Journey Westward: Joyce, "Dubliners" and the Literary Revival

Abstract

Journey Westward: Joyce, "Dubliners" and the Literary Revival by Frank Shovlin. Liverpool U. Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 180. $99.95. James Joyce is inextricably linked with Dublin. Born and raised in the east-coast Irish metropolis and capital city, Joyce famously set all of his fictions there. The appearance of a monograph on Joyce and Western Ireland may therefore come as a surprise, yet such is precisely what Frank Shovlin, the author also of an excellent study on twentieth-century Irish literary periodicals, has written. The Gaelic-speaking west of Ireland is of course important to Joyce and other Irish authors as more than a geographical space; it connotes the essential, primitive, uncorrupted heart of Ireland--in Shovlin's words, the Revivalists' "Utopia" (3). Focusing on Joyce's Dubliners and, in particular, on that volume's closing masterpiece, "The Dead," Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival--steeped in Irish political and cultural history and possessing a keen eye and ear for linguistic detail and allusive nuance--makes the case for considering Joyce as a writer absorbed with "what lay beyond the Shannon, for rather more historically grounded, and sometimes more personal, reasons than those romantic, mythological considerations so close to Yeats's heart" (3). Journey Westward is divided into three long chapters, each of which "takes a different central theme or trope to help build towards a broader reconsideration of Joyce's attitude" to his homeland (3). Collectively, the three chapters explore Joyce's sense of estrangement from the "systems of power prevalent" in Ireland, in particular the British Empire, which "manifested itself in Joyce's Ireland via the Protestant ascendancy" (159-60). Chapter One treats the various "ways in which Joyce critiques Protestant power in Ireland via a subtle series of prompts towards distillation and the production of whisky" (3). To be sure, Dubliners is suffused with references to whisky and distilleries, the first of which appears early on in the collection's opening story, "The Sisters," and the last of which figures in the volume's closing masterpiece, "The Dead." Shovlin notes Joyce's familiarity with the well-known analogy between distillation and creative writing both involve a process of purifying and refining something (spirit or language) but argues that Joyce is far more interested in the "historical and biographical significance of whiskey" (15). Joyce's father, John, had a financial interest in and for a time was secretary of the Dublin and Chapelizod Distillery; when that distillery failed, John realized significant losses. Moreover, whiskey and its production in Ireland at the time "were associated with England, with the landlord caste and with imperial domination generally" (52). Given this view of whiskey, along with the "Joyce family's own misfortunes in the failed distillery at Chapelizod," Shovlin writes, "it is not surprising that Joyce blends the spirit into the mix of Dubliners as a consistently negative omen" (52). Chapter 2 concerns Joyce's engagement with the "seismic historical shift brought about by the fall of Irish Jacobitism in 1691" (4). "Joyce's interest in the lost cause of Jacobitism has been passed over by critics and general readers alike," Shovlin maintains; "such failure to recognize a consistent strain in his work leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Joyce's attitude to Irish nationalism and his engagement with Irish history and historiography" (63). The chapter's many interlocking arguments sensitize readers to Joyce's interest in the lost Stuart cause, in particular as this interest is manifested, however obliquely, in "The Sisters," "After the Race," and "The Dead." Shovlin's discussion of Joyce's surreptitious treatment of the historical phenomenon of the Wild Geese in "The Dead" is particularly convincing. Chapter 3 explores Joyce's "attitudes to both the Literary Revival and to Ireland's tragic [colonial] history" (4). …