Deriding the Rising: Joyce, Joyceans, and Political Sacrifice in Ulysses

Authors: Porter, S.

Journal: James Joyce Quarterly

Volume: 59

Issue: 2

Pages: 247-271

eISSN: 1938-6036

ISSN: 0021-4183

DOI: 10.1353/jjq.0.0167

Source: Scopus

Deriding the Rising: Joyce, Joyceans, and Political Sacrifice in Ulysses

Authors: Porter, S.

Journal: JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY

Volume: 59

Issue: 2

Pages: 247-271

eISSN: 1938-6036

ISSN: 0021-4183

DOI: 10.1353/jjq.0.0167

Source: Web of Science (Lite)

Deriding the Rising: Joyce, Joyceans, and political sacrifice in Ulysses

Authors: Porter, S.

Journal: James Joyce Quarterly

Volume: 59

Issue: 2

Pages: 247-271

Publisher: University of Tulsa

ISSN: 0021-4183

Abstract:

In this essay, I examine Joyce’s derision in Ulysses of Irish republicans executed by the British state and engage with Joyceans’ responses to that derision. Two main Joycean perspectives are addressed – historical revisionism and postcolonialism. Revisionists universally and postcolonialists predominantly view Joyce’s derision positively. This assessment is justified by contrasting republicans’ violent, emotional, and mythologizing celebration of sacrifice with Joyce’s pacific, rational, and realist antipathy to it. I seek to demonstrate that these contrasts are irrelevant, false, or weaker than claimed. I argue that Joyce’s antagonism towards executed republicans was largely the result of his contempt for collectivist challenges to his sense of individual autonomy. So deep was his contempt that it blinded him to the effectiveness of sacrifice in galvanizing the Irish population during the period he was writing Ulysses. Nor is this just an empirical problem; postcolonialist Joyceans face a normative dilemma because acceptance of Joyce’s portrayal of republican deaths as farcical is not consistent with the anticolonialism that is purportedly at the core of their chosen paradigm.

Source: Manual