James Joyce is the author of two texts we have read, one this quarter and one last quarter; Portrait
of an Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners respectively. This quarter we also read Frank McCourt's autobiographical memoir Angela's
Ashes. Even though Portrait is not specifically autobiographical, the case has been made that Stephen Dadaelus, the protagonist,
draws on many of James Joyce's life experiences throughout the text, incorporating family and classmates as characters. Beyond this obvious
comparison there are several others as well. The context of the stories function and form, their similar views towards individualism and the obstacles
placed in their way, and finally their ability to overcome these by crossing boundaries imposed on them. The contrasts are fewer and slightly less
relevant, but none the less worth mentioning; their socioeconomic background and their choice of destination in exile.
Both of these novels are representative of what the German critics call Bildungsroman, novels of development. These stories are both like
the 'well polished pebbles' which Deirbhile quoted Ruth Sawyer regarding myth and folktales. They are childhood stories whose primary experience
is an education at the hands of 'mirthless men'. Both speak of corporal punishment; the Christian Brothers and Jesuits followed the Augustinian
maxim, per molestias erudito 'true education begins with physical abuse', which we first encountered in Cahill's How the Irish Saved
Civilization last quarter. As Joyce suggests, they both manage to fly by the nets that are flung at their young souls: nationality, language
and religion. Both come terribly close to being trapped into the sacred brotherhood of Peter's rock. In the end though they both choose to cross
ideological boundaries and work for the Protestant newspapers, in order to make their escape financially possibly. Frank takes a job with the
Irish Times, and Gabriel in Dubliners works for some 'English rag', Stephen's denial of his mother's dying wish fulfills a similar function.
One of the major differences is the socioeconomic class they come from. Frank is a 'lane boy' forced to attend National schools, while Joyce,
coming originally from a wealthier family, attends Jesuits schools with the other 'rich boys'. They chose different places of exile as well; America
for Frank, returning where he began, and Joyce/Stephen seeks a cosmopolitan exile on the Continent. Both of these authors have attained what
Joyce set out to do, crossing the limited ideological boundaries of nation, language, and religion, "to discover a mode of art whereby your spirit
could express itself in unfettered freedom."
Part I: Question 5
Charles Bedford is one of the central characters/stories in Peter Quinn's civil war era novel Banished Children of Eve. James McKenna is
the Pinkerton agent antagonist in the film The Molly Maguires; about a violent secret society within the Hibernians of a Pennsylvania
coal mining community. Their stories are similar in that they are both traitors to their ethnic history and cultural communities. They represent the
unique opportunities America offered to the immigrant in overcoming the economic fatalism of class, ethnicity and religion. Yet there is a
two-edged quality to the sword that separates the past from the future; where there is gain there is also loss. The blade cuts both ways. The
difference between them resides in how the Irish viewed deserters, informers and traitors.
Both of these characters' stories revolve around the actions they take in order to escape the relative ignominy and margininalized financial
position the Irish immigrant held in Yankee America. As James McKenna says, "I am tired of looking up, I want to look down for a change". In
the same way Charles Bedford, in becoming Ezra van Wyck and turning him into Charles Bedford, 'turns a nobody into somebody' and changes
who he is to insert himself in the Yankee culture, to escape his poverty and limited job prospects. They each betray their history in order to
prosper in their new environment, and it is a lie that allows them this insertion/escape. This desertion is not unlike the actions of the Catholics
who during the Penal days or the Great Hunger chose to abandon their faith in order to escape the economic enslavement and cultural genocide
of their Protestant Planter and English overlords. In the end though this betrayal brings with it the curse of spiritual and emotional loss. Even
though Bedford manages to win the woman of his desire, the desire leaves him in time and he is left with the companionship of her Yankee
father, which is of little consolation. McKenna is in a similar situation when the love interest in his day's work turns aside his love, as well as her
own desire for financial stability, because of his betrayal as an informant. This sheds light on a common theme in the Irish experience in America,
shown in the premise of Eugene O'Niel's play Long Days Journey Into Night, "I feel somehow incomplete and not necessarily liberated".
The major difference between the two characters lies in how their actions relate to the Irish distaste of the deserter, traitor, and informer. Both
represent a deserter to their respective ethnicity or communities as shown above. Even though a traitor to his history Bedford's is allowed
respectability slightly greater than McKenna, who is both and an informer as well. A pariah in smilin' Irish eyes.
Part I: Question 7
Francis Skeffington is the politician protagonist in the film The Last Hurrah battling the fear and bigotry of Protestant Yankee financial
power. Muldoon, the Solid Man, is the title of a song performed by Mick Maloney last quarter and used to illustrate the Irish experience
in establishing themselves as a political force in the urban communities of New York and Boston. James Dunne alias the Bowery Sphinx, is one
of the characters/stories in Peter Quinn's novel of civil war New York, Banished Children of Eve. All of these represent the efforts by the
Irish American community to assert themselves politically in their new home. All of these characters are connected with the history of Irish
politics, specifically the Tammany machine and the Democratic Party. Their differences are minor in regard to our program themes; Skeffington's
ethics or morality in relation to his adversaries, Muldoon's commitment to insularity in the community, and Dunne's association with opportunism
and less than legal means of advancement.
Skeffington appears as a whitewashed version of the characteristic Irish political boss. His devotion to his wife/mother is heart wrenching,
especially in his collapsing under her cherished picture. He was a political man of shrewd abilities though, playing the game dirty when his
Yankee adversaries force him into blackmail. In the end it is these Yankee plutocrats who bring him down; again it is in contradistinction to the
manner in which the Irish politician was commonly removed from office, by exposing graft and corruption. Muldoon is closer in comparison to
James Dunne working at the behest of these political bosses to keep the community safe from the Yankee bigotry of No Irish Need Apply.
They were the 'petty chieftains of the clannish Irish' working for the political agency of their communities. James Dunne's story shows more
realistically the animosity between the O.S.S.B. (Old Stupid Sons of Bitches) of the Yankee Ascendancy and the Irish gangs working in collusion
with the Tammany machine.
Muldoon and Dunne are the solid men who, by getting out the vote, were helping their communities; insuring the Tammany bosses would keep
their fingers on the political and financial power it required to stay afloat in the American landscape. In the ashes of these early politicians'
demise a Phoenix would rise. The bright flash of that risen fire would streak across the skies and a new star would be born, a star that would
ensure the Irish would never suffer the darkness which they had escaped from in Ireland. They would attain in the strengthening of the modem
Democratic Party a political agency they were never allowed in Ireland, one that was really only available to them in the land of youth and plenty,
America.
Part I: Question 12
Bull McCabe is the father in the film The Field, desperate to hold onto the land he has worked hislife to bring to fertility. The "Old man
had red eyes..." is a quote from the last pages of James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; an image from a dream state Stephen
has prior to his leaving Ireland. Bull is a reflection of the 'Old man'; they both represent the Irish Irish of Ireland: Catholic, Gaelic, and desperately
attached to rural communities in Western Ireland. The similarities are obvious, the differences less so; where Bull is wrapped up in the attempt to
reclaim the land, to reestablish his identity with the land, Stephen's 'old man' is used to signify what he is escaping from, a part of himself he no
longer wants to identify with.
Bull McCabe measures himself by what he has accomplished in the act of reawakening a barren field into fertility. He is desultory towards not
only those who left during the Great Hunger to escape death as shown in the American, but as well those who lost their connection to the land,
as shown in his words on blowing a dandelion, "That is what we would be without the land." He represents the remnants of the old Gaelic culture
largely destroyed by the oppressive tyranny of the Penal Days and the genocidal indifference during the Great Hunger. His has a direct
connection to the land and rural farming practices of an older Ireland, especially the use of Dulaman 'seaweed' as fertilizer, as we saw in
the film Man of Arran last quarter. At his son's death we see another connection to the older Gaelic Order in his recognition of the prayer
sung in Gaelic as the fishermen sail away.
Stephen's fear of the 'old man with red-rimmed horny eyes' is largely due to his disaffection with the nets of conformity Irish society hurls about
the young soul. He represents all those things Joyce/Stephen is rebelling against; the divisive politics of nationalism, the glorification of Gaelic
language in an idealized Irish culture, and the oppressive shackles of an outdated religion which refuses to relinquish the key in a modem era.
All of these things are wrapped up in the 'old man' like some Celtic knot. His ghost comes out of the west were the Bull McCabes hold onto a
history and a culture long dead at the hands of the English and buried in a mass grave at Inniskillen. In the end even though Joyce/Stephen fears
and wishes to be rid of this 'redrimmed homyeyed oldman', he must accept that he no more hates him then he hates himself; the 'old man' is part
of his psyche and cannot be exorcised. Joyce inevitably filters his 'night language' through the orality of Irish brogues in Finnegan's Wake in
recognition of his respect and love/hate.
Part II: Question 1
"Cabbage and bones, she said. Cabbage/ and bones" is the last lines of the Tess Gallagher poem 'The Ballad of Ballymoot'.Padraig read it in his
lecture on the themes of Women Irish poets. The poem deals with the subjects of gender relations, as well as the destruction of the traditional
rural Irish family in the 'filthy modem tide' of nationalism and urbanization. The lines are in response to a query of what she is making for dinner.
My first reaction on hearing it was to attribute it to memories of the Great Hunger and the use of bones, specifically the marrow, to thicken soup
stock.
The earlier lines, where her father is shot at the diner table three times, seem to suggest a murder associated with the continuing civil unrest over
an Irish Republic and a Northern Province. In a strange mirror of O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock we see the defeated mother
bemoaning her son's injuries and apathy in light of the same. "My son's lost both his eyes in a fight/ to keep himself a man/ and there he sits
behind the door/ where there is no door/ and he sees by the stumps/ of his hands." The son is perhaps a metaphor for the fight for nationalist
ideals and the eventual blindness such narrowness of thought creates; especially when the fight is intractable or lost altogether.
Strict gender separation is an aspect of the Irish cultural heritage. Whether one looks to the Church as the cause of this dichotomy, as Diner
does in Erin's Daughter in America. Or whether one looks further back, to the warrior culture's turning milk-ties of kinship into blood-ties
of kingship, as Condren suggests in The Serpent and The Goddess, the effects are the same. The experience of Frank McCourt's mother
in Angela's Ashes mirrors the quatrain, "My husband sits all day in a pub/ and all night and I may as well/ be a widow for the way he
beats me/ to prove he's alive." With this kind of marital life it is no wonder Irish women chose to marry late, if at all.
In the story of her daughters we see again this desire to escape the dysfunctional nature of marital relations in Irish culture. "And have you no
daughters for comfort? / Two there are and gone to nuns." It was easier to serve God; discorporate and loving, then it was to be tied to a man
who beat you to dim his own pain. The last daughter represents the dissolution of the Irish farming family in an economically depressed rural
community; "...and a third to the North/ with a fisherman." Such is the legacy of eight hundred years of oppression and an intractable political
quandary, whose very essence is wrapped up in the wounds of a culture eating at itself, because the enemy is time and change and this 'filthy
modem tide'.
Part II: Question 5
"Down by the glenside I met an old woman/ She was plucking young nettles and ne'er saw me coming." These are the first two lines of the song
Bold Fenian Men. The old woman in these lines is the same as the 'Poor Old Woman' in Yeats' play Cathleen ni Houlihann. The
young nettles she is collecting are the young men, who are to fight and die for the freedom of Ireland, they are reminiscent of the sons in the song
Four Green Fields.
The desire to associate a woman with nationhood is based in the ancient association of the Goddess with the fertility of the land. This was
discussed in Condren's The Serpent and The Goddess, in relation to Medb and her misappropriation in the 'ancient anti-feminist poem'
The Tain. In her role as Goddess of sovereignty she was induced by the chief poet, the ollamh to mate with the newly recognized
king in order to not only invest him, but to insure prosperity during his reign. In a Christian era, where the patriarchy ruled the mind/soul through
the will of the church, and the warriors ruled the body through the force of armed culture, the Goddess of sovereignty was either denigrated as a
prostitute, or used as a metaphor to prop up the bankrupt ideology of nationalism.
Richard Kearney in Postnationalist Ireland delivers a strident attack on the use of this metaphor for political purposes. He says of Yeats,
he "offered the myth of Mother Ireland as a symbolic compensation for the colonial calamities of history." The image of Cathleen ni Houlihann
is an idealized version of a mother calling her sons to battle, to death. As Joyce said of Ireland, she "is an old sow who eats her farrow"; he seems
closer to recognizing this misuse of the feminine power of motherhood. Kearney suggests this idea of sovereignty is at the heart of the intractable
'Irish problem' in Northern Ireland. The only way out of this conundrum is to throw out Brigitania and Cathleen/tire both, in order to get past
these nationalist obsessions and myopic territorial claims of sovereignty.
Indeed, this is the only way for the young nettles to ever grow to maturity and spread their seed on the wind. As long as the Motherland calls
her sons to death, in order to free her from servitude, there will forever be strife and discord on the isle of Erin. For the old woman gathering
nettles is analogous with the woman washer at the ford who is a foretelling of doom for those whom have seen her. And only those who see her
first, for what she is, will escape seeing their own clothes in her hands; their blood soaking red the green of Erin's soil.
Part II: Question 8
Young Frank McCourt says " The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I
wonder is there is anyone in the world who would Re us to live," in his autobiographical memoir Angela's Ashes. It highlights the
destructive nature of Irish culture after so many centuries of oppression at the hand of patriarchal Christianity and nationalist politics. One has
little chance of surviving, to say nothing of living, caught between this deadly Scylla and Chaaibides of God and Country.
Since the Irish Catholic Church was subsumed beneath the hem of the Roman Church by the Synod of Whitby in 664, the hope for any form of
an egalitarian, animistic, pluralistic Christianity was dashed on the rocks and lain upon the Roman altar as sacrifice. From that time till now the
idea of sacrifice has driven Christianity further and further from the indigenous form that had flourished in Ireland. It is striking to consider that
Ireland prior to this had no red/blood martyrs; no one to die for the Faith. This is not to suggest there were no faithful there, they just chose
different paths to the ineffable; as Cahill shows in How the Irish Saved Civilization, they preferred the green/hermetic and white/scholarly
routes to martyrdom. In time the Irish Irish conception of Catholicism, as being synonymous with the Republican movement, would tie the
sacrifice for God and Country together in the hunger strikes of Maze/Long Kesh, as we saw in Biting at the Grave and Some Mother's
Son.
In the long sordid history of ill conceived rebellion and insurrection in Ireland: the Republican movement and their predecessors, the Young
Irelanders, the Fenians, the United Irishmen and the Jacobites, these Irish warriors have used the idea of dying for the 'Motherland' as part of
their mythos. Cathleen ni Houlihann is still collecting young nettles, as the song Bold Fenian Men suggests, to die fighting the good
fight for Ireland. The ideal of this noble sacrifice can be seen in the men of the uprising in 1916. Padraig Pearse, in the poem The Mother,
invokes the same Christ-like martyrdom that Bobby Sands would latter take as his own. And the sow continues to eat her farrow, Joyce would
say.
Indeed it is Joyce whom we should look to if we wish to sidestep this continued glorification of death through sacrifice. In the final soliloquy of
Ulysses, Molly Bloom suggests it is the 'Yes, yes' of life that should be our focus. We best ignore these 'mirthless face(s) of a sunken
day' in order to 'forge again in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of our race', a conscience that creates life and not death.
Part III: Group A Question 3
The Otherworld is as powerful a presence in the psyche of the Irish as there ever was. One can see it in the respect for the sidhe and the
places they are associated with; usually pre-Christian Iron Age and Neolithic sacred sites, going so far as to construct roads around trees
believed to be protected by 'fairies'. As Padraig said of one woman, when asked if she believed in fairies, " I don't believe in them, but they're
there." There is a distinct connection between the Otherworld and this one and at certain times and in certain places the distance between them
is non-existent. As Sean pointed out last quarter the Tuatha de Dannan, or Irish Gods were forced into the West by the invasion of the
Milesians, a tribe of Gaulish Celts. This west became in time the Tir na nOg or Land of Youth where the sidhe are said to reside,
and where the spirits of the dead are said to retire. In our own time it has become a place where other more temporal boundaries are capable of
diminishing or disappearing altogether.
Tir na nOg is not the only magic(k) land that is represented in Irish myth; although it is considered the land of spiritual sustenance.
Another such sacral loci is shown in the folktale Cormac's Adventure in the Land o f Promise (Tir Tairnigiri) home of the sea God
Manannan Mac Lin The warrior who comes to lure him there describes it as, "a land wherein there is nought (sic) save truth, and there is neither
age nor decay nor gloom nor sadness nor envy nor jealousy nor hatred nor haughtiness."The film Into the West was our only
representation of the myth cycle of which Tir na nOg is a part. The white horse represents not only a connection to the boys' dead
mother, but also the myth cycle of Ossian who spent three hundred years there and returns on a white horse. The Isle of the Blest is an
Arthurian concept of the same 'Otherworld'. It is here that the slain warriors are taken, it is also where the wounded Arthur is ferried to wait until
it is his time to return. The Fifth Province is a modem extrapolation on this 'Otherworld' theme; it originally was the point where the other four
provinces met in Meath, the middle. at the hill of Uisneach. In ancient Ireland this was the temporal center of the island, which
corresponds to the spiritual center of Tir na nOg. All of these places represent the Irish desire for a magic(k)al land, a spiritual home
where the souls can rest and pass the ages beneath the 'the silver apples of the moon / the golden apples of the sun'. A place where they can
end their wanderings, a place devoid of the strife and sorra' of the temporal difficulties of a land divided.
One of the more important aspects of Irish culture stressed last quarter was the ability to cross boundaries, especially those between the
temporal and the spiritual worlds. The importance of place can be seen in the sacral loci remaining the same within the changing cultural orders.
Patrick establishes his church at Ard Macha or Armagh, a site sacred to the Ulster cycle and the Goddess Macha, as shown in The Serpent
and The Goddess, as well as the animated short film we saw last quarter. In Condren we also see St. Brighid establishing a church at Kildare,
near the site of temporal power, Tara, and the spiritual sacral loci of Brugh na Boinne. The later is a Neolithic tumulus associated
with the Winter Solstice, built before the Great Pyramids in Egypt; the former an Iron Age ceremonial site where the Goddess Medb was said to
mate with the High King to inaugurate his reign. The seasonal cycle of quarters and cross-quarters were also important to the 'Otherworld'. At
Beltain the king and Medb insured the fertility of the crops, at Lugnasadh he was ritually sacrificed to insure the same. Most
importantly in regards to the 'Otherworld', at Samhain as Linda explained, the veil between the worlds was thinnest and most permeable;
allowing the dead, as well as the sidhe to communicate with the living.
In the 'American Wake', we have a direct corollary with the ideas of death and the 'Otherworld'. In Paddy's Lament we saw how when the
Irish were emigrating they had to die in the Old World in order to take passage into the new. The idea of sailing into the West to the Land of
Youth and Plenty, as represented by America, made it necessary to mark the departure as a death-like severance. Tir na nOg was too
much part of the Irish psyche to let the connection be ignored. Richard Kearney in Post Nationalist Ireland uses the Fifth Province as a
metaphor for the non-temporal place where all Irish can go. Not only those on the island, torn between the claims of sovereignty and preferences
of religion, but also those who left in the diaspora for various and sundry locales about the globe. He suggests, "it is to be found in the swinging
door that connects the parish with the cosmos." A place where all those who claim 'Irishness' can find a spiritual home to rest their wander
weary souls. A place where the friends in the song There Were Roses can be together without fear of reprisals, where as Enya
McKiernan says in Going Back, she can 'make her roots take hold', a place where the Mid-Atlantic people can finally find a port for their
ships to anchor in. A place where we as a people can step outside of our temporal connections and reassert what it is to be Irish and find our
center, our ground; the place from which those silver and golden apples sprung.
Part III: Group B Question 4
In the beginning of this program we were told by Padraig to be specifically aware of the collision of traditional oral and modem literate cultures
as seen through the lens of Ireland. Not so much as an either/or dichotomy, but as representative of these different world-views, and how this
effected their interactions within the 'filthy modem tide'. These 'mythologies' inform us, like the refraction of a prism breaking light into it's
constituent wave lengths, how the differences between orality and literacy provide the framework of the misunderstandings and cultural
conflict regarding the intractable 'Irish problem'. It is only be examining these world-views that we can begin to construct the neither/nor of
dualism conjoined to break out of the trap of competition and into the freedom of pluralistic cooperation.
Traditional Irish culture is based largely around the concept of orality and a connection to the land; being rooted in the sense of place. Collins in
The Cultural Conquest of Ireland discusses the difference between the 'having' and 'being' societies. In the lecture on the 'psychodynamics'
of the Gaelic prepositions, Sean used 'ag' or 'at' to illustrate how in a 'being' society the 'other' is seen animistically and given agency,
which in turn makes it impossible to possess or de/value and commodify. In the film The History of English, and the lecture Ceorl gave
on the Indo-European language tree, we were shown how Gaelic, being the oldest and only surviving member of the Celtic language branch, was
one of the best links to understanding the prehistory of the Indo-European cultures. Collins shows as well how the Gaelic language was one of
the major factors allowing the Bardic Order to 'Gaelicize' both the Norman and the Christian conquests of Ireland. Even after the suppression of
the Bardic Order, the language 'Gaalicized', if only marginally the Cromwellian Plaanters children; continuing to alter the form English took in
Ireland. In time the trappings of the traditional Oral culture would be taken as a badge of the Irish Irish, signifying their commitment to an idealized
Ireland which no longer existed except in the farthest West of the island. These rural communities still clung to the daily use of Gaelic, the
connection to the land and reverence of the natural environment, as well as the desperate struggle to salvage the older forms of expression in
poetics, story and song. Bull McCabe in the film The Field is an ideal model of the traditional Irish Oral culture still desperately connected
to rural Ireland, as the 'traveler' Grandfather in the film Into the West maintains his connection to the Bardic tradition of the
seanachaidhe.
As Padraig's story about getting directions and fixing a flat in Ireland illustrates, it is the relation to time, which is the greatest difference between
the traditional oral culture of the past and modern literate cultures of the present. Where the oral culture is still connected to the seasons of the
agricultural round, the literate culture has equated time with money and numbered divisions on a clock. The lecture Ceorl gave on the power and
politics of the printing press, using McLuhan's Guttenburg Galaxy, and notes from Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe showed how the rise of literacy shaped the forces of modernity. Without the printing press the very essence of modem
literate culture would not exist, the uniformity of printed texts makes possible the Protestant Reformation, the Individualism of the Enlightenment,
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the dominance of the Scientific method. Even though it stands as one of the greatest human
achievements, allowing the consolidation of national languages, as Ceorl pointed out it also functions as a reducing valve to the expression of
temporal experience. In addition it allows for the homogenization of world culture, squeezing out the languages of the less economically
essential cultures, illustrated in the poem 'On the Death of Irish'.
The fact that Gaelic survived after eight hundred years of oppression; and a concerted effort to eradicate its use, as we saw in the play Translations,
is a bone in the throat of Collins' assertion that cultures can be conquered. As Padraig suggests the attendance of Gaelic language classes by
middle and upper class Protestants today is reason to be hopeful that the differences which inform the division of Ireland can someday be
altered. In the same way the concerted effort by Native American tribes to revive their oral languages in America is a sign we are moving away
from the homogeneity that threatens us with a damning global cultural impoverishment. As Richard Kearney discusses in Postnationalist Ireland,
the concept of nationalism is the divisive factor in global relations, especially in Northern Ireland. In order for us to overcome this intractable
problem in Ireland we have to conceive a neither/nor framework, where the traditional oral and literate modem cultures can interact cooperatively
instead of competitively; crossing the boundaries, the borders we have devised to separate them one from the other. James Joyce is an excellent
prognosticator in his use of a created 'night language' which filters all the languages he is familiar with through the orality of Irish brogues. Like
the philosopher Toland, he intentionally crosses the barriers, as seen in the song Coonla, in order to I fly past the nets of conformity
: nationalism, language, and religion', and out into the Fifth Province where the open ended system can thrive like T.O. Carlin's musical synthesis.