Joyce and Nationalism.
Our take
Eagleton’s LRB review of Callanan’s *James Joyce: A Political Life* is, unsurprisingly, a worthwhile read, even if the core argument—that Joyce was a committed Parnell supporter—isn't entirely revolutionary. It’s a useful corrective to the common perception of Joyce as an aesthete floating above the fray, a modernist solely concerned with stream-of-consciousness and the minutiae of Dublin life. The revelation that the famously prickly Joyce was once a fervent disciple of Parnell, a figure central to Irish nationalism at the turn of the century, forces us to reconsider the foundations of his artistic project. It’s particularly fascinating because it intersects with the kind of linguistic ferment we’ve been tracking—the sudden blossoming of nationalist sentiment expressed through language—documented so elegantly in [1905: The Linguistic Renaissance]. Seeing Joyce, a pivotal figure in the development of modern literature, emerge from this same well of linguistic and political fervor adds a crucial layer to our understanding of both his work and the broader cultural landscape of the time. And, frankly, it's delightful to see someone so rigorously intellectual as Eagleton digging into the messy, often contradictory, political affiliations of a literary giant.
The interesting thing isn’t just that Joyce was politically engaged, but *how* that engagement shaped his artistic methods. Modernism, with its fragmentation, its deliberate obscurity, its rejection of traditional narrative structures, has often been interpreted as a reaction *against* the constraints of national identity and political ideology. Eagleton’s review, and Callanan’s biography, suggest a more complex relationship: perhaps Joyce’s experimental techniques weren’t a rejection of politics, but a way of *grappling* with its complexities, its ambiguities, and its inherent failures. Consider, for example, the way Joyce uses language in *Ulysses* to capture the chaotic, multilingual reality of Dublin—a city deeply marked by colonial history and nationalist aspirations. It’s a far cry from the straightforward patriotic pronouncements found in earlier nationalist literature. It’s a dismantling, a questioning, a layering of meaning that reflects the fractured nature of Irish identity itself. It’s almost as if he saw the limitations of declarative statements—the inherent inadequacy of any single narrative—and chose to represent that inadequacy through his writing. Which makes you think, doesn’t it, about the challenges of representing complex political realities in any artistic form? Something Ben Yagoda explores beautifully in [Why “Alongside”]? The subtle shifts in language, the unexpected conjunctions, the ways we navigate the space *between* ideas—it’s all crucial to understanding how we talk about—and therefore, how we understand—politics.
The significance of this debate extends beyond Joyce scholarship. It speaks to a broader reassessment of the relationship between art and politics in the early 20th century. For too long, literary criticism has been dominated by a narrative of artistic autonomy, a belief that art should be free from political interference. But Eagleton’s work, and the growing body of scholarship that challenges this assumption, suggests that art is always, inevitably, political—whether it acknowledges it explicitly or not. Even the act of choosing to remain silent, to cultivate an air of neutrality, is a political act in itself. This is particularly relevant when considering the rise of nationalism in Europe during this period, a phenomenon that fueled both artistic innovation and devastating conflict. The way Burrow examines the fraught language of the period in [Obstupefacting Excrescences] underscores the subtle ways ideologies seep into even the most seemingly innocuous phrases. It's a reminder that even the most deliberately obscure work is operating within a specific historical and political context.
Ultimately, Eagleton’s review compels us to ask: how do we reconcile the modernist impulse toward fragmentation and ambiguity with the need for political clarity and action? Can art truly transcend politics, or is it always, in some fundamental way, a reflection of the world around it? And, perhaps most provocatively, does Joyce’s apparent disillusionment with Parnell and Irish nationalism—a disillusionment that clearly influenced his later work—offer a cautionary tale for contemporary artists and intellectuals navigating an increasingly polarized political landscape? The slipperiness of language, the ever-shifting sands of political allegiance—it’s all there in Joyce’s work, waiting to be spooted out.
Terry Eagleton is usually a good read, and his LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Frank Callanan’s James Joyce: A Political Life has some interesting thoughts on Joyce’s relations with politics and modernism; he starts by explaining that Joyce, far from being indifferent to politics, was “a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell,” and continues:
If it’s easy to mistake this haughty young recusant for a critic of nationalism, it’s largely because, with the Parnellites plunged into division and disarray over the fate of their leader, Joyce was now politically homeless. Parnell’s brand of nationalism had been civic rather than ethnic, political rather than cultural, constitutional rather than revolutionary and inclusive rather than sectarian (he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant). Joyce championed all these views, but found none of them adequately represented by the nationalist currents on offer after Parnell’s death. If Joyce’s politics were hard to decipher, it was partly because he concealed his Parnellism behind something of the politician’s reserved and enigmatic demeanour. There’s a touch of Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the youthful Joyce’s imperious, lip-curling, faintly demonic manner. […]
Joyce despised the clericalism and chauvinism of some of his fellow nationalists, but that doesn’t mean that he had any love for the British. He grew up steeped in the nationalist culture of his country, during the first rumblings of the only political revolution the British Isles witnessed in the modern era. Ireland was Britain’s oldest colonial possession, as well as the first British colony to achieve (partial) independence in the 20th century. Joyce once wrote that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ suggesting a direct connection between his literary modernism and his anti-colonialist politics. Nobody who grew up in Dorking or Hastings could have written Finnegans Wake, with its insolent disfiguring of the language of the conqueror. It is a minor historical irony that Joyce spent some of his time in exile teaching English for a living.
He was deeply sceptical of cultural nationalism, not least the doughty efforts of the Gaelic League to revive the Irish language, which had been dealt a severe blow by the Great Famine. Most of those who died or were forced to emigrate were the poor, and the poor constituted the majority of Irish speakers. Joyce had an exceptional flair for languages, and may have attended a course in Irish taught by Patrick Pearse, one of the slain heroes of the 1916 insurrection. Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an enlightened, autonomous European nation-state, not as a land of saintly peasants (a few of them colourfully crazed) speaking what might seem gibberish. Ancient Ireland was in his view as dead as ancient Egypt, though he did not undervalue the achievements of its artists. In fact, his interest in ancient myths and legends was typical of both nationalism and modernism, which tend to be archaic and avant-garde at the same time. To imagine a future beyond modernity may mean dipping back into the pre-modern past. Irish nationalism certainly took an interest in the pre-modern: one 18th-century Irish scholar argued that Irish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. Yet nationalism is only about two and a half centuries old, and sees itself for the most part as a modern invention.
In his distaste for cultural nationalism, Joyce was also ferociously dismissive of the Irish Literary Revival. A lower-middle-class Dubliner was unlikely to feel much affinity with upper-class Anglo-Irish Protestants like W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory. Joyce was urban through and through, author of one of the finest anatomies of a city ever written, whereas the revivalists looked to the rural West. Joyce called Yeats ‘a tiresome idiot’ and told him with customary hauteur that he was too old to be of any use to him. He objected to what he saw as the weaponisation of art in the cause of politics, of which the revival could be seen as a high-toned version. He seems to have taken little interest in James Connolly, the most intellectually fascinating of the Easter Rising’s leaders, perhaps because he saw Connolly’s Marxism as promoting a linear conception of history at odds with his own cyclical view. He tried to read Capital, but found its opening sentence absurd and failed to get beyond it. He did, however, put in a good word for the abortive Fenian uprising of 1867. He also felt a degree of sympathy with Sinn Féin, and while living abroad assiduously read its newspaper, the United Irishman, to keep abreast of Irish political affairs. For a while he was in broad agreement with the programme of Sinn Féin’s leader, Arthur Griffith, although he accused the party of ‘educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred, whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly.’ By ‘racial hatred’ he meant a knee-jerk loathing of the British. […]
Ireland in the early 20th century was peculiarly hospitable to artistic modernism. It’s been argued that modernism tends to spring up in societies that are still in some ways traditionalist but experiencing the excitements and alienations of modernity for the first time. Another precondition is that revolution is in the air. The Ireland in which Joyce grew up fulfilled all these requirements, as a country still under the thumb of the British, the Church and the landed gentry, but gradually industrialising. A modern-minded middle class with nationalist aspirations was challenging the established order, and Joyce, however reticent and heterodox on the national question, was born out of this conflict. Modernism is also a cosmopolitan affair, as small groups of artists in flight from different nations gather together in some polyglot metropolis to speak the lingua franca of art. Getting out of the place was among Ireland’s most venerable customs, one of the few forms of solidarity between the common people and the intelligentsia.
Modernism is a coterie culture, and the Irish had an elite to hand in the form of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The literary wing of the movement was highly self-conscious about the word, and so was Ireland, a country caught between two forms of speech. Finnegans Wake draws on several languages at once, while J.M. Synge was said to write in English and Irish simultaneously. Flann O’Brien sometimes writes English in a way that sounds like Irish. Anglophone Irish authors were using a language that was only ambiguously their own. The country also had an opulent store of mythology, a fertile breeding ground for modernist art. Besides, the transition from realism to modernism was easier to make in a place that didn’t have a robust tradition of literary realism in the first place. By and large, classical realism is the product of an enlightened, self-confident middle class comfortably at home in the world it has fashioned; such classes are unlikely to prosper in colonial conditions. In Ireland, however, this deficit could be made to yield a profit, as fantasy, fable, satire, myth and Gothic flourished in place of realism, from Gulliver’s Travels to Dracula. Released from the constraints of realism, writers like Joyce were free to be as outlandish and exotic as they wished. If they didn’t have a very usable past, they were at least uncurbed by an authoritative Tradition of the kind T.S. Eliot was advocating in England around the time Ulysses was published.
I like a man who stopped reading Capital because he “found its opening sentence absurd” (not that I recommend everyone follow his example).
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