Tag Archives: Celtic Revival

Telemachus 0039

Posted on by

[singlepic id=175 w=320 h=240 float=left]

Haines tries out his Irish on the old milkwoman, but she has no idea what he’s saying.  She asks if he’s from the west of Ireland (where Irish is more commonly spoken), but as we know, he’s English.  Stephen thinks about how impressed the woman is with the Englishman and the Doctor, while he goes unnoticed.

The irony of the  Englishman being the only one who knows Irish is pretty straightforward.  Historically, there’s a basis for it–the use of Irish dropped during the 19th century thanks to the Great Famine and the ban on teaching Irish in the National Schools.  It survived in the West and in more remote parts of the island, but in “The Pale,” the area around Dublin that had the strongest British influence, Irish was largely unknown at this time.  It was revived by the writers and scholars of the Celtic Revival, which was just gaining momentum in 1904.  Because language nearly became extinct, the new Irish republic made it a required subject in schools–for a while it was a requirement to pass an Irish exam in order to get a government job.  Every Irish student now learns it, but they don’t tend to use it, and the language is again gravely threatened.  Joyce famously tried to learn Irish, but gave up after a few lessons.

Perhaps for this reason, whatever it is that Haines says in Irish is not in the text of Ulysses.  Rob has come up with a clever solution–if you roll over the Irish text, you’ll get a translation.  (This is true wherever you see foreign words in Ulysses Seen.)

You might be confused by the milkwoman’s question to Haines, “Are you from West, sir?”  This is how the question appears in the first edition, the 1922 edition, of Ulysses, so that’s what we’re using.  In later editions it would be corrected to “Are you from *the* West, Sir?,” but you get the idea either way.

Extra Credit: Whom do you think Rob has Haines is modeled after? Who does he look like?

<< previous | next >>

Telemachus 0034

Posted on by

[singlepic id=170 w=320 h=240 float=left]

Back to the Odyssey for a second. Stephen is Telemachus, in a house of usurpers, a little too young and too weak to do anything about it but complain. Mulligan, as head usurper, here is still on his tear about selling fine original Irish witticisms to Haines. Stephen plays along half-heartedly, more enjoying the joke at Haines’ expense than whatever it is Mulligan is up to. Telemachus must have been tempted to just give in to the suitors–his situation is desperate, there’s no reason to think his father was going to return. Stephen is similarly lost.

Stephen is not, we will see, a big fan of the Irish nativist trend that was gaining in popularity at that time. There is so much scholarship on this moment, so much said about it, that I’m reluctant to even sketch it out.  Here’s some erudition on the Celtic Revival, as it’s sometimes called.  Haines is in Dublin to capitalize on then trend. If you’ve read Dubliners recently, you may remember the word “simony,” one of the three memorable words on the first page of the first story.  Simony is the sin of selling holy benefits, sacraments and otherwise, for money.  A big sin in the Joycean universe, and part of what we’re seeing here too.

The Mabinogion is a set of early Welsh stories, sometimes characterized as a Welsh national epic. The Upanishads are more of a Hindu religious text than a national myth, but still… you get the point.

So much of what’s going on in Mulligan’s palaver has to do with William Butler Yeats and the role he played in the Celtic Revival, aka Celtic Twilight (the title of a Yeats book),  aka, per Joyce “Cultic Twalette.” And yet this critique is put in Mulligan’s mouth–Mulligan wants to take his shots at the Irish revival and eat on it too, and it’s that inconsistency that Stephen can’t abide.