Abstract
This chapter takes up two case studies involving Irish national memory and commemoration. The first explores the ways that Joyce’s works—from “The Dead” to Finnegans Wake—treat the historical memory of William III, Prince of Orange (and his horse), at the Battles of Aughrim and the Boyne, the events that sealed the future of Ireland as a British colony and as an island of divided allegiances (orange vs. green), with Unionists revering the memory of King Billy and Republicans despising it. The second case study takes up a more recent battle, the 1916 Easter Rising, and explores the varying and conflicting ways that it has been remembered for the past 100 years, including during the recent 2016 centenary commemorations.
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Notes
- 1.
This paragraph has been adapted from chapter 5 of Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire.
- 2.
Padraig Lenihan, in 1690: Battle of the Boyne, writes: “Aughrim emphasises the valour and martial qualities of the Jacobites …. This depiction of Jacobites, favourable in many respects, may have been less suitable to Protestant communal rituals in the face of a post-1790s Catholic resurgence” (259).
- 3.
“Forget not the felled! For the lomondations of Oghrem!” (FW 340.07–08).
- 4.
We might note that “The Lass of Aughrim” is part of Gretta’s memory, after all, because it is Michael Furey that Gretta remembers singing the ballad: “It was a young boy I used to know … named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate” (D 219). So that it is not only Gretta and the Lass herself, but also the repressed memory of Michael Furey, a ghost by absence, who—in Joyce’s version of folk memory, here in the form of Gretta’s memories—represents that repressed, forgotten, and murdered Irish past, the dead, the bodies of “Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.”
- 5.
From which some of the material in this next section is adapted.
- 6.
Let me note the irony that King Billy died quite unexpectedly in 1702: he was riding and his horse stumbled into a mole’s burrow, sending William crashing to the ground and breaking his collarbone; he died of complications soon afterwards. King Billy was, indeed, undone by being blown off his horse.
- 7.
Ulysses is a different matter: Hugh Kenner had already in 1982 connected “Cyclops” with 1916: “When the biscuit-tin, by heroic amplification, renders North Central Dublin a mass of ruins we are to remember what patriotic idealism could claim to have accomplished by Easter 1916” ( Kenner, Ulysses, 139). In the 1990s both Emer Nolan and Enda Duffy read the “Circe” conflagration scene in terms of 1916. More recently, Greg Winston explores the role of 1916 in Ulysses in greater detail.
- 8.
As Stephen later notes, “ Renan’s Jesus is a trifle Buddhistic but the fierce eaters and drinkers of the western world would never worship such a figure. Blood will have blood” (SH 190). These words of Stephen’s bring to mind Joyce’s review in 1903 of a book about Buddhism, in which his sympathy with Buddhist methods of non-aggression and pacifism is clear. After pointing out that “Five things are the five supreme evils for [Buddhists]—fire, water, storms, robbers, and rulers” (note that water, storms, and rulers are things that Stephen fears, too), Joyce goes on to characterize Western values as bellicose and bloodthirsty by contrast: “Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence” (CW 94). There is an echo in these thoughts of Stephen, whose only “arms” will be silence, exile, and cunning, and of Joyce, who would—even through two World Wars—steadily refuse to grant the battlefield any validity as a test of worth.
- 9.
The above two paragraphs are adapted from Cheng, “Nationalism, Celticism, and Cosmopolitanism in A Portrait.”
- 10.
As Emer Nolan reminds us: “It was a revolution organized by myth-makers and poets: activists who could not even decide on what day the uprising was to take place, and some of whom had to interrupt their rehearsal of a play by W. B. Yeats to participate; insurgents who even forgot to bring the glue to paste up copies of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic” ( Nolan, 133).
- 11.
I have previously written about this passage at length, in Joyce, Race, and Empire.
- 12.
But certainly not for James Connolly and some of the other 1916 leaders.
- 13.
Pearse wrote, with deliberate prescience, in The Irish Volunteer newspaper a year before the Rising: “We have no misgivings, no self questionings … We saw our path with absolute clearness; we took it with absolute deliberateness. We could no other … We go in the calm certitude of having done the clear, clean, sheer thing.”
- 14.
As Foster notes further: “The idea that dying for Ireland can be more productive than living for Ireland was enshrined after 1916” (from Episode Three of 1916: the Irish Rebellion, the University of Notre Dame’s documentary film).
- 15.
Note that the commemorations continue to be celebrated on Easter Sunday each year, reinforcing the emphasis on martyrdom, sacrifice, and resurrection via Easter and the liturgical calendar—rather than on April 24 each year, the actual calendar date in 2016 of the Rising (indeed, April 24, 1916 was the Monday after Easter).
- 16.
See, for example: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/president-higgins-urges-the-irish-to-continue-building-a-republic-1.2588644; or: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3510718/Irish-President-says-not-fully-achieved-dreams-ideals-calls-new-Ireland-nation-marks-birth-100-years-Easter-Rising.html. I would like to thank Gerald McDonough for suggesting this connection.
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Cheng, V.J. (2018). The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration. In: Amnesia and the Nation. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71818-7_4
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