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Abstract
This article identifies and explores some major facets of an important theme in the works of James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen that adds to our understanding of the complex ways in which both writers construed Irishness. Striving to acknowledge what they saw as the value of walking without embracing its English nationalist or Romantic associations, these modernists depict walking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland as a beneficial means of expressing and experimenting with different permutations of Irish identity, largely because of the opportunity it presented to negotiate a variety of dangers. By emphasising walking’s taxing and often perilous material realities, Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and Bowen in Seven Winters and The Last September recast the idealised English Romantic view of walking as a darker and more menacing activity that nevertheless offers a useful strategy for articulating fluctuating conceptions of Irishness during the tumultuous period lasting roughly from the death of Parnell through to the Irish War of Independence.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Thomas McGuire, James Silas Rogers, my anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Irish Studies Review for their invaluable suggestions at various stages of this article’s development.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Bowen, Last September, 181. Subsequent references are in-text and to this 2000 edition.
2. Although the women and the rebel do not achieve solidarity, Bowen embeds the potential for it within the scene. The episode concludes with Marda’s hand being grazed by a bullet accidentally discharged from the rebel’s gun, which causes the women’s absent companion, Hugo Montmorency, to reveal his sexual desire for Marda through his intense reaction upon hearing the gunshot. As Ann Owens Weekes argues in a reading that stresses Lois’s awakening to “the violence endemic in both political and sexual situations”, Lois’s effort to keep both the rebel and the injury to Marda hidden from Hugo “symbolically asserts the mutuality of women’s and rebels’ interests” (Irish Women Writers, 102). See also Wolff, “An Anarchy,” 141.
3. See O’Brien, “Dear, Dirty Dublin”; Rubenstein, Public Works.
4. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish, 287, note 47.
5. In a colourful assessment of what present-day visitors might expect on Ireland’s National Waymarked Trails, the popular Frommer’s Ireland guidebook warns that “[m]arkers are frequently miles apart and often seem to be lacking at crucial crossroads”, and it urges ramblers to “stay on marked paths, or face the unmitigated wrath of a territorial Irish sheep farmer” (Daugherty and Jewers, Frommer’s Ireland, 86). Though presented as a good-natured caricature, the Frommer’s image captures a real paradox in contemporary Ireland: even as authorities rush to create more trails, users sometimes have to wonder how much their presence on those trails is actually desired.
6. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, 13.
7. Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” 152.
8. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, 23.
9. As historian Joseph Amato argues:
Just as English villagers and country people continued in centuries past to tread traditional pathways to retain access to the commons (traditional open community lands) and to battle against spreading enclosure, so, in this tradition, do contemporary English country walkers intentionally cross private lands to maintain right of way. (On Foot, 266)
10. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish, 178.
11. Osborn, “Introduction,” 228.
12. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 16.
13. In one of several recent articles stressing Bowen’s stylistic unorthodoxy and other modernist qualities, Sinéad Mooney traces Bowen’s similarities to Samuel Beckett, arguing that Bowen’s fiction often “explores a more genteel version of the wandering of Beckett’s tramps” (“Unstable Compounds,” 246). I would extend this claim to argue that many of Bowen’s characters can be seen as “more genteel” versions of the destitute characters who wander Joyce’s Dublin.
14. Wallace argues that a similar scepticism regarding the English Romantic idealisation of walking is already evident in the mid- to late nineteenth-century British novelists Dickens and Hardy (Walking, Literature, and English Culture, 218–49). However, she does not indicate that these writers actually valued the dangers of walking the way Joyce and Bowen do.
15. See Duffy, “Traffic Accidents: The Modernist Flaneur and Postcolonial Culture,” in The Subaltern Ulysses, 53–92 (the quote cited above is on 59); Barta, Bely, Joyce, and Döblin, 1–18, 47–75.
16. See Lawrence, “Bloom in Circulation”; Herr, “Walking in Dublin.”
17. Lawrence, “Bloom in Circulation,” 21.
18. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 149. Subsequent references are in-text and to this 2006 edition.
19. Yeats, Secret Rose, 173.
20. Stephen thinks of lines from Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen as he stands on the steps of the National Library in the final chapter of A Portrait (200), and he rejects a characteristic Yeatsian ideal in his journal entry for 6 April when he writes:
Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world. (222)
Stephen alludes here to the poem “Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty” from Yeats’s 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds.
21. Yeats, Secret Rose, 198.
22. This moment resembles a scene in chapter II where a younger Stephen, overwhelmed by performing in a school play, storms off into the night, “hardly kn[owing] where he was walking”. He encounters the smell of “horse piss and rotted straw” and thinks, “It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back” (87). In both scenes, Stephen’s directionless walking leads him to confront something unpleasant – horse piss and rotted straw in one case, sexual jealousy in the other – and to discover that it provides the basis for satisfaction or creative success.
23. Timothy Martin, for instance, notes the ashplant’s Wagnerian echoes, arguing that its resemblance to Siegfried’s sword, Nothung, makes it a symbol of “both masculine creative power and independence from authority” (Joyce and Wagner, 43), while Benjamin Harder sees the ashplant as one of several “[p]hallic props […] used as tools of vision in Ulysses” (“Stephen’s Prop,” 242).
24. Amato, On Foot, 46.
25. Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, 3.295–6. Subsequent references are in-text and to this 1986 edition, cited by episode and line number.
26. Amato, On Foot, 285, note 65.
27. Cuchulain’s given name was Setanta, but after he learns that the hound he slew belonged to a smith named Culain, a friend of King Conchubar, he vows to take the hound’s place and is renamed Cuchulain, or “the Hound of Culain”. For a translation of the story, see Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 27–8.
28. I am grateful to Siân White for pointing this out (“‘O, despise not my youth!,’” 531, note 60).
29. Gordon, “Getting Past No,” 506.
30. OED Online, s.v. “stroll, v,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/191768?rskey=Fbc7ko&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed February 27, 2015).
31. A search of the novel’s full text using Imperial College London’s Ulysses :: Concordance website reveals that Joyce never uses any form of the word stroll to describe Stephen’s walking.
32. Sara Crangle notes of Stephen’s final scene in the novel that his “exit from Eccles Street inverts his Martello Tower departure earlier in the day: footsteps now supersede ashplant markings, and he appears fully grounded in the physical realm over which he has long claimed intellectual superiority” (“Stephen’s Handles,” 64). I would add that we can reverse Crangle’s formulation to read the “wavering line” created by Stephen’s ashplant in “Telemachus” as prefiguring the lines of urine he and Bloom create together in “Ithaca” just before Stephen’s departure from the novel (17.1185–98).
33. As Don Gifford explains, “nebeneinander” is the term used by the eighteenth-century German art critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his book Laocoön to describe how the elements in a work of visual art exist side-by-side, in contrast to nacheinander, which describes how the elements in poetry occur in sequence (Ulysses Annotated, 45).
34. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 48.
35. Ibid., 51–2.
36. For a fascinating analysis of the significance of the sewer in Ulysses and of Joyce’s interest in public works more generally, see Rubenstein, Public Works, 43–92.
37. The detail-obsessed narrator of “Ithaca” enumerates these subjects thusly:
Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse. (17.12–17)
38. Stewart, “‘That Eternal “Now,”’” 335.
39. Bowen, Seven Winters, 9. Subsequent references are in-text and to this 1984 edition.
40. Stewart, “‘That Eternal “Now,”’” 339.
41. O’Brien notes that while “[t]he collapse of old tenement houses was a comparatively unusual occurrence”, there was still “the occasional mishap”, including high-profile accidents in 1902, 1909, 1911, and 1913 (“Dear, Dirty Dublin,” 149).
42. Foster, Irish Story, 155.
43. Kiberd, “Strangers in Their Own Country,” 71.
44. Cronin, “‘If I was Irish,’” 188.
45. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, 29.
46. Ibid., 335.
47. Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, 16.
48. Bowen, Collected Stories, 671.
49. Ibid., 672–3.
50. I use Bowen’s own culturally and historically loaded word here, from her 1952 preface to the second US edition of The Last September: “the Troubles troubled everything – even friendliness” (Mulberry Tree, 125.)
51. Caserio, Novel in England, 252.
52. Walshe, “Several Landscapes,” 142.
53. Joyce, Dubliners, 190.
54. Freud, Writings on Art, 195.
55. As Phyllis Lassner and Paula Derdiger argue, the novel shows how “Anglo-Irish values have been frozen in time and space into formal social rituals, and […] these rituals represent petrified icons of a now shadowy past” (“Domestic Gothic,” 201).
56. This trend in the criticism is an understandable consequence of the fact that, as Ellen Wolff notes, the novel’s “Irish” characters (in contradistinction to its Anglo-Irish and English characters) “are granted only cameo appearances, and do not move beyond type to character, do not fully break the bounds of metaphor into a more completely figurative capacity” (“An Anarchy,” 142).
57. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 64.
58. Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen, 54–5; Wolff, “An Anarchy,” 140.
59. Caserio, Novel in England, 251.