garryowen and the bloody mangy mongrel of irish modernity

Garryowen and the Bloody MangyMongrel of Irish Modernity

Sam SloteTrinity College Dublin

Of all the attempts to delineate and demarcate a strict pedi-gree concerning the question of national identity, few would be more curious than Dr. James W. Redfield’s Comparative

Physiognomy or Resemblances between Man and Animals, originally published in 1852.1 Redfield bravely berates phrenology for focus-ing solely on the cranium and thereby ignoring what the face might have to reveal about a person’s innate character; for Redfield, the face reveals quite a lot. Indeed, in terms of determining personality, he claims that the brain is subservient to the face (10). He thus proposes a taxonomy of facial characteristics divided by racial and national types, with each national type compared to one or more animals. He claims that each national character corresponds to some animal and that this correspondence can be educed through facial similarities, although throughout his book, he is really just comparing national stereotypes with animalistic stereotypes. His analysis proceeds by confusing genotype with phenotype, the type with the individual: for Redfield, the outward appearance of an individual betrays his or her innate characteristics. A second order of specious conflation comes when Redfield compares one phenotype (the national) to another (the animalistic), as if national identity were as intrinsic and essential as biological species. He notes the resemblance of Germans to lions, Prussians to cats, Laplanders to reindeer, Arabs to camels, Englishmen to bulls, and, without much originality, Frenchmen to frogs.2

Redfield devotes two chapters to a not entirely flattering compari-son of the Irish to dogs (see Figure 1), thereby adding another bestial caricature to the Irish repertoire. L. Perry Curtis Jr. argues that vari-ous Victorian ethnologists attempted to provide “a scientific basis for assuming that such characteristics as violence, poverty, improvidence, political volatility, and drunkenness were inherently Irish and only Irish.”3 He catalogues numerous examples of “the dominant Victorian stereotype of Paddy [which] looked far more like an ape than a man” (29). Redfield’s canine analogue is thus atypical, but the basic points of comparison, which emphasize inferior, unsophisticated, and even brutal behaviors, are consonant with the examples of the simianized

James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 46, Number 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2009), pp. . Copyright © for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2009. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.

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Paddy that Curtis provides. The initial connection Redfield posits between the Hibernian and the canine involves “Irish eloquence,” which he characterizes as being as bellicose as a dog’s braying (253). From this, he goes on to list other behavioral similarities: “Compare the Irishman and the dog in respect to barking, snarling, howling, begging, fawning, flattering, back-biting, quarrelling, blustering, scenting, seizing, hanging on, teasing, rollicking, and whatever other traits you may discover in either, and you will be convinced that there is a wonderful resemblance” (254). In effect, Redfield’s argument is a wonder of tautology: by looking for common traits between species, you will find a resemblance.

For Redfield, these similarities both of appearance and behavior betray an essential, natural connection between man and beast:

As the dog has a predisposition to be fond of carrion, and has a large chest for the exhalation of carbonic acid gas, it is natural that the Irishman should have a leaning to fermented liquor, and that his chest should be large, enabling him to dispose of a great quantity of excre-mentitious gases by exhalation, and thus adapting him to the evil habit he is inclined to. Under these circumstances, if the Irishman is temper-ate, it is a rare virtue. (266)

Although there are different breeds of dog for each type of Irishman, Redfield admits that some traits are inherent across breeds and are general all over Ireland so that a root or fundamental dog represent-ing the Irish character can be identified: “The genuine Irishman . . . resembles that noblest of all dogs, the Irish wolf-dog” (257). Like the wolf-dog, the Irishman is a great wit who is exceedingly fond of sport and game, but Redfield starts to confuse matters when he notes that the Irish wolf-dog resembles the wolf, the beast that is his natural enemy (261). And so, at least in this case, he allows for some degree of contamination across species. In sum total, Redfield’s canine analo-gies characterize the Irish as subservient once domesticated by their masters: “[The Irish] are good servants if you deal harshly with them, as a master does with his dog; but the moment you are disposed to be familiar with them they are all over you, jumping against you, and laying their dirty paws upon your clean clothes, as if you were no better than they” (264). At least in their potential for domestication, Redfield’s canine Paddy is not quite as brutal as the simian Paddy stereotypical in the nineteenth century. Later in his analysis, however, he admits that this condition “is not so much his fault as the fault of circumstances” (272); or, as Haines has it in “Telemachus,” “[i]t seems history is to blame” (U 1.649). In other words, Redfield introduces a historically conditioned, that is, contingent, circumstance of (canine) servility with the natural condition he elsewhere posits, thereby

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confusing the essentialist argument he propounds. In any case, for Redfield, the canine condition of the Irish bespeaks servility and a resistance to modernity.

Joyce was no lover of dogs.4 His figuration of the animal in Ulysses recapitulates, in inverted form, however, some of Redfield’s odder and more outrageous claims. In both “Proteus” and “Circe,” dogs appear as fungible beasts, ever-transforming into other figures.5 Redfield’s study presupposes unadulterated pedigrees between nations and animals; otherwise his taxonomy would collapse. For Joyce, however, dogs are always mongrels (bloody, mangy ones at that), and it is precisely in this mongrelization that they might have some affinity to the Irish. Writing against the more xenophobic ele-ments of the Gaelic League, Joyce argued in his 1907 lecture “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” that

[o]ur civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are recon-ciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language (if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland. (CW 165-66)

In effect, Joyce’s conception of national identity is always already mongrel. Of course, such hybridity also characterizes the English, as Joyce indicates in “Oxen of the Sun” by tracing the evolution of English prose style through Latin and Saxon antecedents. In contrast to Joyce, some of the strongest partisans of Irish nationalism in the Literary Revival, such as Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran, exempli-fied Redfield’s canine analogy in their mutual presupposition of a pure and natural national character that was sullied by the imposi-tion of English rule.6 Boasts of imagined purity (whether by Hyde or Redfield) rely, however, upon rhetoric. As Redfield admits at the start of his first chapter on the canine Irish,

[w]e have lingered on the verge of one part of our subject, longing for the eloquence which it would seem calculated to inspire, and find that we are likely never to go on unless we content us with plain English, like that which has already served us. That subject is the resemblance between the Irishman and the dog; and the eloquence which we craved (without knowing exactly what we were waiting for) is “Irish elo-quence.” (253)

In order properly to make his case about the Irish, Redfield admits


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that he would need to adopt Irish (that is, canine) attributes. In other words, he must contaminate his study. And such contamination is, of course, the ineluctable character of nation, history, and rhetoric.

This inevitably leads us to the “Cyclops” episode where ques-tions of nationalism and history are vigorously debated in Barney Kiernan’s fine premises on Little Britain Street. Amidst these debates lies the dog known to all men, Garryowen. Writing to the Times Literary Supplement in 1964, W. J. Rasbridge notes that Garryowen was the name of a “famous Irish Setter,” born in 1876 and owned by J. J. Giltrap, a founding member of the Red Irish Setter Club (and father to Joyce’s Aunt Josephine).7 Joyce’s Garryowen, a mongrel “red setter wolfdog” (U 12.715), is somewhat more dyspeptic and thus further removed from the historical Garryowen than the Citizen is from Michael Cusack.8 Joseph Prescott writes that the name Garryowen is fitting because it “combines the title of a popular Irish roistering song—to go with the nationalist context—and the filthy associations of Garryowen, the suburb of Limerick which the song celebrates.”9 Garryowen is thus the perfect figure for raucous, thuggish Irish nationalism, his mongrel status no accidental attribute.

Of course, Garryowen’s status as wolf-dog (albeit admittedly mon-grel), coupled with his propinquity for proud and bellicose Irishmen drinking in a pub, seemingly confirms Redfield’s suppositions about the Irish. The whole scene at Barney Kiernan’s, however, is character-ized by a rampant hybridity, even as the Citizen attempts to defend an Irish purity against the perfidious Sassenach invader. The Citizen berates Bloom for, among other things, his liberal tolerance of diversi-ty. The Citizen’s co-nationals at Kiernan’s let him get away with a lot, although the narrator of the pub scene, an anonymous drunken dun, regards his arch-nationalist talk as merely a string of old clichés.10 The drink-fueled debates in “Cyclops” are a counterpoint to the sober Loyalist history pronounced by Garrett Deasy in “Nestor.” While the sympathies of the Citizen and Mr. Deasy are mostly in opposi-tion, they both employ a selective and distorted view of their history in order to buttress their ideologies. Furthermore, besides a shared anti-Semitism, both the Citizen and Deasy agree that the immediate cause of English involvement in Ireland was Devorghil’s infidelity.11 Nationalist and Loyalist thus both agree on misogyny and a prejudice against what is other or hybrid. To take a line from Hyde’s lecture on de-Anglicization, the Citizen is in a “most anomalous position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it” (“Necessity” 154). Like Redfield’s wolf-dog, who is in danger of resembling the wolf he despises, the Citizen’s values are inflected, if not infected, by those values he opposes. In attacking the English, the Citizen becomes somewhat hybridized himself.

The Citizen’s vision of history is premised on betrayal: Ireland has



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been victimized and stymied for centuries by its neighbor. As he says, “[a]ny civilisation they have they stole from us” (U 12.1200). In effect, his view of Irish history reprises the motif of the song “The Croppy Boy,” which served as a set-piece in “Sirens”; Tom Kernan calls this song “[o]ur native Doric” (U 11.991), which is obviously paradoxical since Doric is not traditionally native to Ireland. In any case, the song tells the poor, bathos-soaked story of the cropped-hair Wexford rebel of 1798 who is treacherously slain by a Loyalist officer disguised as a priest. Within “Sirens,” the song is overdetermined, resonating with both Bloom and Stephen: like Bloom, the Croppy Boy leaves behind no male heir, and, like Stephen, the young rebel did not pray for his mother on her deathbed (U 11.1064-67, 1042-43). The song means more than just betrayal: “Our . . . Doric” is hybridized in that its reso-nances exceed the nationalist context.

The Citizen, however, resists the hybridization of Ireland. For instance, he laments the English names listed in the births and deaths section of what he calls the “Irish all for Ireland Independent” (U 12.222). And the only concession he allows Bloom in his argument about the English contribution to “moderation and botheration and their colonies and their civilisation” is “[t]heir syphilisation” (U 12.1195-96, 1197).12 This echoes the claim made in Gaelic League and Sinn Fein propaganda at the time that the British soldiers stationed in Ireland helped spread venereal disease. Dublin’s garrison consistently was, in fact, among the top five most afflicted in all of the United Kingdom: in 1880, more than one-third of the 4,537 men stationed in Dublin were treated for venereal disease, including 940 cases of syphilis.13

Even as he condemns contamination, adultery, and hybridization, the Citizen is himself not immune to the foreign. His own contami-nation takes place during some of this episode’s parodic burlesques. The initial description of him follows from the style of, among others, François Rabelais. In a sense, this burlesque is a parody of something that is already itself parodic: “The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deep-chested stronglimbed frankeyed . . . longheaded deepvoiced bare-kneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero” (U 12.151-55). He wears a necklace on which is “graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity,” such as “Conn of hundred battles,” a legitimate Irish hero of antiquity (U 12.175-76, 176-77). But the necklace also contains more than a few oddities, such as “Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus” (U 12.182-83), and so on. This list represent-ing Irish heroism is thus mongrelized.

Passages like this prompted critics like Valery Larbaud to pro-nounce that Joyce’s Irishness was inherently hybrid; seemingly fol-lowing from Joyce’s “Saints and Sages” lecture, Larbaud writes that


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Joyce “is what we call a pure ‘Milesian’: Irish and Catholic of old stock, from the Ireland that benefits from some affinities with Spain, France, and Italy, but for whom England is a strange land which cannot be made closer even by the commonality of language.”14 As Larbaud suggests, Joyce’s parodic multiplication of styles is itself distinctly Irish. Furthermore, this miscegenation was ignored by the Literary Revival; indeed, Ernest Boyd attacked Larbaud for claim-ing a “prematurely cosmopolitan reputation” for Joyce and testily insisted that Joyce could only be understood in the proper context of the Revival.15 For Larbaud, Joyce is a mongrel, whereas for Boyd he is a pure-breed.

Joyce’s stylistic burlesques in “Cyclops” nevertheless can be con-strued as having an Irish pedigree. In The Irish Comic Tradition, Vivian Mercier argues that parody and comic hyperbole are salient elements of Irish mythology, which depicts heroes such as Finn MacCool and Fergus MacRoi as outsized buffoons with voracious sexual and culi-nary appetites.16 Thus Joyce’s burlesque of Irish nationalism draws upon the same tradition from which the Literary Revivalists them-selves drew inspiration. Rather than attempt to keep it pure, however, Joyce exacerbates an already latent hybridity of the Irish tradition.17 Indeed, three “comic-giant” traditions are united in “Cyclops”: the Homeric, the Celtic, and the Rabelaisian. The Citizen’s delimited, monoptic perspective is thus itself enmeshed within the parallactic and the multiple.

Like the Citizen and the metamorphosing dogs in “Proteus” and “Circe,” Garryowen is himself plural. When first espied, the narrator describes him as a “bloody mangy mongrel” (U 12.119-20). On the other hand, in the inflated, Rabelaisian description of the Citizen, Garryowen is “a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposi-tion confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone” (U 12.201-05). In the following episode, “Nausicaa,” another variant perspective is proffered: Gerty MacDowell, in the festering mawkishness of the episode’s style, describes him as “grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked it was so human” (U 13.232-33). The dog is thus mongrelized through the multiplicity of perspectives brought to bear upon him. One trait that is almost universally applied to Garryowen is an exaggerated savagery, which would be wholly in keeping with the gigantism of “Cyclops.” The narrator, hardly a reliable source, claims that he has been “told for a fact [Garryowen] ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry” (U 12.126-27).

Marilyn Reizbaum writes that Garryowen’s mongrelization con-



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nects him with Bloom since both are examples of the mischling, a pejorative term used in nineteenth-century Germany to denote racial hybridization.18 Indeed, Garryowen is as much a setter as Bloom is Jewish and is as much a wolfhound as Bloom is Irish. The oddest mongrelization Garryowen undergoes, however, is his brief transformation into a poet. Like the other burlesques, this one is prompted by an event in the pub recounted by the nameless narrator. Garryowen noses around, much to the consternation of the narrator, and the Citizen calls him over and begins “talking to him in Irish and the old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera. Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that has nothing better to do ought to write a letter pro bono publico to the papers” (U 12.705-08). The subsequent vignette takes the form of a newspaper announcement, written in an intolerably twee style, of an exhibition of the works of a preternaturally commu-nicative dog.19 This parodic review recapitulates and inverts a “very severe” review Joyce wrote of Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers for Ernest Longworth at the Daily Express (LettersII 38).20 In it, Joyce excoriates Lady Gregory, and also Hyde, for producing art that was “improper and ineffectual.”21 In “Scylla and Charybdis,” Mulligan chides Stephen for having written a nasty review of Lady Gregory for Longworth (U 9.1158–60), which one would imagine to be not unlike Joyce’s. The review of Garryowen’s poesy begins:

All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the sobriquet of Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and acquaintances Owen Garry. (U 12.712-17)

Garry’s mongrelization continues into the realm of human communi-cation.22 His exhibition, however, is one of cynanthropy, which prop-erly means a “species of madness in which a man imagines himself to be a dog,”23 whereas here it is used to suggest a dog acting like a man. The reversal is appropriate since this burlesque was preceded by the Citizen conversing, or attempting to converse, in Irish with Garry. Just as Garryowen becomes a poet, the Citizen similarly becomes dog-like. Mongrelization is not just contaminating but reciprocally contaminating.

Garryowen, or rather Owen Garry, here becomes Redfield’s per-fect representative of the Irishman: a dog waxing eloquent in Irish. Owen Garry’s verse, we are told, “bears a striking resemblance (the italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards” (U 12.722-23). Moreover, since the metrical system he employs recalls “the intricate


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alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn” (U 12.734-35), Owen Garry’s Celticism is itself hybrid. His verse is, we are told, dis-tinct from Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht;24 Hyde is referred to here as “Little Sweet Branch” (U 12.725), an English translation of his Irish pseudonym An Craoibhin Aoibhinn. The translation into English is not without some irony considering Hyde’s advocacy of de-Angliciza-tion: by rendering his Irish sobriquet in English, Joyce perhaps sug-gests that Hyde’s project of de-Anglicization runs the risk of merely inverting the values it opposes, specifically the Arnoldian resistance to the contamination of English values by Irish ones.

If Owen Garry’s verse is distinct from Hyde’s, then it is judged more similar to “the harsher and more personal note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present very much in the public eye” (U 12.727-30). In his review of Lady Gregory, Joyce singles out Antony Raftery, whose work had been promoted by Gregory and Hyde, for praise: “He had a terrible tongue, it seems, and would make a satirical poem for a very small offence. . . . though he be the last of the great bardic procession, [he] has much of the bardic tradition about him” (CW 104). The other man mentioned here, MacConsidine, is not actually a poet, ancient or otherwise, but rather a scholar acknowledged by Hyde in the Love Songs of Connacht.25 The anonymous “more modern lyrist” could potentially be William Butler Yeats, as Declan Kiberd suggests (1070), or perhaps even Joyce himself.

Garryowen’s poem is rendered into an English that is, admittedly, incapable of fully articulating the complexities of the “metrical sys-tem of the canine original” (U 12.734). The effect, however, may be recaptured if “Owen’s verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indis-tinctly in a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour” (U 12.737-39). In other words, the poem is to be read in a tone imitative of the old towser’s growls and grouses, thereby infecting the reader with a bit of cynanthropy. Indeed, this characterization of Garryowen’s poem recalls Redfield’s description of bellicose Irish eloquence: “On all sides round echoes the ‘war of words,’ in which accent and emphasis play the conspicuous part, the sounds being jerked forth like the report of a rifle” (253).

Garryowen’s impassioned poem is more gruff than its preceding domesticating description implies. It is as if the verbiage typical of the Literary Revival obscures the raw sentiment the ancient poetry might have possessed.26 The emotion expressed is simple: Garryowen is thirsty and hungry, something that should be obvious about a barking dog even to those sadly ignorant of the Irish or canine languages.



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The curse of my cursesSeven days every dayAnd seven dry ThursdaysOn you, Barney Kiernan,Has no sup of waterTo cool my courage,And my guts red roaringAfter Lowry’s lights. (U 12.740-47)

The notable feature of this poem is that it appears in English; that is, it has been translated from some hypothetical Hiberno-canine original, and in this way its presentation in the text is directly analogous to Hyde’s translations in the Love Songs of Connacht. The earliest drafts of the passage show that its disposition as a translation took some time to evolve. In the earliest extant draft of the episode, the poem is deliv-ered not through the context of a burlesque of Irish Revival reportage but, rather, directly through the account of the narrative voice. Joyce redrafted this passage on the same page. In the first version, there is a claim that the poem was to have been delivered in Irish but is now reported in the text in English: “Garryowen made answer and thus he spake, not in Berula [the English language], I ween; in the grand old tongue; the tongue that Finn and Ossian knew” (Buffalo V.A.8:8). In the second version, on the same page, reports indicate that it was uttered in English directly: “He opened his mouth and spoke in the tongue of the hated stranger” (Buffalo V.A.8:8). By installing refer-ences to Hyde, Joyce presents the poem in English while maintaining the pretence that it was delivered in a Hiberno-canine dialect.27

The fact that the poem is a translation is important since translation introduces the problem of renovation versus recrudescence. Some of the contradictions within the Nationalist movement (or, rather, movements) involve this key opposition: is the longed-for Irish state a return to some imagined bygone pure past, or is it to be the cre-ation of something new.28 Furthermore, as Walter Benjamin argues, translation entails a mutual contamination or mongrelization of both languages involved:

For just as the tenor and the significance of the great works of litera-ture undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother tongue of the translator is transformed as well. . . . Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original and the birth pangs [Wehen] of its own.29

In his Love Songs of Connacht, Hyde tries to elide the contaminating or mongrelizing effects of translation. He justifies his literal prose


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translations of Irish poetry into English as a pragmatic necessity for those “foreigners who . . . find themselves hampered in their pursuits through their unavoidable ignorance of the modern Irish idiom” (Connacht v). By providing translations, however, he nonetheless perpetuates Anglicization. The task of translation entails a reciprocal contamination of both the original and the translation, thereby reveal-ing, as Paul de Man argues, that the original had never been pure.30 Similarly, Redfield ignores mongrelization and contamination even as he admits that he requires some Irish eloquence to describe the canine Irish character. The breed of contamination that defines a nation is thus better articulated through the disarticulations of translation rath-er than the assumed purities of race, language, and physiognomy.

Like Hyde and Redfield, the Citizen is oblivious to mongrelization. At one point, he condemns Bloom as a descendant of an immigrant: “Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us . . . after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores” (U 12.1671-72). Evidently, the Citizen misses the point that Saint Patrick was himself an immigrant, of sorts, who contaminated by conver-sion. And the contamination was reciprocal. One of the earliest pieces Joyce wrote for what became Finnegans Wake was a vignette that he described as “a piece describing the conversion of S. Patrick by Ireland” (LettersIII 79). This vignette also marks the first introduction of foreign languages into Joyce’s book.31 The conversion is not just of one into the other but, instead, a manifold, bloody, mangy mongrel of “[m]iscegenations on miscegenations” (FW 18.20).

NOTES

1 James W. Redfield, Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Man and Animals (New York: Redfield, 1853), p. 10. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. I am grateful to Vike Martina Plock for bringing this charming book to my attention.

2 The association of the French with frogs was already old in the sixteenth century. In La Défense et illustration de la langue française, Œuvres complètes, ed. François Goyet and Olivier Millet (Paris: Champion, 2003), 1:9, Joachim du Bellay writes: “nous ne les étranglons pas de la gorge, comme les grenouilles” (“we do not strangle our throats like frogs”).

3 L. Perry Curtis Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), p. 21. Further refer-ences will be cited parenthetically in the text.

4 See, for example, JJII 25-26n and P 243.5 See U 3.332-64 where Stephen mentally changes the cocklepickers’ dog

Tatters into a veritable bestiary: first a hare (U 3.334); then a buck (U 3.337); a horse or the like on its “forehoofs” (U 3.338); a bear (U 3.345); a wolf (U 3.346); a calf (U 3.348); Stephen himself, a “dogsbody” (U 3.351); a rooster—“cocked” (U 3.357); a fox—“[s]omething he buried there, his grandmother”



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(U 3.360–61); a pig—“rooted” (U 3.361); a pard (U 3.363); a panther (U 3.363); and finally a vulture (U 3.363). In “Circe,” the dog’s metamorphoses are somewhat less dramatic as it merely changes its breed and not its species (U 15.100, 247, 356, 532, 633, 659, 663, 667, 673, 690, 693, 706, 708, 1204, 1206, 4630, 4753, 4945).

6 In “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” Language, Lore and Lyrics, ed. Breandán Ó Conaire (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1986), p. 156, Douglas Hyde writes: “What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the Ireland of to-day is the descendent of the Ireland of the seventh century; then the school of Europe and the torch of learning.” Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as “Necessity.”

7 W. J. Rasbridge, “Giltrap and Garryowen,” TLS (9 January 1964), 27.8 On the earliest extant draft of “Cyclops” (Buffalo V.A.8), the Citizen is

named as “Cusack,” “Michael Cusack,” or “Citizen Cusack” (an appellation Cusack himself used). By the fair-copy stage, Joyce had rendered him as the anonymous “Citizen,” thereby implying a distance from the historical char-acter.

9 Joseph Prescott, “Local Allusions in Joyce’s Ulysses,” PMLA, 68 (December 1953), 1226.

10 “So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of nintyeight” (U 12.479-81).

11 Deasy states, “A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here” (U 2.392-93), while the Citizen observes, “The strangers, says the citi-zen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here” (U 12.1156-58).

12 For a discussion of the Citizen’s salient critique of English colonial ambitions, see Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge Publishers, 1995), pp. 96-105. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

13 See Joseph V. O’Brien, “Dear, Dirty Dublin”: A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), p. 117. Bloom thinks about the diseased British soldiers in “Lotus Eaters” (U 5.72).

14 Valery Larbaud, “James Joyce,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, 103 (1922), 387, my translation.

15 Ernest Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (London: Grant Richards, 1923), pp. 404-05.

16 Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 56-57.

17 One example of “Cyclopean” burlesque within the Irish tradition is the twelfth-century The Vision of MacConglinne, which was translated into English in 1892 by Kuno Meyer—see the Aislinge Meic Conglinne: The Vision of MacConglinne, ed. and trans. Meyer (London: David Nutt, 1892), p. 2:

Cathal MacFinguine was a good king, who governed Munster; a great warrior prince was he. A warrior of this sort: with the edge of a hound, he ate like a horse. Satan, viz. a demon of gluttony that was in his throat, used to devour his rations with him. A pig and a cow and a bull-calf of three hands, with three score cakes of pure wheat, and a vat of new ale, and thirty heathpoults’ eggs, that was his first dole, besides his other


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snack, until his great feast was ready for him.

William Butler Yeats based “The Crucifixion of the Outcast” on this tale, but his version lacks what he called, in an 1898 review of Meyer’s translation, the “extravagant indulgence, mystical aspiration and gross materialism” of the source-text—see Yeats, Uncollected Prose, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 1:261.

18 Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 92-93. A problem with Reizbaum’s book is that she consist-ently applies the term mischling to anything that is somehow mixed, thereby divesting Ulyssean hybridity of its protean force. She reduces the idea of a Jewish poetics into a dialectic operation that always synthesizes mischling; for example, according to Reizbaum, Bella Cohen’s hallucinatory gender reversal makes her a “mischling icon” (p. 109). As Reizbaum points out, the idea of confused gender was a standard trope in turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism (notably in the case of Otto Weininger—a key source for Bloom’s “womanly man”—U 15.1799), but Bella’s sex change is more polymorphous than just a satirical synthesis of anti-Semitic ideas. And so by relentlessly applying this term, Reizbaum risks undermining the poetics of difference she tries to artic-ulate by making mischling into the seemingly sole locus of alterity in Ulysses. In this way, the term mischling loses its historical specificity, and difference is collapsed into a monad.

19 Declan Kiberd claims that the review is modeled on the style of Patrick Pearse from the time he edited An Claidheamh Soluis—see James Joyce, Ulysses: Annotated Student Edition, ed. Kiberd (London: Penguin Publishers, 1992), p. 1069. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

20 In “The Dead,” Miss Ivors deduces that Gabriel Conroy writes for the pro-English Daily Express (D 187).

21 See James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, Italian trans. Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 75.

22 Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman explain that Owen Garry was a third-century king of Leinster and that, in one of the stories in Patrick J. McCall’s The Fenian Nights’ Entertainments, Owen Garry’s daughter mar-ries Finn MacCool—see Gifford, with Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 338. I have found no reference to a King Owen Garry, and in McCall’s book the character is simply named as “King Garry”—see McCall, The Fenian Nights’ Entertainments (Dublin: T. G. O’Donoghue, 1897), p. 63 and elsewhere. Joyce does refer to McCall’s book in “Scylla and Charybdis” (U 9.1105).

23 See the Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. cynanthropy (viewed 14 April 2010).

24 Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht (Being the Fourth Chapter of the “Songs of Connacht”) Now for the First Time Collected, Edited, and Translated (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1893). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as Connacht.

25 Hyde mentions “that fine Irish scholar, Donal MacConsidine, from Ennis, in the county Clare” in Love Songs of Connacht (p. 11). This was first discovered by Philip L. Marcus in “Three Irish Allusions in Ulysses,” JJQ, 6 (Summer 1969), 299.

26 On this, see Nolan (pp. 105-06).



127

27 Joyce’s problem of eliding the distinction between English and Irish is echoed in Hyde’s essay on de-Anglicization. Hyde notes that he has encoun-tered numerous people who are unable to distinguish between the Irish and English languages. One such example was a boy he met in Mayo who replied in English to his Irish questions. Hyde then asked him if he spoke Irish, to which the boy replied, “And isn’t it Irish I’m spaking [sic]?” (“Necessity,” p. 167n).

28 See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 202.

29 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 73.

30 In “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 84, Paul de Man notes that the word Benjamin uses in the passage cited above, Wehen, which Zohn translates as “birth pangs,” primarily connotes a sense of suf-fering and thus could be also easily rendered as “death pangs.” Following Benjamin’s argument, de Man proposes that translations “disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticu-lated. . . . They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead” (p. 84).

31 See my essay entitled “‘Odd’s without Ends’: Raymond Queneau and the Twisted Language of the Wake,” James Joyce: The Study of Languages, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 23–35.

Figure 1: “This same dog resembles the paddy,” in James W. Redfield, Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Man and Animals (New York: Redfield, 1853), p. 273.


garryowen and the bloody mangy mongrel of irish modernity

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