Epilogue: Dreams of Resurrection — Ibsen and George Moore

Abstract

‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ (1900), a review of When We Dead Awaken, was Joyce’s first significant publication, ensuring his reputation as a genius among his fellow students. His pamphlet ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, published a year later in 1901, derided the literary efforts of the leading figures of the Irish Revival. In it Joyce conceded that George Moore’s early novels had some originality, but asserted that ‘his new impulse has no kind of relation to the future of art’. By contrast, the artist of the future would follow in the footsteps of Ibsen and ‘carry on the tradition of the old master who is dying of Christiania’.¹ Yet Joyce’s representation of Moore as Ibsen’s antithesis was unfair. In ‘In the Clay’ and ‘The Way Back’, two stories from The Untilled Field (1903), as well as their 1931 retelling, ‘Fugitives’, Moore parodies and examines the plot of When We Dead Awaken, the play that received Joyce’s unreserved enthusiasm in 1900. What is more, Moore turns Ibsen’s last play into the judgment day of the Irish Revival, exploring several core issues of When We Dead Awaken in relation to the movement.