Irish Modernism: Fiction
As the tide of history turned towards Nationalism and Republicanism, and Yeats wondered glumly whether the tradition would die with the aristocracy, one of the seminal figures of literary modernism was emerging in Dublin. While still a student at the new University College - established in 1908 as a college for Catholic middle-class youth along lines suggested by Cardinal John Henry Newman - James Joyce (1882-1941) set himself against the world of politics and religion, and announced that he would bcome, in his own pharse, "a high priest of art". His subsequent career was to be the epitome of obessive dedication. Dubliners (1914), his first book, continued where George Moore had left off, evoking the city as a deathly place, its citizens quietly atrophying in a state of emotional paralysis. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is largely autobiographical and deals with Stephen Dedalus's decision to leave Ireland, criticizing the country as a priest-ridden and superstitious dump. After ten years of trying to get it published, Joyce finally had the bad luck to get it printed in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising. Perhaps understandably, lack of patriotism was not fashionable. Joyce was condemned by just about everyone who mattered and quite a few people who didn't. His next novel, Ulysses , came out in 1922, another flashpoint in Irish history, as the new Irish government went to war with its former comrades. Modelled on Homer's Odyssey , the book follows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through one day and one night of Dublin life, recording their experiences with a relish and precision that repulsed the critics, including Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. The book was widely banned and its self-exiled author was condemned as a pornographer. Ulysses is a kaleidoscope of narrative techniques; Joyce's last work, the vast Finnegans Wake (1939), is the only true polygot novel, a bewitching - and often impenetrable - stew of languages, representing the history of the world as dreamed by its hero, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (alias "Here Comes Everybody", "Haveth Childers Everywhere" etc.) Critics of different persuasions see it as either the pinnacle of literary modernism or the greatest folly in the history of the novel. The other great Irish modernist, Samuel Beckett (1906-89), emigrated to Paris and became Joyce's secretary in 1932. One writer has remarked that while Joyce tried to include everything in his work Beckett tried to leave everything out, and that's a pretty good summary. Backett is bleak, pared down, exploring the fundamental paradox of the futility of speech and yet its absolute necessity. A modernist in his devotion to verbal precision, Beckett is on the other hand a dominant figure in what has been termed the postmodern "literature of exhaustion". As he said shortly before his death - "I have never been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way." Despite his reputation for terseness, Beckett was a prolific writer - the best places to start are the trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies (both 1952) and The Unnamable (1953), and the play Waiting for Godot (1949). The absurd prose and hilarious satire of Flann O'Brien (1912-66) has earned him the reputation of being Ireland's greatest comic writer. His comic vision of Purgatory, The Third Policeman (1967), includes the famous molecular theory, which proposes that excessive riding of a bicycle can lead to the mixing of the molecules of rider and machine - hence a character who is half-man, half-bike. O'Brien's other great book, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), is a weird melange of mythology and pastiche that plays around with the notion that fictional characters might have a life independent of their creators. Under one of his several pseudonyms, Myles Na Gopaleen (Myles of the Little Horses), he wrote a daily column for the Irish Times for many years, and his hilarious journalism is collected in The Best of Myles and Myles Away from Dublin . Traditional fiction continued, of course - for instance. Brinsley MacNamara (1890-1963) devastatingly protrayed small-town life in The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918). But many writers had moved away from social observation and into a kind of modernist fantasy that had its roots way back in the Celtic twi-light. James Stephens (1882-1950), a writer with an unjustly insignificant international reputation, used absurdity as a route to high lyricism. His The Crock of Gold (1912), is a profoundly moving fantasy on the Irish mythological tradition, part fairy story and part post-Joycean satire - in a sence, a precursor of "Magic Realism".
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