Focusing on FW in terms of approaches to Irish history allows us to interpret Joyce at some of the most intense levels of his artistry. Studying the difficult ways in which Joyce explored Irish history also enables us to open up new and affirmative dimensions of historical experience in ourselves. … Joyce in his peculiar courage, could salvage a “yes” from human experience without ceasing to explore and acknowledge the constants terrors and uncertainties that beset any attempt to redeem human history for the sake of a living present.’ (p.3.)

[…] I polemically set my humanistic assumptions and methods in relation to the current scene of Joycean historicism and demonstrate how the critical dialogue on Joyce’s engagement with history intersects with that of professional Irish historians seeking to define their common subject matter. (p.4).

Contests Jameson’s cultural-materialist reading in The Political Unconscious and ‘Ulysses in History’, in McCormack & Stead, eds., James Joyce and Modern Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982), pp.126-41.

Jameson’s consistent project in ‘Ulysses in History’ is to conform Joyce’s novel to his own categories of human collectivity. […/] Jameson’s analysis of Ulysses depends upon a radical simplification of Joyce’s texts that he justifies purely by previous assertions of his theory.’ (p.12.)

Quotes Jameson: ‘The subjective or point-of-view chapter, “Eumaeus”, asks us why we should be interested in stories about private individuals any longer, given the extraordinary relativisation of all individual experience, and the transformation of its contents into so many purely psychological reactions. Meanwhile, the objective chapter, “Ithaca”, completes an infinite subdivision of the objective contents of the narrative, breaking “events” into their smallest material components and asking whether, in that form, they still have any interest whatsoever.’ (‘Ulysses in History’, p.140.)

Hofheinz comments: ‘Jameson’s argument that these two chapters pose a radical questioning of individual, subjective experience would scarcely be challenged by most readers of Ulysses. Jameson, though, finds interpretive [sic] pluralism repellent. Consequently, he proceeds to emphasise that the reasonable quality of his assertion reflects the absolute truth of the dialectical model.’ (p.13; Hofheinz goes on to charge Jameson with a ‘stupefying insensitivity to common human experience’, idem.)

Quotes Wolfgang Iser (The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Johns Hopkins 1978) ‘The production of the meaning of literary texts […] does not merely entail the discovery of the unformulated, which can then be taken over by the active imagination of the reader, it also entails the possibility that we may formulate ourselves and so discover what had previously seemed to elude our consciousness’ (p.294.).

Hofheinz comments: ‘From this perspective, narrative provides a field in which individuals may, if they so choose, question and explore their historical existence without reducing their lives to Althusserian “subject positions” in social collectivities. At the same time, it discloses a world of existential uncertainty and terror that impels many people to hide themselves in such collectivities. Ricoeur’s “aporias of temporality” are problems so severe and inexorable that a reader’s self-formulation on the level of narrative can be a dreadful prospect, especially when a work such as Finnegans Wake demands the imaginary abandonment of much that is comforting and familiar.’ (p.19.)

Quotes Ricoeur: ‘inchoate narrativity … constitutes genuine demand for narrative’; ‘untold and repressed stories’; ‘prehistory’; ‘We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.’ (Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, pp.74-76.)

Hofheinz challenges Attridge and Hayman in their interpretation of the dissolved ‘subject’ of Finnegans Wake.

‘Joyce did not fetishise the Irish art of storytelling. In all instances, he establishes a difference between the stories his characters tell and those they need to tell.’ (p.23.) ‘The stories are thus separable from the ones that need to be told, reflecting without replicating them, creating a semantic relativity in their telling that links Joyce’s insights with Freud’s. Joyce depicts narration as a compulsive, essential, but inadequate expression of human desire. […]’ (p.24.)

Dialogues positively with John Bishop.

Reads the “Norwegian Captain” as a tale of failing patriarchy: ‘From Gabriel Conroy through HCE, Joyce’s Irish marriages founder as the husbands try and fail to live out paradigms of patriarchal conduct, heroic and mundane, against backgrounds filled with popular imagery of Ireland’s heroic past.’ (p.34.)

The Free State thereby enshrined as law the predicament that appears again and again throughout Joyce’s fiction: Irish homes in which fathers crippled with alcoholism, impotence, and rage beat, neglect, or drive their wives into states of enervation and despair and throw their children to the wolves. Joyce agreed with De Valera that the foundation of Ireland is the patriarchal family, but that concept for him was one laced with horror and outrage.

The awakening of Ireland into modernity is thus wedded in Joyce’s last novel to a resurgence of patriarchy, the primary organising principle of metaphysics and social formation in the Western world. An Irish father’s accountability or lack of it, evoked in jagged edges of narrative expressing the patriarchal order’s knots of contradiction and pain, laces upward through the blindness of Irish habit into the historiography of Finnegans Wake, an anamorphosis waiting to materialise behind the screen of historical discourse. [… &c.]’ (p.38.)

[This chapter gives an account of the rise of so-called ‘revisionism’ in Ireland and its contestation in the climate of the Northern troubles.]

Instead of the realistic historical contextualisation implicit in Dubliners and A Portrait, where the weight of collective human experience bears heavily but logically on each individual life, Ulysses anticipates the midden-heap of Finnegans Wake by suggesting that history is an enormous mass of debris, an inertial mass of cultural and psychological garbage that clutters and obstructs the creative powers of living human minds and hearts. The first three chapters of Ulysses detail Stephen Dedalus’ famous “nightmare of history”, offering a highly subjective narrative in which Stephen conflates his crippling personal grief over his mother’s death, his father’s decrepitude, his family’s squalor and his physical deterioration with the recurrent miseries of his colonised country. (p.41.)

Joyce’s internationalisation of Ireland in Ulysses paves the way for a more radical effort in Finnegans Wake, where he constitutes Irish experience as a prevalent but occult template for warring tongues and world-historical themes. (p.42.)

The only Irish unity the Citizen or his drinking partners can claim is a general agreement to share alcoholic narcosis laced with resentment, contempt and malice / Bloom’s perspective holds the moral centre of “Cyclops”: the only concretely meaningful definition of an Irish “nation” in the chapter is the Irish people taken as a whole, their differences intact, “people living in the same place” who are also “living in different places”. The painful ambiguity of the Irish nation in “Cyclops” extends, by implication, to the other nations reviled by the Citizen for their treachery and instability. (p.43.)

Quotes Seamus Deane: ‘[Joyce’s] very real disaffection with politics, Irish or international, enhanced his sense of isolation and was translated into his creed of artistic freedom. Since history could not yield a politics, it was compelled to yield an aesthetic. In this process, disaffection became disdain, political reality dissolved into fiction, fiction realised itself purely in terms of its own medium, language. As a consequence, the finite nature of historical fact was supplanted by the infinite, or near-infinite, possibilities of language. Language was cast into a form which would extend the range of possible signification to an ultimate degree of openness, thereby setting itself against the closed world of limited and limiting historical fact.’ (Celtic Revivals, 1985, p.92; here p.45.)

Quotes Syvlia Beach: ‘I think Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlour game where someone whisopers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a “nightpiece”. I think, too, that, like the author’s sight, the work is often blurred.’ (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1956, p.185; p.46.)

Hofheinz gives an account of the emergence of the ‘ahistorical’ Joyce which reached its apex in the 1950s among critics trained in aestheticist, neo-Aristotelian perspectives who say Joyce as an aspirant to heroic transcendence of historical conditions, a Byronic hero of liberating modernist form - the chief of these being Richard Ellmann. (~p.48.)

Compares Adaline Glasheen’s ‘flashing insights on the Wake’s historical data [with] her skepticism about Joyce’s historical commitment’ (p.49.)

Hofheinz also speaks of the ‘[d]econstructive Joyceans [who] often perceive in Joyce’s texts a destruction of the social contract wedding signified to signifier, and [who] have celebrated this destruction as a subversion of dominant ideological formations for the sake of “free play”, a utopia where the human subject may find freedom.’ (p.51.) He continues: ‘This optimistically liberationist strain of deconstructive criticism continues to flourish in uneasy conjunction with an alternative form of deconstructive analysis employed by proponents of cultural materialism, who define textual historicity as a form of economic production implicating the writer or speaker in compulsory political systems.’ (p.51.)

[Gives account of “Joyce and History” Conference conducted at Yale University in Oct. 1990 and published by Spoo in JJQ, 28:4 (1991), noting how few of the participants focus on historiography; discusses in some detail Cheryl Herr’s ‘Ireland from the Outside’, and quotes:] ‘In this particular nightmare of history, the surveillance apparatus paces all human and narrative desires. And Finnegans Wake resituates itself as a cybernetic history machine, feedback-looped, self-adjusting, making itself readable by insiders and outsiders, then and now … We begin to see that the patterns of self-representation and historiography that were carefully honed by the nationalists from the nineteenth century on were so cannily extrapolated to their logical extensions by Joyce that he was able to predict quite precisely what the future held for a nationalist rising in the face of the British administration.’ (Ibid., p.784-85; here p.56.)

Hofheinz is scathing about Herr’s assumption that the outcome of history is necessarily that which can be known from the priveliged perspective of … Cheryl Herr. (p.57.) On the other hand he draws sympathetic attention to attempts within the Irish Historical Society to cope with Irish society and culture, albeit those historians came up against the rock of renewed Irish troubles and their own liberal apologetics. (~p.58ff.)

Quotes F. S. L. Lyons: ‘I, too, have been seduced by political history, only to find when I moved on to other fields that the foundations were often lacking and that significant generalisation was virtually impossible. But this, you may say, is for the historians to settle among themselves. Let them get on with their history of culture and not bother us until they have something to show for their labours. Fair enough, I reply, if it were only a problem for the historians. That., however, is just what it is not. For the fact that historians are inarticulate about the different cultures which collide with each other in this island is merely a symptom of a more profound ignorance which runs right through our society and is exhibited in excelsis on the other side of the Irish sea.’ (‘The Burden of History’, rep. in Field Day Anthol., Vol. III, p.582; here p.58.)

Quotes J. J. Lee: ‘The concern of the founders of IHS with adequate documentation, a pre-requisite for the establishment of satisfactory scholarly standards, involved a distaste for the study of more recent subjects on which sufficient source material was deemed not to be available. It would not be until the 1970s that Irish cabinet records became accessible […] Many potential sources on modern history in general, and on contemporary history in particular, remained unexploited simply because historians lacked the imagination to think of them as sources.’ (Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, pp.593-94; here p.59.) ‘Also, because of their failure to explore other aspects at anything like the same level of professionalism that they devoted to the political, the historians were unable to adequately illuminate the linkages.’ (Ibid., p.632; here p.59.)

[The historians’] ‘inevitable failure to teach the Irish public how to cultivate synthetic conceptual skills through holistic appreciation of Irish history. (p.59.)

Quotes Lee on Corkery: ‘Corkery’s virulent political partisanship made him anathema to apostles of the new faith [i.e., Moody’s ‘new’ Irish history]. But in rightly rejecting his bias, HIS devotees also neglected the potential of individuals and collectivities, his fascination with societry rather than with the state …’ (Ibid., p.590; here p.60.)

Further quotLee es a ‘bitterly funny’ story of De Valera’s incarceration of the IRA during the emergency, and his permitting them to read ‘Irish history’ in the doctored form of the new state which inevitably cast them as the bearers of the true flame of Irish freedom lacking only realpolitiks to stand side by side with de Valera in a pantheon of his own making.

[Defence of the irish Hist. Soc.:] ‘Modern Irish historians have been strikingly ecumenical and public-minded in their professional behaviour since the 1930s, when they seemed to have enjoyed an unusual social mobility [refers to cross-border links]. Gives an account of Moody’s spearheading of lecture series on RE and BBC NI (Home Service) between 1953 and 1957. Further, ‘Moody and his followers clearly projected a new Irish Enlightenment rather than the counter-revolution with which they were charged. Their goal was to transcend irrational and destructive nationalism with a rational, creative, and pluralistic sense of nationality. An unintended side effect of their “enlightening” project, though, as sometimes been an apparent insensitivity to deep and prevalent Irish feeling that has betrayed the cultural alienation implicit in the “objective” critique of Irish nationalism.’ (p.62.)

On R. F. Foster: Foster does not lack compassion - his survey [in Modern Ireland] deepens and complicates [62] previous perceptions of Ireland’s many struggles. On the other hand, the effect of his analysis of the famine dissolves its real and enduring trauma and terror by diminishing the crimes and sufferings endured by the Irish during that period. He achieves this diminution by rationalising the famine through recourse to his preferred realm of transcendent historical value, the free market. In the process, he seems to exonerate figures like Charles Trevelyan […] who believed that the disaster was the providential act of a supply-side god. Foster’s impassive treatment of Charles Trevelyan casts some light on the reasons for the “revisionist” historians’ bad press in Ireland. Their generosity towards colonising agents in Irish history has certainly seemed to originate in a reflexive riding of ideological curves: they further they draw from Irish nationalism, the closer they come to embracing the transcendental rationalism of English liberal thought. English liberalism and its concomitant complacency about the hegemonic effect of transnational market forces is an especially tempting ideological option for modern Irish historians, since liberalism’s ubiquitous entrenchment in British culture has given it a slippery but real cultural footing everywhere in Ireland.
 Moody and his followers came to bear the public stigma of crypto-colonialists who attacked the mental means by which the Irish defined themselves as post-colonial [… &c.] (p.63.)

By the time Ireland’s imminent absorption into cosmopolitan culture sank in on the general public, attacks on nationalism by Moody, Lyons and others struck many people as [63] apologies for British and multinational hegemony, rather than attempts to conceptualise and transcend the ideological bases of modern Ireland’s violence and repression. In order to revise nationalist history, they had to deny the direly real effectuality of the raw emotions that keep such history alive. This denial limited their power to address Irish experience and lsot them credibility when Yeats’s “blood-dimmed tide” was loosed again. (p.64.)

Quotes Seamus Deane: ‘When I returned from a Berkeley under curfew and full of tear gas, I spent my first weekend in Derry. It was October 1968. The occasion was the first civil rights march. Once again, people were running from the police, batons were swinging, and TV cameras were purring. I had arrived at a crucial time. Four years later, Derry had Bloody Sunday. in between, the blood-letting in the North had begun in earnest. The only response I could make was through poetry. Then, for the first time, I began to feel a member of a generation afflicted by a historical crisis and, again for the first time, I began to have a sense of what Irish writing had, for centuries, been grappling to overcome. When history becomes coincident with biography, poetry emerges. That has happened now in the Northern for that generation which reached maturity before 1970.’ (‘Between Irish and British Fidelities: Poetry’, in Kathleen Jo Ryan & Bernard Share, eds., Irish Traditions, NY: Abradale Press 1985, p.75; here p.65.

Deane identified Field Day Theatre with a search for ‘a new discourse for the relationship between our idea of the human subject and our idea of human communities;’ also speaks of the ‘reorientations that are required of individuals and groups who have undergone a traumatic cultural and political crisis so fundamental tha they must forge for themselves a new speech, a new history or life story that would give it some rational or coherent form’; and his concern with ‘the concealed imperialism of the multinational, the infinite compatibility of all cultures with one another envisaged in terms of the ultimate capacity of all computers to read one another.’ (Intro., Eagleton, et al., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, p.3, p.14, 19; here p.66 [other order].)

Quotes Deane: ‘We cannot but be anxious about our identity if we doom ourselves to be always in search of an idea so elusive that no society could ever embody it and, even more, an idea so eccentric that no feeling of normality can live for long in its company. People do not only possess a culture, they are possessed by it. Identity is here and now, not elsewhere and at another time. Real independence starts with that recognition. Otherwise, a selective reading of our lost past will become an explanation for our lost future. In a strange, but unattractive way, we will remember the future because we have forgotten the past.’ (‘Remembering the Future’, The Crane Bag, 8, 1, 1984, p.87.)

Finnegans Wake does not provide a history of the future, Irish or otherwise. What it does provide is a manifold of [67] interpretive tools for understanding how people delimit their future according to how they understand their pasts. This provision is nowhere more evident than in Joyce’s use of historical writing about Ireland. (p.68.)

Joyce’s use of Irish historical writing is hard to quantify. People continue to debate whether his staging of such mateiral is facile allusion based on scant understanding of primary sources, or something deeper and more structurally compelling. Those who say that Joyce was glib with Irish historical mateirals can cite the oblique, parodic tone of their appearance in his work and argue that Joyce did not systematically use primary sources at all. Instead, they argue, his knowledge of Irish historiography was fragmentary and filce. Drawing on primary Irish historical writing that Joyce did know in some way - e.g., that of John Gilbert, D. A. Chart, Charles Haliday, P. W. Joyce, John O’Donovan - requires a hypoethetical extension if one is to demonstrate a link between those sources and Joyce’s work. Irish historiography, though, is a complex and ambiguous as Finnegans Wake. Drawing meaningful correlations between the two textual universes requires a comparative focus by which one may designate affinities and similarities without doing interpretive violence to either. (p.69.)

In Finnegans Wake Joyce represents a general human predicament of identity-in-opposition, a dialectical relation pervading individuals’ interior and exteriorised experience. (p.70.)

One of the consensual fields, the “topological”, arised in Irish historical writing when problems of topography and translation come to the fore. The topological field tends to emerge when historians seek to work backwards in to the past from physical and rhetorical topoi made fragmentary by breaks in tradition, rather than forward from a [70] continuous bridge of consensually defined evidence. [..] This problem qualifies topological historry as a uniquely prodcutive focus for the distance between sign and referent defining historical play in Finnegans Wake. (pp.70-71.)

The Irish art of naming assured identity-in-opposition between antagonismts, enabling them to agree upon riciprocal paradigms of victory and loss: Aughrim and the river Boyne … (p.71.)

Quotes Norman Vance: ‘The map of Ireland’s physical features and Ireland’s place on the map of Europe are … the only constants in Irish affairs. In neither language nor genre nor “literature” as we tend ot understand it today offers much support for sustained continuities in Ireland, do topographical and geographical permanances contribute much of substance to Irish literary tradition? They do. Poems of place have survived from the earliest times. Ireland’s geographical location close to the British mainland entails an enduring Irish-English (or Irish-British) dialectic institutionalised by conquest, obsessively explored in literature […] But simple polarities are too simple for the tangles of the Irish experience and Irish writing. In any case, it is not so much demonstrable continuity as resented discontinuity that stimulates the tradition-seeking process.’ (Irish Literature: A Social History, Blackwell 1990, p.8.)

Irish historians of the late colonial era, in their question to resurrect a lost Ireland that would clarify their living present, sought to decipher the epitaph of an Ireland buried alive.. The crytology involved in topological history - the working backwards from the scattered topoi of a shattered past - depends upon the logic of a crypt, a hidden space where one seeks to wake the dead. The writing of history, though, obviates such a question. Writing cuts the epitaph for the past’s translation into the present. Whether Irish historians and antiquarians of the late colonial period read ancient Irish documents in the “original” or in English translation, they affirmed the destruction of the Irish Gaelic they sought. Such a loss of the Irish past through inscription may be the reason why Joyce cited Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies both by Moore’s titles and the names of the Irish airs to which his poems were adapted. […] the search to find concrete centres for Ireland’s competing names and claims, consequently gave oppsoing Irish parties common mode of reference, a mutual agreement ot encrypt the present in topics of the past. (p.73.)

Gabriel’s vulnerability to the Irish dead on his journey west is precisely what Stephen Dedalus attempts to avoid on his abortive journey East to the European continent. […] Joyce’s insistence that Ireland either wake up or lie down in the grave forever is not so much a scornful dismissal of his country as it is a concise utterance of the question raised throughout his work with irony and compassion: the difference between a wake and an awakening, between locating oneself in the past and finding oneself in the present, depends upon an existential assessment of names and claims wound into one’s identity.’ (p.73.)

Quotes Joyce: ‘If [Ireland] is truly capable of reviving, let her awake, or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever.’ (CW174.) Also: ‘His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was faiding out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.’ (D223.)

[Hofheinz (pp.75-78) examines Ferguson’s The Cromlech on Howth (1861) [unpag. with interleaved blank pages and copious notes at the end, ill. by Margaret Stokes and lettering initials from the Book of Kells, and glosses:] In Ferguson’s historical scheme throughout The Cromlech on Howth, the landscape of Howth promontory and environs and the ancient ruins on it are of primary importance: all historical and legendary [76] narrative comes from memory of the land or contemplation of the voices encoded in the land when memory is gone. The past is encrypted and entombed: by symbolic extension, the land’s features mirror the features of those who are lost. Ossian the poet/Ferguson the antiquarian keen over the dead, incanting the past through song. Ferguson’s poem concludes with a stanza that combines topographical vividness, cultural interment, and historical alienation: “Farewell, the strength of men is worn,/The night approaches dark and chill./Sleep, till perchance an endless morn/Descend the glittering hill./Of Oscar and Aideen bereft,/Slo Ossian sang. The Fenians sped/Three might shouts to heaven: and left/Ben Edar to the dead.’ / Ossian/Ferguson’s hymn to historical transcendence dissolges into the darkness that obliterates the heroic age of Gaelic Ireland, leaving behind only the promontary of Howth and the cairn at its crown. Aideen and the other Fenians are asleep as well as interred, both dead and alive, waiting for a morning that will wake them from their living death. Behind the production of The Cromlech on Howth is the real-world endeavour by Ferguson, Petrie, Davis, O’Donovan, and others to claim the Irish past through names, to discover Irish history from cultural artifacts. (p.77.)

History of the port of Dublin commissioned to Charles Haliday by Ballast Board, 1850, prompting him to write The Scandavian Kingdom of Dublin.

Hofheinz cites and quotes John Andrews, ‘Ireland - the Land Question and After, 1871-1918’, in A History of the Ordnance Survey, Folkestone: William Dawson & Sons 1982), ‘A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-century Ireland, OUP 1985; and ‘Sir Charles Arden-Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (Chatham: Inst. of Royal Engineers 1926.)

Discusses Colby and Larcom’s administration and management of the Ordnance Survey, and especially their setting up of the Topography Department, 1835-42. Larcom was future under-secretary for Ireland.

P. W. Joyce used the Topography Dept.’s records as the chief source of his two vol. Irish Names of Places (1869).

[Quotes Irish Names of Places:] ‘The local nomenclature of most countries of Europe is made up of the language of the various races … In our island, there was scarcely any admixture of races, till the introduction of an important English element, chiefly within the last three hundred years - for, as I have shown, the Danish irruptions produced no appreciable effect; and accordingy, our place-names are purely Celtic, with the exception of about a thirteenth part, which are English, and mostly of recent introduction. This great name system, begun thousands of years ago by the first wave of population that reached our island, was continued unceasingy from age to age, till it embraced the minute features of the country in its intricate network; and such as it sprang forth from the minds of our ancestors, it exists almost unchanged to this day.’ Further: ‘This is the first book ever written on the subject. In this respect I am somewhat in the position of a settler of a new countyr, who has all the advantages of priority of claim, but who purchases them too dearly perhaps, by the labour and difficulty of tracking his way through the wilderness, and clearing his settlement from primeval forest and tangled underwood’ (pp.vi-vii).

Hofheinz notes that Joyce’s metaphorical self-description as colonist, ‘a self-identification easily made by a successful participant in the liberalised colonial culture of late nineteenth-century Ireland’, and goes on to illustrate the contradiction: ‘Any attempt to excavate and resurrect a “purely Celtic” Ireland from its living death requires the use of resources patented by Celtic Ireland’s destroyers.’ (p.83.)

Haliday was posthumously edited [‘encrypted’] by John P. Prendergast.

[to be cont.]