Abstract
I begin with Joyce for two reasons. First, because he is a touchstone for literary modernism. I shall return to that first reason at the end. For now I want to dwell on my second reason for choosing him, which is that he is Irish, and Irish works of literature also have virtue as touchstones for many issues in Commonwealth literature. Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland has turned the lights lit by writers of the decolonizing and nationalizing world back on the terrain of Irish literary culture, throwing it into a new relief. By the same token, the Irish case can serve as paradigm for Commonwealth and international literature in English, as Kiberd himself anticipates: ‘My belief is that the introduction of the Irish case to the debate will complicate, extend and in some cases expose the limits of current models of postcoloniality.’1 Irish litera-ture in English is the first of such decolonizing and nationalizing literatures, and it is founded on an historical experience which includes the whole range of colonial and postcolonial experience, with two exceptions — downright slavery and voluntary union, as in the case of Scotland.
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Notes
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) 5.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968) 194. Compare Francis Mulhern’s comment on this passage in ‘English reading’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) 260: ‘It is the writing of one for whom “English” could not be self-identical, a literary practice whose “roots” lay in the history of colonialism’. Kiberd’s comments are on pp. 273–4, 331–32 of Inventing Ireland.
J.M. Coetzee, White Writing. On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988) 129.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 21.
Nicos Papastergiadis, Modernity as Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) 106. The classic text on which to found such an approach is The Communist Manifesto, especially the passage from which Marshall Berman takes his title, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
Wole Soyinka, ‘Language as Boundary’, in Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1993) 82.
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) chapter 5.
Michael Gilkes, Creative Schizophrenia: The Caribbean Cultural Challenge (Warwick: University of Warwick Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, 1986).
Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Stephen Slemon, ‘Modernism’s Last Post’, Ariel, 20 (October 1989) 3–17.
Kamau Brathwaite, jazz and the West Indian Novel’, in Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 55–110.
Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. C. Maschler (London: Routledge, 1975) 38.
Derek Walcott, The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1993) 54.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. DirkJ. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964) 119.
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© 1999 T. J. Cribb
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Cribb, T.J. (1999). In the Shadow of Language: from Joyce to Okri. In: Cribb, T.J. (eds) Imagined Commonwealths. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27060-6_7
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