Before Daybreak: “After the Race” and the Origins of Joyce’s Art by Cóilín Owens (review)

Before Daybreak: “After the Race” and the Origins of Joyce’s Art contains everything one could ever want to know about the often-overlooked Dubliners story “After the Race.” Cóilín Owens possesses a deep conviction that “After the Race” comprises seeds of nearly all of James Joyce’s later works, attitudes, concerns, and aesthetics. While an entire study of “After the Race” may seem to some to be a bit much, the method Owens utilizes to provide a “prehistory” of the story is valuable. Literature does not suddenly appear, Owens argues, but is always the result of the delicate ways in which the contexts surrounding an author’s life interact. In Owens’s study, the reader does not only learn about “After the Race” but also about the state of the automobile industry and its associated culture at the turn of the century, the importance of Arthur Griffith in Ireland and his relationship to Joyce, and the events surrounding the centennial of Robert Emmet’s death. Owens argues that “After the Race” is a deeply political story, and by focusing on the political and historical contexts of the period in which it was written, he brings a welcome depth to the tale.

As Owens explains of his text, his “aims here are to write a scholarly study of an elementary work that will also serve those embarking on their first venture into the Joycean universe” (6). “It is not a ‘Joyce-and-X’ kind of book that pursues a single interest that the author shares with Joyce,” he continues, “but one that takes [Joyce] seriously on the terms he set down: his actual words, their lineage, arrangement, and contemporary import” (6). Though the statement seems to imply that this approach is superior to “Joyce-and-X” books because the latter somehow do not take Joyce’s “actual words” “seriously,” the summation in the next line, that the study “holistically tackles a minor text,” is accurate (6).

In the introduction, Owens lays out the scope of his work, explaining it as a portrait of Edwardian Dublin. That period in Dublin, he argues, was “far from paralyzed,” and the “Edwardian years were, in fact, in a continuous ferment of nationalist agitation, much underestimated by cultural commentators with selective interests in the period” (2, 3). Owens makes Edwardian Dublin come alive—it is not the static, hemiplegic, paralyzed city so often assumed by readers of Dubliners but a city defined by significant changes in technology, economics, and continuously churning political unrest.

Many of the subjects in Owens’s study are meticulously researched and interesting to read, independent of their association with “After the Race.” The second chapter, “The Automobile Age,” provides an engaging overview of the early years of the automobile industry and a fascinating analysis of the politics of the Gordon Bennett Cup Race. “The Biographical Crisis,” chapter 3, is a fairly tiresome discussion of the real-life figures that came to influence the creation of each character in “After the Race.” Chapter 4, “Arthur Griffith and the Great Game,” is, overall, an absorbing exploration of Griffith’s relationship with Joyce, Dubliners, and Ireland in the early-twentieth century. Owens explores the economics of colonialism throughout this chapter and argues that, for example, “the Doyles personify the corruption of the Irish Party, the father a formerly ‘advanced Nationalist’ whose business success is based on service to the Crown, and the son who has invested his inheritance in a frivolous foreign business enterprise” (110, D 43). The revelations of quietly hidden political and economic contexts within “After the Race” are where the strengths of Owens’s study are found.

At times, however, Owens’s conclusions do err on the side of being overdone. After nearly thirty pages of background information and tangential (though interesting) information, he comes to the conclusion that,

as a political allegory...