Ecocriticism, Joyce, and the politics of trees in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses

Abstract

This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.

Keywords:

• ecocriticism
• Joyce
• Irish
• trees

Notes

  1. Woolf, Orlando, 13.

  2. James Joyce Quarterly 46, nos. 3–4 (2009): 431–557.

  3. ‘Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Interdisciplinary Conference’, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, 18–19 June 2010.

  4. Brazeau and Gladwin, Eco-Joyce.

  5. The essay originates in a talk I gave at the James Joyce symposium in London in June 2000.

  6. Estok, ‘Shakespeare and Ecocriticism’, 16–17.

  7. In her paper ‘Joyce's “treeless hills”’, Katherine O'Callaghan discussed the theme of Irish deforestation in Finnegans Wake at the ‘Ireland and Ecocriticism’ conference (see n. 3).

  8. Joyce's linking of deforestation to Ireland's ‘vast central bog’, assuredly the Bog of Allen named at the end of ‘The Dead’, is incorrect. Midland bogs are typically ‘raised bogs’, which have a natural origin going back to the aftermath of the last Ice Age. Glacial moraine formed a poorly drained plain full of tiny lakes in depressions between hummocks; in time these became raised bogs. Had he cited a ‘blanket bog’, Joyce would have been closer to accuracy, though the development of blanket bogs, predominantly in the West, pre-dated the arrival of Anglo-Norman settlers. Unintentional products of culture, blanket bogs arose after Neolithic farmers started to clear Ireland's thick post-Ice Age forests, which mantled most of the island by 4000 bc. By the end of the Bronze Age, around 500 bc, the acidification of clear-cut soil due to the leaching of nutrients typified the uplands and had spread to lower levels. On this depleted soil only heathers and rushes grew. Because their debris couldn't decompose, a layer of peat built up, swallowing any lingering trees and the remains of Neolithic farms. Large-scale clear-felling by English and Anglo-Irish landowners made only a late contribution to the ongoing development of blanket bogs. Biologists in Joyce's youth grasped the distinctive origins of the two kinds of bog, but, in ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’, he was drawing not on science but on the narrative of felt nationalist history.

  9. Joyce, Critical Writings, 144. This is Joyce's single, fleeting brief on behalf of reforestation, made probably to educate his Italian audience as to Ireland's sufferings under British rule. Being an Irish nationalist abroad didn't require the surrender of intellectual independence that he believed would have been obligatory at home. In any case, Irish deforestation was not for him a felt issue.

 10. Joyce, Stephen Hero, 239, 253.

 11. Joyce, Dubliners, 116, 223.

 12. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 87.

 13. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 207–8.

 14. I capitalise this character's nickname for convenience; in Ulysses the name appears in lower case. The model for the Citizen, named in Portrait of the Artist, is the cultural nationalist Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic League.

 15. Further page citations refer to Joyce, Ulysses.

 16. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 352.

 17. Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 16.

 18. Quoted in Aalen, Whelan, and Stout, Atlas, 123. In his Reminiscences of my Irish Journey in 1849, Carlyle uses the word ‘ragged’ and its variants as a leitmotif to describe the landscape and the people alike. His occasional mentions of woods, except when they are ‘ragged’, are positive; but this barely post-Famine journal is remarkable for its dearth of references to the English impact on Irish socio-cultural history, let alone natural history.

 19. Besides Aalen, Whelan, and Stout, Atlas, see Neeson, History of Irish Forestry.

 20. Wenzell, Emerald Green, 7.

 21. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 10.

 22. Ibid., 17.

 23. Aalen, Whelan, and Stout, Atlas, 25–6.

 24. ‘In the popular Roman imagination, [Britain] was a place of marsh and forest, mist and drizzle, inhabited by ferocious blue-painted warriors’ (Faulkner, ‘Overview’).

 25. Giraldus Cambrensis, Topography of Ireland.

 26. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 47. Neeson's reference to Sir William Betham's Feudal and Parliamentary Dignities draws on Falkiner, Forestry Question.

 27. That the early English began cutting down the Irish forests for increased security, apart from economic motives, became a staple of Nationalist memory. The Freeman's Journal asserted in 1899: ‘In the wars between them and the Irish, the latter being inferior in warlike weapons…used to take advantage of the extensive woods which then covered the greater part of the island for the purposes of shelter in their guerilla warfare. The English, therefore, endeavoured to destroy these woods by wholesale’ (‘Tree Planting,’ December 7, 1899, 11, http://www. irishnewsarchive.com). In fact, though the English associated the menace of their Irish foes with the forests that afforded them cover, ecocide was not a result of policy but rather a by-product of their profit-driven tree-felling.

 28. Duffy, Exploring, 37.

 29. Quoted in Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 80.

 30. Evelyn, Sylva, 1.

 31. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 81.

 32. Merchant, Death of Nature, 238.

 33. Scottish nationalists similarly blamed England for the deforestation of the Highlands, which, like Ireland, had developed a post-glacial blanket of forests. Their natural and political history, involving the transformation of a wooded landscape into an emblematically bare landscape, parallels Ireland's. The surprise of discovering this occluded history is described by a photographer assigned to take an archetypal picture for a whiskey ad. Coming upon James Hunter's book, Skye: The Island, he learned of a

Highland landscape full of pine, oak, alder, and ash; a place where children memorised the Gaelic alphabet through the names of trees … and spent their lives shadowed by forest; a Highland Scotland slowly … stripped of trees for shipbuilding, the Industrial Revolution, and agriculture. Through our lens, the Highlands had looked [like a] wilderness … It was nothing of the kind. We'd been photographing an ancient clearcut. (Hand, ‘Your Lying Eyes’, 48)

 34. Pearse wrote in October 1913: ‘Ireland is capable of feeding twenty million people … Ireland has resources to feed five times her population: a free Ireland would make those resources available’ (‘From a Hermitage’, 179–80).

 35. Aalen, Whelan, and Stout, Atlas, 21–2.

 36. Ibid., 19.

 37. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6.

 38. ‘Cill Cháis’, anonymous Irish-language poem.

 39. Smyth, Map-making, 86–7.

 40. Friel, Translations.

 41. A typical nationalist lament in The Nation in 1885, the era of the Citizen's prime, describes Ireland as ‘for nearly 300 years … a land reddened with the blood of the martyrs’ and ties together all the losses that he lists, ranging from the crushing of the Gaelic aristocracy and the uprooting of ‘[t]he oaks, the monarchs of the forest’ to the loss of nearly half of Ireland's 1841 population to the Famine (‘Continued from Our Last’, The Nation, 20 June 1885, 9, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com). Although this article's rhetoric brims over with self-pitying binary oppositions, it rests, like the Citizen's parallel view of Irish history, on the bedrock of fact.

 42. William Faulkner evokes a parallel constellation of losses in the Mississippi Delta in his elegiac novella ‘The Bear’, in which Native Americans are analogous to the Celtic Irish. A crucial difference between Joyce and him is that he sees nothing to parody: the loss of the ‘Big Woods’, its creatures, and the cultures that it helped define is tragic.

 43. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 352.

 44. P.W. Joyce links Da Derga's ‘great club of blackthorn’ to his memory of men fighting at a fair ‘with precisely the same kind of weapons – heavy sticks – blackthorn, or oak, or ash – with iron or lead ferules on the end’ (Ancient Ireland, 106).

 45. The Citizen's ‘giant ash’ is the common ash (Fraxinus excelsior), prized for its hard wood and its virtue in forming spear shafts and, in modern times, furniture, tool handles, oars, hurleys, and walking sticks, such as Stephen's ashplant. It is distinct from the mountain ash or rowan, though both have magical properties in Irish folklore; as the Old Irish word nin, it stands for the letter N in the ogham alphabet. With its dark purple flowers, lance-shaped leaves, and green fruit, the ash is a handsome tree that helps support several bird and dozens of insect species; but Joyce appears to have been as oblivious as Stephen and the Citizen to the ash as a natural being in an ecological web that their Irish forebears appreciated and depended on.

 46. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 15.

 47. Ibid., 12.

 48. ‘An act of 1765 allowed the tenant to claim the trees he had planted provided they were registered with the clerk of the peace for the county’ (Duffy, Exploring, 39).

 49. Quoted in Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 352.

 50. Smyth, ‘Greening of Ireland’, qtd in Duffy, Exploring, 39.

 51. Eleventh Report of the Royal Commission .

 52. See Coillte Teoranta, Avondale Forest Park.

 53. ‘Forestry in County Wicklow’, Irish Independent, 18 September 1905, 6, http://www.irishnews archive.com.

 54. Kildare Observer, 12 July 1890, 2. For a paean to the demesne of Lord Dunraven, an Oxford Movement convert to Catholicism, see ‘“Sweet Adare”: A Romantic and Lovely Spot’, Limerick Leader, 15 November 1905, 4. A like ecumenical spirit pervades a report in the nationalist Freeman's Journal on an English forestry society's visit to five Anglo-Irish arboretums, the forestry station at Avondale, and the Viceregal grounds in Dublin (‘AVisit to Ireland’, 25 August 1910, 10). All three articles were accessed at http://www.irishnewsarchive.com.

 55. ‘Reafforestation’, Limerick Leader, 18 March 1910, 4, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com.

 56. Reverend P.S. Dinneen, ‘Treeless Ireland: Ugliness and Waste’, Irish Independent, 2 February 1905, 4, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com. Father Dinneen (1860–1934) was a nationalist scholar, editor, and lexicographer who maintained friendly relations with Protestants. In 1905 John Butler Yeats painted a joint portrait of Dinneen and Douglas Hyde.

 57. ‘Irish Foresters’ Excursion Next Saturday', Freeman's Journal, 21 June 1909, 8, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com.

 58. The Irish National Foresters took their name from the Ancient Order of Foresters (established in 1834 and superseding the Royal Foresters Society), from which they seceded in 1877. The ultimate origin of the name goes back to the law courts of the ancient English ‘royal forests’, lands including but not limited to woodlands.

 59. The Foresters, prominent in Dublin's public life partly because of their plumed regalia and participation in parades, evidently struck at least a few citizens as comical. They also figure parodically in Sean O'Casey's Dublin play Juno and the Paycock. Captain Boyle introduces his friend and fellow slum-dweller, Joxer Daley, as ‘Past Chief Ranger of the Dear Little Shamrock Branch of the Irish National Foresters’ (Juno, 62).

 60. Detecting a literary wood larger than that in ‘Cyclops’, Guy Davenport suggests that the Irish alphabet, its eighteen letters corresponding to the names of Irish trees, is a structuring device that ‘extends an invisible forest over [Joyce's] cityscape’ (‘Joyce's Forest of Symbols’, in Geography, 292). Davenport advances little textual or other evidence, however, to support this notion.

 61. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 353–5.

 62. See Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 76.

 63. Ibid., 19.

 64. Hodgart and Worthington, Song, 74.

 65. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 22.

 66. MacNeill, Celtic Ireland, qtd. in Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 21–2.

 67. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 23.

 68. Ibid., 39, 45.

 69. Commentators on Ireland's deforestation sometimes pointed out the contrast with Germany's stewardship of its forests. This was a topic of interest as far away as New Zealand, where an unidentified Irish agricultural paper's report on the Irish Forestry Commission (presumably Lord Castletown's committee) was summarised in a 1908 leader: ‘“What is going on is really not milling”, said a witness … “it is the massacre of trees”.’ The leader contrasts the spendthrift short-sightedness of Irish landowners with Germany's fostering of forestry ‘as a matter of national importance’ (‘Treeless Ireland’, Hawera & Normanby Star, LIII, 24 June 1908, 7, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a = d&d = HNS19080624.2.35&cl = CL2.1908.06.24&e = –––-10–1––0–). Closer to home, Thomas W. Werber, ‘Late Indian Forest Department’, published in 1903 a long letter on the ‘advisability of establishing a British and Irish forest department and re-planting the forests … after the plan adopted … in Germany’ (‘The Nationalization of Forests in Ireland’, Nenagh Guardian, 15 July 1903, 3, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com). Although an 1899 leader on the same topic in the Freeman's Journal pointed out what the former British colonial administrator elides – that ‘the English have been largely responsible for the loss to Ireland of the capital contained in her forest growth’ – it also cites German forestry as a model (‘Tree Planting’, Freeman's Journal, 7 December 1899, 11, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com). Clearly, nationalists and unionists had common ground with regard to the importance of forest husbandry and the potential economic benefits of Irish reforestation.

 70. Neeson, History of Irish Forestry, 28.

 71. Ibid., 29.

 72. ‘An Hour with John O'Leary’, Southern Star, 1 July 1905, 3, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com.

 73. The core concept underpinning the ethic of bioregionalism is that there are natural countries, not to be found in any geopolitical atlas, that have ‘soft borders’ and ‘are populated by native plants and animals that have endured since the last Ice Age’ (Berg, ‘Introduction’, 1).

 74. Joyce changed Gogarty's dark hair to oak-blond to emphasise, presumably, Mulligan's English bias.

 75. The tree in question in ‘Woodman, Spare that Tree’, the song played in ‘Cyclops’ by the fantasy Bloom, is an oak. In this context, the song is merely satirical; but the oak commodity fetishes in Bloom's dream house in ‘Ithaca’ stem from an unconscious emulation of the tastes of English colonisers in Ireland, which they were able to indulge through the expropriation of Irish forests. Against his satirical drift in the Citizen's speech and the tree wedding, Joyce, in this subtext, appears to engage seriously with the cultural effects of environmental imperialism.

 76. A notice of an auction in Naas, for example, lists as notable items: ‘spinning chair in carved oak, mounted fumed coal oak vase … fumed oak and copper-mounted firescreen … carved oak and copper-mounted stool … carved oak bookcase … [and] fumed oak bedroom suite’ (Kildare Observer, 24 June 1911, 4, http://www.irishnewsarchive.com).

 77. Wenzell comments:

The loss of [Irish forests] began really in earnest with the rise of British imperialism and a quest for supremacy in Ireland, done chiefly to increase the amount of arable land … In this context, ‘arable’ is really the idea of maximizing land for profit, and of course, this utilitarian approach to land as real estate has immediate relevance to globalization in present-day Ireland. (7–8)

 78. Solnit, ‘Lost Woods of Killarney’.

 79. Buitléar, Ireland's Wild Countryside, 12–14.

 80. Quoted in The Ulster Journal of Archaeology, first series, 4 (1856), http://www.libraryireland.com/articles/OldIrishMapsUJA1-4/index.php.

 81. Among other English recipients of land grants in the wake of the Desmond rebellions was Edmund Spenser. Although the intent of these grants was to Anglicise Ireland, the Browne family – reflecting the hybridity of all Irish identities, both cultural and natural – reverted to their pre-Reformation Catholic faith, eventually becoming associated with the old Gaelic order while remaining loyal to the Crown.

 82. Muckross Research Library.

 83. McLoughlin, Discovering Ireland's Natural Woodlands, back cover.

 84. Aalen, Whelan, and Stout, 123.

 85. The pan-Ireland Green Party lost all of its six seats in the Oireachtas in 2011.

 86. Woodland League.

 87. McLoughlin, ‘Introduction’, in Discovering Ireland's Natural Woodlands.

 88. Coillte acknowledges the virtual total loss of Ireland's original forest cover, but, while offering as evidence of its appreciation of biodiversity a survey of tiny remnants of old woodlands, offers no plan to reforest the biological deserts that its large monocultural plantations comprise: ‘[F]orests today that have a long history of woodland cover still have a special value for biodiversity … Coillte recognises the special significance of old woodlands, and … completed a Woodland History Survey … in an attempt to quantify and inventory Ireland's historical woodland sites’ (‘Woodland History Survey’).

 89. Convery, Celebrating Irish Forests, 3.

 90. ‘“I want”, said Joyce, … “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”’ (Budgen, James Joyce , 67–8).

 91. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 86.

 92. Hart, Flora of Howth.

 93. Colgan, Flora of the County Dublin.

 94. Wilson, Biophilia, 12.

 95. Fairhall, ‘“Sunflawered” Humanity’; and ‘Nature’.

 96. ‘Language never replicates extratextual landscapes, but it can be bent toward or away from them’ (Buell, Environmental Imagination, 32).

 97. James, Art of the Novel, 5.

 98. Cooley, ‘Afterword’, 253.

 99. Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 15.

100. Ibid., 144.

101. Oppermann, ‘Theorizing Ecocriticism’, 116.

102. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2. For Buell, a solution to the environmental crisis depends on finding better modes of imagining nature and our relation to it.

103. Guattari highlights subjectivity as the prime mover among his ‘three ecological registers’: ‘the environment, social relations and human subjectivity’ (Three Ecologies, 28).

104. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 430 n. 20.

105. Rueckert, ‘Literature and Ecology’, 86.