James Joyce and the Irish Revolution: The Easter Rising as Modern Event

“The formal breakthroughs in Ulysses lie in its capturing forces that were eddying in Irish society” in 1904, contends Gibbons (Joyce’s Ghosts), an Irish studies professor at Maynooth University, Ireland, in this abstruse study. Gibbons examines how the aesthetic innovations in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) reflect the political turmoil of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence (1919–1921), arguing that the failure of English politicians and generals to see the warning signs leading up to the Rising inspired Joyce to include a gratuitous level of detail in his novel based on the belief that it’s impossible to distinguish between what is and isn’t important from the perspective of the present. Some arguments stretch credulity, as when Gibbons suggests Joyce’s “dislocated narratives” in which multiple plots play out simultaneously resemble the Irish Volunteers’ tactic of splitting up and advancing through Dublin in “irregular zigzag patterns to prevent” becoming easy shelling targets during the Rising. The results are hit or miss, with some eye-opening insights dragged down by dubious connections and opaque prose (“Time and space were recast themselves as the city opened itself up... to transverse pathways, relating disparate spaces through ‘connections that intensify differences’ ”). Only Joyce scholars need apply. Photos. (May)