Ruling passion: James Joyce, Roger Casement, and the bugger's tool

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 95-118

  Mullen, Patrick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249443312     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0011-1562.2004.t01-1-00564.x     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 93-129. All further citations will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as SU
2. For an excellent analysis of Joyce's engagement with the law, see Joseph Valente, James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
3. E. M. Forester in fact refers to Ulysses as a form of inverted Victorianism attempting to cover the world with mud, whereas the Victorians attempted to propagate sweetness and light. It seems appropriate in the lines of this analogy that whereas Arnold connected culture with the force of the state, Joyce in his inversion chooses the more popular bar. See E. M. Forester, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 121-3
4. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Harper and Row, 1979), 97
5. James Joyce, 'Drama and Life', in James Joyce: The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 40. The term comes from this early lecture in which Joyce explains that drama is 'the interplay of passions to portray the truth' (p. 41). He claims that drama is more interested in the play of elemental passions than in the 'motley agents' that bear them out. In the longer version of this essay, I argue that the 'Cyclops' chapter is in this sense essentially dramatic, and that the roster of historical identities in the chapter need to be read as dramatic stylisations. All further citations from the Critical Writings will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as CW
6. For more on the complexity of Casement's national status, see Sawyer, Casement, the Flawed Hero (Boston: Routledge, 1984)
7. Jamie O'Neal, At Swim Two Boys (New York: Scribner, 2003), 448
8. This dissolution is confirmed by Joyce's artistic plans for the chapter. Joyce had wanted to turn the chapter into an opera with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, famous for composing the Ballet mécanique. Though not much remains of the collaboration between the two friends, testimonial evidence points to the importance of the dissolution of character I am suggesting: [Ulysses] has music and it has words, but there the resemblance to other operas ceases. It is, for instance, to be performed, as much as it can be performed, without human players at all, or at least visible ones. [...] No singers appear on the stage. They are concealed below where they vocalize into receivers connected with loudspeakers scattered through the auditorium. This device enables the voices to be heard above the din of pianos and xylophones and also saves the audience the unpleasantness of having to gaze upon singers who do not in the least resemble the characters whose roles they are assuming. (From Mauro Piccinini, Joyce and Antheil, online: www. paristransatlantic.com/antheil/ mainpage/joyce.html)
9. Immanuel Kant, 'Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View', in Immanuel Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 15. All further citations will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as IKH
10. This term is taken from Joseph Valente, 'The Double-bind of Irish Manhood', in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106
11. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 287, 1. 30
12. See MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 170
13. This reformation has an important historical precedent in the operations of the Irish Renaissance. As the native patrimony was translated into English, the lusty sexuality of the original Irish had to be purged for Victorian middle-class (particularly evangelical) models of chastity. For a contemporary commentary on the sexual richness of the Irish-language cultural tradition, and the complicated translation of this tradition into English, see Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 'Why I Choose to Write in Irish, The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back', in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2, ed. David Damrosch (New York: Longman, 2003), 2899-912
14. My critical intuition of the intimate contrast between the two speeches was vindicated when I read that Casement had been sent Emmet's text in Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries with a Study of his Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life (Belfast: Belfast Press, 2002), 509. All further citations will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as RC
15. Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2002), 64
16. Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias (eds), The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement's Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Political Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 487. All further citations will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as BD
17. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 24
18. For more on the connections between humanitarian compassion, the law, and the homoerotic, see my article 'Roger Casement's Global English: From Human Rights to the Homoerotic', Public Culture, 15:3 (2003), 559-78
19. Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910: The Black and the White, ed. Roger Sawyer (London: Pimlico, 1997), 6. All further citations will be from this volume, subsequently referred to as RCD
20. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 2000), 50