The permanence of matter through time is one of our fundamental a priori assumptions about the world. Berkeley (coincidentally an Irishman) had played devil’s advocate in this respect by arguing a counter-intuitive, yet almost- watertight case for ‘immaterialism’. If we lose a coin one day, and the next day we find a coin, who is to tell whether this is one and the same coin? If we look at a tree, then close our eyes, and then look again, who is to tell that this is one and the same tree? What objective proof can be given for the fact that this tree continued to exist at all while we weren’t looking? Berkeley argued that existence is tantamount to being perceived; that the world consists of our perceptions rather than of objects; and that the ‘permanence of matter through time’, between moments of being perceived, is merely a facilitating psychological assumption on our part, not an objective condition of empirical reality.

When Kant disproved Berkeley, he argued categorically that the permanence of matter through time is an analytical and therefore unprovable, but a priori valid, tenet. In time-hallowed fashion Kant distinguished between the substance of things and their incidental qualities (their location, aspect, temperature, movement &c.). The incidental qualities of a given object are changeable through time; its substance is what remains if you discount all incidental qualities, i.e. the substance of an object is by definition that which is not changeable through time: quod erat demonstrandum.

In all the multifarious developments I have charted in the foregoing pages, we can register variations on one basic theme: attempts to see through the mutability, the changes and the incidental qualities of Irish history with all its disruptions, and to distil a core, a substance. There is a constant search for some permanent principle which would define the essence, the transhistorical formula, of Irishness. That project was by no means unique to Ireland; it was central to all nationalisms in Europe, in a century when each state and each nation sought to define itself by cultivating its essential and individual character as it had been postulated by Herder and, after him, by Hegel.

But in Ireland the project was much more fraught and complex than elsewhere, because Ireland, perhaps more than any other European nation, had undergone a particularly violent and disruptive historical development over long centuries of never-resolved conflict, and had (unlike Germany) for most of its recorded history been subject to foreign control. The closest European parallel [225] to the Irish case in this respect is possibly Poland. Irish history seemed to be all incident and no permanence.

Imagining Ireland in the nineteenth century involves, in true Romantic fashion, an ongoing attempt to see through the vicissitudes of political incident and historical confusion. The literary or historical imagination and representation of Ireland tries to redeem a True Ireland from the violent mutability of history and political divisions - and in the result, a Romantic literary agenda becomes also a national project of finding, defining and formulating an ideal Irish identity. Many European nationalities in the wake of Romanticism are preoccupied with identity construction; in the case of Ireland, that project is grafted onto a long-standing confrontation with the neighbouring isle, takes place in a climate of barely-contained hostile divisions, carries a burdensome political heritage and is invested with great, contentious political urgency.

The self-image that takes shape in nineteenth-century Ireland is heavily invested with politics and provides important rhetorical ammunition in the social and ideological conflicts of the time - between Morgan and English indifference, between Moore and Protestant unionists, between Hardiman and Ferguson, between Griffith and Yeats. But its built-in idealist, Romantic character (the search for a transcending, true identity) often moves it into a non-political direction, and the True Ireland is piously sought in a non-contentious register: I he past (that is, those less violent portions of the past, which are not so wild and bloody as to forbid representation altogether) or the idyllic parts of Irish society (the peasantry with their rustic folkways).

Both mechanisms follow an exoticist impetus in that both try to characterize a True Ireland in those aspects which are different, un-mundane, other: ‘when Malachi wore the collar of gold’, or where timeless picturesque custom is enacted in quaint language. Hence, one of the deep-seated motifs of nineteenth-century cultural reflection in Ireland is that which I have termed auto-exoticism: to look lor one’s own identity in the unusual, the extraordinary, the exotic aspects of experience, to conflate the notions of one’s distinctness and one’s distinctiveness. Irish history, as a result, tends to be inevitably traced back to mythical, fictional but colourful roots; Irish life tends to be reduced to its un-English aspects. The cultivation of the ancient, pre-Norman past, with its aristocratic society and refined culture, intersects throughout the century in numerous interesting ways with the cultivation of the contemporary peasant, with his homely humours and artless charm. Despite their great differences, these two elements, past and peasant, become linked and even conflated because both represent a radically un-anglicized, ideal Ireland - witness the overlap between popular history, mythography and folklore in the later century; witness Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain, who speaks with a Kiltartanese brogue. Past and peasant also meet because both arc imagined as situated outside factual history: the one in a mythical prelapsarian past, the other in a de-historicized chronotope situated on the margins of the world as we know it.

[226]

Also, the attempt to create ideal Irelands as a response to a less than ideal political predicament involves a number of imaginative and discursive strategics of anachronism. As we have seen, such strategies of unifying history and Iran scending mutability often involve the substitution of the historical Nacheinander by a spectacular Nebeneinander. The mutability of history, with its shifting and multifarious warring parties, is reduced to a conspectus of scenes on the invariant formula of English misrule and Irish resistance (always the same England, the same Ireland, from Red Hugh O’Donnell to Robert Emmet). The past, in its physical monuments or in its lieux de memoire such as Round Towers, in its literary or poetical or musical remains or in its ossified, unchanging, continuously repeated historical narrative, has direct symbolical significance for a present-day sense of identity. Voices from the past are put before an audience by the retrieval of old manuscripts (be it in the fictional pages of Morgan and Maturin, or in the real-world endeavours of O’Donovan and O’Curry). Supernatural characters stalk the literary imagination, who in their trans-individual or trans-historical identity preside over historical change and fleeting centuries Captain Rock, Melmoth, Dark Rosaleen in all her different renderings, Kathleen Ní Houlihan. They are personifications of the act of remembrance, walking and living (or at least undead) memories that haunt successive generations from century to century. Remembrance from Moore to Davis becomes a cardinal element in the unification of history; towards the end of the century it becomes institutionalized in the penchant for centenary commemorations (of Moore, of O’Connell, of Tone) and in the cult of funerals, which appears simultaneously with the growing belief in a revival of dead ideals and a redemption for Ireland from the historical entropy of Europe.

As a result of all these varied responses and variations on the one underlying theme, the cultural history of Ireland offers an excellent example of the various modalities of turning history either into myth or into spectacle. The borders between history and story are thin: history tends to be told in a ‘once upon a time’ mode, emphasizing the enduring presence of the same old masterplot, while literary stories tend to clutter their narratives with factual asides, footnotes, pieces of background information. Ireland becomes everything that is excluded by the bald statement of what is the case: Ireland is couched in terms of what used to be, what failed to be, what might have been, what must become. Thus, ironically, the desire to retrieve a sense of permanence conspired in the end to exoticize Ireland and to remove it from mundane reality.

Ireland as chronotope: a place with an uneven distribution of time-passage, where time is apt to slow down and come to a standstill at the periphery: that emerges, from the foregoing pages, as one of the formative notions in the literary and historical imagination of Ireland. However, the very notions of what is a centre and what is a periphery are of course fluid, and depend on the perspective of the beholder. Islington might be a suburban periphery from the point of view of Sloane Square or Chelsea, but it counts as part of the metropolis for [227] someone from Lincolnshire, whilst Lincolnshire in turn is the Tennysonian heartland of England for someone from the Hebrides, Canada or Fiji. One and the same place can variously be seen as peripheral or central; the best case living, perhaps, Dublin.

Part of the trauma of the Union was, precisely, a sense of marginalization and justification now that Dublin ceased to be home to a parliament, ceased to be the ventral capital of a nation. When Yeats, Moore, Martyn and Gregory started their literary and dramatic movement, they did so with a sense that they were going lo launch their renewal of dramatic practice from a peripheral vantage point, similar to Ibsen in Norway, Maeterlinck in Flanders, Chekhov in Russia. Accordingly, their movement, launched from the fringes, was to have all the timeless, slow-moving qualities of the periphery: a liminal shadow-zone between life and dream, reality and myth, where lines were to be chanted, and plot or action were secondary to the slow, still spectacle of successive tableaux on stage.

To construct a given place as peripheral or central moves an entire apparatus of signalling devices, signs and standard attributes into place. Places and locations are given central status by being given the attributes of development, a linear, forward-moving progression from past into present into future: time in i he centre introduces constant innovation, and history progresses (for better or worse: into growth or into decay). The modernist dynamic treatment of the metropolis (New York in Dos Passos, Berlin in Doblin) is the outstanding example. Conversely, the periphery stands still, or lags behind, has an intact link with the past (tradition). Witness the archaic countryside of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the provincial second-rate boredom of Dublin in George Moore’ Muslin, the Provence of Pagnol, the dormant and stagnant Flemish towns of Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte, the treatment of the Irish countryside in almost all of nineteenth- century Anglo-Irish literature.

In the case of Dublin, the work of James Joyce offers an interesting example how one and the same place can be seen as peripheral at one moment, central at the next, and how the attendant registers of description match that contradictory construction. The Dublin of Dubliners, with its constant emphasis on stagnation and paralysis, is a provincial town, stifling individual initiative under a smothering blanket. The movements of the characters trail as aimlessly as their lives and experiences. Life in Dublin is a process of stagnation and attrition, and vain hopes for a more exciting life are fixed on an elsewhere, an escape: the exotically named bazaar in ‘Araby’, Buenos Aires for Eveline, the cultural wealth of continental Europe for Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’. There is good cause to see this atmosphere, where Dublin becomes (as Joyce famously called it) ‘that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’, as a lack of true metropolitanism. The ‘parochial, colonized’ and colonially disinherited Dublin of Dubliners lacks the vitality and energy of a proper city: Dublin is ‘falling deeper into provincialism and [is represented] in the decaying and constraining middle-class streets.’

[Bibl.: Luke Gibbons, Transformations of Irish Culture (Cork UP/FDA 1996, pp.134-47; John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Literary Revival (Syracuse UP 1987), p.157; also refs. James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History, (Cambridge UP 1995), pp.64-105.]

It is against this background that we should see the well-known opposition between the Irish west and the European continent in “The dead”. Although [228] the west may be held out as a place for revivalist journeys by the Gaelic Leaguer Miss Ivors, it is also the place from which yet another unquiet shade comes to haunt the present (yet another representative of that class, alongside Tim Finnegan, the Burke and Mahon characters in Synge’s plays, and Count Dracula. The spectre of long-dead Michael Furey, buried al Oughterard, is conjured out of the past to trouble the present, to spoil Gabriel’s complacent fondness and his hopes for a new stage in his marriage and his cultural development by going to the Continent. [See ftn. 3.]  The power of the dead over the living, in Dubliners, is precisely that of old Burke over Norah, in In the Shadow of the Glen. History thus dominated by an undead past is a nightmare from which it is impossible to escape, and it is significant that so much time and space in A Portrait is given, not only to the dead weight of post-Parnellite recrimination, but also to the sermon with its infernal vision insisting so very heavily on the idea of eternity.

There can be no stronger contrast than between the stagnant Dublin of  Dubliners and the vibrant Dublin of Ulysses. Joyce himself appears to revel in the depiction of a Newtonian Dublin, where time and space coexist in a physical, dynamic relationship, dominated by movement and crisscrossing trajectories through space and time, where space divided by time equals speed. This Dublin he constructed with the quintessential organizing tools of space and time: a map and a watch, dovetailing Nebeneinander and Nacheinander in what is fittingly the book’s central episode: The Wandering Rocks. [sic; quotes Frank Budgeon on Joyce’s use of a map and time measures in the chapter.] That episode, set squarely in the middle of Bloomsday and of Ulysses, opens with, precisely, a Jesuit, the superior, the very reverend John Conmee, S.J., resetting his smooth watch - one of the central images in the entire work. If the description of Dublin is fragmented and cubistically broken up (Luke Gibbons speaks quite rightly of a ‘montage’ technique ), the effect is not so much to represent an alienated, fractured state of affairs or state of mind, but rather to celebrate the multifarious and complex ways in which the various elements of this Newtonian universe interact, cross paths, gravitate, attract and repel each other.

It is in this sense of dynamism and movement, and the insistent use of physical clock-time, that Dublin is rendered a metropolis, an omphalos indeed, the quintessential twentieth-century city: a centre rather than a periphery, and quite redeemed from its stagnation and paralysis as described in Dubliners. If Ulysses signals the triumph of modernism, it is marked, not only by its verbal ingenuity, its redefinition of the relationship between content and form, and its irreverent play on conventions, but also because it is placed in direct proximity to the rest of the world-at-large, and abandons, with a palpable sense of release, the ingrained nineteenth-century patterns of the realist, allochronic representation of Ireland.

It will be obvious that this interpretation stands at odds with the one advanced by Udaya Kumar in his fine book The Joycean Labyrinth. Kumar argues that Ulysses’s textual coherence is based on fugatic echoes, cross-allusions and repetitions rather than on a ‘narrative deep structure’. His point is valuable particularly in that it highlights a corresponding attitude to history, which [229] nightmarish as it is, lacks internal order and exhibits only a superficial repetitiveness close to the Freudian notion of the uncanny; Kumar thus places Ulysses on the interesting point of intersection between Berkeley’s theory of perception and ontology, and a modernist theory of time and history. Nevertheless, this argument holds only for Ulysses as sjužet (the textual surface arranged into discontinuous and manipulated episodes, ranging from the opening word ‘Stately’ to the closing word ‘Yes’). The fabula of Ulysses (its underlying subject-matter, the manifold events taking place, or remembered, in Dublin on 16 June 1904) is by no means chaotic; on the contrary, it is carefully organized and orchestrated. All parallaxes, echoes, repetitions, analeptic and proleptic cross­references, neatly converge into a consistent and non-contradictory set of events which take place in a precise and tidy choreography. It is indicative that Kumar finds it difficult to come to terms with the episode which is most explicitly constructed on the parallax as organizing principle and on the interplay between Nebeneinander and Nacheinander, ‘The Wandering Rocks’.

[Bibl. Udaya Kumar, The Joycean Labyrinth; Repetition, Time and Tradition in “Ulysses”, Clarendon Press 1991, espec. pp.69-70.]

It is precisely in the centre of Dublin, at Nelson’s Pillar, that the dynamic vortex of movement swirls to its greatest intensity. The breathless, frenetic, breezy Aeolus episode opens:

This Dublin is indeed a place built on the coordinates of Nebeneinander and Nacheinander." It is a clockwork city for plotting movement, a grid on which location and moment provide the precise coordinates for the action. The vice-regal procession as traced through ‘The wandering rocks’ is prefigured in the viceregicidal plotting explained in ‘Aeolus’:

B. is parkgate […] T is viceregal lodge. C is where the murder took place. K is Knockmaroon gate. […| F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi, Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F.A.B.P Got that? X is Davy’s publichouse in upper Leeson street (U112).

W.J. Mc Cormack has spotted this element in Ulysses with his usual acumen, and points out that the Nebeneinander might evoke ‘the simultaneity of all events in the “nightmare of history”‘, adding that ‘In colonial Ireland sequence and simultaneity are rival experiences of history.’ But it should be added that [230] all the above-cited instances of the dovetailing of space and time represent so many refusals to follow the standard allochrony, the ‘times passes slowly, history has passed overhead’ patterns which had dominated almost the entire representation of Ireland in the previous century (including Dubliners, although the movements of the Two Gallants give an inkling of Joyce’s new, urban approach).

The metropolitan centrality of Dublin is stressed at a multitude of different levels - even in the free indirect discourse that ironically impersonates Father Conmee’s urbane complacency:

This metropolitan notion of a surrounding country serving the needs of the centre is later echoed in the apotheosis of Leopold Bloom, in the ‘Ithaca’ episode, when the entire universe and the engineering skills of the empire concur in providing water for him to make cocoa:

Thus, Ulysses, as well as being so many other things, becomes an immense effort at normalizing and calibrating the position of Dublin in space and time, at showing how much part of the world it is, how it is synchronized with, and in proximity to, the rest of the world. This concern is never abandoned throughout the book and indeed is present in its very closing words.

For the final words of Ulysses are not the famous ‘yes I said yes I will Yes; they are not some Everlasting Yea ventriloquized through Molly as the fleshy incorporation of Das ewig Weibliche. The last words of Ulysses, the ones that provide the true closure, are (and it is proper and fitting in an Irish novel that they should be) paratextual: an annotation made in the author’s own voice, and situating the book deliberately and precisely in real space and in real time. ‘Trieste-Zürich-Paris 1914-1921’. That is not just a modernist variation on the scribal signing-off flourish: it brings to Joyce’s celebration of Ireland precisely [231] that geographical and historical context from which Ireland had been so often removed by the earlier literary imagination. Joyce carefully situates the fictional universe of Dublin, 16 June 1904, not in a Celtic never-never-land or in a stagnated out-of-the-way backwater, but squarely in the space-time of the Joyce family and its vagaries across Europe.

The great originality of Joyce is that he dared to describe an Irish setting in terms of its normalcy - for that was precisely the quality which all earlier authors, whatever their persuasions and sympathies, had denied Ireland. It took, then, one of the greatest innovatory geniuses in European literature to break through the mould of the ingrained discourse of marginality and allochrony which had dominated and suffused the representation of Ireland. In retrospect, that fact makes clear how very protean and all-pervasive that mode of imagining Ireland had been in the nineteenth century; and even today its abiding influence remains noticeable. The acknowledgement of normalcy is still very rare in Ireland-related discourse.

Of course, anyone is free to imagine one’s nation, its cultural profile and its status in the world and in history, as one sees fit. But our freedom of imagination does not exempt us from the necessity of sober reason and critical judgement. No loyalty should exist by virtue of going unquestioned. It is important to look at the ramifications, connotations and presuppositions of our modes of cultural and political identification; and one underlying question must be faced, and must be faced seriously. Should any nation really wish to restrict its self-definition, its sense of ‘what we are’, to the exclusivist, particularist and exoticist terms of ‘the way in which we differ from the rest of humanity’? Joyce’s Ulysses, in rejecting the poetics of anachronism, also rejects such nineteenth-century particularism, and gives eloquent proof of a truth which had become obscured in the preceding century: that Ireland, like any nation, is part of the world at large, and that Irish nationality, like any nationality, is to be defined as part of, and not in contradistinction to, the world as a whole. [End.]

Ftn. 3: One occasionally hears counter-interpretations to the effect that the ‘journey westward’ which Gabriel finds himself forced to undertake is a ‘Good Thing’, a necessary return to reflect on first principles. This attempt to give a more positive nationally Irish reading to Joyce appears distortive. It turns the story at cross purposes, against the general theme of Dubliners, against Joyce’s penchant for masochistically sentimental indulgence in marital jealousy, against his Ibsenitish [sic] enthusiasm evinced at the time, against his endorsement of Synge against the Miss Ivorses in the Abbey audience in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, and against feelings as expressed in his Trieste lectures that Ireland should be finished once and for all with its morbid and jejune invocation of a dead past. The ‘journey westward’ was eloquently rejected by Joyce himself in his decision to head for the Continent In that respect, the reading as advanced by John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish literary revival, pp. 142-74, still holds good, despite different recent interpretations by Luke Gibbons and Emer Nolan. Gibbons sees the final epiphany in “The Dead” as an acceptance, by this most urban of writers, of Ireland’s rural communitarian background; Gibbons juxtaposes Gabriel’s modem, journalism preoccupations with Gretta’s more communitarian involvement in song and oral  communication (Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork UP 1996, pp. 134-47). Nolan revalorizes Gabriel’s ‘swoon’ as a redemption from his self-centered masculinity, the admission of feminine affect, and a concomitant ‘resurgence of tradition’ relayed ‘through the figure of the woman and her illicit passion’ (James Joyce and Nationalism, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 24-36.) (Leerssen, op. cit. [Conclusion – Notes], p.228, n.3.)