James Joyce’s work made a lot of people in Ireland unhappy. In Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland, marking the centenary of the author’s most celebrated work, John McCourt has assembled a generous sample of scandalized reviews and irate letters to editors, confirming the extent of the outrage. This was not just an Irish line of commentary; as detractors in his home country often pointed out, Joyce was widely regarded internationally as a depraved writer. But it was certainly a lively and long-lasting subgenre of Joyce criticism among his compatriots. Nor was it limited to pious Catholics or keen nationalists. The unionist Sunday Express in Dublin carried a review that said of Ulysses: “All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ”. In the Irish Times, a letter writer summarized the charges against Joyce as not just including “deliberate filth” and “continual blasphemy”, but “pretension and affectation, senseless tampering with the English language, inaccuracy in unfolding Dublin life, and, finally, plain dullness and perhaps madness itself”.

Joyce evidently agreed with Oscar Wilde that it would have been worse not to be talked about: he circulated the bad reviews himself. His work remained to the end preoccupied with middle-class, urban, English-speaking Catholic Ireland. “This race and this country and this life produced me”, Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s counterpart in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses) tells his university friend Davin, who is shocked by Stephen’s impiety and lack of patriotism: “I will express myself as I am”. And he did.

Joyce railed against the timorousness of a people whom he described in Dubliners as “the gratefully oppressed”. When he was nine years old the Irish had participated in the destruction of Charles Stewart Parnell, exposed as an adulterer as he came close to winning parliamentary independence for the country at Westminster. As McCourt reports, however, there were from the outset a few Irish readers who considered that – notwithstanding Joyce’s fierce exposure of political and sexual hypocrisy – he had also given unprecedented artistic expression to modern Irish Catholic culture. Mary Colum stated in a review that “It hardly seems possible that Ulysses can really be understood by anyone not brought up in the half-secret tradition of the heroism, tragedy, folly and anger of Irish nationalism, or unfamiliar with the philosophy, history and rubrics of the Roman Catholic Church; or by one who does not know Dublin and certain conspicuous Dubliners”. Even those who disapproved, such as William Magee (who appears under his pen name Eglinton in Ulysses), acknowledged the novelty of the achievement: “There is no faintest trace of Protestantism, that is, of the English spirit. We are obliged to admit that in Joyce literature has reached for the first time in Ireland a complete emancipation from Anglo-Saxon ideals”. In 1949 L. A. G. Strong defended the author against allegations of gratuitous indecency and irreligion by arguing that – following Odysseus, Dante and Swift – Joyce had felt compelled “to go down into hell” in order “to face his own darkness and redeem it”. A few years later Arland Ussher claimed that Joyce expressed not just his own age but the “buried ages” of Ireland, achieving a great “dreaming back”; he was “Ireland’s first great native writer – her Dante or her Chaucer”.

Colum’s review suggests that Irish readers were at an advantage in understanding Ulysses because they were spared the labour of tracking a fair proportion, at least, of its many thousands of local allusions. There is here a note of national possessiveness. But Colum also anticipates the irritated sense among some in Ireland that “outsiders” overstated the obscurity and complexity of Joyce’s work. By the 1950s and 1960s, some Irish writers, while they contended with the grim economic and cultural circumstances of independent Ireland, attempted to make sense for their generation of the extraordinary modernist literature that had accompanied Ireland’s disappointing revolution. They resented the presence in Dublin of what Francis MacManus called “those G.I.s of Joycean scholarship … the foot-slogging Americans”. Earlier Irish writers had been claimed by the English, but the assiduous research of Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, and many others in his wake seemed to represent a full-scale professional American takeover of Irish writing. “Who killed James Joyce?”, the poet Patrick Kavanagh asked in a poem which included the stanza: “What weapon was used / To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon that was used / Was a Harvard thesis”.

Consuming Joyce takes in a comprehensive array of Irish responses to Ulysses and will be an indispensable resource for future studies of Joyce’s reception in the country. Overall, the story of the past forty years, as McCourt tells it, is one of reconciliation. The sway of what Dedalus in Ulysses describes as his “Italian master … the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” has been broken in Ireland. Natives have become scholars and professional critics are no longer so decried by enthusiastic amateurs. McCourt asserts that international academics these days generally agree that Ireland represents something more than mere “background” in Joyce. Evidently, during the Covid pandemic, Joycean reading groups proliferated online, in Dublin and beyond, and have resulted in several blogs or personal accounts of reading Ulysses now reaching print. In Dublin, the buildings where Dedalus (like Joyce) attended classes as an undergraduate, and made the famous announcement of his artistic credo to Davin, house a new museum of Irish literature. The first copy of Ulysses, donated to the Irish state in 1952 by Joyce’s publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, rests in a large glass case as the sole exhibit in a dimly lit side room. In an adjacent room, pencils and notepaper are provided at a long table so that visitors can get started on their own literary works. Printed panels on the walls offer encouragement: “What can you create? Imagine: one day, we might have a museum about you!”.

McCourt is an academic teaching in Italy who founded a long-running international Joyce summer school in Trieste – Joyce’s first home away from Dublin. Terence Killeen is a former journalist whose often-reprinted guide from 2004, Ulysses Unbound, is now published in a new edition by Penguin, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín. Striking a balance between adequate explication and merciful concision, Killeen’s considered, low-key style has already proven illuminating for both academic and general readers. Daniel Mulhall is a professional diplomat and the current Irish ambassador to the United States. Like many critical works before it, Ulysses: A reader’s odyssey promises to “release Ulysses from its reputation of impenetrability”. In this genial, largely first-person narrative, based on Mulhall’s experience of discussing Ulysses and other Irish literary works with varied audiences during his international postings, he argues that Joyce is a significant asset for the “soft power” of the Irish state.

McCourt has collected such a large volume of quotation in Consuming Joyce – much of it vivid and fascinating – that little space is left in the book for analysis of the critical trends that resulted in Joyce’s postwar consecration in the US as the supreme writer of the modernist era, or for consideration of how his future reputation may evolve. McCourt states at the outset that the larger Joyce industry is beyond the scope of his study; and that terrain has indeed been covered by other historians of Joyce criticism, such as Joseph Brooker and Joseph Kelly. Nevertheless, it is frustrating that the later chapters of the book in particular consist mainly of such short summaries of books and other Joycean projects. McCourt remarks somewhat ominously that critical interest in Joyce flagged in the US in the early years of the new millennium – although he judges that this is compensated for by recent criticism from Ireland. Joyce’s fate, however, will no doubt be bound up with broader developments in modernist studies, where at the moment extended treatments of famous white male authors are not in high demand. The rather anxious presentation of the first Ulysses in the Museum of Literature Ireland, surrounded by cheery messages about “creativity”, also indicates some discomfort with the novel’s extraordinary canonicity.

So we perhaps have some reason to doubt McCourt’s concluding judgement that Ulysses “will give at least as much to Ireland and to the world” in its second century as in its first. In the early 1980s Ellmann commented that “there are modern writers about whom the scholars all seem to be more or less agreed … whereas Joyce arouses much more frantic passion”. While the project of deciphering all the allusions in Ulysses will never be fully exhausted, do equally intense or consequential critical controversies lie ahead? In their presentation of the issue of Joyce and Ireland, these critics suggest – and indeed may appear to hope – that there will not.

Ireland has reason to be grateful to Joyce; as his friend Arthur Power put it, “the majority of the world only knows Dublin through the medium of his personality”. But how has the interpretation of Ulysses evolved alongside developments in Ireland over the past hundred years? Killeen, like McCourt, welcomes the apparent cessation of hostilities between transatlantic professors and Joyce’s readers by the Liffey. In his conclusion he possibly overstates the potential future interest of Joycean textual studies to ordinary punters. Killeen’s key assertion is that after the initial chapters of Ulysses, there is a significant shift into a comic mode: “If Ulysses is about anything, it is about this change of tone, more than it is about paternity, or androgyny, or colonialism, or Irish freedom, or many another thematic word one could summon up”. With his textual visions of redemptive historical recurrence, Killeen makes the surprising suggestion that Joyce is not a modernist at all, “except in the technical sense”. Unlike, say, T. S. Eliot, Joyce – the argument goes – accepts, or is indifferent to, or celebrates modern conditions. Tóibín’s introduction elaborates on this point: Ulysses “encourages us to take lightly what we once took seriously, to see the response to life, as exemplified in the book, as fluid, as open to possibility, and indeed pleasure, as any reader of the book must be”. In his blurb for McCourt’s book, Tóibín associates this trajectory directly with recent changes in Ireland: the country’s initial rejection and final embrace of Ulysses reflected “its own fears and neuroses and its own gradual move towards openness and inclusion”. Other Irish writers agree. In 100 Years of Ulysses, a film directed by Ruán Magan and broadcast on Irish television for the centenary of the book’s publication, Paul Muldoon states: “It has taken us a hundred years to read that book … Joyce would be thrilled to think of the modern Ireland, the change that has taken place”.

Mulhall sees his interest in Joyce as entirely compatible with his “professional responsibility to promote Ireland around the world”. He believes that “our national story” helps to give its global currency to Irish literature. Thus he considers it appropriate to celebrate the centenary of the Irish Free State, which later became the Irish Republic, in the same year as that of Ulysses: the former, one presumes, being the culmination of Ireland’s “national story”. Mulhall glosses over the Free State’s difficulties with Joyce, arguing that the first decades of Ulysses were ones in which the state was preoccupied by “the internal dynamics of nation-building at a difficult time in world history”. Mulhall associates Joyce’s politics with Parnell and Arthur Griffith, the founder of the original Sinn Féin – taken here to be examples of non-militaristic Irish nationalists. But he regrets Joyce’s apparent “myopia” or lack of sympathetic understanding of Ulster unionism. By contrast, McCourt suggests that Joyce was in fact an icon of independent Ireland’s mission in the 1990s to become “less threatening to that part of the island’s population belonging to the Protestant and Unionist majority in the North”. This seems far-fetched, and any such view leaves little trace on the resolutely four-province Ireland of Finnegans Wake – the only work Joyce set in Ireland after partition and the settlement of 1922.

McCourt is highly specific when speculating about Joyce’s possible political affiliations in his own lifetime, associating him with a group of counter- revolutionary writers, intellectuals and politicians in the Free State, including Desmond FitzGerald and Eimar O’Duffy, who were among Joyce’s most acute early Irish readers. McCourt argues that they saw in Ulysses a blueprint for a secular, liberal independent state that had been derailed, or at least long delayed, by the rebellion of 1916 and its aftermath. Mulhall suggests that, if Parnell had not fallen, one could envisage Joyce’s own father – a lifelong Parnellite and an irresponsible if charming alcoholic – becoming instead a significant figure in a non-republican “Home Rule” Ireland, and “his talented son James, settling down in Dublin as part of the Irish Catholic elite coming into its own in the twentieth century, with an auxiliary role in the running of the British Empire”.

McCourt is more cautious than Tóibín or Muldoon about what Joyce would have made of contemporary Ireland. Perhaps this was confirmed for him by his investigation of today’s commodified Joyce for tourists: he quotes the journalist John Daly, who wondered in 1998 how this “unique and frankly, weird literary hero” had been turned into “the love-child of Michael Collins and Jack Charlton”. McCourt, though keen to disassociate Joyce from left-wing politics or Irish republicanism, also asks if it is “facile to imagine that a writer of Joyce’s radical power would somehow find himself at home in the secular and profoundly materialistic Ireland of today”. Imagining what the author “would have thought” of political matters is something of an occupational hazard for Joyceans. In 100 Years of Ulysses it is emphasized that, even at the time of the Parnell’s fall, when Joyce was nine, he evidently was concerned that “the form of nationalism that would now emerge would be more extreme and destroy Ireland’s path to becoming a modern pluralistic democracy”. That is to say, Joyce as a child already predicted and feared the Irish revolution.

McCourt presents the “postcolonial” turn in Joyce studies, much of it inspired by the work of Seamus Deane and the application to the Irish situation of readings of modernism by Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in the 1990s, as an understandable but unfortunately overpoliticized corrective to the neglect of Ireland in metropolitan or universalist American criticism. He argues that it was also untimely, in the face of such promising developments as the Celtic Tiger boom and the peace process. In fact, the story is more complicated. As Joe Cleary stresses in his recent book Modernism, Empire, World Literature, Joyce’s first powerful American sponsors, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were not so much metropolitans as – like Joyce – colonial émigrés, emerging from under the sway of European cultural dominance. They certainly recognized the cultural project of Joyce: the reconstruction of cultural tradition after a period of shattering crisis. While the mild liberalism of Ellmann was quite removed from the politics of some of the preceding modernist generation, Joyce was subsequently the key figure in the American annexation of European tradition in the era of the Cold War. By the latter decades of the twentieth century, Ulysses was understood as the epic of western freedom and the antithesis of Soviet totalitarianism. In his late work, Ellmann had in fact no difficulty in recognizing Joyce’s general hostility to British imperialism and his affinity with Irish nationalism – although Joyce’s own project was confined to the realm of cultural politics. A book by Ellmann’s student Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, set out a version of a liberal, or at least a “soft” Irish nationalist, Joyce as early as 1980. It was perhaps only among some Joyceans in independent Ireland, meanwhile, during the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, that such a view of the author was entirely unacceptable. It is now belatedly embraced, perhaps as an alternative to more challenging readings informed by postcolonialism and critical theory.

Ellmann co-edited an edition of Joyce’s critical writings in 1959, which included some patently anti-imperialist articles and lectures from the author’s period in Trieste. When these works were reissued under the editorship of the Irish critic Kevin Barry in 2000, they had to be hedged with health warnings. Perhaps Joyce was just homesick when he wrote them? Certainly, the author’s putative anti-nationalism – considered so scandalous in his youth and later, in lockstep with mainstream Irish liberal opinion after the late 1960s, as heroic – was by then an article of faith for official Ireland. Yet this was the artist who wrote in 1907 of the physical force tradition in Irish nationalism: “This party, under its various names: the ‘Whiteboys’, the ‘Men of ’98’, the ‘United Irishmen’, the ‘Invincibles’, and the ‘Fenians’, has always refused to have any dealings with either the English parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They say (and history fully supports them in making such a claim) that any concession by England to Ireland has been granted unwillingly, at bayonet-point, as the saying goes”. Judging only by Joyce’s occasional and limited comments on the matter, and much of the evidence of his work, his most recurrent objection to Irish resistance to British domination was its self-divided, pusillanimous nature. After 1916 he refused to comment directly on Irish politics at all outside his fiction, telling a journalist (in French) that “the problem of my race is so complicated that one needs to make use of all the means of an elastic art to delineate it – without solving it”. He made perhaps a compromise with his times so he did not have to compromise his commitment to artistic greatness.

If Joyce was repudiated a century ago because he did not fit a conservative national image, there is a risk of self-satisfied complacency now in the attempt to appropriate him. Appropriation can be just as selective as repudiation. The attempt to reclaim Joyce as comfortably liberal in his politics might also reflect a wider impatience with difficulty and with modernism, and even an anti-intellectualism, among current liberal commentators, to match that of Catholic and unionist conservatives a century ago. As recent Irish criticism, represented by Cleary and others, demonstrates, Joyce is better understood as the Irish writer who most profoundly absorbed and most memorably represented the historical experiences of colonial peripherality, violence and cultural trauma. There can be no simple homecoming in the conditions of the early twenty-first century for such an artist.

Emer Nolan is Professor of English at Maynooth University. Her books include Five Irish Women: The second republic, 2019, and Catholic Emancipations, 2007

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