outstanding is his use of history in linking Clongowes...