James Joyce, Literary Legend and Author of ‘Ulysses,’ Gets Fresh Look as Political Person

‘James Joyce: A Political Life’By Frank CallahanPrinceton University Press, 944 pages“James Joyce: A Political Life,” by Frank Callahan, makes a bold claim — that posterity has misread Joyce as a literary wizard detached from politics.The magus of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake,” in that telling, is scarcely of this world at all. His lodestar is identical to that of another Dubliner: “Art for art’s sake.” Mr. Callahan’s scoop is that this is more wrong than right. Over nearly a thousand pages he discloses how politics printed on Joyce’s prose.The image of an apolitical Joyce is burnished by the novelist’s exile at Rome, Trieste, Paris, and Zurich. He left Dublin on October 8, 1904, when he was 22 years old. His final trip to the city of his birth was in 1912. “Ulysses” was published at the City of Light in 1922, and Joyce died in 1941. Joyce’s decades-long distance from Dublin, an arrangement not lacking in acrimony, has fueled the image of an expatriate novelist of unmoored politics.Callahan argues that for all of Joyce’s galactic genius, he was tethered to the politics of Ireland in the late 19th century — particularly the crisis known as the Parnell Split. The scandal did grievous harm to the push for Irish Home Rule, the movement that sought to unwind the Act of Union 1800 that merged Ireland and Great Britain. Callahan reminds 21st century readers that “Joyce, for all his modernism, is a child of the nineteenth century.”Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland’s “uncrowned king,” was the scion of an Anglo-Irish Protestant clan —royal Tudor blood ran in his veins — who turned traitor to his roots. His parliamentary wizardry was directed to the cause of Home Rule, a movement that championed Irish self-government. Parnell’s time as a colossus, though, ended with the backlash toward his affair with a married woman, Katharine O’Shea.The schism among his allies, known as the“Parnell Split,” was so savage as to result in his death in 1891, at the age of just 45. Some 200,000 mourners took to the streets of Dublin for his funeral, and a square and street in that city now bear his name. Prime Minister William Gladstone noted that “Parnell was the most remarkable man I ever met” and the “most interesting one.” The Great Commoner added that “he was an intellectual phenomenon.”Callahan, a barrister and scholar who passed away in 2021 and directed the documentary “100 Years of Ulysses,” argues that Joyce was resolved “not to portray Parnell directly but to catch him in the mirror of his myth in contemporary Ireland.” For Joyce, the fall of Parnell was an event on the scale of what the Dreyfus Affair meant to Marcel Proust. Joyce, Callahan insists, was never apolitical, and was always a nationalist — after his own strange style. First edition of ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. Paris, 1922. Via Wikimedia CommonsThe centrality of Parnell to Joyce is extraordinary given that Joyce was silent regarding, say, World War I, the 1916 Easter Rising, Irish independence, the rise of European fascism, and the outbreak of World War II. Parnell was his beginning and his end. It was as if he adopted the imperative at the end of “A Portrait of a Young Artist as a Young Man” to pass into “silence, exile, and cunning.”“A Political Life” is evenly divided between Joyce’s early life at Dublin and his decades of exile, where he worked to “understand and render imaginatively” the “Ireland that had just passed and the Ireland that was beginning to emerge.” Callahan celebrates Joyce’s “distanced clarity” toward his homeland. Ireland’s “statal inchoateness” becomes the “breach through which coursed all of Joyce’s conceptions” about politics and history.Callahan is especially sharp in inferring the influence exerted on Joyce by Trieste, the Habsburg seaport where he lived between 1904 and 1920. That city sustained the “weight of his high rhetoric of exile” and was the setting of Joyce’s most sustained encounter with Jews. Callahan writes that Joyce was “drawn to the richness and fluidity of associations between the Irish and the Jews.” The poet Padraic Colum, a friend of Joyce’s, once remarked that “it is odd that the creator of the most outstanding Jew in modern literature”— Leopold Bloom of “Ulysses” — did not at that time know any of the Jewish community in Dublin.” Callahan, though, claims that “in renderings of antisemitism, Joyce is a pivotal figure in European literature and culture” in combating the oldest hatred. He “maximized what could be achieved politically by a novel.”Callahan notes that “Joyce was sufficiently interested in Zionism to purchase in Zurich Theodor Herzl’s ‘Der Judenstaat.’” In his notes for “Ulysses” he marks down that “Jews & Irish remember past,” and Joyce’s brother Stanislaus records in his Trieste diary that “today until sundown was a Jewish holiday. Jim and I walked through the principal streets to see how many shops were shut.” Joyce also visited Trieste’s synagogue.The most delightful detail this book uncovers is the memory of an old student of Joyce’s, tracked down by the great biographer Richard Ellman at Haifa, who recalls her teacher frequenting the Hanukkah and Purim parties put on by the Zionist society of Trieste. On those occasions, this old woman on the slopes of Mount Carmel recalled, the Irish master would dance “once or twice upright as a rod in perfect rhythm.”

James Joyce, Literary Legend and Author of ‘Ulysses,’ Gets Fresh Look as Political Person

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