IRELAND – EUROPE CULTURAL AND LITERARY ENCOUNTERS

Цена ?? лв. www.press-su.com CULTURAL AND LITERARY ENCOUNTERS ISBN 978-954-07-4273-1 IRELAND–EUROPE The following collection explores Ireland’s complex relationship with Britain and continental Europe. From varied perspectives, gathered from the “Ireland–Europe: Cultural and Literary Encounters” conference – hosted by Soia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” – literary criticism and linguistic studies are combined to approach this broad topic, resulting in an eclectic body of work: including essays on William Makepeace Thackeray, Flann O’Brien, Tom Greer, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, multilingualism, and the European Union. There is also a special series of articles devoted to W. B. Yeats to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. IRELAND–EUROPE C U LT U R A L A N D L I T E R A R Y ENCOUNTERS St. Kliment Ohridski University Press 

IRELAND – EUROPE CULTURAL AND LITERARY ENCOUNTERS IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 1 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 2 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM IRELAND – EUROPE CULTURAL AND LITERARY ENCOUNTERS Edited by Plamen Gaptov, Maria Georgieva and Jonathan McCreedy St. Kliment Ohridski University Press Sofia • 2017 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 3 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM © © 2016 Edited by Plamen Gaptov, Maria Georgieva and Jonathan McCreedy 2016 St. Kliment Ohridski University Press ISBN 978-954-07-4273-1 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 4 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ 7 W.B YEATS 150TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: GENDER, MYTH AND MYSTICISM “NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN”: MASCULINITY AND AGE IN W.B YEATS’S THE TOWER ........................................................................................................................ 11 Dominik Wallerius Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany W.B YEATS AND P.K YAVOROV: CONCEPTS OF NATIONAL MYTHOPOETICS .......................................................................................................... 22 Yarmila Daskalova St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo W.B YEATS AND THE SYMBOL OF THE GYRES ........................................................ 33 Nikolay Todorov Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” EU LEGISLATION AND MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE USAGE IN IRELAND DUBLIN BILINGUALS: LANGUAGES AND CHALLENGES ..................................... 43 Marina Snesareva Moscow State University MULTILINGUALISM IN THE EU: THE CASE OF IRISH AND BULGARIAN ........ 54 Boryana Bratanova St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo THE NATURE OF MULTILINGUALISM AND CODE-SWITCHING IN FINNEGANS WAKE ............................................................................................................ 65 Jonathan McCreedy Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH VISIONS OF IRELAND: STAGING SPECTACLES DISTANCING THE STEREOTYPE IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S BARRY LYNDON AND ITS LITERARY SOURCE ......................................................................................... 81 Zelma Catalan Sofia University “St. Climent Ohridski” 5 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 5 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM TOM GREER'S A MODERN DAEDALUS (1885): POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND SPECULATIVE SCIENCE FICTION ............................................................................... 93 V. M. Budakov, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” IRELAND AND BULGARIA: 20TH CENTURY WESTERN-EASTERN POSTCOLONIAL STRUGGLES GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND THE GRAND NARRATIVE OF MODERNISATION: ARMS AND THE MAN AND AFTER ........................................... 109 Ludmilla Kostova, St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo FROM PUB TO PERIODICAL: McDAIDS, ENVOY, AND THE VOICE OF A MOVEMENT ........................................................................................................................ 125 James Gallacher Institute of Irish Studies: University of Liverpool JAMES JOYCE, “BLOOMSDAY” AND ULYSSES IN TRANSLATION THROUGH “A MULTICOLOURED PANE” TO JAMES JOYCE’S LITERARY WORLD ................................................................................................................................. 137 Marina Dobrovolskaya Russian State University for the Humanities A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: IMPLICATIONS OF THE TITLE .................................................................................................................................... 146 Teodora Tzankova Bulgarian Academy of Sciences THE ODYSSEY OF MY MACEDONIAN TRANSLATION OF JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES................................................................................................................................ 152 Marija Girevska Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ................................................................................................ 162 6 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 6 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The articles contained within this publication are adapted from presentations given at the “Ireland – Europe: Cultural and Literary Encounters” conference, which took place between the 15th and 16th of June 2015 at Sofia University (“St. Kliment Ohridski”). The “Ireland – Europe: Cultural and Literary Encounters” project was kindly sponsored by the Sofia University Science Research Fund, the Academic Foundation for English and American Studies and the Irish Embassy of Bulgaria. We on the editorial board would firstly like to extend our thanks to Snezhina Dimitrova, project co-ordinator, for her excellent organisational management and unwavering support. Special thanks go to the Irish author Jack Harte, whose opening plenary talk entitled “Unravelling the Spiral, Rehabilitating the Serpent: An Irish Writer in Search of Lost Meaning” set the intellectual pace, and whose enthusiastic contributions, on all topics, were a constant delight and full of insight. We all look forward to the plenary talk’s future publication as a part of a larger creative work. Thanks also to Patrick Coleman, at the Irish Embassy of Bulgaria. Together, the University of Sofia and the Irish Embassy co-funded Mr Harte’s visit to Sofia. In addition to our conference, Patrick organised two events at the Embassy and at the British Council respectively, at which Mr Harte delivered talks on W.B Yeats and James Joyce; both of which were enjoyed by conference attendees. Final thanks go to Zelma Catalan, Georgi Niagolov, Kornelia Slavova, Reny Radkova, and Evgenia Pancheva; all of whom contributed to making the conference (and this book) a reality, in many invaluable ways. This publication is dedicated to Professor Maria Georgeiva, co-editor of this volume, who sadly passed away in August 2016. 7 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 7 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 8 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM W.B YEATS 150TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: GENDER, MYTH AND MYSTICISM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 9 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 10 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM “NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN”: MASCULINITY AND AGE IN W.B YEATS’S THE TOWER Dominik Wallerius Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany I There is critical consensus about at least two aspects of William Butler Yeats’s The Tower (1928). First, the poems in this volume are exemplary for Yeats’s anxious obsession with aging, or as Harold Bloom has eloquently termed it, his “rage against growing old” (350). Already, the first line in the collection states “That is no country for old men” (CP 239); numerous other references about “Decrepit age” (240), ancestors and descendants, and lighter references to the poet as an “old scarecrow” (262) follow suit. The second critical commonplace is that the focus of The Tower is male-centred, if not even patriarchal (as opposed to his next collection The Winding Stair (1933), with its emphasis on female perspectives).1 The volume is “a relentless, agonized interrogation of the social implications of male control” (Mahaffey 132), directing attention to the atrocities of raging wars and the history of “bitter and violent men” (CP 246), whereas women figure rather as victims of male aggression. Taking these two major themes, age and masculinity, as starting points, I would like to inquire how both are connected and mutually influence each other in The Tower. The sociologist Jeff Hearn has pointed out that the consideration of age and aging are unfortunately often overlooked in analyses of gender. Future investigations of gendered subjectivity need to consider how the process of aging is gendered, how the aged subject of her or himself is gendered and what is the relation between female and male aging (94). Often, older men are excluded from analyses and representations of masculinity, which focus rather on younger men: “Dominant constructions and images of men and masculinities are dominated by younger men and men ‘of middle years’, as if men/masculinities ‘end’ pre-old age” (ibid.). This observation is relevant when considering Yeats’s role in Irish public life at the time he was composing The Tower. Elizabeth Cullingford writes that, despite a few forceful public interventions, “[t]he outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War in 1919 confirmed his status as onlooker [...].” (“Introduction” 12), reducing him to an aging man 11 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 11 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM of letters. In the subsequent Irish Civil War, the now ageing poet remained an outsider, but also surprisingly impartial, which, given his later activity as a senator for the Irish Free State, seems puzzling.2 I would like to suggest that Yeats’s indifference towards either of the warring factions can be explained by an intersectional analysis of gender, age and class categories in his poetry. As an aging man with an aristocratic outlook, he felt repelled not only by the atrocities of both wars, but also by the commonness of the new (and younger) masculinities that this war produced. The Tower can thus be seen as part of Yeats’s negotiation of what Raewyn Connell has termed “hegemonic masculinity” (77), the culturally acknowledged form of prestigious norms and codes of masculine behaviour. For Yeats, it was clear that such a model should be based on the tradition of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and its heroes like Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan (Allison 195). In his three long “Big House” poems, “The Tower”, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, the Ascendancy is contrasted with images of both degenerate and inadequate masculine identities, which represent the younger masculinities of the two wars that afflicted Ireland. The overt tone of despair in this volume is, I argue, partly due to the anxiety resulting from the overlapping of the different gender, age and class categories with which Yeats’s personas struggle to maintain a coherent sense of subjectivity. The poet’s fear about being overwhelmed by new models of masculinity and his failure to evoke a powerful and unambiguous counter-image is, finally, exemplified by the decaying structure of the tower. This edifice symbolises phallic strength, yet it is crumbling, and thus the tower also constitutes a metonymic link to men whose masculine values belong to a time long forgotten. II In the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, images of the Anglo-Irish War are juxtaposed with a nightmarish vision of history, a link which constructs masculine identities which the speaker views as inadequate and lacking. It is the haunting presence of a “fourteenth-century incubus” (Bloom 359) at the end of the poem that surprisingly underlines the gendering of the central theme of “the Black-and-Tan terrorising of the Irish countryside” (Whitaker 197): There lurches past, his great eyes without thought Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks, That insolent fiend Robert Artisson To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks (CP 256). 12 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 12 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM As Marjorie Howes has pointed out, the speaker’s contempt is directed at both Lady Kyteler’s sexual self-assertion and her moral decay, caused by her “inappropriate desire for an unworthy and disrespectful inferior” (119). However, this condemnation of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy’s “political, moral and cultural decay” (118) is complemented by the representation of a weak and deficient masculinity. Not only does Robert Artisson’s insolence suggest morally inappropriate conduct, the description of his dragging movement (“lurches”) and apparent lack of intelligence (“eyes without thought”, “stupid”) also evokes notions of physical degeneracy, which makes Lady Kyteler’s attraction to him all the more disconcerting. Furthermore, Lady Kyteler’s “slightly pornographic gifts” (Howes 119) underline this anxiety about masculinity. The reference to dismembered birds is more than just a bawdy pun, though: Lady Kyteler’s presentation of the “Bronzed peacock feathers” and “red combs of her cocks” clearly confronts the reader with a metaphorical image, if not actual, castration. This is especially relevant, as these animals not only represent masculine prestige; for Yeats they also often function as arbiters of new historical cycles (Whitaker 205). However, as Whitaker writes, “the speaker of his poem does not hear a living bird’s annunciation. He sees the dismembered dead: mute testimony of time’s outrage” (ibid.). Robert Artisson is thus not “a male who can inspire passion” as a “cure for social disorder”, as Tratner asserts (153). Rather, this “insolent fiend” embodies transgression of class distinction and manifests a failed, even degenerate, expression of masculinity. In other words, he is the antithesis of a role model for the troubled and fragmented society of war-torn Ireland. The faulty masculinity of Robert Artisson must therefore be seen in connection with the poem’s vision of a country whose “days are dragonridden” (CP 253) because of the “Violence upon the roads” (256) resulting from the Anglo-Irish war. Upon closer scrutiny the depiction of the British Black and Tans is indeed reminiscent of the degeneracy of Robert Artisson. Already in an earlier poem, “Reprisals”, Yeats had denounced the Black and Tans as “Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery” (cf. Cullingford, Fascism 106– 8). In “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” his fierce hatred of them is similarly expressed: “a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free” (253). The intoxication of these troops and their atrocious actions resonate with the blind stumbling of Robert Artisson. But while the latter’s senselessness is founded on sexual corruption and social transgression, the Black and Tans’s intemperance expresses their irresponsibility in both their thirst for drink as well as blood. So, although there is no allegorical correspondence, the poem does establish a transhistorical link between the degeneracy of the medieval villain and the decay of masculine 13 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 13 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM heroic codes of honour as personified by the Black and Tans – a corruption of masculinity that the speaker makes responsible for the brutality of the conflict. In writing the poem about the barbarism of the war and invoking this medieval fiend, Yeats, already past the age of revolutionary fervour, condemns the deficiencies of younger masculinities, who are antithetical to his ideal of hegemonic masculinity based on Anglo-Irish “integrity in public life, strong political leadership, and a vigorous cultural tradition” (Howes 118). III With this link between the corrupted masculinities of Robert Artisson and the Black and Tans, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” combines a nightmare from a distant past with an equally traumatising present. The contemporary soldiers in the poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, however, similarly represent images of deficiency. The now further aged speaker does not identify with them, not least because of his distinct class consciousness. The first aspect to notice is that these soldiers appear as an anonymous mass, characterised only by the (unjustified) violence of their actions: In cloud-pale rags, or in lace, The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop, Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face, Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing (CP 251). As this passage suggests, the rage of these soldiers is self-consuming and harmful. Their fury is not a vital force from which something new could emerge, but the violence aims towards an undefinable emptiness. The causes that these soldiers are fighting for are thus taken into question, and, furthermore, the combatants are even dehumanised: like animals they bite and scratch, which expresses a sense of irrational cruelty and also suggests a lack of nobility in their actions. Both motifs are later combined in a bitter remark in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” to characterise the cultural decay brought forth by the years of war: We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth (255). It is certainly true that the speaker implicates himself in this critique, but the “weasel” clearly also refers back to the “biting at arm or at face” of the 14 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 14 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM troopers in “Meditations in Time of Civil War”. The emptiness of the fighting that the latter poem regrets is overtly contrasted in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” with the ideals of “honour and of truth”, which can be seen as codes of masculinity which appear to have gotten lost during the Irish Civil War: “What began as the struggle to avenge a genuine wrong, and to gain Ireland’s independence from England, has degenerated into fratricidal strife” (Cullingford, “Jacques Molay” 765). Violence is thus depicted as existing for its own sake, as it is not grounded in the ideals which fuelled the Irish fight for independence, and by implication the loss of those ideals makes the contemporary soldiers nothing better than animals. The animal imagery offers a lead to the ideological kernel of Yeats’s dismissal of the masculinities the Irish Civil War produced. The temporal shift to the time when “honour” and “truth” were still codes of any value might suggest indeed the perspective of an aging man who despairs over the deadly follies of younger men. But the anonymity of the troops and the vulgarity of the weasel suggest the speaker’s aristocratic aversion and class bias, which “Meditations in Time of Civil War” develops further: The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine, The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace, Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean, Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place To brazen hawks (CP 252). The vision connects these unicorns with the earlier soldiers (“cloud pale” and “rags of cloud or of lace”), but their identity transforms into “an indifferent multitude” of “brazen hawks” who succeed them. Yeats’s class anxiety can be perceived here quite overtly, as the words “indifferent” and “brazen” could refer either to the callous violence of the fighting or to anarchic and vulgar middle class democracy, “the rule of the mob” (Smith 46, cf. Tratner 155). The indifference and brazenness he identifies as characteristic of the newer generation leaves no space for the heroism of “honour” and “truth” of seven years earlier. So, the new masculinities are not only threatening because they are younger and more active or because they represent “the pain of divided loyalties” (Cullingford, “Introduction” 12–13), they also upset the heroic ideals upon which the speaker’s aristocratic model of masculinity is based. As with the degeneracy and transgression of Robert Artisson, class is an underlying factor for the rejection of deficient masculinity. The implicit accusation here is that democracy equals anarchy, which can only produce suffering for all in a “senseless tumult” (CP 251), but no noble, masculine fight for a unified society (assumedly based on class divisions). 15 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 15 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM The speaker’s alienation from the contemporary models of masculinity acting in the Civil War becomes most apparent in his reaction to the two soldiers in front of his house in the same poem. The fight for hegemony in Ireland, as narrated by the speaker, becomes a fight for the definition of hegemonic masculinity, and, as before, the speaker depicts the combatants as common, even vulgar, and lacking masculine nobility, which he deems essential: An affable Irregular, A heavily-built Falstaffian man, Comes cracking jokes of civil war As though to die by gunshot were The finest play under the sun. A brown Lieutenant and his men, Half dressed in national uniform, Stand at my door, and I complain Of the foul weather, hail and rain, A pear-tree broken by the storm (250). The tone in the description of both soldiers vacillates between proud disdain and tired resignation. The old man faces a newer generation of men with whose masculine performance he cannot identify because within it he finds fault. Thus, although they stand in marked contrast, the speaker prefers neither to the other. The Irregular presents himself as heroic, but the speaker’s reservation (“As though”) indicates that he does not share his view. War is a part of a symbolical economy of (serious) “games” in which masculinity is constituted, as Pierre Bourdieu has remarked (47). Calling the Irregular “Falstaffian” thus ironically undermines the latter’s claim to participation in these serious games since Shakespeare’s character is clearly a far cry from chivalric military heroism. Stan Smith notes that “Yeats’s heroic figures are important primarily as instances of character revealed by a single action which sums up their identity and significance” (78). With his affableness and “cracking jokes” the Irregular represents such a moment of defining action, and he exposes himself as an unworthy hero, who seems to take the performance of masculinity not seriously enough, thus representing “a curious mixture between tragedy and farce” (Doggett 158). But the “brown Lieutenant” is no more heroic than his counterpart. The rags he wears (“Half dressed”) are only remainders of heroism and a mockery of aristocratic decorum; their wearer cannot defend aristocratic values because he does not belong to their tradition. Tellingly, the speaker does not even bother to speak to him about the war, because he sees in him no better alternative to the Irregular. Like 16 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 16 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM the “brazen hawks”, the two soldiers described here are lacking in terms of masculinity because they embody the “indifferent mass”, which knows no class distinction. Their senseless fight against each other leaves the speaker behind in gloom and “envy” (CP 250). It would be a mistake, though, to reduce this envy to the fact that they have “popular causes” (Faulkner 38) to follow. The loneliness of the speaker rather expresses his haughty superiority to them and his despair that his model of hegemonic masculinity has lost its entitlement. IV The various disappointing, even threatening masculinities presented in “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” are countered with a masculinist fantasy in the poem “The Tower”. The final part of this poem envisions a future masculinity that is paradoxically relying on the faraway past of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The passage begins by offering an image of masculine physicality in romantic harmony with nature: It is time that I wrote my will; I choose upstanding men That climb the streams until The fountain leap, and at dawn Drop their cast at the side Of dripping stone (CP 244). This depiction seriously, even solemnly, stresses physical prowess as a marker of the masculinity which his heirs are supposed to embody. Against this model, developed with considerable pathos (cf. Bloom 351–2), the images of masculinity of the two later poems must look deficient.3 However, more significant for the construction of this envisioned masculinity is the link the speaker establishes between his successors and his own idealised ancestors belonging to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy: I declare They shall inherit my pride, The pride of people that were Bound neither to Cause nor to State, Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants that spat, The people of Burke and of Grattan That gave, though free to refuse (CP 244). 17 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 17 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM Physical prowess is thereby complemented by a “pride” that is based on aristocratic leisure and independence, if not self-righteousness.4 For Harold Bloom this fantasy is an immature (and futile) longing for a cultural identity that has lost meaning and existence (351). But this judgement means to underestimate the specific intersectional constellation of gender, class and age, in which the speaker unfolds the anxiety of an aging male subject unable to cope with the social transformation of masculinity resulting from the Civil War. So far from just being aristocratic nostalgia, the invocation of those “passionate individualists, freethinkers, and, in that respect, images of the poet” (Allison 197) marks an attempt to overcome both the speaker’s own aged masculinity and the inadequate forms he perceives as the result of the several wars (WWI, the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War), which changed the meanings and codes of masculinity in Ireland. The masculine collective that the speaker imagines is thought of as being vertically rather than horizontally linked, a notion that he took over from Burke himself (Howes 104).5 It is therefore important to register that the temporal shift that results from Yeats’s linking of future and past leaves a gap in the present, which is thus implicitly silenced. It is here that Yeats’s anti-democratic tendency becomes conspicuous, an aspect which Daniel A. Harris ignores when he writes: “This pride is not the arrogance of a powerful minority but the exuberant sense of creative activity in history” (175). The vision effectively shows the nostalgia for the elite of a peaceful and ordered society. As the early commentator T.R. Henn remarked: “Before the First World War that aristocratic culture seemed to have given so much: pride and race, independence of thought, and a certain integrity of political values” (103). It should be clear that this “certain integrity” also implied a hierarchised society in which relationships between those in power and those lacking it remained uncontested, a vision incorporating “the values of a hierarchical, ordered society in which a cultural and political aristocracy gave leadership and dignity to a people who respected and served them” (Smith 70). In sharp contrast to this image, the current forms of masculinity fail to meet these idealisations: the poorly clad lieutenant lacks Burkean dignity whereas the Falstaffian Irregular shows the false kind of pride when he relates heroic narratives that were “designed to perpetuate bloodshed” (Doggett 159), instead of ending it. However, the specifically gendered nature of this aristocratic thinking is rarely acknowledged. For Harris, the speaker’s “shrewd pun on ‘upstanding” saves this powerful naming of heirs from sentimentality – and compactly defines his visionary men: they are “upright” physically, as well as morally and intellectually” (172). While thus acknowledging the gendered markers of the aristocracy, Harris does not recognise the overtly phallic connotation of 18 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 18 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM ‘upstanding”. In a different context, Joseph Valente has pointed to the distinctly aristocratic notion of masculinity for Yeats, and he quotes the poet stating that “Manhood is all, and the root of manhood is courage and courtesy” (238). With this statement, Valente comments: “Yeats not only signals his growing insistence upon an aristocratic style of being-in-the-world, he looks to reappropriate the chivalric discourse of manliness to the aristocratic culture whence it originally sprang” (ibid.). However, this quote is taken from a period when Yeats was actively involved in nationalist politics. Although his distinct investment in masculinity as nobility is still visible in The Tower, a certain resignation has taken hold of the aging poet. His idealised “upstanding” men thus indulge in solitary “predawn fishing expeditions” (Bloom 351), rather than lead their society, which has been taken over by deficient male subjects, who are fighting senselessly “For the embrace of nothing” (CP 251). V As different representations and fantasies of hegemonic masculinity have failed, the tower as such, the organising symbol of the “Big House” poems, epitomises the contradictions of Yeats engagement with masculinity. Feminist critics have pointed out that, although it is Yeats’s “most aggressively phallic symbol” (Cullingford, Gender and History 13), the poet himself saw that the tower is ultimately “Half dead at the top” (CP 287).6 So, this edifice is not only expressing the futility of a masculine counter-image to the degenerate and inadequate masculinities the poet denigrates elsewhere; the tower also exemplifies Yeats’s ambivalent attitude to the (imagined) Anglo-Irish ancestry.7 This uncertainty can be sensed in “Mediations in Time of Civil War” in a passage where the speaker refers to the current and former owner of tower and what they leave: “Two men have founded here” (247). But the stability that the word “founded” promises does not hold true for either of the men. The “manat-arms”, the first owner of the tower, and his followers had become “castaways / Forgetting and forgot” (248), consequently not leaving a memorable legacy. The poet himself bequeaths the tower and its environs ominously as “Befitting emblems of adversity” (248). The word “adversity”, however, is befitting in itself to express Yeats’s attitude, as it ambiguously refers to misfortune, opposition or even contrariness (OED). The tower expresses therefore an inherent instability of the masculine ideology that Yeats desires, and which might stem from his own complex and ambivalent attitude towards the Ascendancy (Howes 125). Itself reduced to “loosening masonry” (CP 250) and “broken stone” (293), the tower is not suited to fend off (literally and metaphorically) the new masculinities of the Civil War, as Yeats, who had to witness the burning of similar Big Houses 19 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 19 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM by Éamon De Valera’s men, knew all too well. At the same time, moreover, the claim to be distinct from those atrocious actions is undermined by the “barbarism” (Howes 105) and “murderous past” (Smith 66) of the Anglo-Irish ancestry and the tower respectively. Eventually, like the “man-at-arms”, both belong to an almost forgotten past. VI In her study on Yeats’s love poetry, Elizabeth Cullingford highlights the poet’s more feminine understanding of his poetic vocation: “Although his father praised active men, Yeats was timid and passive, dependent upon reverie and dreams for his inspiration” (Gender and History 13). As I have shown, in The Tower these imaginations can be read as unveiling a cautious negotiation of masculine subjectivity. The masculinities presented in the “Big House” poems pose a dilemma which exemplifies Yeats’s complex and shifting identity politics, defined by the intersection of gender, age and class. The poet projects his older age onto an aristocratic heritage. However, this heritage is not a suitable image for hegemonic masculinity because it represents a class already declined and itself inherently unstable. On the other hand, the younger masculinities, which result from the social and political upheavals in Ireland, are lacking the noble pride that he claims as the defining element of hegemonic masculinity. The tower, with its decaying structure and problematic heritage is therefore not merely an “ironic mask” (Cullingford, Gender and History 13). It is rather the expression of a deeply troubled engagement of a proud but ageing man with the gender politics of an age in which he saw his values as threatened. From this perspective, the Ireland he saw emerge was indeed “no country for old men”. NOTES 1 See Mahaffey (137, 140) See Cullingford for a discussion of his “lack of partisanship” (Fascism 112) during the Civil War. 3 The arrangement of the three poems in the volume reverses the chronological order, which enhances the foil character of this particular vision, since it is the first the reader encounters. 4 For a general discussion of this aspect see Howes (106–7). 5 Cf. Cullingford, Fascism 132. 6 Cf. Cullingford, Gender and History 13; Mahaffey 132. 7 For a more extended discussion of this ambivalence see Howes (105–8). 2 20 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 20 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM WORKS CITED Book by one author Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Cullingford, Elizabeth. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism. London: Macmillan, 1981. ---. Gender and History in Yeats Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Faulkner, Peter. Yeats. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987. Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mahaffey, Vicki. States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Smith, Stan. W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction. Savage: Barnes and Noble, 1990. Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Yeats, W.B. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman's Library. Pössneck: GGP Media, 1992. Chapter in edited book Allison, Jonathan. “Yeats and Politics”. The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats. Eds. Marjorie Howes and John Kelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 185–205. Cullingford, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. Yeats: Poems, 1919–1935. Ed. Elizabeth Cullingford. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. 8–22. Harris, Daniel A. “On ‘The Tower”. Yeats: Poems, 1919–1935; A Casebook. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. 163–80. Hearn, Jeff. “Neglected Intersectionalities in Studying Men: Age(ing), Virtuality, Transnationality”. Framing Intersectionality. Eds. Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar and Linda Supik. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 89–104. Henn, T.R. “The Background”. Yeats: Poems, 1919–1935. Ed. Elizabeth Cullingford. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. 100–10. Whitaker, Thomas R. “On Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”. Yeats: Poems, 1919–1935. Ed. Elizabeth Cullingford. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. 197–207. Journal Article Cullingford, Elizabeth. “How Jacques Molay Got up the Tower: Yeats and the Irish Civil War”. ELH, 50:4 (1983): 763–89. Doggett, Rob. “Writing Out (of) Chaos: Constructions of History in Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War””. Twentieth Century Literature, 47:2 (2001): 137–68. 21 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 21 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM W.B YEATS AND P.K YAVOROV: CONCEPTS OF NATIONAL MYTHOPOETICS Yarmila Daskalova St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo The following essay is an intertextual reading by multiple seminal works of two emblematic lyrical-dramatic poets from Ireland and Bulgaria: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Peyo Yavorov (1876–1914). I have coined the term “common typologies” to define a recurring concept taken from Yavorov’s and Yeats’s “philosophy” of love; one inspired by the inseparable image of the “woman-motherland”. The poets realise their respective aesthetic “designs” on different levels: Yeats was inspired by Celtic and Greek mythology, whilst Yavorov relied on Bulgarian folk tradition to build his “national mythopoeia”. However, in their endeavour to create a sacred mythopoeic image of the motherland, they were unquestionably on common ground; which, in the case of Yeats, was constructed during his lifetime, whilst with Yavorov, it remained incomplete and only acquired a distinctive outline following his death. Furthermore, this study aims to prove that the poets’ impulsive search for spirituality and subtle eroticism brings to the foreground an obsessive passion for “the woman-motherland” image. As a result – because of its un-attainability – this image turns into a vision and, ultimately, into a sui generis alter ego (or rather altra ego) of the authors’ own selves. This feminine “epiphany” is perceived as an intervention of fate and finds further expression in the concept of the femme fatale. Yeats and Yavorov share an obvious affinity for this notion, traceable throughout their completed works. The poets attempt to find vindication for their great, but lost, love for the motherland; respectively through persistent, imaginary journeys back to the threshold of Celtic and Greek mythologies, and Bulgarian mythological and folk traditions. However, the authors find their respective “Irish” and “Bulgarian” solutions lie in two different directions, despite the fact that they deal with the same dilemma. Whilst Yeats perceives the motherland as the epitome of his own ideal of female beauty, (essentially erotic, with its perfect proportions), Yavorov, (with his modernist challenging of metaphysical truths), finds expression in the inevitable split between earthly and celestial love – whose reconciliation appears to be unattainable. Both poets, however, opened the way for a new doctrine, which, unlike a metaphysical comprehension of experience, could be viewed as a mundane, though hieratic, understanding of the “philosophy” of love. Whilst the essential 22 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 22 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM difference between the earthly and celestial had never been questioned previously from the point of view of the transcendental, the idea of the ambivalence of experience came to co-exist dramatically in their minds. In this sense, their “philosophies” should be viewed as phenomenological and symptomatic of their own time, rather than as a consistent theory of the relativity of modernism. Their ideological formations, influenced by their “national” journeys towards their respective mythologies and folklores, therefore acquired a specifically archaic as well as intellectualised significance; associating the concepts of myth with the illogical intuitions of individuality, as much as the collective traditions of the “nation”. W.B YEATS: FORGING A MYTHOPOEIC STEREOTYPE Yeats appears to have felt a need to make his mythopoeic personification of Ireland more enduring, all the time writing in a context characterised by mythologising and counter-mythologising. (He employs images from Celtic mythology in the collections Crossways, The Celtic Twilight, The Wind among the Reeds, In the Seven Woods, and in the plays Cathleen-ni-Houlihan, Deirdre, On Baile’s Strand and The Only Jealousy of Emer). Yeats considered this mythology to be part of what he called the “Anima Mundi”. In Per Amica Silentia Lunae he wrote: “I am persuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body and period, and I think of Anima Mundi as a great pool or garden where it moves through its allotted growth like a great water plant or fragrant branches in the air” (The Major Works 418). He went so far as to identify some of the Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century as his precursors. As Edward Hirsh points out, for Yeats such oral bards and wandering minstrels as “Raftery”, (to him the “Irish Homer”), were not wholly isolated men because they were the “inheritors of an ancient mythological tradition” (883). One particular Gaelic myth from this tradition, one of sovereignty gained by sexual transformation, came to be firmly rooted in Yeats’ work. According to this myth, Queen Maeve, also known as “Medb”, as the warrior queen of Connacht, resorted to using enormous sexual energy and military prowess in order to endow the men who were to accede to the throne with new identities. No king could reign in Connacht unless he was married to Maeve. It was also said that “she never was without one man in the shadow of another” (Cotterell 63). When sexually accosted, and a potential sovereign acceded to the throne, Queen Maeve was transfigured into a young beauty. This myth likewise combined the image of Ireland with an image of idealised and highly desired femininity; its source being creatively powerful. For Yeats, this image is usually traced to Maud Gonne, often represented in 23 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 23 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM his writing as “the living embodiment of the spirit of Erin” (Cullingford 11). Because of her involvement with the Irish struggle for national independence she seemed a fitting emblem of Ireland. In conformity with an aesthetic vision derived from Celtic mythology, specifically, from myths about Cailleac Bheara or Queen Maeve, both identified by Cullingford as “the humanised version of the goddess of Sovereignty” (4), the emblematic figure is antithetically beautiful and ugly. She is a hag and a beautiful fairy, an old witch and a young beauty, at the same time. These aisling forms belonged to, as Yeats himself suggested, “a tradition of belief older than any European Church founded upon the experience of the world before the modern bias” (Autobiographies 265). It seems, as Harwood suggests, that “Maud Gonne met the requirements of Yeats’s imagination, because she was engaged in acting the role of a “warrior queen’” (268). If Maud Gonne had initially, in his early period, been seen as a living paragon for an ideal Ireland, derived from Celtic mythology, in his later “Hellenic” poems, she personifies an Ireland of epic stature, reminiscent of the mythological stature of godlike figures such as Helen of Troy or Athena Pallas. The following extracts from “No Second Troy” and “A Thought from Propertius” attest to this point: What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is Was there another Troy for her to burn (CP 140)? or She might, so noble from head To great shapely knees, The long flowing line, Have walked to the altar Through the holy images At Pallas Athena’s side, Or been fit spoil for a Centaur Drunk with the unmixed wine (202). The legendary “monumental serenity” of classical heroic goddesses – to use Winckelmann’s famous phrase – was intended to be a constituent of a national myth. This, in Yeats’ view, had to be forged out of different mythologies and levels of experience in order to achieve an effect required for the building of 24 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 24 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM a prosperous nation. The invocation of a classical literary genealogy evidently intended to complement a national ideal once sought only in Celtic sources. THE FEMME FATALE: IDOLATRY OR SUPERHUMAN AESTHETICISM? THE STATUE AND ITS ROLE IN MYTH-MAKING The femme fatale, a feminine figure seen as exerting deadly powers on the surrounding world, obsessed writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Statues representing classical goddesses were frequently envisaged as expressions of fatal femininity, producing a particularly powerful impact through their ambiguous and dangerous presence.The monumental suggestiveness of high fore-headed Aphrodites, Helens of Troy and other goddesses of supreme beauty overpowered Yeats's imagination, from 1910 onwards; their “living embodiment” inevitably being Maud Gonne. On the statuesque beauty of his beloved, Yeats writes in his Autobiographies: “Her face like the face of some Greek statue, showed little thought, as though a Scopas had measured and long calculated, consorted with Egyptian sages and mathematicians out of Babylon that he might face even Artemisia’s sepulchral image with a living norm” (364–365). For Yeats, the statues of Mausolus and Artemisia – which he had seen in the British Museum, and served as creative “prototypes” within his poem “The Statues” (1939) – appeared to accommodate a specific ambivalence. He wrote in Autobiographies: “These private, half animal, half divine figures [...] became to me [...] images of an unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man racked by doubt and inquiry, can achieve” (150). Yeats’s interest in perfect measurements, embodied by certain statues, was derived from his preoccupation with Pythagoras’s philosophical focus on the mythic quality of numbers. The “plummet-measured face” (384 and 385) from the poem “The Statues” is explicitly related to Greek sculptors who relied on Pythagoras’s “calculation, number, measurement” (ibid.) to make their statues “move in marble or in bronze” (ibid.). The “Statues” from the eponymous poem – also inspired by the “statuesque” figure of Maud Gonne – seem to embody Yeats's ideal of sexualised beauty as a mixture of number and passion. He wrote: There are moments when I am certain that art must once again accept those Greek proportions which carry into plastic art the Pythagorean numbers, those faces which are divine because all there is empty and measured. Europe was not born when Greek galleys defeated the Persian hordes at Salamis [but] when the Doric studios set out those broad-backed marble statues against the 25 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 25 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM multiform vague, expressive Asiatic sea, they gave to the sexual instinct of Europe its goal, its fixed type. In the warm sea of the French and Italian Riviera I can still see it (in Adams 306). And here is an excerpt from the poem “The Statues”: […] for the men That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down All Asiatic vague immensities, And not the banks and oars that swam upon The many-headed foam of Salamis. Europe put off that foam when Phidias Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass (CP 384). The emergence of myth should be linked with the crossing of multi-cultural layers, (one civilisation replacing another) in the creation of a unified symbol. The historical association here is with the Athenians who defeated Persia in the Battle of Salamis. Salamis seems to be viewed as a point of intersection in the rise and fall of civilisations. The idea here is that civilisations rise and fall, but, as Heraclitus puts it: “they live each other’s life and die each other’s death” (see A Vision 68). The early civilizations of the ancient Near East (Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, etc.), had died out but they handed down their testaments to Ancient Greece.1 Greece conquered the world as a state where art flourished and where democratic freedom of personality was a primary concern. Although Rome conquered Greece with its iron legions, Greece outlived Rome owing to the power and beauty of its glorious spirit, reborn as an idea in Byzantium. The Renaissance of the West would not have emerged without Byzantium's influence. Yeats wrote, with this connection in mind: Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound, and it amuses one to remember that before Phidias, and his westward-moving art, Persia fell, and that when full moon came round again, amid eastward-moving thought and brought Byzantine glory, Rome fell; and that at the outset of our westwardmoving Renaissance, Byzantium fell; all things “dying each other’s life, living each other’s death” (in Bloom 282). Yeats had an eclectic, arbitrary and flexible sense of history but this pattern of thought was sensible and coherent. Irrespective of whether he makes use of mythological (Celtic or Greek), poetic (personal) or substantialised (statuesque) emblems, he unites them by way of a living norm, identified by his “Muse” 26 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 26 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM Maud Gonne. This is how “the living embodiment” came to function as an archetype in his poetry. She might have lived in Egypt or Greece, she might have crossed the boundary between the living and the dead as a fairy from the Celtic world, or she might have been perceived as a petrified idol, as a statue. In Harwood’s words, “Yeats and Maud Gonne, as it were, joined forces to create a woman of legend [and] [no] biographer has so far succeeded in disentangling image and reality” (268). PEYO YAVOROV2 On a different scale, we can identify similar typological schemes of mythologisation of the motherland and the beloved woman in the work of PeyoYavorov, who was conditioned by Bulgaria’s specific historical and geo-political location, its development and characteristic cultural experience. In view of the lack of a theoretical and aesthetic platform in Bulgarian modernism,3 the ontological core of the cultural life and rituals of Bulgarians from the period of the National Revival, and the respective construction of a united national mythopoeic text in the literary context, were built upon using mythological, legendary, religious and mystical codes about the conceptions of “ethnicity” and “the motherland”. In Yavorov’s work these conceptions find their expression, for the most part, within the images of the mother and the beloved woman. Geo Milev, one of the most distinguished literary figures of Bulgarian expressionism from the 20s of the 20th century, announced the emergence of Peyo Yavorov on the literary scene as an “emanation of the genius of the [Bulgarian] race” (164). Indeed, the characteristic mysticism in Yavorov's rhythmical ritually-symbolic incantatory versification, derived from Bulgarian folklore, justifies to a considerable degree the aforementioned quotation. The notion of Yavorov as a “national” poet corresponds with how Yeats is an emblematic Irish “national” poet – his greatest inspiration, and dedication, being his beloved Ireland. The triune iconic “Mother-Motherland-Beloved Woman”image made Yavorov suffer; making him a willing martyr for his poetic faith. “Myth”, a touchstone in literary history – and critical thought during this time – engender d and brought Yavorov’s idea of merging the images of the mother, the motherland and the beloved woman together into a triune. In “Night”, a characteristically “ethnic” poem, he writes: Forgive, thrice miserable motherland, Forgive your fallen son. I will be yours, I swear to you, mother, 27 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 27 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM I swear by the thousand wounds Of your shattered shape; […] With my blood I will draw a cross From the Danube to the white Aegean And from the Albanian wasteland To the waters of the Black sea ( я 62). And further on: I am not willing yet to die! So early, So young – o, let me live For your sake, mother, for the motherland, And for her sake… (67). Sergiy Frank insightfully remarks in The Crash of the Idols that the evergrowing meaninglessness and depreciation of the spiritual life of human beings comes as a result of one’s loss of identity: “The more miserable we feel, the more dismal our souls become and the more acutely we miss and long for the motherland” (in Velkova-Gaidarzieva 157). In this sense, the concept of “the motherland” in the works of both Yeats and Yavorov bears purely metaphysical connotations. Their personal and individual poetic identities merge together the collective and the “national” in a specific dramatical way, which enables them to build up a fateful bond with the motherland. It is revealing, and no accident, that the poem “Motherland” – from Yavorov's Revelations collection – states: Where are you, where are you, motherland? Is it possible that you be in that rampant rabble Of wolves and goats – over vale and hill Forever scattered whose name is riffraff? … But you are here, in my very self, you, motherland! And I have you: my joy is grief… For unwarranted burdens bend my back. And I have you – so as to be alone amongst the rabble ( я 150–151). The involuntary sufferer whose back is bent under the heavy burden of an unknown weight, and who drags along the fetters of his metaphysical motherland, is said to be “alone amongst the rabble”. He wanders gloomily over its scattered patches in search of its impossible unity; like a “Solitary Stranger”, to quote the title of his earlier poem. The accumulation of pain and suffering in the soul of the poetic speaker, after all, reveals a truth about 28 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 28 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM the motherland's condition: that it is forever and irrevocably torn up by savage conflicts and dissentions, with no possibility of restoring its previous integrity. THE FEMME FETALE AND ITS ROLE IN MYTH-MAKING IN THE POETRY OF P.K. YAVOROV The recurrent theme of the tragic personality split in Yavorov’s poetry, as with Yeats’s, acquires a particularly powerful note when it is engendered by a yearning for an impossible unity of a country rent by division and dissent; as well as for the ideal iconic image of the beloved woman. The notion of ideal femininity, however, is here replaced by the image of the femme fatale, embodied by Lora Karavelova; seen by Yavorov as simultaneously angelic and demonic. The coveted “Holy Grail” for Yavorov is the unification of the lost motherland, as well as an attainment of the ideal image of the “beloved woman”. His pursuit of the primal triunity of the “Mother-Motherland-Beloved” however turned out to be futile and gave birth to the frightening shadows of the demon-woman: “the monstrous child of crime and disgrace”, “the queens of the night”, and the ambivalent nature of “sinful flesh and vision light” ( я 54). These are images of an unrealised Joan of Arc, whose pristine purity has been lost. In “A Monster” he writes: Thou art a monster! Monstrous child Of crime and disgrace, In secret you were born by them Away from even Satan’s eye: Born by filth and shame! And at your sight, In horror, did they turn to stone (125). Or in “The Curse”: O, cursed be the moment, woman, sinful flesh, I saw you midst the cloud of my prayers. My life has ever since been filled with haggard drowse... My manly strength in battle hardened, is now gone! My song has turned to wail for I have lost my way (161). The male's “surrender” to a female's flesh evidently refers to the power of fatal femininity: to its mythical and mystical sway over the consciousness of the poetic speaker/poet. As a result, feeling helpless, he can only hear an echo 29 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 29 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM from his own voice, having lost his manly power. The indifferent echo of the speaker’s words from “Adam’s Song” – “It seems that in a gloomy dungeon / I hear only an echo from my call” (199) – turns a question mark (instead of an answer) to the question of “Man”, thus making him feel entrapped within his own confused thoughts about earthly deeds. Logically enough, the echo’s resonating words constitute a vicious circle for “man,” which hinders him from following any trajectory of transcending metaphysics that might disclose secrets sought in his lifetime. The only possible way to find out what is behind the echo's impenetrable face is to be devoured by the dark bosom of death: “Death! It’s all I see in the white arc/ Of your secret tables, life!” (174). Here, Yavorov introduces the theme of the extreme and mysterious experience of death itself. Life is seen merely as a shroud, a mask which the poet takes off and the dark immensity of death is revealed to him. This experience eventually brings some revelation; it confides a truth to the poetic speaker which, until that moment, remained hidden from his questioning reason. The thought is lost, he suggests, but what is earned is a secret for us as readers. The “one and only word” which “brings together good and evil” and “has neither syllables nor sounds” (139) is kept from the inquisitiveness of “the others”. The deliberate juxtaposition of life, which symbolically corresponds with the carnival meaning of the mask on the one hand, and death, which overwhelms him through the passionate laughter of bacchanal night, on the other, (see his poem “The Mask”) is intended to show the paradoxical convergence of two mutually exclusive concepts, their clashing brings about an initiation into the very secrets of human existence. In the final reckoning, in the case of both Yavorov and Yeats, disentangling image from reality is doomed to failure. Elevated to the realm of mythology, Yavorov and Lora Karavelova have deservedly earned a place in the privileged space of literature; the Bulgarian modernist poet and the femme fatale, par excellence. His letter to his sister Ekaterina, after Lora’s suicide and his subsequent loss of sight, is revealing. In it he wrote: Almost blind for the outer world, endowed with an inner sight, I can see the blessed souls of my mother and Lora alive around me. They encourage me to drink the cup of bitterness to the dregs in order to attain the eternal peace in which they rejoice ( я 5 392). These lines demonstrate Yavorov’s ultimate resignation and humble acceptance of his own “self”, being distanced from the carnival monstrosity of reality at this time. For the first time in his work, he perceived his alter ego as a reflection of his innermost essence. Being at the borderline where the 30 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 30 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM inevitable meaning of time’s relativity and the absolute meaning of eternity got together, similar to the blind Oedipus Rex, he saw through the dark curtains of time, truth, and the very meaning of human existence: “Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it” (Letters 922), as Yeats himself observed. This last judgment on the soul and the self of the poet, and eternal peace was well-deserved. Lora, Yavorov and the Motherland attained completeness and embodied truth. NOTES 1 Mikhail Rostovtzeff writes in A History of the Ancient World: But it must be remembered that the lofty creation of Greece was developed from the culture attained by the ancient East; that Greek civilization only became world-wide as the result of a fresh and prolonged contact with the Eastern cultures, after the conquest of the East by Alexander the Great; and that it became the property of the West, that is, of modern Europe, simply because it was taken over in its entirety by Italy. We must also remember that Italy alone made it accessible, in its Roman form, to all those parts of the ancient world which Italy united for the purpose of civilized life. If the civilization of the East and of Greece was not confined to the eastern part of the ancient world but became the foundation of culture for the West and for modern Europe, for this Europe is indebted to Italy and to Rome. Hence, if ancient civilization is to have any ethnographical label, it should properly be called GraecoRoman” (10). 2 All translations from Bulgarian into English are my own (Y. D.). 3 The “dramatic” identity of modernism in the Bulgarian context was determined by the specific intellectual climate in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. The National Revival period in Bulgarian history coincided with times of Aestheticism and Decadence in the context of European poetry. The enthusiasm and excitement by Bulgarians to, at once, sow the seeds of their recently won independence from Ottoman rule, and plant the “flowers” of European cultural achievement in a native soil, inevitably led to a modernist phenomenon, and determined its extremely complex character. The rapid establishment of a national identity and the people’s striving to catch up in a “revolutionary” way what Europe had already achieved, in an “evolutionary” manner, determined the characteristic milieu within which the innovative spirit of the time grew up. Although there emerged literary-critical texts which aimed at synthesizing the aesthetic principles of the new trend, which appeared to be programmatic in a sense, they could not be regarded as manifestoes of Bulgarian modernism; especially as far as aesthetic individualism and symbolism was concerned, in its early stages. Such texts include Dr Krastev’s On Tendency and the Tendentious in Literature, Pencho Slaveykov’s Bulgarian Poetry, Ivan Andreychin’s On the New Way and the essay by Dimo Kyorchev titled Our Sorrows. They all aimed to propagate European modernism in Bulgaria and were unified in their explicitly negative attitude about what was native. 31 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 31 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM WORKS CITED Books by one author Adams, Hazard. Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic. Tallahasee: University Press Florida, 1983. Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Cotterell, Arthur. Celtic Mythology. London: Hermes House, 2002. Rostovtzeff, Mikhail. A History of the Ancient World.The Orient and Greece. Biblo Tannen Publishers, 1926. Yeats, William Butler. Autobiographies, London: Papermack, 1992. ---. A Vision (1937). London: Macmillan, 1981. ---. The Letters of W.B Yeats. Ed. Alan Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1955. ---. The Major Works, Ed. E. Larissy, Oxford University Press, 1997. ---. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman's Library. Pössneck: GGP Media, 1992. , .Б o. : „ . . “, 1999. , . я . , 1965. , .. я, . , 1965. ---. я, . я. , 1965. of & - Chapter in edited book Harwood, John. “Secret Communion’: Yeats’s Sexual Destiny”. Yeats and Women. Ed. D. Toomey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc, 1997. Journal article Cullingford, Elizabeth. “Thinking of Her…as…Ireland’: Yeats, Pearse and Heaney”. Textual Practice 2.1 (1990): 1–20. Hirsch, Edward. “And I Myself Created Hanrahan’: Yeats, Folklore and Fiction”. ELH 48, (1981): 880–893. 32 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 32 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM W.B YEATS AND THE SYMBOL OF THE GYRES Nikolay Todorov Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” I. YEATS’s A Vision: context AND doubts A Vision by the Irish poet, and Nobel prize for literature winner with its two revisions – from 1925 and 1937 – is sometimes called a “notoriously knotty and peculiar work” (“Preface” vii). Critics are divided regarding the nature and the authenticity of the “automatic writing” used for the work’s basic material (Moore 256–278). Amongst many questions that have arisen, the “worst case scenario” may be that Yeats’s 25-year-old wife Georgie manipulated him concerning her medium skills (he husband hurried the marriage because of astrological prognostics, which he followed closely throughout all of his life). Although it is unlikely that we will ever get a conclusive answer concerning this theory. Despite the original scripts being sometimes doubtful and contradictory (of nearly a thousand printed pages only a relatively small number were used), the interpretation, the artistic consciousness and Yeats's sincerity and faith in the book was never in put in doubt; particularly in his principal role of elaborating its final form, with its specific wording, metaphors and stylistic “arrangements” (A Vision 25). David A. Ross outlines the relationship between Yeats’s brief philosophical treatise Per Amica Silentia Lunae, published in January 1918, and in A Vision. The symbol of the gyres is already present together with “the winding movement of nature” and “the heaving circles”. David A. Ross notes that A Vision’s status as a record of supernatural revelation is “complicated […] by its clear emergence from Yeats’s most habitual patterns of thought” (416). According to Virginia Moore, the rituals of the occult society the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” in which he was an active member, were “as full of wheels as a watch shop” (263). The result is that A Vision belongs to at least two broad literary traditions: 1) It stands in the long line of works supposedly written through “mysterious agencies” (similar, for example, to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s works).1 2) Undeniably, it is modernist experimental prose: fragmented, “patchworklike”, with its own personal mythology, symbolic system and metaphorical language (similar to James Joyce’s Ulysses). 33 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 33 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM II. THE IMPORTANCE OF A Vision AND ITS INITIAL RECEPTION It is no longer in doubt that A Vision, which occupied a considerable amount of the writer’s attention post-1917, is indispensable for the understanding of Yeats’s later works, both in his poetry and prose. It sold poorly and received little critical attention at the time of its first publication. The situation did not change much with the second revised and expanded edition. Responses were scarce and Yeats’s “oldest friend” (as he called him), the theologian George Russell (“AE”) acknowledged in his review of the 1925 edition, that he was “unable in a brief space to give the slightest idea” of A Vision’s technical complexity because “almost any of its crammed pages would need a volume to elucidate its meanings” (“A Vision” 272), and continued: For all its bewildering complexity the metaphysical structure he rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with the precision of Chinese puzzle-boxes into each other. It coheres together, its parts are related logically to each other, but does it relate so well to life (ibid.)? Virginia Moore is no less cautious and stated “comment on every detail would take three books” (261), and the poet and critic W.H Auden dismissed it as an “embarrassment” (“Preface” vii). In his critical review of A Vision, Ross had some more important questions to ask: Are we to take seriously its putative coherence or to make what use we can of its sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening parts and pieces? Are we to extract from the husk of its system an implicit poetry? Is its system the essence of its poetry? Does it shed light on the world or merely on Yeats? What light does it shed on the poems and plays? Are its junctures of impenetrable obscurity strategic or botched? How to evaluate the epistemological status of a system allegedly communicated by spirits? Are its putative truths figurative or literal? (416) In Yeats’s own words: I will never think any thoughts but these or some modification or extension of these; when I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though it may not be in the words. (A Packet for Ezra Pound 32) And finally, he made a postponed statement similar to a confession: 34 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 34 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM Four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I offered to spend what remained of [my] life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences (A Vision 8). III. INFLUENCES ON YEATS COSMOLOGY A Vision begins with the introduction of two “main symbols”: “the Great Wheel” and “the Gyres”. In this paper, I focus on the latter and its relation with Yeats’s concept of “time”. Whilst writing his initial draft of A Vision, he read Berkeley, Whitehead and Spengler, amongst others (“A Vision of Ezra Pound” 258), and he names in the text a large number of authors who exercised their influence on him, including: Empedocles, Heraclitus, Simplicius, Duhem, Alcemon, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Macrobius, Swedenborg, Flaubert, Plotinus, Gentile, Kant, Boehme, Hegel, Blake, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Pythagoras and Plato. This impressive accumulation of references reminds one of the approaches of Yeats’s fellow modernists Joyce, Eliot and Pound to the “world of ideas” and their consequent interpretations and implementations which at first sight can seem random and incoherent. From the above listed authors, “direct” influence on the understanding of the symbolic “gyres” include: Swedenborg, with his “gyrations”, “spiral movement of points” and “vortexes”; Descartes, with his “vortex”; Boehme, with his “gyre” and Flaubert, with his “spirale”. Each one directly, or indirectly, in turn leant on theories by ancient Greek philosophers. Ezra Pound, an associate and friend of Yeats, was attracted to the symbol of the vortex a decade earlier when he participated in Vorticism, a short-lived avant-garde movement. He acted as the poet’s secretary and is believed to have exercised a strong influence on the formation (or even “reformation”) of the latter’s views. Detailed accounts of their collaborations are provided by James Longenbach in Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism and Catherine E. Paul in “A Vision of Ezra Pound” (252–269). Although Pound was quite skeptical about Yeats’s beliefs, they discussed metaphysics and poetic imagery, amongst other topics; including the interlocking vortices (or cones) and the idea of the interplay between individuals, historical events, cycles, spheres, and greater knowledge. Hugh Kenner outlines the similarities of the concepts of Yeats and Pound: both figures representing “a circulation with a still centre: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near” (239). Moreover Yeats’s A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929) was included as a preface to the second edition of A Vision, and this may be interpreted also as an address to readers that book was a parallel to Pound’s never-to-be-finished project, The Cantos (“A Vision of Ezra Pound” 259). Such theories regarding literature and art were implemented 35 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 35 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM even earlier by poets such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, all of whom were familiar with, and to different degrees influenced by, Swedenborg. Parallels can also be made with Edmund Husserl’s concept of “phenomenological reduction” and Ernst Cassirer’s experience-defining “symbolic forms”. IV. YEATS’S SYMBOLIC SYSTEM OF THE GYRES AND THE ANCIENT GREEK TRADITION The origins of Yeats’s symbol of the gyres can be traced back to the preSocratic philosophy of Ancient Greece. Especially noteworthy are the writers: Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plotinus, and Proclus. Anaximander was the first to develop a cosmology, or a systematic philosophical view of the world. He associates the birth of things with their passing away, generally interpreted as a cycle, and introduced the concept of apeiron (often translated as “unlimited”), that is the “origin of all”, which has no beginning and no end. Heraclitus states that the divine reason implicit in the cosmos orders and gives it form and meaning (viz. the “logos”), is manifest through the connection between opposites. Both of them relate the origin of celestial bodies with primary element fire (Thales points out water; Anaximenes – the air). Heraclitus’s “Fragment 34” says: Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water. and water is the death of earth, and air is the death of water, and fire of aer. and so in reverse (18). Parmenides and Empedocles present reality as a tension of opposed forces, discord and concord. Plotinus elaborates three basic principles of the world which he called: “the One”, “Intellect”, and “Soul”. “The One” presents the primordial unity of the universe as “self-caused”, and the cause of existence. In A Vision, all of these ideas are embodied in different ways and associated with the following elements, complementing the cosmological system within which the gyres take part: 1) The “spherical ultimate reality”, (a monistic conception closest to what Parmenides calls “a well rounded reality” with a “timeless existence”). It “falls” into human consciousness via a series of antinomies (or dualistic representations). “The One” disintegrates into “Many”. This can be seen also in Yeats’s poem “The Gift of Harun-al-Rashid”: “From the great Treatise of Parmenides;/ All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things” (Yeats 2000, 384). 36 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 36 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM 2) Yeats’s cosmology understands time as a “cosmic cycle” of eternal change, growth and decay where two opposing personified cosmic forces remain in a “dynamic equilibrium”. Indeed, the historical cycle is heavily derivative of Giambattista Vico’s New Science (“The Political Occult” 331–332). 3) There are also the oppositions of “growth-decay”, “solar-lunar”, “malefemale” within the “secondary” reality of the “accessible” world. In A Vision, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy is occasionally represented by Heraclitus quotations; for instance, “all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death” (A Vision 68). The poem “The Gyres” also – quite naturally – makes direct reference to the spiralling cones: “The gyres! The gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;/ Things thought too long can be no longer thought” (CP 340). 4) The “Primary Tincture” (A Vision 72) is also “bipolar”. It is both “the purified state of the Great Work” and “the Essence”. The symbol of the gyre reflects interior oppositions, expressing two forces (or essences) in space and time. According to A Vision, the straight line expresses time, emotion, and subjective life in opposition to space, intellect, and objective life. The gyres perform two movements which circulate about a centre; one constantly prevailing. 5) The “Antithetical Tincture” (72) is the oppositional state; the primary being the one which “serves” and the antithetical being the one which “creates”. The “primary Tincture” is associated with truth, good and peace whilst the antithetical one stands for fiction, evil and war. V. INTERTWINING TRADITIONS The cosmological views of the Ancient Greeks found new expression in the works of poets such as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, both of whom exercised a strong influence on Yeats (see Ross 442–446, 548–550). Returning to the symbol of the gyres, Blake uses the symbol of the spiral with similar meaning on many occasions; for example, in Jerusalem, Plate 17, (E 161): “Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist:/ But Negations Exist Not” (693). Shelley also demonstrates a remarkable similarity with Heraclitus's views in “Time”: Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! (191) 37 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 37 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM Modern French philosophical tradition and aesthetics, most often traced back to Descartes, culminated in the works of the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose lectures in the United Kingdom and the United States, were met with international acclaim. His views had an important impact on modernist thought throughout the western world, influencing amongst others works such as Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927). Although criticised later for being “attracted by mysticism”, Bergson produced influential works such as Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), The Creative Mind (1923) and Duration and Simultaneity (1922). One of his principal concepts was that “real time” (durée or duration) is a “spherical dimension where past, present, and future coexist” in continual interaction with each other and with a kind of vital force (élan vital)., Durée is a dynamic temporality of one's psychic experience within one's present self, in contrast to “mechanistic time”. It is only in these moments that reality can be truly and directly reached; viz. in a permanent flow or flux, (again using Heraclites's “essence” terminology), which is its “essence”. A similar “personalised duration” was described at the same time by the American philosopher and psychologist William James in his The Principles of Psychology (1890). VI. YEATS’S ESCHATOLOGY Gyres supposedly merge and stop their motion at the “end of time”. It seems that Yeats's primary understanding was that humanity would “return” and “reunite” with the “Primary One” outside of time and space. A reference to the Hindu concept of “attaining harmony” can be made. His meeting with Bengali philosopher Mohini Chatterjee in 1886 was important in forming views and ideas as well as fostering a lasting interest in Eastern theosophy. Yeats also befriended the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and promoted his works in the West. Nevertheless Yeats’s view of the quest for peace is rarely stated directly but it can be found in the first edition of A Vision under the title “BEATITUDE”. Themes of apocalyptic “annunciations” and “revelations”, and possessing a Christian background, can be discovered in the poems “The Magi”, “The Mother of God”, “The Resurrection”, “Two Songs from a Play”, and “The Second Coming”. A Vision states that the “current cycle” of time is expected to bring a revelation contrary to the one of life and antithetical to the expectation of the birth of Christ 2000 years ago (302). This idea can be traced even in some of Yeats’s final works including “Under Ben Bulben”: Proof that there's a purpose set Before the secret working mind: Profane perfection of mankind (CP 374). 38 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 38 5/12/2017 8:41:09 AM A Vision once more proves to be far more than a stylistic experiment or an example of Yeats’s lasting fascination with the occult and with certain spiritualist practices The ideas in A Vision reach their completion at a “timeless point” where“continuation” seems unimaginable or at least improbable. Nevertheless, it remains a book which challenges the limits of comprehensibility and aesthetic experience, which can fruitfully be inscribed along with other works awaiting further interpretations, including Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Pound’s The Cantos. NOTES 1 Trance, automatism and similar techniques were widely used by the French avantgarde writers after the First World War, most notably by the circle around André Breton, whose First Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924. WORKS CITED Book by one author Aristotle, De Anima. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008. Bergson, Henri. Key Writings, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Blake, William. The Complete Poems. Ed. W. H. Stevenson. London and New York: Longman, 1989. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Meade, Marion. Madame Blavatsky: The Woman behind the Myth. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1980. Moore, Virginia. The Unicorn: W. B. Yeats’s Search for Reality. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Ross, David A. Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: a Literary Reference to his Life and Work, New York: Facts On File, 2009. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Lyrical Poems and Translations of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Maryland: Wideside Press, 2008. Yeats, William Butler. A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925). Ed. by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly. London: Macmillan, 1978. ---. A Packet for Ezra Pound. Dublin: The Cuala Press, (August) 1929. ---. A Vision (1937). London: Macmillan, 1981. ---. The Collected Poems. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2000. ---. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman's Library. Pössneck: GGP Media, 1992. 39 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 39 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Chapter in edited book Jeffares, A. Norman. “A Vision”. W.B Yeats: The Critical Heritage. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Mann, Neil and Gibson, Matthew and Nally, Claire V. “Preface”. W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts. Ed. by Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Claire V. Nally. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012. Nally, Claire E. “The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision”. W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts. Ed. by Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Claire V. Nally. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012. Paul, Catherine E. “A Vision of Ezra Pound”. W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts. Ed. by Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Claire V. Nally. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012. Electronic sources/web publications Heraclitus. The Complete Fragments. Transl. William Harris. Web. http://community. middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/heraclitus.pdf. Accessed August 21st, 2015. 40 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 40 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM EU LEGISLATION AND MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE USAGE IN IRELAND IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 41 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 42 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM DUBLIN BILINGUALS: LANGUAGES AND CHALLENGES Marina Snesareva Moscow State University The status of the Irish language today is rather controversial. According to Article 8 of the Constitution of Ireland, it is recognised as the first official language of the state: “The Irish language as the national language is the first official language. The English language is recognised as a second official language” (Ireland 8–9). Theoretically, it means that any official communication in Ireland can be conducted through Irish. In practice, however, the majority of the country’s population use English in all aspects of their daily life and even those who can speak Irish are bilingual. Due to its official status Irish has substantial governmental support both on the national and the EU level. Several institutions and organisations strive to promote and support Irish use in the country: the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, which deals mainly with the Irish-speaking areas, the Language Commissioner who controls the use of both national languages in official institutions and the Irish Government, and “Foras na Gaeilge”, an organisation promoting the use of Irish in both public and private spheres, (supporting Irish language teaching, say), to name but a few. Besides, being an EU member-state, Ireland can avail of the support the European Union gives to minority languages in accordance with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages adopted in 1992. It should be pointed out here that Ireland was unable to sign the charter in regards to Irish as it is the country’s state language, albeit a minority one. However, the United Kingdom ratified the charter in respect to Welsh in Wales and Irish in Northern Ireland. Irish is also supported by means of the educational system: not only is it an obligatory school subject, but there are also a number of all-Irish schools (Ir. gaelscoileanna), both primary and secondary, where all subjects are taught through Irish. An important point to be mentioned here is that these schools provide high quality education free of charge. These institutions turned out to be quite successful, and in 2012–2013 there were 177 primary and 40 secondary all-Irish schools outside the Gaeltacht (“Irish-medium education outside the Gaeltacht 2012–2013”). However, the educational system in Ireland still has a number of problems, such as: a) mixed classes of students with different 43 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 43 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM language proficiency levels; b) an insufficient number of textbooks and course materials available in Irish; and c) an insufficient number of teachers with a high level of proficiency in Irish (Ní Chonchúir 116). Nevertheless, the Irish themselves view it as an integral part of their identity and often emphasise its cultural and sentimental value. Thus, sociological research conducted by Micheál MacGréil in 2007–2008 in Maynooth showed that the majority of respondents (there were 1015 in total) had a positive attitude to the Irish language: 52% believed that Irish should be preserved, 40.3% that Irish should be revived and only 6.7% rejected Irish completely (MacGréil 35). This positive attitude to both the language and those who speak it (101), however, does not necessarily result in the actual use of Irish. Despite official support, it remains an endangered minority language whose speakers are bilingual, i.e. have some knowledge of English even though Irish is their first language. And while the majority of the population uses English in daily life, the Gaeltacht is not free from problems either. Even though the general attitude to Irish is now quite positive, for a long time the language had non-prestigious associations with backwardness and rural life. This also had a negative impact upon its usage. Before we try to put the Irish situation in the European context, it is worth pointing out that bilingualism on the whole is quite common. In fact, scholars claim that there are more bilinguals than monolinguals in today’s world (Edwards 1). Indeed, 54% of the EU population speak two languages, and for some countries this figure even exceeds 90% (European Commission 5). One of the natural outcomes of such linguistic diversity is that some of the languages spoken in Europe are bound to be regional or minority ones, supported by the aforementioned 1992 Charter. According to official estimates, there are over 60 indigenous regional and minority languages in the EU spoken by over 46 million people (2). In a broader European context, UNESCO lists over 90 European languages that are definitely, severely or critically endangered in its “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” (Moseley), Irish being one of them: As the above map shows, UNESCO differentiates between five categories of endangered languages: “vulnerable” (for example, Welsh and Scots), “definitely endangered” (Irish and Scottish Gaelic), “severely endangered” (such as Jersey French in France), “critically endangered” (revived Manx and Cornish) and “extinct” (Alderney French). The picture makes it clear that even though Irish might be less endangered than many other languages, both its future and the current linguistic situation in Ireland raise concerns among the scholars. 44 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 44 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Picture 1. Endangered languages of Ireland and the United Kingdom The reason is that minority languages are often unstable and can face a threat of language shift or ultimately language death, should the number of speakers drop radically. The problem here is that even when a country’s state policy supports language diversity, it does not always coincide with what its population needs and desires. Thus, minority language speakers may decide to switch to the dominant language instead of preserving their own, in order to avail of its economic and social advantages. Indeed, as Fishman pointed out back in 1989, “few of us [...] are fully masters in our own homes; but none of us willingly settle for being strangers in our own homes, servants, dispossessed ghosts” (401). This is why younger speakers may refuse to use a minority language in favour of a more prestigious one. And even though from a linguist’s point of view preserving and documenting languages makes perfect sense, in a globalised world it becomes more and more problematic to protect minority languages and justify their necessity and 45 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 45 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM use. For example, in 1992, Peter Ladefoged wondered how speakers could be told to preserve linguistic diversity when it might be at the expense of their own upward socioeconomic mobility (811). In his article he gave an example of a speaker of Dahalo, an endangered Cushitic language, who was asked by Ladefoged whether his teenage sons spoke the language, and he answered in the negative. He was rather surprised by the speaker’s attitude and described it as follows: “He was smiling when he said it, and did not seem to regret it. He was proud that his sons had been to school, and knew things that he did not. Who am I to say that he was wrong?” (ibid.). Another problem, pointed out by Matthias Brezinger, is that restricted language use leads to restricted input and lower competence level: Limited use of the minority language leads to limited exposure to that language, which results in decreasing competence, lack of confidence in using the language, and increasing reliance on the dominant language. The circle then repeats itself on a lower level, by more limited use of the minority language (283–84). Besides, minority languages are used in a restricted number of contexts which leads to their impoverishment as “not using [a language] in the home domain detracts from its liveliness and endangers its transmission into future generations, while using it solely in the home domain limits its ultimate usefulness, since speakers will be unable to cope with the interpenetration of domains such as talking about work or school at home” (Clyne 308). This is exactly the case with Irish whose speakers often lack words denoting complex or modern concepts and have to switch to English during the conversation, especially in official settings. Speaking about the current linguistic situation in Ireland, it should be pointed out that it resulted from a combination of several factors but a lot of recent developments are closely connected with social changes. As Ó Riagáin pointed out back in 1997, “social interaction systems [in Ireland] have altered very considerably in the period since 1960 [...]. Until this point, social networks tended to be localized: since 1960, they have become increasingly more differentiated” (273–4). Another important thing is that “not only is the number of marriages between fluent Irish-speakers in decline, but there is also evidence to suggest that some parents with high ability of Irish have become less efficient in reproducing children with equally high levels of Irish in recent decades” (Ó Riagáin 273–4). As a result, many Irish people do not use the language at home and even if they do, it is often done for communication with only one parent (cf. Ní Chonchúir 114). Besides, in modern society Irish performs a cultural rather than communicative function (Mas-Moury Mack 53; Peillion 46 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 46 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM 102), whereas the latter is essential for language survival. This function of Irish also explains why speakers’ positive attitude towards the language frequently does not result in its use. Finally, the Gaeltacht is not free from problems either as the territory of the actual use of Irish is gradually shrinking (see picture 2), most residents being bilingual and able to communicate in English with outsiders. As pointed out by Hindley, “one wonders if the English-language television does not now talk more to Gaeltacht children than their parents do, assessed in hours per day. Certainly it talks to them long enough to guarantee their fluency in English by the age of 5 and to provide prime subject matter for conversation with their friends” (200). Today the imbalance between Irish and English is even more obvious, with English being the main language of the media, Internet and social networks. That is why even in Irish-speaking families children may grow up using English, or, as Ciarán Lenoach puts it, becoming “spontaneous English-speakers” (61). Picture 2. The actual use of Irish in the Gaeltacht (Hickey 119). 47 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 47 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM This all leads to rather pessimistic prognoses. Thus, according to recently published research by Ó Giollagáin and Charlton on the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht, Gaeltachts as Irish-speaking areas in a strict sense will probably cease to exist in 15–20 years despite the state’s attempts to support the use of Irish (Ó Giollagáin and Charlton 134). Indeed, according to the latest census data, by the Central Statistics Office, daily usage of Irish in the Gaeltacht is just 24.45%, whereas for the whole country the corresponding figure is even lower: only 5.3% of all Irish speakers, or 2.15% of all population, speak Irish on a daily basis. In view of the above, the role of urban speakers and language learners in preserving the language becomes extremely important. In order to study fluency and pronunciation of such speakers a field research was carried out in Dublin in November last year. Along with phonetic data, the interviews provided interesting sociolinguistic information: the attitude of Dubliners to Irish and the reason they became fluent in the first place, to name but a few. There were 36 informants in total (20 male and 16 female), belonging to different age groups, the youngest Dubliners being just 12–13 years old and the oldest, 64 (see picture 3): Picture 3. Dublin informants: age groups and percent of speakers. The chart makes it clear that most respondents (67%) were young Dubliners, i.e. not older than 35; 17% of the informants were speakers aged 35 to 45, and the last two groups had the lowest number of speakers, 8% each. The interviews consisted of two parts: a) respondents had to read aloud words and word-combinations in Irish and English, and b) respondents 48 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 48 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM were provided with a set of simple questions designed to engage them in a conversation, (and thus obtain more natural speech data through doing so). Most of the Dubliners hardly ever spoke Irish at home during their childhood, so the first question they were asked was what made them fluent and why they did not lose the language after school (see table 1): Table 1. Dublin Irish speakers: reasons for becoming fluent. Becoming fluent in Irish Reason Number of speakers Parents’ choice 19 Personal reasons 11 Irish was a compulsory school subject 10 Positive Gaeltacht experience 9 Irish was spoken with some family members 5 Irish is used for work 2 Irish was needed for the Leaving Certificate 2 Other 1 Quite naturally, most informants emphasised the role of parents: they said it was their parents’ choice to send them to an all-Irish school or summer courses in the Gaeltacht (19 speakers), either because they wanted the children to know the language (13 answers out of 19) or because they believed allIrish schools provided better education (6 answers). That is why the following statements were not uncommon among the informants: “It was really from my parents. We were sent to an all-Irish school, so we learnt everything through the medium of Irish. We did that from the age of five, so we didn’t know any different” (Informant 6), and Informant 7 stated “Basically, I’d be lying if I said I had a huge interest in Irish back when I was eight years old and sent to an all-Irish school”. Besides, 11 speakers emphasised personal reasons for learning and using Irish. For example, one Dubliner (Informant 25) said: “I just enjoyed speaking it. I think there are some great things you can say in Irish that don’t really translate well into English”. Another got his motivation from seeing foreigners use the language: I then remember I was watching a television programme on Irish language television and I saw these people speaking around the table and I knew by their accent they weren’t Irish. And there was a German, there was an Austrian and there was a guy from Norway – and they could all speak Irish. And I was saying: God, that’s our language and they can speak it probably better than us. So then I started speaking Irish seriously (Informant 11). 49 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 49 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Irish being a compulsory school subject was named as one of the reasons by 10 speakers, with one Dubliner being especially sincere: “It’s because it’s compulsory. That’s the reason why everyone does it. Like, that’s the blunt answer but I didn’t like speaking Irish” (Informant 12). Sadly, only five respondents spoke Irish at home during childhood with some family members. On the other hand, quite a number of speakers visited the Gaeltacht and were influenced by the positive experience they had there either during school summer courses or later visits. Finally, the Dubliner from the “other” group was motivated by his friends: For years I wouldn’t have been speaking Irish at all until I came back to Ireland. I just found that several of my friends who I’d known for many-many years and with whom I’d had a relationship entirely through English – they had decided by themselves to switch to Irish. So when I came back, you know, two my best friends were now speaking Irish so I started it as well. That was it (Informant 14). Of course, these replies are by no means characteristic of all of Dublin's population: after all, Irish-speaking Dubliners are a minority, but for them their parents’ attitude to the language seems to be of paramount importance. In addition, there is generational difference: while older speakers listed various personal reasons for speaking Irish, younger speakers tended to be more practical – they wanted good grades at school or intended to use Irish for work. The last point leads to the next question, concerning opportunities to speak Irish in Dublin and the frequency with which such interactions occur (see table 2): Table 2. Informants’ experience: Irish use in Dublin. Using Irish in Dublin Frequency and/or setting Number of speakers Work, several days a week 11 School, several days a week 6 At home with children, daily basis 5 At university, but not outside 4 From time to time 4 Very rarely 3 All the time, different settings 3 Other 3 As table 2 shows, the majority of fluent speakers use Irish regularly only if it is required for work (11 people) or education (6 respondents speak it in school and 4 more at the university). Besides, five raise their children bilingual and speak Irish to them. Apart from that, there seem to be few opportunities to use 50 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 50 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM the language in Dublin, and the awareness about such places and settings, even if they are there, is rather low. One younger speaker put it this way: “Actually I don’t have anyone really [to speak Irish to]. Like, I joined the Irish society in Trinity and the only thing we’ve done is an Irish pub crawl. And they didn’t even speak that much Irish there” (Informant 12). Interestingly enough, only two informants named the Internet and social networks as platforms for language use which might indicate that the rest either simply forgot to mention it or that they were not willing to use Irish online. The pattern one can observe here is that work and study seem to be essential for keeping the language outside the Gaeltacht, even more than family. Indeed, not only Irish gets used regularly but also its speakers see the practical benefits of knowing the language and may frequently find themselves in situations where switching to English is out of the question. However, many informants were afraid of losing Irish because it was not used. Thus, one respondent said she had hardly spoken any Irish for two years (Informant 6). Besides, quite a number of speakers emphasised the necessity to create more opportunities and to make a conscious effort to use Irish, which seems to be the case with any minority language. Finally, the informants were asked about their attitude to the language, and despite all of them being enthusiastic fluent speakers, replies varied (see table 3): Table 3. Dublin Irish speakers: language attitude. Attitude to Irish among Dublin speakers Attitude Number of speakers Interest in the language, linguistic or otherwise 14 Sentimental value, e.g. childhood memories 13 Irish as an integral part of national identity 10 Irish as an integral part of own identity 6 Cultural value 5 Indifferent 4 Thus, 14 informants said they were interested in Irish, linguistically or otherwise, even though not all of them had a linguistic background. Quite a lot of people (13 in total) mentioned the sentimental value of Irish, i.e. its connection to positive childhood memories. For ten speakers. the language was part of national identity, i.e. something that distinguished Irish people from those of other nationalities, while six said Irish was important for their own identity. Finally, the cultural value of Irish was mentioned five times while four speakers were rather indifferent to the language and thought they only knew it because it had been taught in school. 51 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 51 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM If there is any conclusion to be made based on this data, it should be pointed out that by no means do they show the common attitude to Irish in Dublin. Fluent speakers are a clear minority and even within this group opinions and attitudes vary and may change over time. There is, however, one point worth mentioning: their replies seem to confirm previous sociolinguistic survey data that Irish has a cultural, rather than communicative, function in contemporary society. Those who choose to speak it, justify their choice by personal reasons (sentimental attachment to the language, family values and the idea of Irishness). Living outside the Gaeltacht, Irish speakers have to create opportunities for language use – and unless they are lucky to have a job with Irish, or family members who are equally fluent, there is just a handful of places they can go for practice: conversational clubs (Ir. ciorcal comhrá) being one of them. Globalisation and the wide spread of English mean you have to make a conscious effort to keep a minority language alive; yet globalisation has its own advantages, with media and the Internet making it, if not easier, then definitely possible to practise a minority language even for those who do not live in the vicinity of its native speakers. WORKS CITED Book by one author Clyne, Michael. Dynamics of Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Edwards, John. Multilingualism. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. European Commission. Europeans and Their Languages: Special Eurobarometer 386. Brussels: European Commission, 2012. Fishman, Joshua A. Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1989. Hickey, Raymond. The Dialects of Irish: Study of a Changing Landscape. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Hindley, Reg. The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Ireland. Bunreacht na hÉireann: Constitution of Ireland. Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2013. Mac Gréil, Micheál. The Irish Language and the Irish People: Report on the Attitudes Towards, Competence in and Use of the Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland in 2007–'08. Maynooth: NUI Maynooth, 2009. Mas-Moury Mack, Vanessa. “Language Attitudes of Parents in Irish-Medium Primary Schools in County Dublin”. Diss. Université Michel de Montaigne, 2013. 52 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 52 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr, and Martin Charlton. Nuashonrú ar an Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch ar Úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht: 2006–2011. Gaillimh: Údarás na Gaeltachta, 2015. Ó Riagáin, Pádraig. Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland 1893–1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Peillon, Michel. Contemporary Irish Society: An Introduction. Dublin: Gill and Macmillian, 1982. Chapter in edited book Brenzinger, Matthias. “Language Contact and Language Displacement”. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Ed. Florian Coulmas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998: 273–84. Lenoach, Ciarán. “An Ghaeilge Iarthraidisiúnta agus a Dioscúrsa”. An Chonair Chaoch: An Mionteangachas sa Dátheangachas. Ed. Ciarán Lenoach, Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, and Brian Ó Curnáin. Galway: Leabhar Breac, 2012. 19–109. Ní Chonchúir, Aoife. “Feasacht Sochtheangeolaíochta agus Riachtanais Siollabais Chainteoirí Dúchais na Gaeltachta”. An Chonair Chaoch: An Mionteangachas sa Dátheangachas. Ed. Ciarán Lenoach, Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, and Brian Ó Curnáin. Galway: Leabhar Breac, 2012: 110–43. Journal article Ladefoged, Peter. “Another view of endangered languages”. Language 68.4 (1992): 4–10. Electronic sources/web publications Central Statistics Office. Central Statistics Office. Web. 21 July 2015. http://www.cso.ie/ en/census/census2011reports/census2011profile9whatweknow-educationskillsandthei rishlanguage/. “Irish-medium education outside the Gaeltacht 2012–2013”. Gaelscoileanna Teo. Web. 22 July 2015. http://www.gaelscoileanna.ie/assets/Irish-Medium-education_English.pdf. Moseley, Chris, ed. UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. UNESCO. Web. 21 July 2015. http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas. 53 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 53 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM MULTILINGUALISM IN THE EU: THE CASE OF IRISH AND BULGARIAN Boryana Bratanova University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria This paper researches multilingualism and language diversity as a major EU policy in opposition to monoglossia and loss of linguistic identity. The study is narrowed to two out of the twenty-four official EU languages – Irish and Bulgarian – due to their similar status as recently accepted languages in the union. Prior to 1st January 2007, English was Ireland's official language within EU institutions whilst Irish had the status of a treaty language, despite its constitution stating that it has a bilingual identity. However, on this date, Ireland became only the second country after Malta to be classed as possessing two official languages within the EU; in its case, English and Irish. The 1st of January 2008 also coincided with Bulgaria and Romania becoming member states; their national languages similarly contributing to the linguistic diversity of the union. The primary issue of research here concerns how Irish and Bulgarian functioned within the environment of EU institutions, (in the fields of translation and interpretation), from 2007 onwards. The overall objective of the study is to focus on policies of promoting language diversity by integrating languages with a smaller number of native speakers. It also aims at associating the EU policy of language diversity with the broader notion of language preservation on a world-wide scale. Although the two languages have a different status at home in terms of number of native speakers, they offer grounds for comparison within the framework of the EU policy of multilingualism. However, their official EU status seems to veil stark differences matching the status of the two languages at home. While Bulgarian is a fully functioning national language, Irish is endangered within Ireland itself. In this respect, whilst Bulgarian is fully employed in EU communication, Irish is still struggling due to its weakened status at home. THE EU POLICY OF MULTILINGUALISM As a major EU policy, multilingualism results from the general trend of establishing unity while promoting diversity and preserving the national identity of the member states in the union. Linguistic diversity is just one aspect of 54 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 54 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM the multifaceted and heterogeneous footing over which the European umbrella stretches. The peculiarities of multilingualism can hardly find parallel in the complexity of the union primarily due to the fact that language is also a means of promoting culture, cognition and a sense of identity. The hybridity inherent in linguistic diversity, as well as the fact that languages are considered to be Europe’s greatest asset, has always been recognized by the union. Following the EU's 2007 enlargement, two new commissioner positions were thrown open, one being a post devoted to multilingualism. The decision concerning the establishment of the latter was passed back in 2005. On the 1st January 2007, Leonard Orban was placed in charge of the new special EU policy of linguistic diversity. Prior to 2007, multilingualism was part of the “Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism” portfolio. During the second Barroso Commission (2010 – 2014), multilingualism was included in the larger portfolio of “Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth” with Androulla Vassiliou as Commissioner. However, in the Juncker Commission (term of office: 2014 – 2019) multilingualism is not explicitly stated as belonging to any portfolio. The one where it formerly belonged is now labelled “Education, Culture, Youth and Sport” (The European Commission).1 With twenty-four official languages spoken in twenty-eight countries, the EU is a unique creation. Its first multilingualism policy was acknowledged in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), wherein articles 21 and 22 postulate non-discrimination on the grounds of language as well as a respect for linguistic diversity. Multilingualism itself is defined as “both a person’s ability to use several languages and the coexistence of different language communities in one geographical area. [...] the term is [also] used to describe the new field of Commission policy that promotes a climate conductive to the full expression of all languages, in which the teaching and learning of a variety of languages can flourish” (“A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism”). The major objective behind the policy of multilingualism is to facilitate the process of communication between EU citizens on the one hand and between EU citizens and institutions on the other. However, it can also be considered a strategy for preserving the language identity of the citizens and a policy of supporting national languages against the dominance of global English as today's Lingua Franca. The government of each member state determines which national language(s) are representative of its country in the EU institutions. Until 2004, it had been set as formal practice for each member state to have one official EU language. Then, Malta became the first country ever to be represented by two – English and Maltese. This new tradition was followed by Ireland with an official status being granted to Irish. This new European practice of language diversity will 55 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 55 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM be potentially strengthened by Spain, which has been initiating procedures to grant official EU status to Basque, Galician and Catalan, which currently have the status of regional languages (cf. O’Rourke 105–114). However, since 2006 the use of these three languages has been made possible in the EU institutions as semi-official languages, used both for translation and interpreting. As the Special Eurobarometer 243 study demonstrates (European Commission), more than sixty regional or minority languages spoken in EU member states do not have official status in the union. Despite the ongoing debate over the unrestrictive essence of multilingualism, the enhancement of linguistic diversity in Europe demonstrates a proven track record of being closely related to the principles of transparency, efficiency and information access. Another key concept related to multilingualism policy concerns language as a means of promoting culture. The policy of linguistic diversity ensures the fluency of intercultural dialogue and communication and as a result, multilingualism can hence be associated with the term multiculturalism. That is why, as stated in the New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism, “the Commission does not promote the use of artificial languages which, by definition, have no cultural references”. The latter can also be considered a motion against the potential loss of linguistic identity, resulting from a predominant usage of “privileged” languages, in terms of its large number of speakers (viz. English, French and German). Another strategic benefit regarding the EU’s language policy is that it offers favourable ground for the continued integration of new member states, which is the essence of the European idea itself. Social and cultural integration, by breaking language barriers, is considered a common and efficient method both for boundary crossing and cross-boundary transfer. Multilingualism facilitates not only oral communication but also written exchanges due to the equipollence of alphabets. Thus, the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets share equal footing with the Roman script, irrespective of the fact that Bulgarian and Greek are amongst the lesser used languages in the union because of their smaller number of native speakers. The EU hence has three official alphabets. In order to make the present study comprehensive, it is also necessary to adopt the distinction between “working EU languages” and “official EU languages”; terms which have been drawn up to ensure the efficiency and consistency of the information flow within EU institutions. As a supranational body, the EU needs to facilitate communication and information exchange between its institutions and organizations. This necessity has resulted in selecting a certain number amongst all the official languages of the union, granting them the legal status of “working” languages. The latter refers to languages used as a primary means of communication between the EU institutions and for the purposes of translating internal documents (cf. Athanassiou 9–17). In the European Parliament, all 56 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 56 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM twenty-four official languages are “working” languages, so that MEPs can voice their opinions in their native tongue. Following this general distinction, it should be emphasized that Irish and Bulgarian have the predominant status of official (“working”) EU languages, except in special cases. THE STATUS OF IRISH AS AN OFFICIAL EU LANGUAGE As mentioned earlier in the paper, Ireland belongs to the group of “member states with more than one official language” (Athanassiou 13). Despite being the national language of the Republic of Ireland, Irish (Gaeilge) is by no means the most widely spoken language in the EU member state (cf. O´ Laoire 164–184, Mac Giolla Chríost 199–233). On the basis of comparing three consecutive censuses conducted in 2002, 2006 and 2011 respectively, an important conclusion comes to the foreground. While in 2002 the number of Irish speakers in the country was 1,570,894 (41.9%) of the population, in 2006 this figure was 1,656,790 (40.8%) and in 2011 it was 1,774,437 (41.4%). The figures show that the number of Irish speakers increased by 85,896 speakers between 2002 and 2006 and by 117,647 speakers between 2006 and 2011 (Figure 1). The latter shows 7.1% increase for a five-year period. Another interesting fact has to do with the number of speakers who use Irish on a daily basis outside of the education system. In 2006, 72,148 people aged three and above spoke Irish on a daily basis outside school while in 2011 the number of speakers increased by 5,037 people reaching 77,185.2 The latter has to do with the fact that Irish has been employed for the purposes of education: the socalled school-produced bilinguals (Ó Murchú 486). Figure 1 Number of Irish speakers in 2002, 2006 and 2011 57 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 57 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM However, the Irish language has a mostly regional distribution. Out of the 72,148 people who indicated they use Irish outside the education system on a daily basis, 23,175 (33 %) live in Gaeltacht areas. In order to provide a better picture of the linguistic dichotomy of Ireland, it is useful to note that: “in Ireland’s own parliament less than 2% of business is conducted in Gaelic” (“Gaelic language gets official EU status”). The hybrid status and use of Irish in European institutions is largely a mapping of the heterogeneous and apparently weakened status of Ireland’s first official language within the country itself. As far as the usage of Irish as a language within government and administration is concerned, it “has come to be fully accepted as an appropriate and adequate medium for State and public affairs, notwithstanding the low rate of its actual use in these domains” (Ó Murchú 477). Similar disproportion applies to the use of the language at the supranational level since clause (4) of the Council Regulation (EC) number 920/2005, which establishes the status of the Irish in the EU, reads: It is however appropriate to decide that, for practical reasons and on transitional basis, the institutions of the European Union are not to be bound by the obligation to draft and translate all acts [...] in the Irish language. It is also appropriate to provide that such a derogation be partial [...] and to empower the Council to determine unanimously, within a period of four years after the date of application of this Regulation and at five-yearly intervals thereafter, whether to put an end to that derogation. In other words, Irish can be used unrestrictedly in European institutions, but its usage is practically restricted to the main body of EU legislation, associated with “compelling circumstances” (Athanassiou 15). The stated derogation initially held for a five-year period, i.e. until 1 January 2012, but it was extended till 1 January 2017 (“The Derogation of Irish in the EU”), being subject to further consideration and possible renewal,. In the meantime, due to its prominent number of speakers, English is the representative language of Ireland both within the member state and the European Union. However, the limited usage of Irish does not apply to the joint regulations of the Parliament and the Council (Council Regulation (EC) No 920/2005, Article 2). The same goes for the correspondence between Irish-speaking EU citizens, which can also be carried out in the language. In view of the various measures taken to promote the use of Irish, ranging from educational activities to direct financial support for the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht areas in the west of Ireland – where 80% of native Irish speakers reside (approximately 66,000 in total) – the integration of the language within the EU could be considered a bid to maintain and further promote the use of 58 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 58 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Ireland’s vernacular throughout the state and in Europe. This latest attempt on behalf of the government is a costly venture estimated at approximately € 3.5 million annually, funding Irish language facilities and the training of translators and interpreters. It was initially expected that up to 110 translators and 40 new interpreters could be recruited by the Directorate General (DG) for Translation and the DG for Interpretation at the European Commission; however, that figure was gradually reduced to about 30 Gaelic speakers, including translators and support staff.3 Initially, 4 posts were opened at the DGT, (3 for translators, and one for support staff) and 7 at the Commission’s Legal Service (5 lawyer-linguists and 2 support staff). During the first six months following Irish's induction as an official EU language, the actual number of translators reached no more than 5, plus 2 staff members, totaling a mere 7 Gaelic speakers. Therefore, Irish is of limited use within EU translation services, and interpretation has an even narrower range, solely being provided upon explicit request. Concerning interpreters, as of June 2007, there were none who had Irish as their first language within its institutions (including freelancers). However, since then, interpreters and staff have been trained with the support of the Irish government and the EU. Whilst translation into Irish was previously employed, due to its status of a treaty language, interpretation was put into practice for the first time on 15 January 2007 when MEP Brian Crowley spoke Irish in the European Parliament at a session in Strasbourg. A week later – for the first time at ministerial level – Irish was spoken by Noel Treacy, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, when he addressed the General Affairs and External Relations Council on 22 January 2007 in Brussels (“Irish Translation Service”). At present, there are 35 Irish translators associated with the Directorate General for Translation, both in permanent and temporary job positions. Concerning the number of translated pages, 6,994 pages were translated in 2014, with Irish as the target language (0.30% of all translations). Regarding interpretation, the situation has not changed since 2007, due to the stated derogation and there are no interpreters, including freelance, with Irish as their first language listed in the statistics provided by the Directorate General for Interpretation. However, Irish language translators and interpreters have been trained at universities in Ireland at the cost of € 12 million.4 It is worth mentioning that Maltese received a similar derogation between 2004 to 2007. Although this could have extended for another year, it was not applied. It has not been active since 2007 (“7.2.4. Rules Governing the Language in the Institutions”). Now it has become apparent that the official status of Irish and its use in the EU institutions is of symbolic, national significance. Socio-political or 59 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 59 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM geo-political issues are of lesser concern. Speaking Irish is seen as a hallmark of “Irishness” and a means of promoting national identity in the globalized Europe of today. As shown by the statistics above, the status of Irish at a European level is somewhat similar to its ambivalent status at home – namely, it is a national language which is not prevalent in one's daily communication. THE STATUS OF BULGARIAN AS AN OFFICIAL EU LANGUAGE Just like Irish, Bulgarian became an official EU language on 1 January 2007 with Bulgaria’s accession to the union giving it a status of a full member state (cf. Bechev 113–129, Pachev 8–21). Following EU regulations, Bulgaria added its national language to the linguistic diversity of the union. However, Bulgarian does not share the ambivalent status of Irish at home, being the national and most widely spoken language in the country. Irish is peculiar mainly because the country’s national language became an official EU language 34 years after the country joined the union, partly in an attempt to give further impetus to its preservation and development. However, Bulgarian actively functions within the institutions with a team of translators and interpreters providing the necessary services to ensure fully-fledged communication in Bulgarian within the EU. In this respect, Bulgarian enjoys the dynamism and full usage shared by most official EU languages. While Irish and Bulgarian both stem from the ancient Indo-European language, they belong to different families: Irish is a Celtic language, Bulgarian is a Southern Slavic. As mentioned earlier, their formally identical but practically dissimilar status in the EU reflects their status at home. As a whole, Celtic languages (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh), though supported, rank far below English in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in respect to the number of speakers. On the other hand, Slavic national languages rank first in their home countries and feature tendencies of variation and change, which mark them as active, dynamic and fully functioning. It should be highlighted again that Bulgarian has a symbolic status in the linguistic diversity of a United Europe as it blazed the trail for a new script. Cyrillic script is used by approximately 224 million people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia, and in the latter three the Latin alphabet is used in parallel (Brunwasser, 2006). Being the national language at home, Bulgarian is fully exploited for the purposes of both translation and interpretation at an EU level. The disproportion concerning the number of speakers of Irish and Bulgarian naturally triggers disproportion how many translators and interpreters are employed at EU level. 60 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 60 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Upon Bulgaria’s accession the number of translator positions at EU level equalled 40 plus additional 50 freelancers. As of 1 January 2007, 31 Bulgarian translators work at the DGT with other posts subsequently filled, supported by 8 assistants. Concerning interpretation, 3 interpreters had already been working at EU level before 1 January 2007, before 4 more were additionally recruited, thus reaching the number of 7 at the DG for Interpretation. Six others were working at the European Parliament with more freelance positions to be occupied later.5 Concerning translation: 22,857 pages were translated into Bulgarian during the first half of 2007, compared with “the modest” 1,635 translated into Irish. As of June 2007, there were about 47 Bulgarian translators working in the Commission compared to 5 Irish translators. Additionally, the Acquis Communautaire, (about 90,000 pages) was translated into Bulgarian prior to the country’s accession. Only primary legislation (Treaties) were available in Irish prior to 1st January 2007, the Acquis being unavailable. A final distinction of Bulgarian as an official (“working”) EU language is that it functions in the union as a fully integrated language with its own linguistic profile. It represents a distinctive community within the variegated multitude of EU nationals. In terms of figures, 79 translators were affiliated with the Directorate General for Translation in 2014. The number of pages translated with Bulgarian as its target language was 85,624. Concerning interpretation, there were 12 Bulgarian interpreters at the Directorate General for Interpretation in 2014 and a number of freelance assistants. In short, Bulgarian shares equal footing with other EU languages, save Irish, which faces derogation at EU level at present. CONCLUSION As they are two small languages, which joined the multifarious language family of the European Union at the same time, Irish and Bulgarian offer favourable grounds for comparison. However, they currently demonstrate dissimilar statuses both at home and abroad. They serve as a modern tool for integrating what are generally considered smaller linguistic communities into the wider European community, and as such they function as symbols of national identity. Irish and Bulgarian also contribute to the linguistic diversity of a United Europe and foster mutual understanding, which underpins the concept of multilingualism itself. Multilingualism also embodies the intrinsic relation between language, cognition and culture, thus ensuring the smooth flow of intercultural communication within a multicultural society. Integration through uniqueness exhibits a complex and multifaceted initiative, which is a prime goal of the EU's vast paradigm. 61 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 61 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM NOTES All websites listed in the paper were accessed on 30 August 2015. 1 See “The European Commission” website homepage: http://ec.europa.eu/commission/ The following official yearly reports are recorded within this research (see Census 2002, Vol. 11, Irish Language; Census 2006, Vol. 9, Irish Language; Census 2002. Principal Demographic Results; Census 2006. Principal Demographic Results; Profile 9: What We Know; This is Ireland. Highlights from Census 2011, Part 1). 3 Statistics related to translation and interpreting into or from Irish are taken from the following sources: (“Gaelic language gets official EU status”; “Decision to seek approval of Irish as official EU language welcomed”; “Commission ready to welcome three new official languages on 1 January 2007”; “Multilingualism: more translators and interpreters for the three new languages are arriving”). 4 See “Translation in Figures 2014”; “Interpretation in Figures 2014”; and “Why should Irish get full EU support? Not enough of us speak it”. 5 Statistics related to Bulgarian language come from the following major sources: (Brunwasser, 2007; “Translation in Figures 2014” ; “Interpretation in Figures 2014 ”). 2 WORKS CITED Book by one author Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait. The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation. Routledge, 2005. O’Rourke, Bernadette. Galician and Irish in the European Context. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Chapter in edited book Bechev, Dimitar. “Bulgaria’s Path to EU Membership – and Beyond”. Bulgaria and Europe: Shifting Identities. Ed. Stefanos Katsikas. London: Anthem Press, 2011: 113–129. O´ Laoire, Muiris. “Language Use and Language Attitudes in Ireland”. Multilingualism in European Bilingual Contexts: Language Use and Attitudes. Ed. David Lasagabaster and Ángel Huguet. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007: 164–184. Ó Murchú, Máirtín. “Aspects of the Societal Status of Modern Irish”. The Celtic Languages. Ed. Martin J. Ball. London & New York: Routledge, 1993: 471–490. Electronic sources/web publications “7.2.4. Rules governing the languages in the institutions”. Europa.eu. Web. http:// publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370204.htm “A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism”. Brussels, 22 November 2005, 3. COM(2005) 596. EUR.lex. europa.eu. Web. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/ LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2005:0596:FIN:en:PDF 62 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 62 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Athanassiou, Phoebus. The Application of Multilingualism in the European Union Context. ECB Legal Working Paper Series No. 2, February 2006. Web. http://www.ecb.int/pub/ pdf/scplps/ecblwp2.pdf Brunwasser, Matthew. “For Europe, a lesson in ABCs (of Cyrillic)”. International Herald Tribune, 8 August 2006. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/world/ europe/08iht-eu.2421140.html?pagewanted=all ---. 2007. “Commission ready to welcome three new official languages on 1st January 2007. Multilingualism: more translators and interpreters for the three new languages are arriving”. MEMO/07/75. Brussels, 23 February 2007. Web. http://europa.eu/rapid/ press-release_MEMO-07-75_en.pdf Census 2002. Principal Demographic Results. Government of Ireland, 2003. Web. http:// www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/pdr_2002.pdf Census 2002, Vol. 11, Irish Language. Government of Ireland, 2004. Web. http://www.cso. ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/vol11_entire.pdf Census 2006. Principal Demographic Results. Government of Ireland, 2007. Web. http:// www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/Amended,Final,Principal,Demographi c,Results,2006.pdf Census 2006, Vol. 9, Irish Language. Government of Ireland, 2007. Web. http://www.cso. ie/en/media/csoie/census/census2006results/volume9/volume_9_irish_language_ entire_volume.pdf Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 2000. European Parliament. Web. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf “Commission ready to welcome three new official languages on 1 January 2007”. IP/06/1854. Brussels, 20 December 2006. Web. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ IP-06-1854_en.htm?locale=en “Council Regulation (EC) No. 920/2005”. 13 June 2005. Web. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32005R0920 European Commission. Europeans and Their Languages. Special Eurobarometer 243. February 2006. European Commission. Web. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/ archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf “Gaelic language gets official EU status”. USA Today, 13 June 2005. Web. http://usatoday30. usatoday.com/news/world/2005-06-13-gaelic_x.htm “Interpretation in Figures 2014”. European Commission. Web. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/scic/ docs/about_dg_int/statistics-brochure.pdf “Irish Translation Service”. World Access: Translation, Localisation and Globalisation. Web. http://www.worldaccesstrans.com/irish.php McKenna, Aaron. “Why should Irish get full EU support? Not enough of us speak it”. The Journal. Web. http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/irish-official-language-eu-1950256Feb2015/ “Multilingualism: More Translators and Interpreters for the Three New Languages are Arriving”. MEMO /07/75 Brussels, 23 February 2007. Web. http://europa.eu/rapid/ pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/07/75&format=HTML&aged=0&langua ge=EN&guiLanguage=en Pachev, Angel: , . “ ” (“Bulgaria i bulgarskiyat ezik v Evropeiskiya sayuz “, “Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Language in the European Union”). Bulgarski ezik (Bulgarian Language) 1/2007: 8–21. Web. http://www.balgarskiezik.org/1–2007/A_Pachev.pdf 63 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 63 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Profile 9: What We Know. Government of Ireland, 2012. Web. http://www.cso.ie/en/media/ csoie/census/documents/census2011profile9/Profile,9,What,we,know,full,doc,for,w eb.pdf Siggins, Lorna. “Decision to seek approval of Irish as official EU language welcomed”. The Irish Times, 15 July 2004. Web. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/decision-to-seekapproval-of-irish-as-official-eu-language-welcomed-1.1149136 “The Derogation of Irish in the EU”. Gaelport.com. Priomhsuiomh na Gaeilge. Web. http:// www.gaelport.com/?treeID=37&NewsItemID=10575 “The European Commission”. Home Page. Web. http://ec.europa.eu/commission/. This is Ireland: Highlights from Census 2011, Part 1. Government of Ireland, 2012. Web. http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011pdr/Census,2011,Hig hlights,Part,1,web,72dpi.pdf “Translation in Figures 2014”. European Commission. Web. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/ translation/whoweare/translation_figures_en.pdf 64 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 64 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM THE NATURE OF MULTILINGUALISM AND CODESWITCHING IN FINNEGANS WAKE Jonathan McCreedy Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” The dense dream language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake – known within criticism as “Wakese” – incorporates the appearance of over 50 world languages1 and often they are used simultaneously, creating great semantic and semiotic disturbance and confusion. However, Joyce's unprecedented feat is – more often than not – simply admired or marvelled at in criticism, rather than studied specifically. Conversely, Finnegans Wake “detractors” often cite Joyce's aesthetic accomplishment and linguistic virtuosity as a severe error in creative judgement by its author. It is the “final straw”, increasing the novel's often spectacular difficulty level to the point of “unreadability”. Dozens and dozens of languages are spoken, but an unanswered question remains, why is this so? It is insufficient to simply declare that this is a trait of “Wakese”. In fact, at present we are in lieu of a strict linguistic “type” to which we can classify the “language”. Unusually, I will use a sociolinguistic inspired approach, employing specific terminology from the critical field within my research. Specifically, I will investigate a single passage of Finnegans Wake in close relation to “code switching” with the aim of finding out answers as to how and why shifts in language constantly occur within its narrative. With such linguistic knowledge, one may be in a better position to classify “Wakese” as a specific type of language: for example, as an argot or a cant. In principal, a difficulty arises in relation to applying this research angle to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. One reason is that no recognisable form of “reality” exists in the novel. To wit, it is a highly non-standard practice to analyse passages of Joyce's text as if it is “socio-linguistic data”, as I shall be doing here.2 Firstly, it does not strictly obey scientific parameters and guidelines. Finnegans Wake rarely sticks firm to reality in terms of language usage. However, despite its obscurity and linguistic complexity, in essentials, dialogue in the novel functions as normal communication between characters. Structurally, much of the narrative consists of conversations, a fact evident even to one who merely picks the novel off a shelf and quickly flicks through its pages. Most notably, two such examples book-end the novel, the first being between two cavemen Mutt and Jute (on pages 16–18). Its content is “mirrored” on pages 609–610 in a talk between the similarly named men, Muta 65 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 65 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM and Juva. In the case of my article, I treat one section of Finnegans Wake as a transcription of a dialogue between two Irish soldiers. Its content is henceforth viewed as linguistic “data”. The section I have chosen is titled “Buckley and the Russian General” which, in fact, looks like a dialogue transcription. Its speakers are Irish soldiers called “Butt” and “Taff”. It also identifies itself as a kind of “closet” play, owing to its usage of stage directions, written in italics. Conversation is key within the literary structure of many sections in Finnegans Wake, regardless of the identity of the speakers. Here is a short excerpt from its opening: TAFF (all Perssiasterssias shookatnaratatattar at his waggon horchers, his bulgeglarying stargapers razzledazzlingly full of eyes, full of balls, full of holes, full of buttons, full of stains, full of medals, full of blickblackblobs). Grozarktic! Toadlebens! Some garment guy! Insects appalling, low hum clang sin! A cheap decoy! Too deep destroy! Say mangraphique, may say nay por daguerre! BUTT (if that he hids foregodden has nate of glozery farused ameet the florahs of the follest, his spent fish’s livid smile giving allasundery the bumfit of the doped). Come alleyou jupes of Wymmingtown that graze the calves of Man! A bear raigning in his heavenspawn consomation robes. Rent, outraged, yewleaved, grained, bal looned, hindergored and voluant! Erminia’s capecloaked hoo doodman! First he s s st steppes. Then he st stoo stoopt. Lookt (FW 339.18–30).3 Linguistic “data” can be harvested, or selected, arbitrarily in Finnegans Wake. The nature of any selection is entirely up to the will of the researcher. For instance, whether data is bound within a sentence, a page, or indeed multiple pages of the novel: if preference is given to certain words, or phrases, over others, and so on. Finnegans Wake, in its totality, is so linguistically dense, one must unavoidably undertake manageable research aims: to study at most 20 page long passages, say, not the entire book, and to restrict one's study to a number of languages. Three or four, at most, say from an isolated language family. Only with specific “boundaries” in place can we proceed on a sociolinguistic study of Finnegans Wake, which in this article concerns the frequency of individual languages in a 16 paged section. There are 35 distinct languages present in “Buckley and the Russian General”. This graph charts the most prevalent 17 in terms of frequency. The frequency of the others is found in this footnote.4 I have decided to study Irish and Bulgarian in this article as they are amongst the most prominent languages in terms of code-switching: fifth and sixth in rank order of frequency (56 and 42 appearances respectively). 66 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 66 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM Figure 1. Frequency of code switching in the “Buckley and the Russian General” section of Finnegans Wake. Most prominent 17 languages (out of a total of 35). The majority of characters in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake are multilingual, which is one of the reasons why a estimated total of 50 distinct languages, (not counting regional variants of English), feature in the novel. Finnegans Wake on the whole is written in“a kind of English” – its omniscient narrators and characters all possessing English as their L1 language, so to speak. However, within the space of a sentence, (or even within a single word), speakers regularly include lexis from a variety of different languages: from one or two, to seven in total. Code-switching is therefore one of the reasons therefore why Finnegans Wake is so difficult. Language barriers exist copiously on every page since no conceivable reader of the novel is not going to be multilingual to the extent of knowing 50 specific languages. The Wake's characters have no difficulties, however: their characters being highly “un-realistic”. However, as stated previously, linguistic exaggerations aside, Wake characters communicate in regular, even normal forms of discursive exchange. The conversation concerns the re-telling of a story: indeed, one that is fundamentally plain and uncomplicated, with simplicity being its core structural element. The story is a witty narrative Joyce's father regularly told at parties, one which concerned a Russian General and an Irish soldier in the Crimean war. It begins with the Irish soldier encountering a Russian general in the periphery of the battle. He aims his weapon but is unable to shoot him because he so 67 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 67 5/12/2017 8:41:10 AM admires his handsome military outfit and medals. Taking control of himself, the Irishman takes aim again; however, he stalls once more as the general has proceeded to lower his trousers to defecate behind the bushes. He cannot bring himself to kill a man who is in such a vulnerable and human condition. Once the general finishes however, he digs up a patch of grassy turf with which to wipe himself. Upon doing so, the Irishman to immediately shoots him dead, the reason being that this act was somehow an “insult to Ireland” (353.17–18). Butt and Taff are two Irish soldiers who speak English as their main language of discourse. They are two extremely multilingual speakers; however, a reason for this can be ascertained. One hypothesis is that their multilingualism is a product of their profession as soldiers. Their travels to foreign countries (Wardhaugh 2464) whilst on tours of duty perhaps necessitated an active knowledge of native languages for the purpose of communicating with civilians. This “social identity” (2477) may dictate many of their language choices. It is difficult to definitively determine their level of competence in each language. In some languages, Butt and Taff possess a mere border-line “pidgen” understanding, whilst in others they only know a few assorted crude terms, (similar to schoolboys who learn only swear words in French, say). The reasoning underlying their knowledge of each one is idiosyncratic. Each of the 35 languages has seemingly been learnt for a specific purpose: some of which will associate with their profession, and others not. It follows that code-switching is integral to Butt and Taff's lengthy dialogue. Different types may be said to occur: “situational code switching” (Meyerhoff 4661), “metaphorical code-switching” and code-switching to “signal in-group humour” (4774). Situational code-switching occurs when the “languages used change according to the situations in which the conversants find themselves: they speak one language in one situation and another in a different one. No topic change is involved” (Wardhaugh 2684). Therefore, the location of the discourse is important, as is the time, the country, the number of people present, the nationalities of the speakers, and numerous other sociological parameters. The men, two “Citizen soldiers” (FW 338.5), are sitting alone in the informal, private environment of a village bar in the outskirts of Dublin. Although there are twelve other customers present, a bar-man, a servant and a maid, they are never disturbed. Therefore, the conversation, and its code-switching, is self-contained between the two men. The date of the action is not difficult to establish. It is approximately the time of the section's composition (in late 1938). However, it is nigh on impossible to explain how time functions in the lives of Butt and Taff: both of whom are veterans of wars including the Irish War of Independence, the Crimean War, and World War 1, to name a mere few. The question of surreal temporality in this section calls for an article in itself, however, in respect to 68 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 68 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM situational code switching, the issue of time being bent, and made surreal, removes certain restraints otherwise imposed by “realism”. Both men have travelled all over the world many times and learnt dozens of languages through direct experiences, an otherwise impossible task if normal time-laws existed. Butt is a “mottledged youth” (338.5), a prematurely aged man (“mottled” and “middle-aged”) due to harrowing war experiences. He and Taff are talking about former battles. The elder Butt leading the conversation which initially concerns his involvement in a skirmish at Sevastapol in the Crimea. Butt's first exchange with Taff includes three instances of code-switching. Firstly, instead of replying “yes” to a question, he utters “da” (338.13). I transcribe it in full below: “But da. But dada, mwilshsuni. Till even so aften” (338.13–14).5 FINNEGANS WAKE ENGLISH “Da” VARIOUS SLAVIC LANGUAGES “Da” (“ ”) FINNEGANS WAKE “Mwilshsuni” SHELTA “Mwílsha shuni” ENGLISH “I see”5 FINNEGANS WAKE “Aften” DANISH Aften” ENGLISH “Evening” “yes” Butt speaks many Slavic languages, where of course “da” (or close variations of it) mean “yes” almost uniformly. In his exchange, he also inserts the utterance “milwilshuli”, a portmanteau of the Shelta words “mwílsha” and “shuni” (meaning “me” and “see”). Shelta is a cant language spoken by the minority Irish Traveller community in the UK and Ireland. We will begin with a study of Irish, the fifth most prominent language in terms of code-switching overall. It is special in that it is the only one that has no association with their social identity as soldiers. It is native to Ireland so they have not come into contact with it whilst on any of their tours of duty, (which is how Butt and Taff encounter and hence learn most other languages). IRISH AND SHELTA IN FINNEGANS WAKE Irish reached an all time numerical low in terms of overall speakers at the end of the nineteenth century. The Great Famine (1845 – 52) and numerous potato blights resulted in a huge drop in the peasant population of the west of 69 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 69 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Ireland through fatalities and emigration, and this brought the language close to extinction. Approximately one million native Irish died and a million escaped to live in America. The number of speakers eventually dropped below 10% of the nation's population, most of whom lived in small villages and towns (called Gaeltacts) on the west coast where it was – and still is – actively spoken in daily life. In the first part of the twentieth century, Irish was spoken by non-fluent natives, however, their reasons and methods differed from those living in the Gaeltacts. Firstly, it was used largely in the form of limited codeswitching from English. Linguistic competence within conversations was average and writing skills in Irish were similarly substandard. In anticipation of the “Troubles”, however, from 19th century revolutionary stirrings through to the War of Independence, the language was politicised by many influential and high ranking Irish nationalist figures and politicians. In 1892, Douglas Hyde, a leading figure in the Gaelic Revival, delivered his influential speech “The Necessity for De-anglicising Ireland” which called upon Irishmen to eliminate traces of Englishness from Irish life and art, with the aim to re-educate the public about their national culture. In it he states: I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman, who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage the efforts, which are being made to keep alive our once great national tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to de-Anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the language (in Mackillop and Murphy 145). Irish was spoken as a “form of political expression” (Wardhaugh 2669), and as a form of “resistance” against the larger language power of English. At this time, usage of Irish “express[ed] [national] solidarity” (ibid.). In Finnegans Wake, characters often code-switch from English to Irish as a token gesture to Hyde's and the Gaelic League's belief that all Irishmen should speak Irish and that the country's culture should be “de-anglicised”. Butt and Taff's usage of Irish code-switching is comparable to a speech by the “Citizen” character in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses; a man Joyce whom based upon the real-life character of Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). In this mock-heroic episode, Joyce immortalises him unflatteringly as the one eyed monster Polyphemous. Certainly in the Citizen's case, code-switching has the token quality of showing support for the Gaelic League and Irish nationalism. Whenever he greets someone he substitutes the English “friend” for the Irish “chara”: “Never better, a chara, says [the Citizen]” (Ulysses 243). Greetings such as “a chara” are not political in themselves, however, his usage is arguably contrived and political in its 70 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 70 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM employment. At one point, he speaks Irish to his dog Garryowen in Irish: “Bi i dho husht, says he” (243), which means “be quiet!”. In a grotesquely humourous touch – Joyce makes his only L1 Irish “speaker” in the bar a fleabitten mutt. The Irish language shows “endangered” traits in 1904's Dublin as its national usage was more than decimated during the 19th century. Historical and contemporary nationalist battle-cries and slogans unsurprisingly feature heavily in the Citizen's vocabulary. This motivation, together with code-switching, politicised the language in the early twentieth century; for instance, the usage of the words “Sinn Fein!” and “Sinn fein amhain!” (251) meaning “ourselves” and “ourselves alone!” respectively.6 The words instantly evoke a call to arms and an a staunch definition of Irish identity. This is “metaphorical code-switching” defined by Ronald Warhaugh as being when “[...] the choice of code adds a distinct flavour to what is said about the topic” (2687), in this case a political “flavour”. Nationalistic lexis constitutes one half of the total content of Irish in Butt and Taff's dialogue. Additionally: “The choice encodes certain social values” (ibid.). The following three phrases serve as an introduction. They are complicated lexically and grammatically; their coinage being ancient and traditional in the first two cases. The third is contemporary, and is the most prolifically employed: IRISH “Éire go bráth” “Uladh abú” “Sinn fein amhain!” ENGLISH FINNEGANS WAKE “Ireland until Judgement Day” “Erin gone brugk” (FW 347.21) “Ulster to victory” “Ullahbluh” (339.2) “Ourselves alone” “Foinn duhans” (343.25) “Shieldfails” (344.25) “shinfine” (346.27) “Sinn Fein” is spoken approximately 18 times in Finnegans Wake, by a variety of characters and more-so by frequency than any other Irish phrase in any of Joyce's works. These instances of code-switching are highly “ethnolinguistic”, which is when “the use of a particular language variety is an extremely significant factor in defining a cultural and ethnic identity” (Meyerhoff 4427). In contemporary late 1930's Irish society, there was no restriction upon where this type occurred, for instance, at home or publically in street rallies. The remaining Irish words within Butt and Taff's dialogue are incorporated because of the private “situation” and surroundings, specifically, they are words “reserved mainly for use in the family and informal local friendship circles” (Wardraugh 2733). To set the scene, Butt and Taff are first met in the corner snug of the Mulligar Inn. The Irish words specific to this type of situational code-switching are: 71 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 71 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM IRISH “Sláinte” “Doeoch an dorais” “Miliseach dílis” “A chara mo chroidhe” ENGLISH “Health!” “Parting drink” “Dearest sweetheart” “My friend of my heart”. FINNEGANS WAKE “Sczlanthas!” (351.14).7 “Doog at doorak” (354.3) “Meelisha's deelishas” (351.23) “Achaura moucreas” (345.2) It is tradition in Irish bar and family settings to code-switch from English to Irish when making a toast. Therefore, when Butt buys Taff a beer, before drinking and clinking glasses they say “sláinte” (“Sczlanthas!” (351.14)), the equivalent of “cheers!” from English pub etiquette. This instance of codeswitching originates deep within Irish drinking culture, and it is one that is used throughout the world, mainly by Hibernophiles. “Doeoch an dorais”, means “parting drink”, and its equivalent in English pub etiquette is “one for the road”. It is still frequently used today. Butt and Taff also code-switch when they recall romantic experiences: specifically with women whom they may have met whilst on tours of duty. Irish is the language of love to both men, not Italian or French. Through code-switching, they seek to imitate the bards of Irish love poetry whose works survived well into the 20th century. The“sean-nós” genre of unaccompanied vocal singing rarely uses English lyrics; a style of music regularly sung in at home or in bars. Two romantic, even self-consciously sentimental, phrases which Butt and Taff know in Irish are: “meelisha's deelishas” (351.23) for “miliseach dílis”, and “achaura moucreas” (345.2) for chara mo chroidhe”. They mean “dearest sweetheart” and “my friend of my heart”, respectively. Butt and Taff also code-switch on 13 occasions into Shelta,8 a cant language spoken by the minority “Traveller” community in Ireland – an “admixture of Irish and English words” (Rose 157). It is unlikely that that Butt or Taff are Travellers themselves, firstly because they do not speak much Shelta, elsewhere in their discourse they demean Travellers by referring to them as “tinkers” – “tankers” (FW 351.26) – a derogatory term. Butt and Taff's competence in Shelta is limited to knowing bawdy terms including: SHELTA “Karnag” “Spurk” “Midril” “Skimisk” ENGLISH “underwear” “flirt” “devil” “drunk” FINNEGANS WAKE “Karnag” (340.8) “Spurk” (346.32) “Midril” (347.1) “Skimisk” (347.5) This functions additionally to “signal ingroup humour” (Meyerhoff 4774); however, it does not by itself demonstrate high linguistic competency. Profanity 72 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 72 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM is considered amusing when taken from other languages; hence, Butt and Taff say the word “arse” (FW 344.12), “vagina” (338.17) and “shit” (345.13 and 353.20) in French, “arse” in Russian (339.26), and “penis” in Polish (350.19). The rude words are merely used for comic effect. BULGARIAN AND SLAVIC LANGUAGES IN FINNEGANS WAKE In general, a wide range of Slavic languages are involved in code-switching in this section of Finnegans Wake, their number of appearances being as follows: Russian (102), Bulgarian (42), Ruthenian – an old form of Ukrainian – (20), Polish (17), and Serbo-Croat (4).9 This is not entirely unsurprising since Butt and Taff have engaged in land battles around the Black Sea coastline, specifically in Bulgaria, Russia and the Crimea. Butt and Taff are particularly linguistically competent in Russian, reflecting Joyce's own knowledge of the language, which he personally studied in 1928 (Engelhart 136).10 Butt and Taff's “social identity” as soldiers dictates their use of Bulgarian, which on the whole concerns having a knowledge of only basic lexis. The lexis they know can be grouped under multiple subheadings: GREETINGS FAREWELLS MEANS OF EXPRESSING GRATITUDE BULGARIAN “Dober den”/“ “Svogam/“ “Blagodariya”/“ ”. ” ENGLISH “Good day” FINNEGANS WAKE “Dubrin din” (346.15–16) “Goodbye” “Sbogom” (347.2) ” “Thank you” “Blaguadargoos” (346.14) Hypothetically, the men were in Bulgaria and communicated with the locals, a knowledge of the language being thereby a social necessity. They know how to understand certain simple and practical conversational situations, including calculating time and ascertaining weather conditions and seasons.11 Basic terms for time, day and year are also known, including “blodidens” (347.6) (“den”/“ ”) and “godinats” (347.6) (“godina”/“ ”). They also know family titles which is essential: BULGARIAN “Maika”/“ ” “Sin”/“ ” “Suprug”/“ ” ENGLISH “Mother” “Son” “Husband” FINNEGANS WAKE “Maikar” (352.36) “Sinya” (348.34) “Soprussed” (345.8) 73 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 73 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Other instances of basic conversational Bulgarian involve inquiring about money, and simple counting. BULGARIAN “Pari”/“ ” “Tri”/“ ” “Chetiri”/“ ” “Pet”/“ ” ENGLISH “Money” “Three” “Four” “Five” FINNEGANS WAKE “Parishmoslattery” (350.27)12 “Triggity, shittery, pet” (352.28) The phrase “studenly drobs led” (344.9) – or rather, “suddenly drops dead” – is the most striking and linguistically competent usage of Bulgarian in Finnegans Wake. It incorporates three Bulgarian words, and it can be appreciated by a multilingual Bulgarian-English audience as a cunning multilingual play on words. “Studenly” meaning “cold” (“studen”/“ ”), “drobs” or “liver” (“drob”/“ ”) and “led” (“led”/“ ”) for “ice” combine to make “cold liver ice”; the inference being that the Russian General is shot in the liver, in the freezing ice. The “lead” of the bullet causes him to expire, and he “suddenly drops dead”.13 If code-switching is present within the dialogue sections of Finnegans Wake, as I have argued, more in-depth research can be undertaken in the future. The crucial, yet basic, question as to why Finnegans Wake hosts a near unbelievable number of language appearances is as yet unanswered in criticism, and sociolinguistics can arguably provide a deep understanding as to why this is so. For instance, genetic Joyce critics, scholars of his compositional work, need to understand better why he spent copious amounts of time harvesting foreign lexis in his compositional notebooks. Notebook 46 (“VI.B.46”), one of his most enormous collections, contains 28 languages and dialects in total, arranged in lists. To get a full and better understanding of the “nature of code-switching” in Finnegans Wake, it is necessary to research multiple dialogues in full, although it would be a considerable undertaking. Such large scale “data” collecting, followed by an evaluation of the respective types of code-switching, (“situational” and so on), in each one is essential. For instance, in the Book IV dialogue “Muta and Juva”, one of the speakers is a devout Catholic, evangelising to his conversant. Therefore, he code-switches into Latin on no less than 45 occasions, (4 times the frequency of German, the next most common language). A “compare and contrast” approach between dialogues in Finnegans Wake would also improve the overall understanding of how “Wakese” is spoken. Is it possible to pose, using all of this data and information, a fixed linguistic definition for the language in totality? Does it betray argot traits for instance, at times, (criminality is rife in Finnegans Wake)? Is it a cornucopia of impenetrable cants, (and thus definable as a cant itself)? Or is it, simply, English with extreme levels of code-switching present? The 74 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 74 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM answer is, unfortunately, not likely to be a straightforward one since nothing like “Wakese” exists in the real world. Despite this reservation, I believe sociolinguistic research tools provide us with a way forward; one that will hopefully reverse the current critical trend of disinterest in the inner linguistic workings of Finnegans Wake's most unique facet – namely, its unmistakable, baffling, multilingual narrative. NOTES The Finnegans Wake annotation database Fweet.org has been an invaluable tool for this article: its vast compendium of linguistic findings specifically. The following link leads to the linguistic data-set for page 338, the first page of “Buckley and the Russian General”: http://fweet.org/cgi bin/fw_grep.cgi?srch=%5E338&cake=&icase=1&accent=1&regex=1 &beauty=1&hilight=1&escope=1&rscope=1&dist=4&ndist=4&fontsz=100&shorth=1 1 For a concise list, see McHugh (xix-xx). One way of describing this analytical method would be to say that in this article, Finnegans Wake is read through a “realistic sociolinguistic lens”. 3 All quotes from Finnegans Wake are written according to the fixed convention used in James Joyce criticism. FW is uniformly used within parentheses as an abbreviation. For example: (FW 339.18–30) as a citation refers specifically to sentences 18 to 30 of page 339. All editions of Finnegans Wake (more or less) share the exact same typeset and precise page layout, with only one notable exception: 2012's The Restored Finnegans Wake, edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon. 4 Frequency of code switching in the “Buckley and the Russian General” section of Finnegans Wake. Full data set: 2 German French Russian Latin Irish Bulgarian Dutch Italian Malay Danish Ruthenian Greek Armenian Polish Portuguese Albanian Shelta Chinese 115 103 102 62 56 42 41 41 28 20 20 20 19 17 15 15 13 10 Basque Welsh Norwegian Japanese Old Norse Provençal Serbo-Croat Hebrew Finnish Cornish Icelandic Turkish Bog Latin Swedish Cant Sanskrit Breton 7 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 75 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 75 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM 5 As noted in Fweet.org and elsewhere, “dada” may reference the Swiss avant-guard art movement (whose coinage is often attributed as baby talk for “father”). The melodic rhythm and metre of the Robert Burns poem “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” is felt in “Till even so aften”, itself an English lyric with a sly code-switch into Danish at its conclusion, and “buddha” may even be heard in “But dada”. 6 “Sinn fein” is the title of an Irish Republican party originally founded by Arthur Griffith in 1904. 7 This code-switch may combine “sláinte” with the Polish for “drinking glass” – “Szklanka”. 8 We know that much of Joyce's knowledge of Shelta is taken from R.A Stewart Macalister's The Secret Languages of Ireland, a text which he took notes from in 1938. He also used it to mine words and phrases from Ogham and Bog Latin. This word "mwilshsuni" is written (in an incomplete and corrupted form) as “mwlilsah” in his 46th notebook (Rose 157 and see VI.B.46 – 78). 9 Neil Cornwall hypothesises in James Joyce and the Russians that Joyce learnt Southern Slavonic lexis whilst in Trieste during the years 1904–1915, when it was a former city in Austrian Slovenia. His acquaintances included Marco Bliznakov – the Bulgarian Consul – his pupil Alios Skrivanitch, and his brother in law, the Czech Frantisĕk Schauek. (Engelhart 136). Slavonic lexis in Finnegans Wake was also harvested from dictionaries in the late 1930s. 10 Their knowledge of Bulgarian and Russian lexis ranges far beyond a mere basic level of communication. Turkish appears a mere 2 times, which suggests that they did not fight on its soil, nor did they have direct contact with its people. 11 “Wraimy wetter” (347.7) incorporates both “wet” for rain and the Bulgarian for “weather” – “vreme”/“ ”. 12 The Bulgarian for “goldsmith” (“zlatar”/“ ”) can also be found in “parishmoslattery”. 13 Humourously playing on stereotypes, the Russian General already has a severely damaged liver, due to excessive drinking. WORKS CITED Works by one author Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Great Britain: Faber and Faber, 1939. ---. Ulysses. Ed. by Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head, 2008. McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. USA: John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Meyerhoff, Miriam. Introducing Sociolinguistics. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Kindle edition. Rose, Danis. James Joyce's The Index Manuscript: Finnegans Wake Holograph Workbook VI.B.46. England: the Wake Newslitter Press, 1978. Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Sixth edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Kindle edition. 76 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 76 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Book by more than one author Mackillop, James and Murphy, Maureen O'Rourke. Irish Literature: A Reader. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987. Chapter in edited book Engelhart, Bernd. “...or Ivan Salvansky Slavar” (FW 355.11) The Integration of Slavonic Languages into Finnegans Wake”. Genitricksling Joyce. European Joyce Studies 9. Ed. Mierlo, Wim Van. Slote, Sam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 135–145. Journal articles Skrabanek, Petr. “355.11 Salvanski Slavar, R. Slavyanskii Slovar (Slavonic Dictionary)”, A Wake Newslitter IX.4 (1972): 51. ---. “Slavonicisms in Finnegans Wake”, Irish Slavonic Studies 2, (1981): 3. Electronic sources/web publications Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury. www.fweet.org. Ed. Raphael Slepon. 77 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 77 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 78 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH VISIONS OF IRELAND: STAGING SPECTACLES IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 79 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 80 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM DISTANCING THE STEREOTYPE IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S BARRY LYNDON AND ITS LITERARY SOURCE Zelma Catalan Sofia University “St. Climent Ohridski” 40 years after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) is enjoying its triumph in cinemas across the world. After years of relative neglect and scepticism, Martin Scorsese’s persistent praise has now been endorsed by lavish superlatives such as Tim Robey’s “a spellbinding experience” or Roger Ebert’s “the arrogance of genius”. Yet when it first came out, the film provoked mixed reactions among reviewers and spectators. Kubrick’s deliberate emphasis on costume and camera technique, the slow action and sparse dialogue were seen as overly alienating and demanding.1 As critic John Hofsess wrote at the time, “Words are a film critic’s primary tools and when a movie doesn’t lend itself to verbal translation – discussions about character, ideas, values, plot development, and so on – many critics are inclined to dismiss it as unimportant or as a failure”. By contrast, to this day film scholars regard the film’s visual aesthetic and its elegiac atmosphere as a unique feat of cinematic originality and psychological subtlety. But while most studies duly acknowledge Kubrick’s imaginative treatment of his literary source, Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, they rarely, if ever, find any deeper affinities apart from those of plot and narrative sequence. Certainly, given the radical difference between Thackeray’s narratorprotagonist with his flamboyant, boisterous, self-aggrandising rhetoric and Kubrick’s painfully repressed cinematic Lyndon, the cursory treatment of the textual source is hardly surprising. Still, in one important aspect the two works share a relationship which seems to have evaded scholarly attention. It concerns the role played by the stereotypical content that gives shape to the overall conception and largely determines the action in both the novel and the film. Though divided by over a century, Kubrick and Thackeray, I believe, show equal alertness to the power of stereotype to deplete individual identity and trigger conflict and aggression. Moreover, as I want to argue here, both the novel and the film deliberately work to minimise their respective audience’s empathy with the protagonist by playing on the contradictory nature of stereotypes and self-stereotypes. In popular parlance and among scholars, stereotypes have come to enjoy a rather bad press. This is because, being over-simplified representations of 81 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 81 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM social categories and social groups, they foster prejudice and hostility.2 But basically, as psychologist Henry Tejfel proposed in his Social Identity Theory, they are universal mental tools that establish fixed associations between groups and their properties and so facilitate the perception of whole categories. In their seminal article of 1979, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict”, Tajfel and Turner explained that social stereotypes serve more specific functions. They are central to every individual’s endeavour to support a positive self-image by identifying with an in-group and distancing oneself from an out-group. So, while stereotyping eases cognition through its pattern of simplification, it also entails the loss of prominence of individual group and category members and their features. Moreover, because they fulfil individual needs of self-valorisation and bring about a sense of security against identity threat, social stereotypes are readily adopted and propagated. The fundamental essentialism which enables the formation of social stereotypes sometimes drives people to form self-stereotypes which may include even the negative features of their in-group but which are deemed irrelevant or less important compared to its positive features and to the supposedly negative ones of the out-group. But in all cases, stereotyping and self-stereotyping involve strong in-group bias with cognitive repercussions, in that they encourage the exaggeration of differences and of the real or imagined negative characteristics of the out-group. That is why they promote prejudice, misunderstanding and inter-group conflict (Schneider 252). This is particularly true of ethnic and national stereotypes, which are typically based on what Joep Leerssen defines as “imagemes”, that is, ambivalent protoconstructs with polarised positive and negative elements. Imagemes allow the coexistence of such elements which are selectively invoked and actualised whenever the need of self-enhancement arises but they invariably retain their nature as parts of a contrast (Leerssen, “Rhetoric” 279). Their very doublesidedness conveniently fills any momentary psychological lack on a personal, national and ethnic level and promises identity confirmation and security. In general, therefore, stereotypes create the sense of safe belonging to a powerful in-group – a sense that is largely illusory, imagined – as the term imageme itself suggests. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon is a work that from its very beginning illuminates the conflictive bias created by stereotypes. Initially serialised in 1844 as The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century and republished in 1856 as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., of the Kingdom of Ireland, it is a satire in the shape of a picaresque story whose structural contours are maintained by the consistency of the protagonist’s faulty self- and social categorisation and by Thackeray’s deliberately ironic treatment of his attitudes. The novel did not have the success its author had hoped for and to this day it resides in 82 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 82 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM relative obscurity among his oeuvre. There is a good explanation for this: like Catherine, Thackeray’s first novel which he had published four years earlier, Barry Lyndon was meant to prevent empathy for its protagonist-narrator by laying bare his deficiencies of judgement about self and others. Thackeray meant to expose not just the immorality but also the social and artistic worthlessness of a heroic stereotype unreflectively adopted by a reading public eager for sensationalist pleasure and habituated into thinking about the social world in simplified categories. In this first-person narrative, however, Barry’s tireless bragging and his invariably self-justifying rhetoric are subjected to two modes of critical scrutiny. One is the rhythmical intervention of George Fitzboodle, the supposed holder and editor of the original manuscript. But the more important means of ironic denunciation is the clash between the protagonist’s actions and his own evaluation of them in his capacity of a wholly unreliable narrator. The very form of a fictitious memoir, written by an Irish adventurer and tracing his rise and eventual fall, as well as the solidity of its historical setting, provide the reader with an easy access into the actual events which the narrator misjudges to suit his own ends. In spite of his claims to the contrary, everything that happens to Barry and those around him is almost exclusively the outcome of his own decisions and his actions, rather than the effect of good or bad luck, though there is some of that too in his adventurous youth and especially in his gambling exploits. Thackeray’s irony, however, is not meant to serve only a moral argument unrelated to any artistic purposes. Just as he was to do so famously in Vanity Fair only two years later, Thackeray focuses the whole of his endeavour on revealing the reality behind the idealised concepts of the heroic in life and literature. Fitz-Boodle’s words may be taken as Thackeray’s own as he encourages writers to describe “not only what is beautiful, but what is ill-favoured too, faithfully, so that each may appear as like as possible to nature” (310). In Barry Lyndon Thackeray ironically inverts the coordinates of the heroic image through a narrative which details the life journey of a morally and emotionally insensitive personality, a profligate who is at the same time a relentless social climber. In his first-person account, however, the protagonist displays total absence of self-awareness regarding the motives and the effects of his doings. His personal background and his self-identification as a descendant of Irish aristocracy and even royalty, however, opens a more specific access to the Irish self-stereotype and the role played in its formation by the history of Anglo-Irish relations. Barry’s family belongs to the minor Irish nobility which was dispossessed by the English. But although, as Borislav Knežević points out, the background of Barry’s story is invariably filled with Ireland and its history as seen by the English (163), the stereotypical content making up his own 83 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 83 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM character extends the margins of the static images of the Irish held in England since the late eighteenth century. Thackeray indeed shaped his protagonist first of all as a comic analogue of the stereotype of the Irish circulated on the English page and stage in his own time as the Irish rogue and the Stage or Comic Irishman. Yet, as Robert Colby has shown in his seminal study, the origins of Barry Lyndon lie also in the Irish heroic self-stereotypes which had solidified in the nation’s folklore and had found wider circulation through the highly popular novels of Charles Lever and William Lover. In combining the two different attitudes to Irishness, Thackeray provides a critical perspective only partly based on the anti-Irish sentiments held in England at the time and mostly on the anti-Catholic bias which he shared. Rather, it grows out of his considerable first-hand knowledge of the country and its people and his interest for those aspects of the Irish national character in its historical development which the popular stereotypes typically left out. Barry Lyndon himself was partly conceived during the writer’s lengthy visit to Ireland in 1842 when he came across the stories of some famous real-life Irish personalities, such as the notorious highwayman James Freney and the adventurer Andrew Robinson Bowes, alias Stoney-Bowes. Elements of their life stories supplied some of the facts of Barry Lyndon’s notorious career in combination with those of a number of other historical figures, among them even Casanova, as well as with Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.3 In terms of his provenance therefore, the literary character of Barry Lyndon is a composite figure but the life Thackeray endows him with hinges less on the documented prototypes than on the fundamentally split structure of the social and national stereotypes that form his sense of identity. As Maureen Waters points out (31–2), he is the Irish rogue but seen from two opposing perspectives – both as the figure glamorised in the Irish national tale and as the Comic Irishman mocked in England. He is also the allegedly indomitable Irish soldier glorified by Lever and Lover in their hugely popular novels but is, in addition, the self-proud shabby genteel descendant of petty Irish gentry, a type Thackeray satirised time and again in this and his subsequent works. In general, then, Barry comprises diverse and contradictory features of the Irish national stereotype, such as Thackeray saw it, with its irreconcilable split between self-aggrandisement and self-pity, with its nostalgia for a past glory and obsequious reverence for the aristocracy of the day. By placing him at the centre of a picaresque story, Thackeray allows each of these components to come into action as the occasion arises. Barry Lyndon’s geographically varied career enables the popularly exploited stereotypes of the Irish to extend beyond the English representations of the whole Irish nation as an inferior out-group but also to coexist with the self-stereotypes held by the Irish themselves. Most 84 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 84 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM notably, since he evokes both stances without any sense of contradiction or a trace of self-doubt, this bragging, boasting and lying first-person narrator quickly damns himself morally and ethically, as Thackeray takes pains to show. With such a variety of authorial intentions, literary and otherwise, and their ramifying implications, it is not surprising that the irony, which is the novel’s most conspicuous discursive feature, may be seen as simply clouding a split between the moral impetus of the rogue literature Thackeray had inherited and his drive to satirise it (Parker 75). The split is indeed there but it originates in the protagonist’s total reliance on imagemes in making sense of the world and of his own place in it. His habit of deliberately selecting the features suited to the needs of the moment and the ease with which he accords them positive or negative values cuts into every level of his account. And, as Leerssen observes in his examination of the literary representations of national stereotypes, it is precisely this irreconcilable split that makes these constructions so vulnerable to irony (“National stereotypes” 55–8). Barry’s stereotypes are truly imagemes in that they are fundamental to his pattern of learning, or rather non-learning about his in-group and his out-groups. It is his habit to oscillate between two attitudinal poles in his assessment of the communities he claims he belongs to. His most loudly expressed positive bias is towards the Irish nation as an in-group which he invests with the features of courage, nobility, integrity and a glorious past. At times he makes it seem as if his attachment to that imageme wholly controls his responses, so that he waxes sentimental and spontaneously bursts into tears when news from or about his native Ireland reaches him and especially when he accidentally meets up with his uncle. The rhythmical occurrence of such scenes brings up the “Stage Irishman” which in the nineteenth century started to give prominence to such features as well-meaning naiveté and sentimentality (Leerssen, “Irish” 192). Barry however takes a one-sided look, automatically ascribing the positive qualities with which he invests the image of Ireland to his individual self-image and thus loads it with personal worth. At the same time, his selfstereotype of an Irish gentleman embraces the negative characteristics of the national image quite unproblematically, so that emotionality and aggression, naïveté and cunning not only coexist but they exchange their values as the occasion requires. Nor does he give any indication that he is aware of any contradiction since he customarily bridges the split by naturalising the pride in a noble descent, also an element of the Comic Irishman’s stereotype, as his individual prerogative. Thus Barry repeatedly states that his pedigree goes back all the way to the kings of his country and so justifies his conviction that he deserves all the life bonuses that come with an aristocratic origin and that any means to gain them are thereby legitimate. Indeed, in Thackeray’s second title 85 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 85 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM “Kingdom” is not just a historical fact which, as the protagonist himself has to admit, he knows nothing about (90). This “Kingdom” is merely a constitutive feature of his imagined in-group and provides him with the justification for his violent actions in his acquisition of money and rank. These he denies to his compatriots, though. With his habitual blend of fabrication and hyperbole, he declares that “truth compels me to assert that my family was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world”, but immediately reserves that asset for himself alone: “I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render it common” (3). His unrestrained bragging about his pedigree which punctuates his account and his aggressive insistence that his dissolute lifestyle, and especially his abuse of Lady Lynton, lie within his birth right thus further accentuate the split typical of the national imageme. The same is true of his contradictory use of Anglo-Irish Protestant identity. He can boast that as a child he was known as “English Redmond” (8) and further make repeated declarations indicating that he valorises the Anglo-Irish Protestant in-group above the out-group of Irish Catholics, and yet refer to the AngloIrish aristocrats as the enemy which has robbed him of his family inheritance. His marriage to Lady Lyndon is presented both as a victory in terms of social ascendancy and recovery of his rightful rank and status, and as revenge on those who, according to his account, are to blame for the impoverished state of his family. Attached to his country and his nation, as he claims he is, he openly expresses his contempt for both when he returns to Ireland and finds it shabby and neglected and Dublin “a beggarly, savage city” (249). The negative effect of Barry’s stereotypical thinking is also revealed in the complete lack of fit between his self-image and that of those powerful groups with which he verbally associates himself. Invariably and in spite of his bragging about his closeness with English and European aristocrats, he never becomes their equal. Barry’s partnership with the Chevalier de Balibary enables him to rub shoulders with English and European aristocrats by whom he is always openly rejected. This is only logical inasmuch as in his inability to penetrate this out-group and make it his own, he breaks into acts of indiscriminate aggression which often grows into uncontrolled violence. The only ones who unreservedly take him on are, initially, his uncle’s family from whom he later scornfully dissociates himself, and his mother, with whom he also reluctantly reunites. His only unproblematic relation is with his paternal uncle the Chevalier – imposter, Catholic, card-sharper and gambler and Barry’s instructor in the art of aggressive upward mobility and complete disregard for legal and moral restrictions. The familiar stereotype of the rogue is indeed evoked but not in order to expose the hollowness and immorality of rank and 86 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 86 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM status, as that literary figure often did. Thackeray’s Barry perpetrates only suffering and not the punishment that society might justly deserve. To give just one example, when confronted by their straightforward references to him as “low Irishman”, “coarse adventurer”, “insufferable blackleg and puppy,” he merely responds with violence: his “way of silencing such people”, as he says, is by the sword (190) though this is only a temporary expedient. His greatest triumph – obtaining Lady Lyndon and her estates and fortune – is also the result of conspiracies, extortion, and finally sheer intimidation. The Stage Irishman’s amorousness in Thackeray’s novel coexists with a selection of inversely valorised negative features such as cheating, lying, philandering and staunch misogyny. Overall, Thackeray endows his hero with a unique ability to make himself disliked and unloved, and to lose every gain he has made not only in the diegetic world but also in the actual one of his contact with the readers of the novel. His spectacular assault into the coveted society is not a victory in a heroic struggle, and in the end he deservedly becomes its victim. Thackeray’s complex play with various stereotypes, combined with his use of unreliable first-person narration, ultimately creates an ethical problem for his readers in that it ironically foregrounds the difference between truth telling and lying while refusing to provide any firm ground for establishing the actuality and the nature of the facts on which Barry Lyndon builds his imagemes of himself and the world. He remains a perpetual outsider yet does not use his position to gain cognitive maturity. What Stanley Kubrick does is invert the narrative perspective so that in his film, rather than Barry looking at the world as Thackeray’s protagonist does, it is the world in front of Barry that is placed directly within the audience’s view. This world, however, is so elaborately aestheticized that it is anything but “as like as possible to nature”. It is populated by figures imagined by Barry himself and beautified by his nostalgia. Kubrick masterfully represents the illusory essence of its perfection through the slow pace of the action which allows the audience to enjoy the decorative mis-en-scene, through long pauses and minimal dialogue but to remain emotionally aloof. The use of an external narrator who occasionally breaks in with plot summary and discreet comments serves as a reminder that what the audience sees is a multiplicity of intertwined perspectives into fictions that originate in the fixity of “imagined images” – that is of the stereotypes and self-stereotypes that make up the protagonist’s inner life and prompt him to action or inaction. The film’s aesthetic also serves to remind that stereotypes are basically the products of desire, while narratorial unreliability is the product of will – the narrator’s, and in the final account, the author’s. It is well known that Kubrick sought maximum authenticity for his Barry Lyndon, mostly shooting on location in Ireland and by studying the eighteenth century. But the “truth” he provides 87 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 87 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM is second hand. While the setting and the costumes are based on paintings of the period, as the film progresses, its most memorable scenes become visual analogues of the paintings his hero seeks to acquire as tokens of his rising status. By using highly stylised art as his model, Kubrick provides an inlet into the narrator’s imagined representation of an ideal “other”, characterised by order and harmony into which he believes he could easily fit. This aesthetic orderliness depends on toning down all disruptive elements, Barry’s Irishness foremost.4 The carefully crafted pictorial mode in Kubrick’s arrangement of actors and objects thus mirrors these idealised yet abridged representations which, in the hero’s conception of the social world, prevent him from grasping and coping with the problems of real life. Instead of being embodied in unique characters, therefore, Irishness in the film adds to the overpowering impact of the formalised aesthetic as a notable but short-lived disruption which is fast superseded by a return to the pictorial. The stereotypical in the Irish national character is thus momentarily evoked through surface features only to be distanced by the dominant pictorial aesthetic. Sentimentality for instance is briefly expressed by Barry, his mother and Captain Grogan but is swiftly displaced by the stilted, impersonal language; open, balanced mutuality unsuccessfully vies with Barry’s and his associates’ dispassionate attitudes and cold indifference. Actually, the truly Irish characters are so few that the stereotype of the Irish quickly melts into that of the English, or even European aristocracy which forms Barry’s coveted in-group even as it rejects him. The movement away from the Irish towards a supra-national, and therefore inauthentic identity begins in the scenes between Redmond and his protector Captain Grogan. Their Irish accent creates a sense of closeness of temperament based on a shared background. But the Irish accent diminishes in importance, overpowered as it is by Barry’s imageme of gentility. The process of distancing begins very early, when Feeney the highwayman addresses the young Redmond as he robs him. When the boy tells him that he himself is on the run from the law, Feeney responds in a highly formal way, “Mr. Barry, in my profession we hear many such stories. Yours is one of the most intriguing and touching I’ve heard in many weeks. Nevertheless, I’m afraid I cannot grant your request”. It is as if even the criminal has been absorbed within the construct of the stereotype. In Barry’s interaction with the Chevalier de Balibari, the parameters of the interaction similarly change from the spontaneous to the ritualised. Thus, on meeting his future patron in the art of gambling and swindling, Barry loses his equanimity and bursts into tears when he discovers that the Chevalier is a fellow-countryman. Very soon, however, the sentimentality in which the scene is steeped disappears as if hidden behind the mask-like painted faces of the Chevalier and Barry himself. 88 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 88 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Englishness in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is also from the very first presented as coveted order and not as the object of rancour fitting for the power that has dispossessed and subjugated Ireland. Englishness invades Barry’s word physically and symbolically, through the bright red colour, immaculate order and rhythm of movement of the English army as it marches towards the village. Its perfect beauty suggests promises of nobility and valour. This visual construct therefore introduces the stereotype that will later draw Barry in its perimeter and distance him from his Irish origins and national psychology. This pattern is emphasised by Kubrick’s elaborate play with point of view. In the abovementioned scene the camera is placed behind the crowd of local onlookers and slowly zooms onto the immaculate ranks of the soldiers led by Captain Quin. Barry is also there but stands at some distance behind the last row. He is, moreover, differentiated by his clothes made of homespun brown cloth. The audience looks at the English with the eyes of the villagers, who are transfixed by the sight but is also able to observe Barry who is observing his compatriots as well as the foreign army. The effect is that of nostalgic memory which moves both forward and back in time and decorates the past with the trimmings of dream and hope. Later in the film, during the European episodes, the imageme of England and the English as ordered and regulated perfection further activates its ambivalence. In Barry’s brief military career the glory implied by the earlier scene is inverted to its opposite, humiliation and savagery; the use of the colour red is transferred from the immaculate English uniforms to the blood of the battles. But once Barry reenters civilian society after he meets up with Balibary and becomes his gambling partner, Englishness once again enters Barry’s conception of the social world through a stereotype signalled by the painted, beautified and wholly artificial faces and postures of its representatives. Notably, the scenes where Barry rubs shoulders with them feature card-games, making play the most powerful trope in the film as it is in the novel. Still, with its pronounced element of aggression and catastrophe for the losers, it also marks gambling as symbolic of the psychological vulnerability resulting from stereotypical thinking. In the first of the gambling scenes the camera is positioned behind Barry so that he both sees and is being seen as in the episode with the English army but without being granted any individuality and distinct identity. He looks and acts like the others and is hardly distinguishable except for his non-participation in the game. With each new gambling scene and especially when the aristocratic Lyntons enter his world, he begins to take a more prominent position as their own object of vision, while at the same time his increased artificiality and depersonalisation blend him into the negatively represented human ambience. And as Barry’s new in-group loses more of its 89 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 89 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM initial fascination, his life in it comes to resemble a staged performance devised by himself, with the English aristocrats and even his wife as reluctant actors. The only point of contact between them and the single sign of his belonging is his habitual drinking and womanising which further undermine the stability of his freshly acquired rank and status. With the exception of his younger son’s birthday and funeral, Kubrick's Barry is more and more often shown at a distance from his companions. And notably, when he reaches his nadir, it is in a scene where he is asleep after a gambling and drinking spree, with his back turned to his last-remaining companions lost in a game in which he does not take part. The final act of exclusion and rejection is the duel with his wife’s son Bullington in which he is wounded and morally and financially defeated. The duel ironically repeats the starting point of his adventures but this time it is for real, Bullington’s violence reciprocating his own towards his wife and especially towards her son in the famous thrashing scene at the Musicale. Barry’s ultimate physical mutilation and death symbolically announce the failure of his stereotypical thinking about himself and the others as a mechanism of socialisation, as well as the total collapse of its cognitive and interactional potential. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is thus related to its original on the principle of continuity rather than contiguity. Its starting point is the one where Thackeray’s satiric enterprise ends – at the very limit of ethical and moral undesirability, where the aesthetic project collapses under its own weight. Kubrick’s melancholic reading of Thackeray’s novel tests that limit to discover its origin not in the literary cliché but within the deeper recesses of human nature. It opens a view to the place where identity takes shape through a constant process of the individual’s differentiation from and comparison with the others in the interest of self-worth and the pursuance of self-interest. In that process, outlines often get skewed and imaginations replace the clearer view and the accurate perceptions of the other. But the outside view, from a place detached in time and place, may reach into the desires which prompt the formation of stereotypes and imagemes and discover a redeeming passion for belonging and acceptance. Thackeray sneers at such a possibility as a dangerous illusion, while Kubrick marvels at the artistic potential it releases. Where Thackeray and Kubrick are in agreement is that as social and psychological mechanisms, stereotypes are personally inefficient. Neither of the two Barry Lyndons is able to resolve his deep cognitive and emotional conflicts by relying on stereotypes for his interpretation of self and others. Both Barry Lyndons ultimately take recourse in useless violence and inevitably fail to find or ascertain a stable position in the social world. 90 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 90 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM NOTES 1 For a representative selection of positive but somewhat sceptical reviews, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Pluck of Barry Lyndon”, Film Comment, March / April 1976 and Penelope Houston, “Barry Lyndon”, Sight & Sound, Spring 1976. 2 In his 1982 article “Social psychology of intergroup relations”, Tajfel explains the role of stereotypes for individual and group categorisation. An excellent overview of the negative light in which stereotypes are held by social psychologists can be found in the chapter “Social, cultural and cognitive factors in stereotype formation” in Stereotypes as Explanations by McGarty, Yzerbyt and Spears. See also Daniel Bar-Tal for an extension of the basic premises of stereotype theory into ethnic and national contexts. 3 For the sources of Barry Lyndon and his numerous prototypes, see Colby’s article and Andrew Sanders’s excellent introduction to the novel. 4 Kubrick’s choice of Ryan O’Neal for the leading role is particularly appropriate for this purpose, as this actor’s face is memorable yet without any distinctive feature with a characterological effect. WORKS CITED Book by one author Schneider, David. The Psychology of Stereotyping. New York: Guilford Press, 2005. Thackeray, W. M. The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1984. Waters, Maureen. The Comic Irishman. Albany: SUNY Press, 1984. Book by more than one author McGarty, C., V. Yzerbyt and R. Spears. Stereotypes as Explanations: The Formation of Meaningful Beliefs about Social Groups. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Chapter in edited book Leerssen, Joep. 1997. “National Stereotypes and Literature. Canonicity, Characterization, Irony”. L’immagine dell’altro e l’identità nazionale: metodi di ricerca letteraria. Ed. M. Beller. Fasano: Schena, 49–60. ---. “Irish”. Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Eds. M. Beller and J. Leerssen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Sanders, Andrew. “Introduction”. The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esquire, by W. M. Thackeray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, vii-xxii. Tajfel, H. and J. C. Turner. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict”. The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Eds. G.Austin and S.Worchel. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979, 33–47. 91 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 91 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Journal Article Bar-Tal, Daniel. “Formation and Change of Ethnic and National Stereotypes: An Integrative Model”. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 21 (1997), 491–523. Colby, Robert. “Barry Lyndon and the Irish Hero”. Nineteenth Century Fiction, 21 (1966): 109–130. Knežević, Borislav. “A Picaresque Historical Novel: Ireland in W. M. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon”. Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia. (2002–2003):161–178. Web. 20 May 2015. Leerssen, Joep. “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey”. Poetics Today, 21:2 ( 2000), 265–290. Parker, David. “Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon”. Ariel VI:4 (1975), 68–80. Tajfel, H. “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations”. Annual Review of Psychology, 33 (1982), 1–39. Article in a magazine/newspaper Hofsess, John. “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Barry Lyndon”. The New York Times, 11 Jan 1976. Web. 20 May 2015. Robey, Tim. “Barry Lyndon: Kubrick’s Neglected Masterpiece”. The Telegraph, 5 Feb 2009. Web. 21August 2015. Electronic sources/Web publications Ebert, Roger. “Barry Lyndon”. Rogerebert.com. 9 Sept 2009. Web. 20 May 2015. Houston, Penelope. “Barry Lyndon”. Sight & Sound, Spring 1976. Web. 20 May 2015. http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ss/barrylyndon.htm. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Pluck of Barry Lyndon”. Film Comment, March / April 1976, 26–28. Web. 21August 2015. <jonathanrosenbaum.net>. Film Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Barry Lyndon. Warner Bros, 1975. 92 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 92 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM TOM GREER'S A MODERN DAEDALUS (1885): POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND SPECULATIVE SCIENCE FICTION V. M. Budakov, University of Sofia (St. Kliment Ohridski) Tom Greer’s novel A Modern Daedalus (1885) relates the story of a scientific flying machine being invented, as well as chronicling the break out and victory of an imaginary rebellion for Irish independence: the events taking place in the near future of 1886. It is a history of events which never take place, yet Greer intends it to be a record of events which foreshadow such an uprising. As well as being science fiction, it is also a political pamphlet which poses the question of Irish autonomy. It uses technoscientific imaginary to suggest a prophetic hypothesis of what is to occur in the near future, as a consequence of previous political affairs. The ideologically vibrant nineteenth century begot – amongst other events – the Commune of Paris and fears of European revolution, short-lived but seemingly practical utopian communities, franchise reforms, and nationalistic wars. Late-Victorian popular fiction responded accordingly to these contemporary events with speculations about the future, which clearly evoked worries about likely, yet unwanted, soon-to-come political disorder. Generally, hopes for forthcoming political changes, together with apprehensive doubts about their implementation, were apparently the instigating impulse for “what-if” speculations about “other places and times”, to prove either how illogical or harmful changes might be or whether or not they were inevitable. Norman Spinrad argues, “Speculative fiction is exactly what the words imply – any fiction containing a speculative element, anything at all written about the could-be-but isn’t” and he adds that science fiction “is a special case of speculative fiction” (1–2). In analyzing Basil Davenport’s chapter “Speculative Science Fiction”, Brooks Landon identifies the two main questions which science fiction tackles: “trying to imagine the future in terms of extrapolating from the present, in effect asking what might be ‘if this goes on…,’ and trying to imagine conditions significantly different from those of the writer’s reality by posing the question ‘what if…?’” (23); two of the basic tools of science fiction, Landon further argues, are extrapolation and speculation (24) which draw projections of the extended present into a future time and make conjectures about the future as derived from the present. 93 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 93 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM More specifically, speculative fiction is a term which covers a cluster of loosely defined and intersecting genres (Connors 146). These can be works of alternate reality, future history, science fiction, utopias, and dystopias which employ an imaginary time and place of imagined, other worlds – wanted or unwanted – where, by way of political incidents or technological advancement, historic events are likely to happen. These disparate narratives problematise the present through a visionary examination of a plausible future. The last quarter of the nineteenth century allowed for a future-thinking scrutinisation of contemporary politics. Indeed, a political question underlies such works. I. F. Clarke, Darko Suvin, and later Matthew Beaumont have argued that the sudden boom of speculative works at this time – converging, utopia, dystopia, science fiction, or future and alternate histories as expression and forecast of hope or doubt or fear – came as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871.1 To be more precise, these were actually fears of revolutionary upheaval in England accompanied with worries of a sudden invasion by a foreign power; in other words, they were apprehensions regarding the stability, security, and integrity of the British Empire. In addition to scenarios that viewed the empire as a victim to hostile attack and defeat from enemies, Irish and Irish-themed speculative fiction had its own common theme which also threatened to undermine imperial integrity, whilst also contributing to the invasion fiction genre. Within the pre-Wellsian years when science fiction emerged in 1871 according to I. F. Clarke to almost the end of the nineteenth century (qtd. in Suvin 148), one of the major themes in Irish speculative fiction was the Home Rule question, and the majority of texts that speculated about Ireland’s future expressed fears rather than hopes about what lay ahead (James 5–8). Self-rule engenders a division between roughly two groups: Unionist texts which spoke in favor of the empire’s integrity and home-rule and nationalist texts which articulated the idea of Irish independence. Most of the narratives that appeared in response to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill attempts in 1886 and 1893, for example, disclosed anti-Liberal, loyalist feelings. In contrast to these were speculative, futuristic works such as John Francis Maguire’s The Next Generation (1871), the anonymously published The Battle of the Moy (1883), and Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus (1885) which were pro-Liberal and written prior to the 1886 Government of Ireland Bill, when Irish autonomy was still just only propositional and hypothetical. With the exception of Maguire’s novel, almost all of the texts appear to be influenced by George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) which basically played an essential role in spreading political horror throughout the British public sphere of upcoming adversarial armies. At the same time, though embracing liberal views regarding British politics, Greer’s novel seems to be 94 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 94 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM more controversial in tone and message as it – by the end of the tale – turns its narrator into a blend of Fenian nationalism and Anglo-Irish loyalism; one who is aware of his origins as an Anglo-Irishman, and who admires Britain's historical legacy; a revolutionary and a pacifist; as well as a murderer and a utopian dreamer. With the futuristic scientificity, which clothes the novel’s political subject, Greer’s tale generically subscribes to the definition of “scientifiction,” given by Hugo Gernsback, the founder and editor of Amazing Stories: it is “the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story – a charming romance, intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (3). This type of late nineteenth century speculative fiction was “outwardlooking, speculative, consequential” and may rather be viewed as “a philosophical-mathematical jeu d'esprit,” or “a social parable” that was “concerned to open our eyes to the world”; in contrast to a “fantasy of this period, [that] whether for adults or children, looked inward and backward, as a therapy or a retreat” (Hunt 17). The speculative type of science fiction enacts plausible, possible future-think events – the causes of which generate in the present – and their consequences hypothetically alter the future, which looks upon the present as a past time. The stance wherein the future is envisaged as a revision of the present was aptly observed by a reviewer who wrote that A Modern Daedalus “affect[s] to narrate the events of an imaginary future as though they really happened in the past” (Rev. of A Modern, Westminster 303). In this form of writing, present-day concern questions are intended to be viewed and solved in a fictional reality that is alternative to the politics and social order in which the writer envisages the future. Considering that Greer’s A Modern Daedalus was viewed as “unstable in political viewpoint” (Foster 348, n.16), it primarily “combines the emancipatory promises of progress and freedom associated with the European Enlightenment” (Morton 40), while the narrator’s invented “flying machine” appears to “symbolise the contemporary modernisation of Irish Nationalism” (O'Donghaile 82). Thus, it may be argued that Greer who uses a scientifictional future setting for his novel maintains that what seems as a change of allegiance or political ambivalence is the author’s aim to include everything, even contradictory, positions that shape a hybrid, unmonolithic Irish national identity in development. Independence could be achieved not with technologically revolutionised warfare but through resourceful parliamentarian means. To communicate this, Greer uses the allegorical instrument of the cautionary tale to imply the reverse of what one suggests. Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus (1885) fuses a cautionary tale of war and foreign invasion with science fiction to tell a story of how an invented flying contraption can change the course of action in an imagined revolutionary war 95 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 95 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM of Irish independence. Greer’s novel was probably inspired by Hugh Harkin’s Quarterclift: or, the Adventures of Hudy McGuiggen (1841).2. Yet, it is also believed that the title A Modern Daedalus and some themes in the novel may have served as inspiration for James Joyce’s fictional artist “Stephen Dedalus” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.3. While exploring the ethical parameters of science when applied to warfare, Greer’s novel mainly focuses on the heinous change of an artificer from a Unionist to a murderous Nationalist. This demeaning evolution – from an altruistic pacifist to a murderer – is in parallel with the anticolonial rebellion in Ireland. That its events occur only shortly after 1885 suggests Greer saw Anglo-Irish politics as stormy and unpredictable; one which may soon lead to radical upheaval. Presumably, he believed a warning against impending adversities was called for. The Preface to the novel is explicit, stating “the incidents of this story are purely imaginary; but the ideas and forces with which it deals are real, and may at any moment be brought into active play by the inevitable development of the ‘resources of civilization’” (vi).4 It also clearly reveals the author’s political stand. He writes that his novel is by no means “the work of an enemy of England” (v). “On the contrary”, he goes on, presumably searching for empathizing feelings from English readers, “though a native of Ireland, I am a lover of England, and a believer in the necessity of a firm and lasting union between the two countries”. He declares his “deepest abhorrence” “for the methods of the socalled ‘dynamite party’” and states that assassinations and bombing of public monuments is counter-civilizational (v-vi). The invention of a manned aerial apparatus, which Greer’s narrator John O'Halloran contrives, is imbued with an Enlightenment themed confidence that science is the driving force of humanity. Greer must have been inspired by the latest inventions in aeronautics, in particular the invention of the aeroplane by Victor Tatin in 1879 and several other successful experiments performed by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884.5 In addition to John Francis Maguire’s The Next Generation (1872), in which aerial transport is viewed as a kind of regular urban practice of locomotion, another pseudo-futuristic narrative studying the British Empire from 1840 to 1981 also highlights the burgeoning new era of aerial travel powered by “electricity […] which conveyed passengers through the air at the rate of eighty miles an hour” (LangTung 12). Fantasies of the usage of airborne travel – benefited from successful experiments in aerial navigation – occupied the minds of many who thought of a projected, better and more efficient new age of technological development. As early as 1872, Gladstone himself outlined the hopes of a dawning, practicable new turn in history when he claimed that – amongst other discoveries – it was “the invention of aerial locomotion, which will transport labour at a trifling 96 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 96 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM cost of money and of time, to any part of the planet, and which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions” (39). Gladstone conditioned his future cosmopolitan idealism on technological, associating it with feasible future perfectibility. This liberal hope of a future to come is analogous to the protagonist’s own perception of scientificity as a means of achieving humanist development. John O’Halloran, the only character with a university degree in the family of farmers, invents a flying apparatus – one employing wings that can easily be strapped one's body. He is full of admiration of English culture and science, a full supporter of the union; but he is critical of aristocratic landlordism in Ireland and sympathetic to Irish grievances. After university, the narrator chooses to start work at an iron foundry to gain “practical knowledge of the manufacture and tempering of steel, and of the manipulations of fine metalsteel” (5) instead of following “one of the learned professions” (4) as his father wanted, or taking a teaching position like most of his fellow students. In order to complete his work on the invention of a flying apparatus he returns home to Donegal where he expects to find privacy to finish his project. What awaits him there, however, is the skeptical attitude of his relatives who look upon his scientific endeavor as “a lunatic craze” (5). Even though O’Halloran resents politics he shows no ignorance of the twists and ambivalence of Irish political aspirations. He writes: Men hitherto ‘loyal’ were now to be found in the ‘Nationalist’ ranks, and the Presbyterian ministers of the North vied as popular leaders with the Catholic priests of the South and West. My father and brothers – staunch supporters of the English connection as long as they hoped for justice at the hands of an English Parliament – now threw themselves with stern energy into the popular movement (9). O’Halloran finds his family’s political radicalism foreign to his scientific sensitivities: “The whole history of Russian Nihilism, of German Socialism, of the Italian Carbonari, of the French Commune, was at their fingers’ ends;” yet, their evening conversations by the fireside are mind-opening revelations of Ireland’s colonial imprisonment (7). In his first flight over Donegal, O’Halloran grieves over the deplorable condition of the peasantry and inveighs against the indignant system of eviction and the ruthless cruelty of the crowbar brigades. His initial lack of interest in contemporary politics, however, is severely challenged as he is overwhelmed “with the most unscientific sorrow and indignation” (14). Eager about the future and the application of his scientific discovery yet almost impartial to the 97 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 97 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Irish agrarian question, O’Halloran’s first aerial journeys appear to be his first lessons in contemporary politics and economy. The narrator’s excitement of his discovery is not out of vanity but of philanthropic hopes in scientific progress. But this moment of scientific exhilaration when he makes “the circuit of Ireland with a speed that seemed magical” (17) – with historic sites below that swiftly change beneath him “like figures in a dream” (18) – abruptly turns to rationalized fury. He sees, for instance, from high above a well-known despotic evictor, guarded by armed policemen, who have just “ejected” about fifty people out of their homes whose only prospect of survival is the workhouse. The evicted Irish families and the roofless cabins fill the narrator’s heart “with bitter hatred and indignation”. “Remember,” he writes, “I was the son of an Irish peasant farmer, himself liable to the same treatment at any moment” (21). While empathizing with the wretched condition of the evicted families, he feels empowered by the wings and symbolically transforms into a guarding angel of the impoverished Irish peasantry. O’Halloran is instantly consumed by a vengeful killer instinct, but an unexpected shot from a distance makes him a witness to the murder of the agent by two snipers with Metford rifles. On returning home from his aerial excursion, which serves as a wake-up call for his own Irish grievance, O’Halloran learns that one of his brothers was the murderer of the evicting agent and that the whole family is part of a secret organization evocative of the Irish “Invisibles”. His father and brothers accuse him of being unpatriotic as he declines their offer to make his flying machine available for the Irish cause. His father excitedly suggests that it “will ensure the triumph of Old Ireland” and that he should start training other Irishmen to set up “a flying brigade that can go anywhere and do anything” (35–6), while O’Halloran is certain that a scientific invention is much more profitable than “plotting and violence.” “Think of all we can do for our country”, he tries to argue with his family, “in a peaceful way, with the wealth and power that this discovery will bring us” (38). His contraption is taken away by his father who thinks that it should be destroyed if it cannot help Ireland’s cause of independence. Banished from his family as a traitor, O’Halloran makes another pair of wings and flies to England to promulgate his invention. But when he reaches London he alights on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral but soon after that he realizes that his escapade has immediately caused horror among the crowded people in the streets as they believe he is a dynamite plotter. The newsboy in the street voices out the headlines of the panic: “full description of the flying man!! sixteen people trampled to death in the streets!!! great dynamic plot to blow up St. Paul’s!!!!” (81). Greer’s adventure relates to a series of criminal events of the 1880s that painted a vile political landscape of assassinations, outrage, and fear of a next 98 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 98 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM terrorist attack, all of these organized by the Fenian dynamiters. A pamphleteer who supposedly writes from a future 2884, for instance, notices the paranoia caused by the explosion campaigns in contrast to the self-deluded assertions of prosperity in England: “[t]he Victorian authors not unfrequently descant upon the superiority of their age, while every newspaper affords testimony to its marvellous atrocities. The terrors of dynamite had already become invoked by Nihilists and Fenians, and scarcely less dangerous than their indiscriminate explosions were the ordinary perils of the streets” (Stone 24). A book reviewer of A Modern Daedalus aptly points out that such a theme could have been spared to the English public, since the terrorist attacks caused rampant panic in England in the early 1880s: “As if the dynamite scare was not enough affliction for the British heart, the author of this book has provided a further horror in an imaginary autobiography of an Irishman”.6 Historians of the Fenian movement claim that thirteen terrorist attacks and threats took place in London, and elsewhere in England, between 1883 to 1885 (Wisnicki 145; Porter 196). The most recent of the Fenian bombing campaigns that panicked London before A Modern Daedalus appeared in April, and almost certainly shaped the tone of Greer’s tale, were the nearly concurrent explosions at Westminster Hall, the House of Parliament, and the Tower of London on 24th Jan. 1885 (Wisnicki 145; Ryland 99). Instead of being stunned by the scientific breakthrough, the general public in A Modern Daedalus views the flying machine as an effective means of invasion from enemies. Greer actually builds upon a literary form and themes which had turned marketable in popular fiction since the appearance of George Tomkyns Chesney's The Battle of Dorking. A book review identifies Greer’s indebtedness to Chesney and to the popular Channel tunnel scare of the early 1880s, both highlighting Britain’s vulnerable national security.7 While Chesney’s cautionary tale describes the defeat of the British Empire as a result of newly invented “fatal engines” (13) and other invasion tales such as How John Bull Lost London (1882) document how England is conquered by a newly built tunnel under the English Channel, Greer’s novel portrays an attack on British imperial power from within, not from without; and, on that account alone, its warning proves to carry an ambivalent message for contemporary British readers. For Anglo-Irish Home Rule supporters, A Modern Daedalus professed nationalist, anticolonial sentiments; it championed for an alliance of all denominations and urged a general insurrection in Ireland. For unionist readers in Ireland, and the majority of English readers, it was a text with scaremongering content; one which spoke in favor of Fenianism and subversive terrorism, which tried to coerce the policy of self-rule by non-parliamentary acts. In either case, the novel’s tenor was the dissolution of the Empire. 99 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 99 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Greer obviously parodies the 1880s channel tunnel scare, instigated by the Liberal Government’s project to commence the building of a tunnel under the English Channel to connect England and the continent. It was feared that the tunnel would allow unhampered access to Britain by land. A public lecture, for instance, articulates this fear concisely: “Some major-generals and others despair of their country, and think that, if we have a tunnel, the foreigner will take it and invade our country; others think this unlikely, and believe that a tunnel is not an avenue of attack” (Dawkins 12). A number of works that copied Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) appeared to foster public scares about the tunnel as a war zone.8 These invasion fears, however, were simply an addition to the scare of airborne invasions from mainland Europe; alarming scenarios of such offensive attacks had been intermittently rekindled since the mid-1780s.9 In this context, O’Halloran’s touchdown on the roof of St. Paul’s similarly ignites panic and conspiracies which are debated in British Parliament. An MP states that reportedly the flying man placed “an explosive of a destructive nature” on the roof of the cathedral and that “the popular apprehension connected the occurrence with what was known as the ‘party of action’ among Irish Nationalists” (Greer 89). Another views the invention as a “terrible weapon” that “might be of some use to those who were labouring for the disintegration of the Empire and the disruption of Society” (94). The invention plagues the everyday talk of citizens. In an overheard conversation, a sympathizer of the conservatives is worried about the “effect it would have on foreign relations” and rhetorically asks others “What could hinder the French or German from landing an army where they please? It would be twice as bad as the Channel Tunnel, and there’s no mistaking what the opinion of the country was about that”. In the hands of other nations, he declares, this scientific discovery “would simply be the ruin of the country” (118). Greer fuses the channel tunnel scare with the dynamite bombing campaign to turn contemporary anxieties regarding imperial sovereignty and social security to his character’s own advantage. O’Halloran gradually becomes dispirited as his altruistic intentions are rejected and disputed both at home and in England. He is imprisoned after he refuses to sell, even for a million pounds, the patent of his discovery to the Home Secretary of the Tory Government. This incarceration has a cooling effect on O’Halloran’s otherwise slightly shattered scientific and philanthropic enthusiasm and portends his next step – the role of a vengeful guardian of Irish patriotism, prompted earlier during his flights over Donegal. Prior to the start of the bombing campaign in Britain in early 1881, Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World and proponent of disruptive, terrorist attacks, had outlined the future militant methods of the anti-imperial pursuits of the Fenians (Hoffman 8). He declared that “[t]he Irish cause requires Skirmishers. It 100 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 100 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM requires a little band of heroes who will initiate and keep up, without intermission, a guerrilla warfare – men who will fly over land and sea like invisible beings – now striking the enemy in Ireland, now in India, now in England itself, as occasion may present” (qtd. in Morton 39). Ford calls for frontless warfare that is expected to gradually weaken the strength of the empire at its center and in its satellite territories. It is a warfare carried stealthily by devoted insurgents who are expected to traverse the imperial domains surreptitiously and prove a nationalist cause by substituting the peaceful, parliamentarian debate for a strategy of unexpected violence. As M.L.R. Smith points out, these intended skirmishes were thought of only as “a series of diversionary attacks” and as a “prelude to a general insurrection in Ireland” (17). Greer’s own story of O’Halloran’s aerial flight illustrates exactly this overture to insurrection. In his first flight he sees despairing scenes of “a dozen roofless cabins” and evicted households, he witnesses the murder of an evicting agent, and he later realizes that his own family is part of an underground insurrection cell. When he is imprisoned in England for suspicion of subversive activity and his Anglophilic esteem starts to evaporate, he learns from the press how the rebellion at home started. It is after “an extensive eviction was impending” and because “it was on so large a scale that resistance was expected” (136); assassinations and dynamite campaigns grow into a rebellion before he joins the Irish army as a commander of a flying brigade after he escapes from prison with the help of one of his brothers. The narrator of Modern Daedalus makes it plain that Ireland’s war of independence starts with a clandestine network of agitators, assassinations, and skirmishes; but it later grows into a general rebellion as part of a larger geopolitical, anti-colonial map. On a number of occasions Greer indicates that radical agitation is promoted by Americans Fenians. Next, the Boer War is exceptionally inspirational for Irish independence in O’Halloran’s story. “The Boers taught us a lesson at Majuba Hill,” his brother Dick assertively remarks (31). In a similar way, Fred Burnaby’s Our Radicals (1886) illustrates how the people of Hindustan, taking Ireland as their model, start their rebellion as a follow-up of subversive radicalism10. Another of Dick’s exclamations reveals that there is a contagious, global anti-imperialist movement going on. At the height of the rebellion O’Halloran’s brother exclaims: “Do you know the Boers fought for the independence of Ireland that day? They showed what could be done against the British army by really good shooting, and set Irishmen to work to organise the body that has done such good service since” (216). In addition, this international movement has its ideological underpinning that O’Halloran finds to be effective “among the masses”, and points out how a conservative mind may look upon them as “the Radical and Republican prints, 101 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 101 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM which advocated such Utopian and Socialistic (and therefore wicked) dreams”. At the same time, his future history of events aims to praise Irish exceptionality in this global revolutionary context: the Irish, he claims, “for once had shown themselves able to fight, and proved their fitness for self-government” (251). In other words, the Irish question is viewed on a broader, international scale as an example to be followed by others. John O’Halloran’s invention of the flying machine provokes the conflict in the novel, first between the narrator and his family – who urge him to apply his wings as part of the nationalist cause, using them as a weapon – then between himself and the British Government – who offer him a million pounds for his invention – and finally between himself and his own changed convictions (since he has turned from a scientist into a murderer). The protagonist is full of paradoxes, which also seems to suggest the paradoxical nature of Irish political aspirations. Originally he declares that his invention is dedicated to humanity and was not meant to hurt people, yet further on in the novel O’Halloran mercilessly bombards the English camps with his flying squadron and does his utmost to convince himself that he is an involuntary victim to circumstances that forced him to turn into a soldier. He condemns himself quoting Macbeth: “I am afraid to think what I have done; look on’t again I dare not” (240), but in the next scene he keeps on bombarding English soldiers, who were sent to Ireland to defend the Union of which he, personally, seems to be in favor (at least at the beginning of his fictional memoir), while fighting on the Nationalist side. In the end, the independence of Ireland appears to be Halloran’s own independence as a scholar, so after the war he returns to his intellectual seclusion and devotes himself to the manufacturing of flying machines. The final chapter “More Dreams” is a counterpoint to the first chapter “Dreams and Dreamers.” While the beginning of the novel criticizes radical social dreaming and eulogizes scientific imagination, the end presents a near sentimental blend of the dreams of a philosophical mind and the dreams about the newly formed republican self-rule in Ireland, projected in a visionary future world. The fiction that combines social dreaming or nightmares with or without the scientific advancement and application of futuristic technologies in a future setting or in a parallel reality is in its essence a speculative inspection of contemporary politics and serves as cautionary tale of unwanted events that may happen in the future provided that little attention is paid to current problem-causing questions. This is exactly what Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus subscribes to in the contemporaneous debate on Irish autonomy. The novel dwells upon the growth of the narrator John O’Halloran from an altruistic scientist and pacifist to a patriotic nationalist soldier. O’Halloran’s invented flying apparatus is allusive of an attempt at presenting an impartial 102 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 102 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM look upon antagonized differences that Irish Home question generated in the 1880s. Though the novel finishes with a victory of the rebellion and a series of devastating scenes of bloodshed and butchery, Greer is not an advocate of the war with Great Britain. He uses the cautionary tale as an instrument of his political message to suggest to contemporary readers in Ireland, England, and America that parliamentary means of influence are a more powerful alternative to an eventual war and conflict. In this light, through his character John O’Halloran, Greer seems to contend that a union between Ireland and the empire is sustainable as long as there is room for negotiation for selfgovernment in Ireland. NOTES 1 See I. F. Clarke 1–2; Darko Suvin 148–149; Matthew Beaumont 465–467. Stephen J. Brown, S.J., Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-lore (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Company, 1916), 98. According to this source, Greer’s novel is “[a]n amusing story founded on the old Co. Derry folk tale of a ‘gommeral’ named Hudy McGuiggin, who didn't see why he couldn't fly. So he made himself wings out of the feathers of a goose. Arrayed in these, he jumped off a high mountain (still shown by the peasantry), and of course came to grief. Strange to say, he recovered and lived to be an old man” (108). 3 Newman, “Source for the Name ‘Dedalus’?”, 271–274. See also Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (1984; Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 30–31; David Sexton, “Body Language,” rev of James Joyce by Patrick Parrinder, The Times Literary Supplement, April 5 [no. 4279], 1985: 390. 4 Further references to Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus will be indicated parenthetically in the text. 5 For a comment on Victor Tatin‘s invention, see “Notes and News,” Science 4.94 (Nov. 21, 1884): 480–482, at 481 and 482; For Renard and Krebs’s experiments, see “Navigation of the Air,” Science 4.97 (Dec. 12, 1884): 531–32. 6 A book review from the London Bookseller quoted in Rev. of A Modern Dӕdalus, by Tom Greer. “Humor and Satire” 150. 7 Rev. of A Modern Daedalus, by Tom Greer, “Recent Novels,” The Nation 526. 8 In one speculative tale, England is gradually invaded by the incoming French army. Grip, [pseud.] How John Bull Lost London: or, The Capture of the Channel Tunnel (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1882). Two other works on this theme include: Hector Chauvin, The Battle of Boulogne, or, How Calais Became English Again: Another Version of the Channel Tunnel Affair (London: C. E. Roworth, 1882), and The Channel Tunnel: Danger to England or No Danger? Submarina: or, Green Eyes and Blue Glasses. An Amusing Spectacle of Short Sight, as Exhibited by the Glorious Year of Light A.D. 1882, Recalled and Recorded One Hundred Years After (London: Yates Alexander and Shepheard, 1882). 2 103 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 103 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM 9 See “First Balloon Ascents in Britain” The Book of Days 2:345–47. The author apprehensively remarks that as the balloon was a French invention “[it] might it not be used as a means of invasion by the natural enemies of the British race!” In support of the worries, the article further quotes the caption of a 1784 caricature entitled Montgolfier in the Clouds, Constructing Air Balloons for the Grande Monarque. It farcically implicates that France's imperial intentions of world dominance were supposedly to be achieved through aerial warfare of spying and the destruction of garrisons and commercial centers. 10 “Since the Indians had been taught to read English in the native schools, the sale of newspapers published in Ireland had increased enormously in the large towns throughout Hindostan. It was known that Irishmen had obtained Home Rule by means of outrages and murders, and this knowledge had induced the natives of Hindostan to try the same argument with a like object in their own case.” See Burnaby, Our Radicals 1:201. WORKS CITED Book by one author Brown, Stephen J. Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folklore. Dublin and London: Maunsel and Company, 1916. Burnaby, Fred[erick Gustavus]. Our Radicals. A Tale of Love and Politics. Ed. J. Percival Hughes. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886. Chesney, George Tomkyns. The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871. “First Balloon Ascents in Britain: Lunardi–Tytler”. The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, and History, Curiosities of Literature, and Oddities of Human Life and Character. 2 vols. Ed. R. Chambers. 1862?. Edinburgh: W and R. Chambers, 1872. Foster, John Wilson. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art. 1987. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Gladstone, W. E. Address Delivered at the Distribution of Prizes in the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, December 21, 1872. London: John Murray, 1873. Greer, Tom. A Modern Dædalus. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1885. Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Lang-Tung (pseud.), The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: Being a History of England between the Years 1840–1981. Written for the Use of Junior Classes in Schools. By Lang-Tung, Professor of History at the Imperial University of Pekin, and Tutor to Their Imperial Highnesses the Princes Sing and Hang. Translated into the English Language by YEA, Pekin, 2881 A.D. London: F.V. White and Co., 1881. Morton, Stephen. States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. O'Donghaile, Deaglan. Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Smith, M.L.R. Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement. 1995. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 104 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 104 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM Stone, Charles J. History of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. By Edwarda Gibbon, … [Auckland, A.D. 2884]. Ye Leadenhalle Presse Pamphlets. London: Field and Tuer, Ye Leadenhalle Tresse, S.C, 1884. Wisnicki, Adrian S. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel. New York: Routledge, 2008. Chapter in edited book Connors, Sean P. “‘I Try to Remember Who I Am and Who I Am Not’: The Subjugation of Nature and Women in The Hunger Games”. Ed. P. L. Thomas. Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres. Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genre 3. Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2013, 145–164. Hunt, Peter. “Fantasy and Alternative Worlds”. Introduction. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Ed. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz. Contemporary Classics of Children's Literature. 2001. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Porter, Bernard. “Appendix 2: Chronology of Events”. The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch Before the First World War. 1987. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 1991. Ryland, Frederick, comp. “Event of 1885”. Queen Victoria. Events of the Reign, 1837 to 1897. London: George Allen, 1897. Spinrad, Norman. “Introduction: Modern Science Fiction”. Modern Science Fiction. Ed. Norman Spinrad. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974. Suvin, Darko. “Victorian Science Fiction, 1871–85: The Rise of the Alternative History Sub-Genre”. (Lascience-fiction victorienne, 1871–1885: l'émergence du sous-genre de l'uchronie) Science Fiction Studies 10.2 (Jul. 1983): 148–169. Journal article Beaumont, Matthew. “Cacotopianism, the Paris Commune, and England's Anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870–1900”. ELH 73.2 (Summer 2006): 465–487. Clarke, I. F. “Forecasts of Warfare in Fiction 1803–1914”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 10.1 (Oct. 1967): 1–25. Gernsback, Hugo. “A New Sort of Magazine”. Amazing Stories [The Magazine of Scientifiction]. [1.1] April 1926: 3. James, Edward. “The Anglo-Irish Disagreement: Past Irish Futures”. The Linen Hall Review 3.4 (Winter 1986): 5–8. Landon, Brooks. “Extrapolation and Speculation”. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: OUP, 2014, 23–34. “Navigation of the Air,” Science 4.97 (Dec. 12, 1884): 531–32. Newman, Francis X. “Source for the Name ‘Dedalus’?” James Joyce Quarterly 4.4 (Summer, 1967): 271–274. “Notes and News,” Science 4.94 (Nov. 21, 1884): 480–482. Rev. of A Modern Dӕdalus, by Tom Greer. “Humor and Satire”. “A–Fiction, Poetry, and the Drama”. “Survey of Current Literature”. The Literary News: A Monthly Journal of Current Literature. [New Series; vol. 6, no. 5] May 1885: 150. 105 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 105 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM ---. of A Modern Daedalus, by Tom Greer. “Recent Novels”. The Nation. A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. Vol. 40, no. 1043. [From Jan. 1 to June 30] June 25, 1885: 525–526. ---. of A Modern Dӕdalus, by Tom Greer. The Westminster Review 124 July-Oct, 1885: 303–304. Electronic sources/web publications Dawkins, William Boyd. The Channel Tunnel. Vol. 16. Salford: Trans Manchester Geological Society, J. Roberts (Printer). 2 May 1882: 1–20. LSE Selected Pamphlets. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/60240828. JSTOR. Accessed 27 Sept. 2015. 106 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 106 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM IRELAND AND BULGARIA: 20TH CENTURY WESTERN-EASTERN POSTCOLONIAL STRUGGLES IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 107 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 108 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND THE GRAND NARRATIVE OF MODERNISATION: ARMS AND THE MAN AND AFTER Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria George Bernard Shaw’s critique of received grand narratives, such as the nineteenth-century progress-centred “gospel” of liberalism, has been admiringly noted by the playwright’s latter-day commentators (Gahan 194). Attention has also been drawn to his (largely unsuccessful) attempts to produce new grand narratives for his own time, such as a “religion of Creative Evolution” (ibid.). Shaw’s grand narratives rank as failures because they lack “the unifying coherence that the form demands” (ibid.). However, even this can be construed as a positive feature, testifying to the playwright’s awareness of the limitations of the construction of such narratives (ibid.) and, consequently, to his anticipation of our own time’s sceptical attitude towards them. But was Shaw really so far removed from nineteenth-century ideas of progress as one might be led to believe, by sceptical statements that he himself made, such as his frequently quoted commentary on the “growth” of civilisation in 1898's “Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra” (Three Plays, locations 5048–5055), or by words that he put into the mouths of some of his characters, most notably, Tom Broadbent, “the champion idiot of all the world” (John Bull's Other Island 128)? This essay will attempt to provide an answer to the question by focusing on the playwright’s treatment of the grand narrative of modernisation in his 1894 “Bulgarian” play Arms and the Man (henceforth referred to as Arms). A brief comparison between it and his later play about Ireland, John Bull’s Other Island (henceforth referred to as John Bull), will be undertaken in the concluding part of the text. Significantly, both plays are concerned with societies that are in the process of undergoing significant changes in order to move up “the ladder of a unitary modernity” (Ferguson 167), and comparing some of their key structural and thematic aspects should shed light on Shaw’s evolving view of modernisation. A discussion of Arms is incomplete without a glance at its reception, insofar as previous readers’ responses are not only essential to our own interaction with texts but they also reflect important social and intellectual developments in the great world outside them. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception of Shaw’s “Bulgarian” play was marked by a polarisation of opinion: 109 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 109 5/12/2017 8:41:11 AM while a lot of “native” interpreters adopted a dismissive attitude to it, (mis) reading it, in the words of Shaw himself, as a “comic opera or a burlesque” (Collected Letters II 312–3),1 a number of foreign readers and viewers took issue with the play’s portrayal of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians. Samuel A. Weiss has presented a detailed picture of the political aspects of the play’s reception in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, between 1903 and the 1920s, and has particularly dwelled on Bulgarian responses to it in within the atmosphere of rising tensions fuelled by pre-WWI troubles in South Eastern Europe and the Balkans:2 and, later, by post-War resentment over the re-drawing of state borders in the region (27–33). He has also remarked on Shaw’s own reaction to such responses (27– 29). Michael Holroyd has similarly commented on Bulgarian criticism of the play in the 1920s and Shaw’s response to it (3496–3586). More recently, the play has been subjected to a number of reinterpretations by scholars with East European antecedents. Their readings of the play have been part of a multifaceted reaction to the resurgence of nineteenth-century patterns of mental mapping and marginalising constructions; specifically, in the West’s political-cultural imaginings of the Balkans in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and the excesses of violence accompanying the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. Most scholars working within this context tend to make use of conceptual tools culled from the repertoire of postcolonial critique (Kostova, “Postcommunist” 74–86). By and large, Shaw’s Arms has been reinterpreted as an instance of Western denigration of Bulgaria and, generally speaking, the Balkan region to which the country belongs. Together with other texts that have similarly been construed as products of “the imperialism of the [Western] imagination”,3 the play has become part of what I have described elsewhere as a “Balkanist canon” (ibid. 78).4 The play has been analysed from such a perspective by Maria Todorova and Vesna Goldsworthy, authors of the two seminal books on Western representations of the Balkans, Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). Bulgarian-Canadian scholar Roumiana Deltcheva places Arms alongside Voltaire’s Candide and a skit on the Jay Leno Show in order to attest an enduring denigratory tendency in Western approaches to Bulgaria (5–9). Another Bulgarian-born scholar approaches the play in terms of the fin-de-siècle construction of Balkan identity as “the other within Europe” (Tchaprazov 72). Of all such critical evaluations Todorova’s, despite its relative brevity, seems the most meticulously contextualised one (111–15). With the others there is a tendency to abstract Shaw’s play from its historical, literary and theatrical contexts. Elsewhere, I have argued that Arms may be read as a future-oriented “conjectural history” of Bulgaria whose telos is the overcoming of the country’s “Oriental” backwardness and its movement 110 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 110 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM towards modern, Western-style capitalism (Kostova, Tales 175–84). In what follows, I will reiterate and amplify some of my arguments. Yet another area of the play’s critical exploration may be described, somewhat simplistically, as “Anglo-Irish”. Scholars working within this trend favour what may be termed a displacement paradigm, that is, they view Shaw’s Bulgaria as a more or less distorted image of Ireland or even England. As early as 1991, Declan Kiberd stated, in the second volume of the authoritative Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, that “in a play like Arms and the Man (1894), the word ‘Bulgaria’ might be replaced, without undue strain, by the word ‘Ireland’” (“George Bernard Shaw” 421). The displacement of Anglo-Irish Protestant anxieties onto Bulgaria is likewise central to Michael McAteer’s 2010 reading of Arms (210–17). In 2000, Kiberd published another interpretation of the play in which he analysed “the mapping of England onto Bulgaria [my emphasis]” (Irish Classics 341). For the critic this mapping is an authorial strategy aimed at “trick[ing] [English] audiences into laughing at a slightly skewed version of their own society” and thus stimulating self-analysis amongst them (341). Katharyn Stober follows the same trend in an article focusing on Raina Petkoff as a “xenophilous” “pre-New Woman” subverting conservative Victorian moral values (89–101). While “Anglo-Irish” readings have yielded valuable insights, they have also led to the relative obscuring of the representation of Bulgaria in the play. It seems to me that Arms is most fruitfully approached through a perspective that takes into account the play’s “native” historical, literary and theatrical contexts but is also alert to Bulgaria’s portrayal in it, or does not “strip the play of its geography” (Tchaprazov 71). ARMS AS A “CONJECTURAL HISTORY” OF A “HOPEFUL AND GALLANT LITTLE STATE” 5 The term “conjectural history” was coined by Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and was closely linked to the Scottish Enlightenment’s model of stadial development (Garrett 82). A conjectural (or theoretical) history was usually a narrative striving to explain a movement from one stage of societal development to another. If there was no evidence for a particular historical change in a certain society, then that change could be “conjectured” through the examination of another social context in which evidence could be found (Pittock 263). Scottish conjectural historical narratives were oriented towards the past or, at any rate, they aimed at explaining aspects of the present through speculation about a putative past. Shaw’s Arms, in my view, makes conjectures about Bulgaria’s future by using a hypothetical construction of the country’s present as a point of departure. 111 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 111 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Are we justified in describing Shaw’s construction of late nineteenthcentury Bulgaria as hypothetical? The playwright himself stressed his play’s “political actuality and ethnographical verisimilitude” (Collected Letters II 312–3). However, a number of Shavian commentators have pointed out that the dramatist knew little about Bulgaria at the time of the writing of the play and the acquisition of solid knowledge about the country and its inhabitants was not among his priorities. Thus, Holroyd explains that the first version of the play was entitled Alps and Balkans, and, significantly, it did not contain any specific geographical references: “the names of the places [were] left blank” (3533). The characters were simply called “the Father,” “the Daughter,” “the Heroic Lover,” “the Stranger,” and so on (3531–4). It was Sidney Webb who gave Shaw the idea of using the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885 as a time setting, whereas a Russian émigré, who had commanded a flotilla on the Danube, supplied “a good deal of historical and social information” about the country (3531–4). The outcome of Shaw's combined use of second-hand information from a non-native informer, newspaper reports about the Serbo-Bulgarian war and selective reading of travel books in the British Museum is a portrayal of Bulgaria that a number of Bulgarian readers and spectators subsequently found inauthentic. On the other hand, some specialised Western readers have complimented Shaw on his representation of Bulgaria. For instance, Weiss, who acknowledges the playwright’s insufficient familiarity with his chosen setting, nevertheless praises him for having grasped the “greater” socio-historical picture and having revealed “the essential social changes that followed the liberation of a backward country, such as Bulgaria, in 1878, from centuries of feudal Turkish rule [my emphasis]” (37). McAteer goes even further: he accepts Shaw’s historically erroneous assertion that the Bulgarian army was commanded by Russian officers in the war with Serbia6 and praises the playwright for his insightful portrayal of “the rift between the Austro-Slavic and the Russophile wing within Pan-Slavism” (213). The Serbo-Bulgarian war did show up the artificiality of the Pan-Slavic project, which was based on a non-conflictual idea of European “Slavdom”, but was hardly a reflection of the “rift” between the movement’s two wings. To avoid both resentment and praise founded on overgeneralisation, I will attempt to contextualise Shaw’s representation of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians by drawing on nineteenthcentury perceptions of historical development. This should also shed light on Shaw’s complicity with liberal ideas of progress. Despite the playwright’s jibes at liberalism,7 his view of Bulgaria as a “young” nation “emerging from slavery” that must needs “ap[e] western civilisation” (Plays Pleasant 15) easily falls within the context of nineteenth-century Western European liberal historiography. As Monika Baár has demonstrated, this historiography 112 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 112 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM followed Enlightenment savants in viewing Eastern Europe “not as the antipode of civilisation” but as an intermediate cultural-geographical area located “somewhere along a developmental scale that stretched from civilisation at one end to barbarism at the other” (62). Moreover, it “envisaged the progress of civilisation as the imitation of […] vanguard nation[s]” by emergent ones (63). Emphasis was thus laid on the civilisational superiority of “established’ nations” in Europe’s Western half, such as Britain and France, which “were confident of their leadership in Europe and beyond” (62). According to this progress-oriented schema, Eastern European modernisation was a form of (self-)Occidentalisation. Needless to say, Shaw never uses the term “modernisation” either in Arms or in his comments on it. In fact, the concept had not been theorised fully by 1893 when he started working on his text. However, the play’s plot is shaped by the dominant idea of the transformation of Bulgarian society “from rural and agrarian conditions to urban […] modes of living” (McGrath and Martin 6). Moreover, in the context of the play, the Swiss professional soldier Bluntschli, who is not keen on fighting and risking his life, but possesses first-rate bureaucratic skills, is assigned the role of the moderniser of a nation in transition, thus bearing out Shaw’s conviction that progress “travels” from West to East. Bluntschli’s approaching cross-cultural marriage to the Bulgarian Raina Petkoff, which is announced in the concluding part of the play and seems to link it, however tangentially, to Irish national tales, such as Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Bram Stoker’s much more recent and highly melodramatic The Snake’s Pass (1890), clearly implies that the Balkan “periphery” is bound to overcome its backwardness in due course and is to share at least some of the economic, political and cultural advantages of the “developed” world. Added to Shaw’s affirmation of Western superiority is his adherence to “a binary typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races, cultures, and societies” (Said 206). Despite his rejection of the excessive reliance on “race”8 for the explanation of cultural traits in John Bull (123), the playwright did share a concern with “racial” survival and extinction, and “weaker” and “stronger” races with a lot of late Victorian thinkers and writers.9 In the Preface to Plays Pleasant, the Bulgarians are described as a “spirited race [my emphasis]” that has long been under “the despotism of the Turk” (15). In Arms itself, “the spirited race” is trying to assert its “Europeanness” through the inept imitation of Western ways. Bulgarians are thus portrayed as changing, and this distinguishes them from the “races” making up the Orient “proper” which were stereotypically represented, in the nineteenth century, as passive and static. Despite the dynamism of the newly emancipated Bulgarian nation, the legacy of “the Turk” is still an essential part of its present. Shaw represents 113 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 113 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Bulgaria as demi-Oriental. Its culture is characterised by a high degree of semiotic instability which manifests itself in the uneasy coexistence of two sets of features. One set comprises traits that Shaw's Western European contemporaries tended to interpret as “Oriental”: poor personal hygiene and habitual cigarette-smoking for women.10 The features belonging to the other set are best described as quasi-Western insofar as they are the outcome of the play’s Bulgarian characters’ faulty interpretation of Western culture. Whereas the “Oriental” characteristics have presumably been produced by Bulgaria’s long-term Oriental-Muslim domination, and are practically indigenous to the country, the quasi-Western ones have been imported only recently. The play's Bulgarian characters emblematise the country’s dynamic present. They are all represented as changing. The upper-class characters, Sergius Saranoff and the Petkoffs, are involved in a series of Occidentalising exercises: they study and, to the best of their ability, imitate the manners and the mores of the West with the intention of passing for “genuine” Europeans. Within this context, Major Petkoff emerges as the character that is most impervious to change and most attached to the “old way” of life. While they do not share their masters' obsession with “Europe”, the servants Nicola and Louka are also going through a process of Westernisation. Significantly, neither masters nor servants acquire Western culture directly from one of the “established nations” of Western Europe. In Act I, Raina Petkoff reveals that she and her parents go to Bucharest, the capital of the neighbouring “young” state of Romania, “every year for the opera season” (35). She adds that she has spent “one month in Vienna” (35), a metropolis traditionally portrayed in British travelogues as replete with Oriental types and therefore not “properly Western” (Kostova, “A Gateway” 97). Nicola borrows his models of hygiene and dainty femininity from Russian culture (71), itself the product of (self-) Occidentalisation, as Shaw was to demonstrate in his 1913 one-act play Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) (22–23). Despite the Bulgarian characters’ “relay translation” of Western culture, they are bound to move forward. Resorting to the rhetorical synonymy of woman and nation, Shaw presents Bulgaria's passing from one stage to the other through the fates of the play's female characters: the servant Louka, her mistress Catherine Petkoff and Catherine's daughter Raina. In accordance with a nineteenth-century idea of the Volk as deeply rooted in the land, the peasant Louka is the least Westernised of the three. This is signalled by her appearance: she wears a “peasant's dress with double apron” (22). In addition, Louka lacks the servility traditionally expected from a servant in the West, but is said to be “proud” and “defiant” (22). Last but not least, she cultivates the stereotypically Oriental habit of cigarette smoking. At the same 114 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 114 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM time, Louka is different from other Bulgarian women in her position because of the cultural instruction that has been imparted to her by her fiancé Nicola. Nicola reminds her of her debt to him in an impassioned speech: NICOLA: [scrambling up and going to her] Yes, me. Who was it made you give up wearing a couple of pounds of false black hair on your head and reddening your lips and cheeks like any other Bulgarian girl! I did. Who taught you to trim your nails, and keep your hands clean, and be dainty about yourself, like a fine Russian lady ? Me: do you hear that ? Me! (71) Albeit indirectly, Louka has been (partially) Westernised. Catherine Petkoff's Occidentalisation is likewise skin deep. She is intent on disguising her “Balkanness” by presenting a “civilised” facade, or, as we are told in a stage direction, she “might be a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer, but is determined to be a Viennese lady, and to that end wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions” (20). Catherine incessantly cultivates the external signs of “civilised” behaviour. For instance, she has taken to washing her neck every day. Her husband Major Petkoff finds this excessive and “unnatural” (43). As a newly introduced element of personal hygiene, regular bathing (“wet[ting] oneself all over with cold water,” as an anonymous Englishman stationed in Philippopolis is said to have done [43]) contrasts with the life style of the previous generation: the Major's own father “never had a bath in his life,” but nevertheless “lived to be ninety-eight” and was “the healthiest man in Bulgaria”(43). Late nineteenth-century British spectators of the play must have been aware of the fact that Old Petkoff's life style was no different from that of slum dwellers in London and other industrial cities (cf. Eliza Doolittle's life style before her “metamorphosis”). By conflating underdeveloped but changing Bulgaria and the slums of a “civilised” Western metropolis, such as London, on the basis of the hygienic habits of their inhabitants, Shaw demonstrates the relativity of such concepts as “civilisation” and “barbarity”. This conflation also shows that the signs of “civilisation” that Catherine and the other upper-class Bulgarian characters are at such pains to cultivate are, in fact, part of a fantasy of the West that they themselves have produced. In the “real” West of the nineteenth century, a relatively small number of people were scrupulously clean. On the other hand, “real” society women in the same privileged entity were supposed to wear their tea gowns only at home when they entertained family members and friends informally. The Petkoffs' daughter Raina exemplifies Bulgaria’s semiotic instability at its most problematic. She insists on seeing herself and her family as thoroughly 115 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 115 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM “European”; hence her naïve bragging to Bluntschli in Act I: RAINA: Do you know what a library is ? THE MAN: A library ? A roomful of books ? RAINA: Yes. We have one, the only one in Bulgaria. THE MAN: Actually a real library! I should like to see that. RAINA: [affectedly] I tell you these things to shew you that you are not in the house of ignorant country folk who would kill you the moment they saw your Serbian uniform, but among civilised people. (35) Being a dreamer, a reader of romantic fiction and poetry, and an admirer of nineteenth-century opera, Raina imposes on reality patterns derived from these spheres. For instance, she shelters Bluntschli in her bedroom in imitation of the magnanimous act of the old Castilian noble Silva in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Ernani, itself based on Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani (Plays Pleasant 35). One may, indeed, see her as a Balkan Madame Bovary. However, unlike Flaubert's heroine, she is aware of the artificiality of art-derived patterns and of the fantasy quality of the signs of “civilisation” that she is consuming and (re)producing in her daily life. As a result, Raina leads a double life, involving affected posing, on the one hand, and clear-headed calculation, on the other. The following episode provides good illustration of both: SERGIUS: [with fire] ... But enough of myself and my affairs. How is Raina; and where is Raina? RAINA: [suddenly coming round the corner of the house and standing at the top of the steps...] Raina is here. [She makes a charming picture as they turn to look at her. ... Sergius goes impulsively to meet her. Posing regally, she presents her hand; he drops chivalrously on one knee and kisses it]. PETKOFF: [aside to Catherine, beaming with paternal pride] Pretty, isn't it? She always appears at the right moment. CATHERINE: [impatiently] Yes: she listens for it. It is an abominable habit. (46) Raina is an early embodiment of the Shavian “Life Force,” and as such she is intent on making what would later on become known as a good eugenic marriage. The ideal of etherialised, “pure” womanhood to which she aspires in her relationship with Sergius is a fake. It only masks her true essence which is that of an inexorable man-hunter and manipulator (cf. Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman). Sergius Saranoff's Balkan-grown Byronism is the masculine counterpart of Raina's Bovaryism. It is said to be the outcome of the “intense activity” into which the “[naturally] acute critical faculty” of this “clever imaginative 116 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 116 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM barbarian” has been thrown by “the arrival of Western civilisation in the Balkans”(44). By Western standards, his Byronic pose is irredeemably old-fashioned: the Bulgarian's “half tragic, half ironic air” would have fascinated “the grandmothers of his English contemporaries” (45). Significantly, even in the Balkan context, Sergius's Byronism appeals more to Catherine Petkoff than to her daughter. Raina distrusts his romantic posing largely because she recognises her own penchant for play-acting in it. The servant Louka easily sees through the upper-class characters' fake romanticism. In fact, she predicts that Raina will gladly leave Sergius for Bluntschli, thus revealing herself as her mistress's all-knowing double and as a home-grown realist. For Shaw, realists are the ones who are bold enough “to lay hold of […] mask[s] that we have not dared to discard and reveal the disagreeable truth” underneath (Holroyd, locations 2413–14). Louka and Raina could be read as a composite figure standing for the emergent Bulgarian nation. Between them, they typify what, in conformity with a biological model of socio-historical development, are taken to be the “young” country's essential features: “barbaric” health, vitality, energy, shrewdness, and courage, but also imitation of old-fashioned foreign models, affectation, and counterfeit refinement. Given Shaw’s contempt for idealism, perceived as “life by the rule of precedent” and as a predilection for “beautiful masks which the idealist puts for us on the unbearable faces of truth” (Holroyd, locations 2407–8), some of those are to be discarded as so much useless ballast as the Balkan country outgrows its present stage of (under)development. Louka and Raina are the emblems of the change that is to shape their country's history. Quite significantly, they are responsible for the final reshuffling of marriage partners in a way that should point to the Balkan Ruritania's future development. Raina is matched with the Swiss Bluntschli, who stands for Western capitalism. Louka gets Sergius Saranoff, who badly needs her ministrations as an unmasker of spurious Western attitudes. As the representative of the Western “centre,” Bluntschli is the character who is to sow the seeds of capitalism in the “gallant little state”. Significantly, the Bulgarians cannot look up to the Russians, who, as already remarked, were mistakenly assumed by Shaw to have had full command of their army in the war with the Serbs, to help them progress to capitalism. In his play Great Catherine and Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (1918), Shaw portrays Tsarist Russia as a land of a backward despotism. His attitude to it strongly contrasts with his much later celebration of the Soviet Union as “the only country […] where you can get real freedom” and of Stalin as “the greatest man alive” and “a good Fabian,” to boot (Weintraub). It has been said that Shaw created “the stage Englishman” in John Bull 117 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 117 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM (Holroyd 2892). Bluntschli may be seen as “the stage Swiss”. He possesses a number of stereotypically “Swiss” qualities such as efficiency, down-to-earth practicality and ruthless punctuality (cf. the stereotype of the Swiss as a nation of watch-makers). However, national stereotyping is not the only key to Bluntschli's character. In the play's ideological mosaic, this particular product of Shaw's cultural-political imagination embodies the most typical traits of the capitalist middle class. The fact that he is a professional soldier rather than a merchant or an industrialist does not invalidate this assertion. As already hinted, Bluntschli's conception of war is thoroughly bourgeois: being a soldier is a trade like any other. Love of glory and heroism are not part of it. He tells Raina that he joined the Serbs “because they came first on the road from Switzerland” (28). In battle his most important consideration is physical survival: this is why he prefers to carry chocolate rather than cartridges. According to Bluntschli, a romantic display of personal courage is thoroughly unprofessional. The outcome of a battle should be decided by the competence of the warring sides in making proper strategic decisions and by their use of advanced military weapons. Bluntschli himself is in the artillery and is spared the necessity of killing enemy soldiers in a hand-to-hand combat. He is convinced that the modern battlefield is no place for misplaced idealism or cheap theatricals. This is why the sight of Sergius Saranoff at the head of the cavalry charge that leads to the final victory of the Bulgarian army only provokes an ironic reaction from him. The Bulgarian officer, he avers, is an inveterate idealist (in the Shavian sense of the word!), a Don Quixote who properly belongs on the operatic stage rather than in the modern world (31–32). Sergius' cavalry attack would have turned into a suicide mission, if the Serb artillery had been sent the right kind of ammunition. For the prosaic Bluntschli the course of history is “always already”, determined by unromantic mistakes such as misplaced ammunition rather than by acts of grand heroism. Bluntschli's choice of occupation should also highlight a contradiction which for Shaw was undoubtedly central to the middle-class mentality. Despite his sober practicality in professional matters, the Swiss regards himself as a romantic. Like the archetypal homo economicus Robinson Crusoe, who views his “wandering Inclination” (Defoe 5) as a source of endless trouble, Bluntschli claims that he “spoiled all [his] chances in life through an incurably romantic disposition” (85). In the founding fiction of European capitalism, Robinson's mobility emerges as the chief means whereby he achieves economic success. Because of his “romantic disposition”, Bluntschli finds himself in a backward Balkan country which he sets out to “civilise” by teaching the locals the value of efficiency. Since Majors Petkoff and Saranoff are not good at administrative work, he steps in and writes all orders that are needed for the disbanding of the 118 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 118 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM army now that the war is over (30). There is no apparent reason why Bluntschli should burden himself with this activity. He belongs to the enemy army and the two Bulgarians are not his commanding officers. One possible explanation is that he cannot resist work – especially when he is confronted with the bumbling attempts of the two Bulgarian officers to solve the problems in hand. For Bluntschli, as for Robinson before him, work is the “principle of the legitimation of social power” (Moretti 30). The writing of orders and despatches does not bring any money but through it the Swiss establishes his superiority in civil matters over the two Bulgarians and gains prestige. This is also a good way of reminding us that he is the play’s agent of modernisation: as some of the authorities on the subject have shown, modernisation is accompanied by “increasing dependency on bureaucracies” (McGrath and Martin 6). Marriage to Raina should help Bluntschli fulfil his function as a historical agent and from this perspective the match of the “xenophilous” Bulgarian woman and the Swiss is highly desirable. Raina accepts his marriage proposal. However, the play does not end with wedding bells but with Bluntschli's solemn promise that he will be back to claim his bride and, presumably, to resume his function as the human instrument of modernisation “punctually at five in the evening on Tuesday fortnight” (89). The two couples' marriages should lead to the establishment of “healthy” families, constituting the “natural” units of the “young” nation's society. In addition, the approaching union of Raina and Bluntshli is an emblem of the integration of the Balkan “periphery” with the European “centre”. The Sergius/ Louka relationship, however, is more closely linked to the “periphery's” mixed culture and therefore represents the perpetuation of some of its semiotic instability, despite Louka’s status as one of the play’s realists. One feels that a marriage to Nicola, which she rejected, might have been more appropriate in terms of the plot’s ideological organisation. Nicola, recognised by Bluntschli as “the ablest man” in Bulgaria (84), is the play’s home-grown capitalist whose dream is to “set up a shop” in Sofia (83). The Swiss is so impressed with Nicola’s abilities that he is prepared to “make him manager of a hotel if he can speak French and German” (84). However, the Nicola/Louka relationship must have been sacrificed by Shaw because it could not be fitted into the format of the “well-made play” of which Arms is an example, despite its iconoclastic content.11 As the play’s sexually aggressive soubrette Louka had to become her mistress’s rival and had to seduce Sergius. Shaw’s ability to make use of “conventional vehicles” (Wearing xx) for the expression of his advanced ideas is, to my mind, one of the intriguing aspects of the play. Arms may be described as a serious drame a thèse which is concerned, on the one hand, with the debunking of idealism, in the Shavian sense of the 119 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 119 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM word, and with Bulgaria’s road towards modernisation, on the other. The play foregrounds the inevitability and desirability of modern change. Interestingly, its agent of modernisation, Bluntschli, emerges as a largely disinterested capitalist. He helps the Bulgarian officers with their administrative tasks, thus demonstrating the value of efficiency. His marriage proposal to Raina reveals, by his own admission, his “incurably romantic disposition” (85). Bluntschli’s promise to return to Bulgaria does encourage speculation about his future plans and activities. For instance, one wonders if he might embark upon business ventures that would bring him substantial profits but could also result in the exploitation of the Bulgarians. But insofar as there are no indications in the play of such a scheme ever becoming reality, we cannot move beyond speculation. By and large, Arms presents us with a positive picture of modernisation: the natives do not resist it and it is likely to help them overcome the legacy of recent foreign domination and join Europe. Despite Bulgarian criticism of the play, it ends with anticipations of positive change for the Bulgarians. Written ten years later, John Bull represents modernisation from a very different perspective. For one thing, the “Irish” play’s chief agent of modernisation, the Englishman Broadbent, has very clear plans about the rural community of Rosscullen, which still retains vestiges of traditional Irish life: BROADBENT: We'll take Ireland in hand, and by straightforward business habits teach it efficiency and self-help on sound Liberal principles. … I shall bring money here: I shall raise wages: I shall found public institutions, a library, a Polytechnic [undenominational, of course], a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a Garden city of Rosscullen: the round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored. (191) Broadbent is helped in his business ventures by Larry Doyle, a practical and ruthless Irishman, who shares the Englishman’s belief in efficiency. Doyle has the additional advantage of understanding the “native” mentality and seeing through the “masks” that some of the Irish characters put on when associating with Broadbent. The “Anglicised” Irishman’s own behaviour has been approached in terms of Fanon’s analysis of racism and colonial behaviour in Black Skin, White Masks: he deplores poverty and oppression in Ireland but clearly identifies with Broadbent’s policy of drastic change and profit making (Ochshorn 184). John Bull’s plot also includes a cross-cultural marriage which could be linked much more easily to the earlier tradition of the Irish national tale insofar as it follows the “classical” formula of an Englishman marrying an Irishwoman. The Irishwoman in question is Nora Reilly, who enjoys prestige 120 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 120 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM in Rosscullen on account of her modest fortune of forty pounds a year. As she has had to wait for Doyle for eighteen years, she accepts Broadbent’s marriage proposal mostly to spite her Irish lover. Broadbent, however, wishes to marry her not because he has been swept off his feet by the charms of the “native” colleen but in order to facilitate his political and economic schemes. He immediately involves her in his canvassing campaign and she is mortified because she has to associate with people whom she has always regarded as her social inferiors (188–9). According to Kathleen Ochshorn, Nora “functions in the play as a kind of symbol of the neglected, slightly weather-beaten charm of Rosscullen itself, and […] is essentially colonised by the broadchested Broadbent” (188). She definitely lacks Raina’s youth, vitality and will power. In addition, her approaching marriage to Broadbent seems the diametrical opposite of the “healing” cross-cultural unions in Irish national tales, such as The Wild Irish Girl. It has been said about Owenson’s Glorvina that she “links her nation’s past and future, both embodying and healing its troubled history” (Ferris 242). It is impossible for Nora to accomplish such a task in the context of a play which presents modernisation as part of a long history of colonisation and loss. Another significant difference between Shaw’s “Bulgarian” and his “Irish” play is that the potentially negative consequences of modernisation are envisaged in the latter. The eventual failure of Broadbent’s Syndicate is foretold by Peter Keegan, a defrocked Catholic priest whose identification with animals and insects recalls St. Francis of Assisi while his celebration of the divine and/in the human is reminiscent of William Blake. Keegan paints a grim picture of the commercialisation of Rosscullen, complete with “little children carrying the golf clubs of […] tourists” (189) and goes on to predict the liquidation of the Syndicate and the ruin of its investors and the people of Rosscullen (192). According to Robert Meisel, John Bull is “the first Shaw play to project a sour future, a future we can recognise, whose colonialism and whose utopia may be found in holiday resorts and real-estate development” (131). It is also a play in which received ideas of progress and modernisation are thoroughly deconstructed. Shaw was able to discern and point out the dangers inherent in modernisation when writing about the land of his birth with which he identified closely. His “conjectural history” of modernisation in Bulgaria, a country he knew very little and decidedly did not identify with, could only convey some of the truth. 121 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 121 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM NOTES 1 However, there were exceptions. Thus, William Archer praised Shaw for having ”set himself to knock the stuffing […] out of war” (22). 2 For a lucid commentary on the controversy over the use of the terms “South Eastern Europe” and “Balkans,” see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, especially pages 38–61. In this essay, the two political-geographical terms will be used interchangeably. 3 My reference is to the title of Vesna Goldsworthy’s seminal book Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). 4 From Maria Todorova’s term “Balkanism” which designates the complex patterns of South Eastern Europe’s “othering” by the West. See her Imagining the Balkans, especially pages 5–20. 5 My reference is to Shaw’s 1898 Preface to Plays Pleasant: “the political and religious idealism which had inspired Gladstone to call for the rescue of these Balkan principalities from the despotism of the Turk, and converted miserably enslaved provinces into hopeful and gallant little States [my emphasis]” (15). 6 On the withdrawal of all Russian officers from the Bulgarian army in 1885, see Crampton 123. 7 Derogatory references to the British Liberal leader Gladstone abound in John Bull. Liberalism is also mocked in Shaw’s 1913 one-act play Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) in which the eponymous heroine poses as a champion of Voltairean principles and prides herself on being a “Liberal Empress” (22). 8 On “race” as a classificatory category in accounts of human diversity, and on the word’s uses in nineteenth-century contexts, see Kostova, “Countering” 349–351. 9 On Shaw‘s later fascination with eugenics, see Laura Doyle, page 12. 10 On the link between poor personal hygiene and Oriental life, see, Boner 42. On habitual smoking as part of the stereotype of the Oriental woman, see Malek Alloula, pages 67–83. 11 For a reading of Arms as a well-made play, see J. P. Wearing’s Introduction to the 2008 Methuen Drama edition of the play. WORKS CITED Book by one author Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986. Baár, Monika. Historians and Nationalism. East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Boner, Charles. Transylvania; Its Products and Its People. London: Longman, 1865. Crampton, R. J. Bulgaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body. The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 122 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 122 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw. The One-Volume Definitive Edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Kindle Edition. Kiberd, Declan. Irish Classics. London: Granta Books, 2000. Kostova, Ludmilla. Tales of the Periphery: the Balkan in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Veliko Turnovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 1997. Moretti, Franco. The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Shaw, George Bernard. Plays Pleasant. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Penguin Books, 1946. ---. Three Plays for Puritans. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Penguin Books, 1946. Kindle Edition. ---. Collected Letters II, 1898–1910.Ed. Dan E. Laurence. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. ---. Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress. London: A Digreads. com Publication, 2004. Kindle Edition. ---. Arms and the Man. A Pleasant Play. Ed. J. P. Wearing. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. ---.John Bull’s Other Island. Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. ---. Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores).London: Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Prints, 2010. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wearing, J. P. Introduction. Arms and the Man. A Pleasant Play. Ed. J. P. Wearing. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Book by more than one author McGrath, John and Martin, Cathleen Callanan. The Modernisation of the Western World. A Society Transformed. New York: Routledge, 2015. Chapter in edited book Ferguson, James. “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development”. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul et al. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Ferris, Ina. “The Irish Novel 1800–1829”. The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period. Ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Garrett, Aaron. “Anthropology: the ‘Original’ of Human Nature”. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Alexander Broadie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kiberd, Declan. “George Bernard Shaw”. The Field Anthology of Irish Writing. Ed. Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter and Jonathan Williams. Vol. 2. Londonderry, Northern Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1991. 123 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 123 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Kostova, Ludmilla. “A Gateway to Europe's Orient(s): Austria in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing and Vampire Literature”. Austria and Austrians: Images in World Literature. Ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2003. ---. “Postcommunist and Postcolonial Voices Singing in Unison? Reflections on an Ongoing Critical Practice”. Boundaries, Boundary Crossing, Cross-Boundary Transfer. Ed. Vladimir Trendafilov and Irena Vassileva. Blagoevgrad: South Western University Press, 2009. ---. “Countering the Threat of Racial Decline: the Case of Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud”. Proceedings of the Jubilee Conference of St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo. English and American Studies. Ed. Ludmilla Kostova and Boryana Bratanova. Veliko Turnovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 2014. McAteer, Michael. “A Troubled Union: Representations of Eastern Europe in NineteenthCentury Irish Protestant Literature”. Facing the East in the West. Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. Ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Sissy Helf. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010. Pittock, Murray G. H. “Historiography”. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Alexander Broadie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Journal article Gahan, Peter. “Colonial Locations of Contested Space and John Bull’s Other Island”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 202–229. Meisel, Martin. “John Bull’s Other Island and Other Working Partnerships”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 7 (1987): 119–136. Ochshorn, Kathleen. “Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull’s Other Island”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 180–193. Stober, Katharyn.“Shaw’s Xenphilous New Woman: Raina Petkoff as Mistress of Her Domain”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31 (2011): 89–101. Tchaprazov, Stoyan. “The Bulgarians of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31 (2011): 71–88. Weiss, Samuel A. “Shaw, ‘Arms and the Man’, and the Bulgarians”. Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 10 (1990): 27–44. Article in magazine/newspaper Archer, William. Initialled Notice. The World 25 April 1894: 22. Electronic sources/web publications Deltcheva, Roumiana. “East Central Europe as a Politically Correct Scapegoat: The Case of Bulgaria”. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1:2 (1999). Web. 27. 01. 2000. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb. Weintraub, Stanley. “GBS and the Despots”. TLS. Web. 22 August 2011. http://www.thetls.co.uk/tls/public/article707002.ece. 124 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 124 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM FROM PUB TO PERIODICAL: McDAIDS, ENVOY, AND THE VOICE OF A MOVEMENT James Gallacher Institute of Irish Studies: University of Liverpool The application of postcolonial modalities of criticism towards Irish literature has been a burgeoning subject over the past few decades, with the advent of a critical sense of “otherness” within the progress of the Irish literary tradition. Richard Kearney particularly makes the assertion of an “Irish mind” that differs in logical procession from that of major European thought, allowing for a mutuality of seemingly contradictory philosophical traditions to be simultaneously entertained. He identifies this as a thematic constant throughout the written history of Irish literature in the English language, citing James Joyce as the most profound and expansive example and noting that the “modernist tendency in Irish culture is characterised by a determination to demythologize the orthodox heritage of tradition in so far as it lays constraints upon the openness and plurality of experience” (13). Kearney goes on to use Joyce’s semi-autobiographical character Stephan Dedalus as the definitive example of this concept, with his desire to escape the “nightmare of history” manifesting in a refusal to serve those institutions in which he no longer believes (“home”, “fatherland” or “church”). This model of a pluralist approach to the question of “Irishness” within literature is built upon to a certain extent by Gerry Smyth, who asserts that the Joycean pluralism of embodying both constructive and deconstructive elements facilitates an “Irish mind” that becomes both engaged and displaced, consequently rendering it vulnerable to becoming a selfperpetuating manifestation of “otherness” in and of itself. An “Irish mind” that is permanently opposed to the dualism of wider European thought risks becoming perpetually defined by this detachment or inability to interact with “normal” reality and thus serves to perpetuate the assumptive stereotypes upon which the balance of power was predicated in the first place. The circularity of this approach gives rise to an adulterated presentation of the “Irish mind” in which the national headspace is occupied simultaneously by that of the possessor and possessed; this in turn suggests a postcolonial culture formed with a peculiarly schizophrenic take on matters both of the literary present and past. My own contention, however, is that not only did the mutation of the “Irish mind” into a perpetually self-marginalising culture as advocated by Smyth fail to occur, but that indeed the circumstances required for this mutation never happened. Kearney maintains that in order for 125 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 125 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM postcolonial culture to take root, a decolonisation of the cultural mind set was a necessary handmaiden to the cleansing of a state’s political apparatus postrevolution. If these two processes never transpired, or indeed failed in some way, then the cultural and political environment necessary for the burgeoning of a truly postcolonial culture could not have come into existence. That this was the case is highlighted by Declan Kiberd in his authoritative monograph Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, in which he records that Kevin O’Higgins (first Justice Minister for the Irish Free State) branded his colleagues as “probably the most conservative revolutionaries in history” (263). Kiberd’s assessment of Ireland in the years immediately post-revolution is illuminating in this regard and thus worth recording in detail: They [O’Higgins’ colleagues] were autocratic in the way that military men often are. They were anxious not only to secure the state against internal attack but also to demonstrate to the British and the wider world that they could govern with discipline and authority. Just how conservative they were may be seen in their suppression of the Daíl Courts which had been set up during the War of Independence in 1920 […]. This neglect would in time permit the politicians of the Free State government to retain as much power as possible for themselves by winding up the Daíl Courts. The “retreat from revolution” had already begun. Soon judges and lawyers would once again be donning the gowns and wigs of the British system; and the newly-liberated people would be employing the unmodified devices of the old regime upon themselves. War and civil war appeared to have drained all energy and imagination away: there was precious little left with which to reimagine the national condition (263). This “retreat from revolution” so soon after its victory in turn manifested itself in a seemingly grotesque betrayal of the romantic narratives of the Literary Revival that had furnished its beginnings. As Seamus Deane put it: “the fake nation, with its inflated rhetoric of origin and authenticity, had given way to the fake state, with its deflated rhetoric of bureaucratic dinginess” (162). With the dismal failure of the nation’s founding fathers to expunge the infrastructural trappings of imperialism came a calcifying conservatism in regard to matters cultural; the creation in 1922 of a “Committee on Evil Literature” ultimately resulted in the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 which allowed for censorship of any text deemed “in general tendency indecent or obscene”. This scattergun approach to cultural policing was amended slightly by Éamon de Valera in 1933, who qualified the remit of the act’s enforcers by declaring that art in keeping with the nation’s holiest ideals was to be encouraged, which in turn produced a literary scene hidebound by an ever-decreasing cache of acceptable subject matter, one that came to be 126 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 126 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM dominated by writers who Patrick Kavanagh was to deride as “the dregs of the old Literary revival” (1959, 29). It was into this culture of malaise that a younger group of writers made their entrance upon the Irish literary stage, including Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, and Flann O’Brien, who gravitated away from the orthodox drinking spots of the local literati such as the Palace and Pearl bars, populated as they were by “respectable Gaelic Revivalists” who “left becalmed by genius […] sat, it seemed, nightly […] comforting themselves with large whiskeys, reminiscences of F.R Higgins and discussions of assonance, before going home to the suburbs” (Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails 8). These young authors, who Cronin was to describe as “waiting for elevation, to Parnassus, the scaffold or wherever” (1999, 8), represented a generation who were the inheritors of a failed political and cultural legacy, and who reacted with a raucous irreverence towards their literary elders, as one poignant anecdote concerning Bertie Smyllie’s – editor of the Irish times and doyen of the Dublin literary elite – illstarred attempt to sniff out literary talent in the younger writers’ stronghold of McDaids, highlights: Smyllie turned up there [at McDaids] one night, having made the prodigious journey (of about half a mile) from the Palace. It was about the time that this pub was beginning its long history as a poetic glue-pot. A fight over the use of spondees was going on in one corner between two wild men in duffle coats, Brendan Behan was standing on a table bawling his rendition of “I was Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and Gainor Crist, the Ginger Man was getting sick, evidently into someone else’s pint. It was too much for the great man, who finished his Irish in one vast swallow, his large Irish, gave a final, baleful owllike glare at his frightening assembly, and waddled out into the Harry Street night and the ultimate sanctuary of the Palace as fast as his trotters could take him. He was never seen in McDaid’s again (John Ryan, 29). This essay will establish the contextual environment into which two of these authors, Kavanagh and O’Brien, came to represent a manifest encapsulation of their socio-cultural environment within their work, and how they subsequently came to form the bulwark of a distinct literary culture of mid-century Dublin that found its collective voice among the pages of the Envoy literary magazine. Flann O’Brien, employed as bureaucrat in the Irish Civil Service, was ensconced within an institution that personified the systematic failure of the Irish revolution to instigate an identity of any meaningful authenticity. He constructed a number of pseudonyms through which he channelled his latent frustration at the stultifying atmosphere of Ireland at that time. O’Brien alternated between attacking the so-called “Plain People of Ireland”, a catch127 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 127 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM all term of his own devising, to describe the bumptiously insular character of what John Ryan was to describe as “The Dubliner of the Post-Natal Free State” under the sobriquet Myles na gCopaleen. O’Brien’s employment seemed to engender equally vehement reactions of repulsion and fascination with the machinations of state minutia, as Ryan again noted: “Bureaucracy fascinated him […] he knew its internal workings well. He was the scourge of bad byelaws, petty tyrannies and officialise, either English or Irish” (129). Through his persistent battles with the stygian pettiness of Dublin officialdom, and the legendary editorial contribution he made in Envoy, entitled “A Bash in the Tunnel”, O’Brien can be seen to be bringing a heavy satirical judgement down upon the literary and political life of the state he inhabited, as his tragicomic indictment of the situation of the artist in Ireland reflects: Sitting fully dressed, innerly locked in the toilet of a locked coach where he has no right to be, resentfully drinking somebody else’s whiskey, being whisked hither and thither by anonymous shunters, keeping fastidiously the while on the outer face of his door the simple word ENGAGED (18). The dismal circularity of O’Brien’s description highlights some of the dominant themes of both his literary and personal/professional life: repetitive tedium, alcoholism, and a keen sense of displaced restriction were to surface regularly within both his journalism and prose fiction, most notably in the pages of his weekly newspaper column “Cruiskeen Lawn” in which his journalistic alter-ego Myles na gCopaleen can be found railing tirelessly against the encapsulate microcosm of post-Revolutionary Ireland’s bureaucratic pettiness, those whom he styled “The Plain People of Ireland”: ‘The Plain People of Ireland’: Um. Did they teach you spelling there at all? ‘Myself’: They taught me anything you like to mention. ‘The Plain People of Ireland’: Then how about the word ‘judgement’ above? Unless we are very much mistaken, that should be JUDGMENT. ‘Myself’: It is unthinkable that you should be very much mistaken, but if you take the trouble to look up any dictionary, you will find that either form is admissible, you smug, self-righteous swine. (Half to myself: The ignorant, self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained hamfaced mealy mouth streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws!) (81). While the pages of “Cruiskeen Lawn” may have provided O’Nolan with a medium through which he was able to respond to the tedium of life within the Civil Service. As his tenure within it progressed he became increasingly less capable of maintaining even a façade of commitment to his work. Michael 128 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 128 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Phelan, who from 1952 served as an underling in O’Nolan’s department recounts in “A Watcher in the Wings” a typical attempt to engage him. Invariably, he was to be found “staring gloomily ahead and blindly signing the documents presented […] head thrown forward and buried in a moan of despair”, (98). In a discussion regarding work, it would inevitably result in a conversation similar to the following: ‘Mr. O Nuallain, Mr. So and so has phoned about’. ‘F — So and so!’. ‘But the county council feel that we should’. ‘F — the county council! F — the whole f-ing lot of them’. (106) This ever more viscerally hostile attitude towards his work coincided with a marked upswing in his drinking, which had always been heavy. Cronin records how “there were frequent meetings with local authority officials and members of the public at which he was inclined to be sarcastic, aggressive or even obviously drunk […] when officially present he had spent much of the day in the Scotch House, a place which Myles na gCopaleen referred to in his column as “my office” (1990, 83). Although O’Nolan was officially explicitly forbidden from engaging publically in any party political matter or the giving of any controversial political statements, he had been the recipient of a significant amount of discretion regarding the enforcement of such regulations which governed these matters. However, with the return of the rurally populist Fianna Fáil party to government and subsequent appointment of War of Independence veteran Patrick Smith as Minister of Local Government, a man renowned as having limited appreciation or sympathy for matters of literary nuance. He was consequently O’Nolan’s ultimate superior and plausible deniability that he was the author of “Cruiskeen Lawn” could no longer be licensed. The climax of O’Nolan’s increasingly reckless attacks on Dublin officialdom came with the government sanctioning of the “An Tostal” tourist festival in 1953. While this may have ostensibly been a moderately encouraging attempt to ease some of the grinding economic stagnation of those years, the undertaking soon lapsed into an orgiastic exercise in insular aggrandisement. The bumptious solemnity with which the festival was approached at a political level almost inevitably incurred a sarcastic response from O’Nolan; while arguably not constituting his finest satirical moments, the “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns devoted it do not lack controversy, in particular one of four written under the heading of “Titostalitarianism”. This somewhat tenuous juxtaposition of the recent visit to Britain by Marshal Tito and the influx of foreign tourists during the festival contained a particularly offensive reference to a politician 129 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 129 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM whose response to any question requiring even the merest modicum of intellectual effort was thus described: “The great jaw would drop, the ruined graveyard of tombstone teeth would be revealed, the eyes would roll, and the malt-eroded voice would say “Hah?”” (Cronin 1990, 200). Despite not being mentioned by name, general consensus within his department settled on Patrick Smith as the target of Myles’ attack and this time not even the tried and tested tactic of claiming authorial ambiguity could save him. After several days’ wrangling over pension entitlement, O’Nolan resigned on the grounds of incapacity due to ill-health. Michael Phelan, described his last day as going down “in a final fanfare of fucks” (106). This seemingly fitting epitaph for the virulently acrimonious nature of O’Nolan’s exit from government employ serves to emphasise the impossibly incongruous relationship between the keenly piercing and creative satire of his writing and the mindlessly tedious environment against which it struggled to find its voice. In the aftermath of his leaving the Civil Service, O’Nolan’s drinking increased significantly. While he had always treated sobriety in the workplace as something of an occupational hazard, to be avoided if at all possible. Now he found that unemployment served to grant him licence to drink without the restricting need to pay lip-service to office life. From this point on he became a far more regular character along the pubs of Grafton Street, particularly McDaid’s, which in the years immediately preceding his sacking had become something of a magnet for literary figures seeking fulfilment beyond the abraded husk of the literary revivalism on offer in the Palace or Pearl bars. The drunken freedom afforded to O’Nolan by his lack of work was not, however, matched by his financial circumstances; with only a paltry Civil Service pension of £265 per annum to survive on, he found himself more dependent than ever on hack journalism, to which end he – in addition to his intended six Irish Times columns a week – looked desperately to hawk his trade. A litany of publications were ultimately illsuited to his literary talents, such as the Southern Star, Longford Leader and the Social and Personal. Much of the work submitted to these magazines consisted of rehashed “Cruiskeen Lawn” content that did little to either enhance or progress his literary profile. Kavanagh, similar to O’Nolan, had found himself compelled by financial necessity to undertake employment ill-suited to his literary talents, or at least to his self-perception as the pre-eminent Irish poet of his day. His primary means of survival in the years immediately prior to Envoy’s inception in 1949 had been as something of a jack-of-all-trades sub-editor at the Catholic weekly newspaper The Standard; eventually attainming the position as the paper’s lead film critic. His ambivalence towards the paper grew to rank antipathy upon 130 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 130 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM his accession to the job. Having neither qualification or enthusiasm to discuss cinema as an art form, he forcefully stated his intent with regard this role in his very first column: “a critic should have an attitude, a bias” (Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, 240). From the outset of his tenure, Kavanagh’s disdain for film as a legitimate artistic medium became apparent in fittingly caustic style. Allied to his keen sense of self as a redoubtable and necessarily vital commentator on matters cultural, this antipathy manifested itself in frequent entreaties to the Dublin populace to forego or boycott film and cinema punctuated by scathing pronouncements made upon the character of those who attended showings, lambasting the “queues of drab little girls” who “shuffle towards their Aladdin’s cave, certain that they will find therein romance and colour and song and dance” (Quinn, 240). This type of high-handed assault indicates a distinctly lofted perception of both the artist and the profoundly significant potential of art to effect profound cultural change. This attitude was to remain with Kavanagh well after his contract at The Standard had been terminated. Indeed, in an early issue of his monthly Envoy article “Diary” – an aspect of the magazine that Cronin would later describe as crucial in marking it out as the first radical point of departure in post-war letters in Ireland – found Kavanagh lamenting the negligible appreciation for poetry in Ireland, as recorded by John Ryan: There is an instinct in mankind which recognises the priestly nature of the poet’s function. This instinct has never been strong in Ireland for Ireland is a particularly cynical and materialistic country – for all its boastings about religion. Who, and when was invented the romantic Ireland? (2008, 92). The sense of visceral dismay so keenly expressed in Kavanagh’s “Diary” entries chime with sentiments made by O’Nolan in a “Cruiskeen Lawn” column regarding the problematic state of Irish art. The piece, which references Kavanagh throughout, elicits his own damning indictment on the depth of contemporary Irish letters: As regards writers, let it be said at once that there is no major personality in Irish letters today. In the last century, Joyce and Yeats were the only two who were men of genius. For the rest, we have an infestation of literary vermin, an eruption of literary scabies for which no cure has yet been found. Call it, if you will, ‘type-phoid’. We all know them, they are very serious ‘young’ men, their work is important (256). The similarities of opinion regarding the state of Irish letters as surveyed by O’Nolan and Kavanagh certainly found common ground with many of 131 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 131 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM the other authors who gravitated towards both McDaids and Envoy. Anthony Cronin recounts in Dead as Doornails the realities of local literary life: Most of the elder ones [writers], known to local fame, were respectable Gaelic revivalists, in orthodox employment in the civil service or the radio station. Left becalmed in the wake of genius, they sat, it seemed, nightly in the Pearl or the Palace, comforting themselves with large whiskeys, reminiscences of F.R Higgins and discussions of assonance, before going home to the suburbs. One recognized their life-style as the vie de lettres locally accepted and approved. It was not somehow attractive (8). It was Kavanagh’s attack on these “respectable Gaelic revivalists” in the incendiary act of poetic bridge burning that was “The Paddiad”, which had first facilitated his expulsion from orthodox literary circles. The poem thematically chimes Cronin’s description of the contemporary Dublin vie de lettres by painting “The Devil as a Patron of Irish Letters” as a mild-mannered revivalist; “a fellow aged about sixty, bland and mellow; saintly silver locks of hair, quietvoiced as a monk at prayer” who “has written many Catholic novels, none of which mention devils” (“The Paddiad” in Collected Poems, 2005, 150). This “devil Mediocrity” heads a band of similarly derivative and anodyne writers known collectively as “The Paddies” who sit “in the corner of a Dublin pub […] croaking nightly in the bog” (2005, 150). The themes explored within express clearly Kavanagh’s acute dissatisfaction with the realities of Dublin literary life and also the role he saw for himself in response to it; casting himself among the assorted acolytes of mediocrity as “Paddy Conscience” and evoking the great names of Irish literature past, declaring: [...] this Is Stephen Dedalus, This is Yeats who ranted to knave and fool before he knew, This is Sean O’Casey saying Fare thee well to Inisfallen (150). This equation of himself with the respective giants of 20th Century Irish literature emphasises both Kavanagh’s belief in his own literary abilities and also the base inadequacy of what he saw before him and it was via Envoy that these themes found a home in what Cronin described as “with a little hocus pocus, could be made to sound like the voice of a movement” (1999, 80). What, then, can be said of any attempt to document this movement? There currently exists little to no critical literature that encompasses the era as a 132 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 132 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM whole. Indeed, Cronin’s Dead as Doornails and John Ryan’s Remembering How We Stood represent the only two genuine attempts to document both the characters alongside their writing and their period in anything approaching a holistic manner, and given the personally reminiscent natures of both books, they offer only limited scope for academic insight into the nature of the times and work produced within it. Of the two, Ryan offers the most overt possibility of the genuine existence of a collective coterie among postwar Dublin, despite initially declaring that “it would be too much to claim that anything like a literary movement was born, unless AE's definition of a “literary movement” is used, which is thus: “five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially” (xii-xiv). Cronin subsequently goes on to state: History may disagree; she may find so many unlabelled loose ends lying around but belonging to the same period, excessive and untidy […] whereupon all the disparate elements that gave the time its special flavour will be made to fall in beneath one unifying academic banner […] Those I knew and liked the most […] were linked together by bonds of time, location and circumstance […]. In a peculiar Dublin way there did exist a rough-and-ready camaraderie […] which was the outcome of a mutual history of chronic impecuniosity, the abuse of nonentities, the usual grey savageries inflicted by the establishment on the artist, but mostly the common experience of neglect – financial and critical (xii-xiv). It was the “bonds of time, location and circumstance”, forged by a perversely serendipitous chain of events, that led this group of writers to descend on McDaids, at the same time as Envoy was coming into being. These mutual histories, telling of poverty, alcoholism, professional frustration and literary stagnation strongly link these authors and represent a movement which found itself trapped within a country that had suffered an abortive revolution; one that had resulted in little to no genuine cultural evolution, and one that had found itself in thrall to a corrosively repressive Catholic hegemony. This shared experience, channelled via the twin conduits of pub and periodical, was to become the bedrock of a response that was thematically collective in nature and authentic in its reaction to the culture into which it was conceived. 133 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 133 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM WORKS CITED Book by one author Cronin, Anthony. Dead as Doornails. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1999. --- No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. London: Paladin Grafton Books 1990. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Calarendon, 1997. Kavanagh, Patrick. Collected Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland – The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage, 1996. Ryan, John. Remembering How We Stood – Bohemian Dublin at the Mid-Century. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008. Smyth, Gerry. Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature. London: Pluto Press 1998. Journal article Kavanagh, Patrick. “From Monaghan to the Grand Canal”. An Irish Quarterly Review, (1959): 31–32. Phelan, Michael. “A Watcher in the Wings: A Lingering Look at Myles na gCopaleen”. Administration 24.2 (1976) 96–106. 134 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 134 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM JAMES JOYCE, “BLOOMSDAY” AND ULYSSES IN TRANSLATION IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 135 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 136 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM THROUGH “A MULTICOLOURED PANE” TO JAMES JOYCE’S LITERARY WORLD Marina Dobrovolskaya Russian State University for the Humanities For almost a century, Russian literary scholars have expressed the need to research James Joyce's works through translation: firstly, as a means of explaining different aspects within the reception of world literature, and secondly, to treat and study the texts separately within the global critical discourses of Irish cultural, literary, linguistic studies, and history in general. In the words of the ubiquitous narrator of episode 17 of Ulysses, “Ithaca”, Joyce allows his reader to observe “through a rondel of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with continual changes” (557). Presently, this “spectacle” can be performed by visually presenting Joyce’s text in the reflection of “another” culture. The reader, especially the non-native reader of English, who studies English language and literature, needs to be “guided” in his or her understanding of Ulysses and other works of Joyce in a learning practice. He regularly comes into fashion in Russia, with different editions of Ulysses, with attractive front covers, available in the book market alongside translations of his poems and letters. Evidence gathered from this diversity also points to new ways of approaching questions about James Joyce’s role within the global literary world. The visual nature of the original text of Ulysses in English and its translation into the Russian language are quite different. The primary intention of such a comparison is pedagogical, to provide students with a certain “guidance” around Joyce’s literary world. Reading Ulysses aloud in English and Russian brings students to different levels of perception of the texts: visually, aurally and mentally. Joyce evidently creates the round world of Ulysses through a combination of sounds, letters, and words. For example, it is important that the right sound rhythms are used within a translation, such as in the sentence: “round and round and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe” (ibid.) which looks and is heard very differently in Russian, namely as: „ “( 666). In the learning process, seeing the link between the author and the reader is highly important, and this can be seen through studying translations. It allows students to see what the translator sees, and hence making them compare their own feelings towards the original text and its translation. 137 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 137 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Emily Tall in The Reception of James Joyce in Russia writes that one of the first translators of Ulysses “Khinkis deeply regretted that he had never visited Ireland” (255). He belonged to the generation of talented translators and scholars of the 1960s who felt the following: It was […] their mission, their task, to master contemporary world culture… They simply had a burning desire, a thirst, for this knowledge. This was a personal thirst and at the same time it coincided with a social thirst, with society’s need to read and translate “the most difficult authors” (ibid.). Later Sergei Khoruzhii, a professional mathematician, translated it, providing it with annotations and glosses. He admitted that his translation was not exclusive and compared it with “linguistic weightlifting” (913). When analysing potential variations within translation of Ulysses, it is important to focus on how sounds and spellings of the letter o are rendered. For instance, the well-known names of “the greatest doctors, the O’Shiels, the O’Hickeys, the O’Lees” (Ulysses, 315) are read and pronounced “ ’Ш , ’ ’ ”( 416) in Russian. Joyce’s personal name James was first transliterated into Russian spelling as Dzhems, in 1936 ( . 10, 69). Д was later changed to Д . Dzheyms with its vowel e and Russian consonant y, indicates the iotation which is not the same as the English y in boy. To make the Russian sound, “the tip of the tongue is pressed against the bottom teeth, […] the breath is forced out through the narrow channel running from back to front down the middle of the tongue” (Forbes 43). The translator, who is not tied to a word for word transliteration, looks for the freedom to recreate the idea as a whole, without referring to the rules of phonetic transcription (see table 1). Table 1 In 1936, a 10 episode translation of Ulysses was published in the International Literature Journal. Here, the translator transliterates the title of the “North Circular road”. In the 2012 edition, the same name is translated word for word. [Italics are used for emphasis below] Russian edition 1936 Russian edition 2012 Ulysses “Father Conmee turned the “ “ corner and walked along the North Circular road” – ” ” (181). ( . 10, 69). ( 236). Of course, English and Russian differ significantly, specifically in regards to their alphabets and the pronunciation of sounds. The number of English vowel sounds represented by vowel letters, and their combinations with the other vowels and with certain consonants, is larger than the number of vowel 138 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 138 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM letters, which is not the same in the Russian language. According to A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language, some vowels have up-rounding, others have the lips spread or neutral. The vowel o occurs by itself in unstressed syllables, and u has the greatest amount of lip-rounding. Labial articulation is particularly useful when reading aloud in both English and Russian. All kinds of articulation can be seen in a mirror ( 9). The 15th letter of the English alphabet, the letter o, dominates within word formations of Ulysses in comparison with its Russian Cyrillic translation, almost as if o gives its round shape to the text as a whole. In Ulysses, the letter o represents varied sounds with entirely different spellings: such as “bowl”, “mirror”, “round”, “tone”, “beloved”, “body”, “one”, “two”, “slow”, “loose”, “mockery” (see Ulysses, 3). In most cases English o words have different equivalents in Russian (see table 2). Table 2 Ulysses “the globe” (549). “the waning moon” (550). “flowers all a womans body” (643). “… loves sweet ssoooooooong … comes looooves…” (627–628). “O! and everyone cried O! O!” (300). “Ow!” (306). “ “ “ “… Russian edition 2012 ”( 657). ” (657). ” (777). … …” (755–756). “ ! ! ! ” (397). “ - ! (404)”. , The words with double o letters like “door”, “spoon”, “moon” are rare in Russian, and as a rule, they are loan-words like “zoo” ( “ ”). In English, two similar vowel-letters present one sound, whereas in Russian, two letters present two sounds. An unstressed o is pronounced in the same way as a Russian unstressed a. Forbes remarks that “this peculiarity of Russian as spoken in Moscow and the west and south of that city explains the first vowel of the old English word Muscovy, based on Moscow” (19–20). It is very common in Russian translations to change the reader’s perception of a word by using certain suffixes, which are confined to English -y / -ie endings. The word “boy” in the sentences “Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy’s shoulder with the book, what is a pier” (Ulysses 20) and “A swarthy boy opened a book…” (21) is translated using the diminutive form of the noun “ ”: “ ,– , ,– , ”( 28) and “ …” (28). According to the Smirnitsky dictionary “ / is a little boy, 139 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 139 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM laddie” (279). The diminutive in translation is semantically loaded. It is longer in spelling and in pronunciation, if you break it into syllables “ - - ”, but in a different context the original implication can be reversed. In Victor Shklovsky’s theory of roughened form “art exists [so] that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” (Weninger 154–155). I presume that Joyce’s art is to make the globe “globy”. The globe, as a noun, means “an object shaped like a ball... a model of the earth …” (Hornby 371). In Ulysses there are a diversity of words denoting round objects and motions: “Circus horse walking in a ring” (Ulysses 309), “But the ball rolled down to her” (305), “Children’s hands always round them” (305), “to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs…” (608). The letter o in Ulysses is “a circular object” similar to the meaning of a globe. In Russian, translations of o shaped words are presented by shaped equivalents. The Russian o is pronounced with a slight initial overtone u. The reason why Russian u is written is explained by Forbes in Russian Grammar: “In Greek the sound could only be represented by ov, which was incorporated in the Cyrillic alphabet as and was long written thus; these two letters were later combined to form the letter , which in its turn became gradually assimilated to the Western European , but with a different value” (20). In this connection, the name of the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses sounds slightly the same in both languages but in a different graphic spelling. In translation, the double o in “Bloom” changes into the Russian letter in “ ”. The relationship between the o sounds and spellings in the anagrams of Bloom’s name in the “Ithaca” episode could be considered alike in transliteration, but visually these pairs are absolutely different in lettersound combination when translated. In addition to Joyce’s anagrams, the translator produces “personal” changes in the order of the letters, inserting a comma and an abbreviation “ ” (see table 3). Table 3 Ulysses “Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom” (370). “Leopold Bloom Ellpodbomool Molldopeloob Bollopedoom Old Ollebo” (554). “ Russian edition 2012 . . . ”( 485). “ , ” (663). 140 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 140 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Weninger states that the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, with its evocative opening incantation “Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus”, might have been intended as Joyce's ironic counterpoint manifesto on the sly to Tzara's Dada Manifesto (149 -151). Its emotional tone is expressed through different repetitions of o shaped words in the style of the “Carmen Arvale”, the preserved chant of the Arval priests and a prayer to Mars and Lares for a good harvest. In translation, the Latin “Eamus” is presented using the Russian verb “ ” that has close connections with the Latin “gradior”, the Irish “in-greinn”, and the Bulgarian “ ”. The translator includes his own linguistic commentary into the text, as if it is a textbook for the Russian reader (see table 4). Table 4 Ulysses “Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Russian edition 2012 “ . . . , , . - , , . , , - . Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” (314). - ! 415)”. - ! - - ! ( In a recently discovered “Circe” manuscript page, (the 15th episode of Ulysses), Joyce unifies the words “moon” and “foaming” into “moonfoaming” (“Manuscript page II.ii.1”). It is possible to explain his correction by consulting several notes within his “Oxen of the Sun” episode worksheets. Firstly, the cryptic phrase “an art of grouping of who with who, on two elements in creation” (“Manuscript note II.ii.2”) could refer to Joyce's interest in cosmology and his search for “causes, for generative factors of things” (ibid.) found in the encyclopedic knowledge of “two (indestructible and ungenerable) creators of universe of nature … (Space and Time) (motion)” (ibid.). In the translated text the reader needs to puzzle over each word separately (see table 5). 141 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 141 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Table 5 Russian edition 2012 Ulysses “A dark horse, riderless, bolts like a “ phantom past the winningpost, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars …” (467). , , , ”( , 567). One of the greatest difficulties that Russian presents is placing stresses correctly when reading literary texts aloud, since a misplaced stress may lead to a misunderstanding of the original author’s tone. Joyce’s linguistic technique of making something appear twice its size is represented using its combination with the adverb doubly. In translation, it is rendered by the compound adjective я with the stress on the second element of the word (see table 6). Table 6 Ulysses “What spectacle confronted them when “ they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?” (573). Russian edition 2012 , , , , ?” ( , , 684). The number “two” and different numerical combinations tend to intensify the variety of feelings and emotions when counting spherical objects, shaped like stars or planets. Because of this, translation seems not enough for a translator trained in the mathematical arts. Thus, the sentence “Two” turns into the compound structure of two sentences: “ ” and “ ” in which the cardinal “two” appears in the translation as the ordinal the second. Joyce’s union of the two words “night” and “cloud” in one strengthens the night image of the Universe, though in translation this double composition appears in a separate form of a noun “ ” with an attributive adjective “ ”. The two other sentences “An optical illusion” and “Mirage” look and sound alike in both languages (see table 7). Table 7 Ulysses “A star I see. Venus? Can’t tell yet. “ Two. When three it’s night. Were those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No. Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land, goodnight” (308). Russian edition 2012 . ? . , . , ? . , ? . . . . . ”( 407). . . - 142 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 142 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Don Gifford, in his introduction to Ulysses Annotated, makes a factual observation about how “monetary values” were important for the middle-class circle of Joyce’s time. For Joyce, a round piece of metal money is a word that can be “twisted round [one's] fingers” (Ulysses 13), or to coin two words in one: “twopence, fourpence, eightpence” (see table 8). Table 8 Ulysses “- Bill, sir? She said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir. [… ]Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his fingers and cried: - A miracle! … Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand. - We’ll owe twopence, he said. - Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning, sir” (13). “- Russian edition 2012 ?– , , .–Э , . […] , , - : - , !… . -Э “Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart, “ eightpence a gallon of porter” (65). ,– , . – , – . ,– , - . ”( 18). , – , …” (83). , , Generally, the original text of Ulysses and its Russian translation look alike, athough different punctuation is occasionally chosen, often for logistic and imaginary reasons (see table 9). Table 9 Ulysses “[...] of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000, 000, 000, 000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet […]” (573). “[…] as marriage had been celebrated 1 calendar month after the 18 anniversary of her birth (8 September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with female issue born 15 June 1889 [ …]” (605). Russian edition 2012 “ ( ) 10 (57000 000 000 000 ) 900 […]” ( 685). “… 1 18(8 1870 ), 8 , , - 15 1889 [...] ” (725–726). 143 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 143 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Weninger contextualizes a quotation from Kandinsky’s theory of the “geometric point”: Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech [emphasis in original]. [.…] The question “Where?” and “nought” at the end of the 17th episode [“Ithaca”] could symbolize the “spartial bridge […] between Leopold Bloom’s physical and mental wanderings and Molly’s purely mental peregrinations (134). Joyce characterizes “nought” in his own way: “if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached” (Ulysses 574). The number 8 looks like a double o symbol in its vertical position. If it is twisted across the horizontal line, it turns into “the symbol of infinity” (Hornby 443). Gifford explains in his commentary that the 18th episode “Penelope” was “divided into eight (8) sprawling, unpunctuated sentences”, symbolising “the sign for eternity” (610). In Ulysses the word “infinity” is used in different combinations, for instance: “the room of the infinite possibilities” (21), and “to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity” (573). Naturally, the endless number of o shaped words has not been uncovered and are therefore left for “cerebration” (554) in “imaginary or real life” (ibid.). Indeed, James Joyce has provided his readers and translators with much joy and a sense of wonder creating his own rhythmic o shaped world of sounds, letters and words. WORKS CITED Book by one author Forbes, Nevill. Russian Grammar. Ed. by J.C. Dumbreck. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. by Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head, 2008. Weninger, Robert K. The German Joyce. University Press of Florida, 2012. , . я . : , 1969. , . .( . . , . ). : , 2012. Books by more than one author Gifford, Don and Robert Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Hornby, A.S. and A.P. Cowie, J. Windsor Lewis. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. 144 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 144 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Russian-English Dictionary. Ed. by A.I. Smirnitsky. Moscow: Russian Language Publishers, 1981. Chapter in edited book Tall, Emily. “The Reception of James Joyce in Russia”. The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Volume I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe.. London. New York: Thoemmes Continuum. A Continuum imprint, 2004. , ." ". , . .( . . , . ). : , 2012. Journal Article , . (1936): 69–88. . 10. ( . . ). я , 4, Electronic sources/ Web publications Joyce, James. “A letter to Frank Budgen at the end of February, 1921”. Web. jamesjoyce.ie/ on-this-day-25–november. ---. “Manuscript page II.ii.1”. (The “Circe” Episode of Ulysses). Held in the “Hans E. Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. National Library of Ireland, 2014. Web. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000576897/HierarchyTree. ---. “Manuscript note II.ii.2. (The “Oxen of the Sun” Episode of Ulysses). Held in the “Hans E. Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation”. National Library of Ireland, 2014. Web. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000577150/HierarchyTree. Herrmann Michaelis, Daniel Jones. A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language, 1913. Web. https://archive.org/details/aphoneticdictio00jonegoog. Э я . Web. http://www.slovopedia. com/22/195/1632651.html" </a. 145 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 145 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: IMPLICATIONS OF THE TITLE Teodora Tzankova Bulgarian Academy of Sciences The first published novel of James Joyce bears the concept of portrait in its title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In comparison with conventional titles following the formula “A/The Portrait of X”, Joyce’s choice is undoubtedly more attractive. It has become very popular amongst both the learned and general public and given rise to imitations of all kinds. Examples in this aspect are works as diverse as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (a collection of short stories by Dylan Thomas), “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” (a poem by Ogden Nash), Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (a novel by Joseph Heller), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (a critical work by Linda Huff), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny (a cartoon by Warner Bros), and “A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist” (a song by “Antimatter”). Nevertheless, such popularity also has its reverse side. Since it is so well-known and so frequently imitated, the title of Joyce’s novel runs the risk of becoming banal and hence loses its original richness of meaning. The latter effect is also due to the importance many commentators give to the fact that it was proposed to Joyce by his brother, Stanislaus. They think that this gives them a sufficient reason to neglect it, implying that, in any case, he was not fully responsible for it. However, even if the idea of the title didn’t come from Joyce it certainly hadn’t been imposed upon him without his knowledge or against his will; that’s why diminishing his responsibility is undue. Conversely, as I shall try to show, a “titrological” analysis – i.e. a study of the title – is not a whim but a justifiable critical approach. As the above mentioned variations show, the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is composed of two easily discernible parts: “A Portrait of the Artist” and “as a Young Man”. We shall look at them separately. “A Portrait of the Artist…”. Since in the novel there is no painted portrait to the title may refer, it must be taken as a qualification of the entire literary work: namely one which defines it as a “portrait”. It is a preceded by the indefinite article “a”, that is, it is 146 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 146 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM neither unique nor definite. The word “artist”, on the other hand, refers to “a craftsperson, an artisan, a learned person, a person skilled in an art, a schemer, rogue” (OED Online), and as Fritz Senn (134) appropriately informs us, its Indo-European root “ar-” means “to fit, to join”. Moreover, “artist” cognates with the Latin word “artes” – cf. with the novel’s epigraph, a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes” (“And he turned his mind to unknown arts”). Thereby, the connection established between the paratexts draws attention to the following phenomena: 1) the emblematic parallel between Daedalus and the artist of the title, and 2) the characterization of the “artes” (the skills, the arts) as “ignotas” (an unknown). Thus, new features of the person portrayed are added to the already mentioned ones: he is skillful in unknown arts and like Daedalus he joins in a new manner the materials he has at his disposal and creates original works. The artist portrayed like this is “the artist”. The definite article “the” refers to an already known person: the painter of the portrait. Therefore, the “portrait of the artist” is a self-portrait; a “portrait of the author of the portrait”, if you will. This conclusion is confirmed by an old and long-lasting tradition in the history of art. Self-portraits by Dürer, Rembrandt, Rafael, Poussin, David, Van Gogh, and many others bear these or similar titles. By means of its title, Joyce's novel enters the tradition of the self-portrait, a subgenre of the portrait. It originated in Europe at the end of XVth century, when plane mirrors had already spread outside Venice, the self-awareness of one’s individuality was growing and artists were acquiring higher social status. The painter, model and commissioner are one and the same person in the case of the self-portrait, which circumstances give the artist almost absolute freedom. His independence from any external factors allows him to construct his public image as he wishes; besides, it makes the self-portrait an appropriate field for all kinds of artistic experiments. With self-portraits, just as for any other kind, it is required to be painted from life. In addition, the author of a self-portrait needs to look at himself while painting. The latter is possible only by means of a mirror. Self-contemplation in a mirror is therefore a necessity for the self-portrait. Although seemingly an everyday act, self-contemplation is not a trivial one: the person who looks at himself in a mirror finds himself in the paradoxical situation of “vacillating between subject and object” ( , 29). He takes at the same time the hold of “the internal and the exteriorized, estranged point of view” (ibid.). This personal split is a powerful stimulus for self-reflection. Thus the necessity for the painter to look at himself in order to depict himself stresses the ongoing self-reflection as a main prerequisite for a self-portrait. 147 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 147 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Besides the creative process, this necessity affects the final result. First of all, the artist depicts himself in the way he sees himself, that is, as a reflection; and secondly, the artist depicts himself while he is looking at himself. The selfportrait par excellence is a depiction of a mirror reflection which shows the painter in the process of creating that very self-portrait. The process its creation entails both the literal and the metaphorical look at the mirror, and its literal and metaphorical self-representation. The use of a mirror in the process of creating a self-portrait also affects the viewer. Whilst standing in front one, he sees a depicted reflection of a painter who is painting himself – since what he sees is a reflection and what he looks at is a mirror. It follows then that the self-portrait is, more than any other genre, a portrait of the viewer since any mirror, even a metaphorical one, reflects the person who looks at it. However, when an observer contemplates upon a self-portrait they are put into the role of the painter. This is because their viewing is itself an act of reflection. Thus, the viewer is invited to take a strong stand with respect to the work, to actually take part in its creation. However, the contemplation of a depicted reflection of a painter depicting himself holds something more at stake, specifically, when an observer contemplates upon a reflection, they are put into the role of the person reflected; and when the person in question is a painter, the observer is put into the role of a painter. The specifics of the self-portrait described above predetermine its functions. These may be divided into two types: the “private” and “public”. Self-examination and an experimentation with different techniques, styles and topics belong to the “private”, whereas self-fashioning, the shedding of light on the process of painting and the demonstration of artistic skills are all “public” functions. The self-portrait questions the identity of the painter as an individual and as a concept, focusing on his self-perception and selfrepresentation. Against the background of these observations it becomes more and more evident that the concept of self-portrait applied to Joyce's novel is not casual. If we transfer the features of the self-portrait from painting to literature we may argue that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an experimental novel, which sheds light on writing as a creative process and questions the writer’s identity; he examines himself, constructs his public image and proves his artistic skills whereas the readers recognize themselves in the character depicted and at the same time are invited to take part in the creation of the work through active reading. 148 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 148 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM “…as a Young Man”. The second part of the title – “as a Young Man” – involves a distance in time which may be authentic, (while the artist was young), or constructed (the artist imagined as young). It is worth noting that the young age in itself neither includes nor excludes the artist: the person portrayed is a young man who is to become an artist but the title doesn’t answer the question whether it happens during the process. Besides, the expression “as a young man” implies that at this implied time is already gone; he is no longer young but in return – as the first part of the title affirms – he has become the author of a self-portrait; that is, he has become an artist. Thus, it becomes clear that the title indicates two different chronological moments: at the earlier point in time, there is a young man who is to become an artist; at a later point, there is the artist who used to be a young man. They are both one and the same person, split into two by time; the latter painting the portrait of the former. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be more concisely defined as “a portrait the artist draws of the young man he used to be”. In that case, however, the process of portrayal presents some interesting features; for instance, the object of study, or face in the mirror, is the young man whereas the subject, or the face in front of the mirror, is the already not young artist. The viewer paradoxically takes the place of both. The striking distance between object and subject is in fact the distance between the time portrayed and the time of portrayal. The autobiography is the literary genre which corresponds to the characteristics implied by the title. It must be underlined that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a life record of the already not young Stephen Dedalus; that is, of the narrator of the novel, not its writer. In the context of autobiography, the distance between the time portrayed and the time of portrayal is translated into a distance between the life of the character depicted and the moment in which this life has been depicted by the narrator. However, while depicting the life of the character the narrator also depicts himself, as a narrator; therefore the novel doubles the self-portrait. There is one self-portrait of the character and another one, of the narrator. The difference between the two persons portrayed is the difference between “past and present, between the remembered self and the remembering self, between the life once lived and the task of reconstructing that life in words” (Heffernan 15–16). The gap in between reveals the crucial importance of memory and language. It is thanks to memory that the distant point across the gap comes into existence in the mind of the narrator and due to language that it comes into life as a story – an autobiography. 149 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 149 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Unlike his counterpart, the painter of literary self-portraits may peep into a mirror and see his younger self. However, whilst peeping, he cannot help but look from the point of view of his present, changed, more experienced self. The author of an autobiography always sees himself “through veils of time” (16) in the felicitous expression of James A. Heffernan. Good examples are available throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It poses the question whether or not the omens that the protagonist will become an artist, and his sense of mission belong to the past of the character, or else reflect the narrator's present awareness of being an artist; whether they are facts of life perceived as signs by the person depicted or become signs later, (when they enter the conscious or unconscious project of the depicting person to construct his or her identity). We cannot answer this. The impossibility to answer this nevertheless sheds some light on the above mentioned problem of the authentic or constructed youth of the character: the “veils of time” prevent full authenticity but a complete construction is also impossible since it is opposed by memory. So, the youth of the character depicted is at the same time authentic and constructed but these components are not always in homogenous proportion. The diary of Stephen Dedalus, which closes the novel, is a telling break in the homogeneity. Like the autobiography, the diary is a form of self-representation; unlike the autobiography, it is intimate and periodical (Levenson 1018). This intimacy makes it unsuitable for external projects and the periodicity prevents the veils of time from troubling the mirror. That’s why, with the restriction that full authenticity is not possible, it may be argued that Stephen Dedalus, in his diary, is more authentic than his portrayal in the rest of the novel. Apart from establishing narratological pillars, the expression “as a young man” puts youth in the foreground in terms of ideology. Cleo Protokhristova notes that since “the modern world gives ground for its appearance on the necessity to reject the past defined as “old age”, [it] identifies itself with youth taking it as an emblem and as a result making it its main ideological problem” ( 114). From this point of view, the young age of the main character is a statement intended to qualify him – and the novel – as modern. Among the important implications of this gesture are the commitment to topics such as social adaptation, conflicts between an individual and society, and the focus on the inner world of a person. The last detail to consider is the composition of the title of Joyce’s novel. The first part – “A Portrait of the Artist” – makes the reader think of a classical self-portrait in which not only the subject and the object of portrayal, but also the time of portrayal and the time portrayed, coincide. The second part – “as a Young Man” – immediately rejects the supposition about the unity of time by splitting it in two and raises the question if the object is – like the subject – 150 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 150 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM an artist. It may be assumed that this outline – a hypothesis, a refutation and/ or questioning of the hypothesis – will pass on from the reading of the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to a reading of the entire novel. NOTES The subject of the present paper is fully developed in my PhD dissertation: Tzankova, Teodora. (2012). The Portrait in Modern Literature (Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, José Martínez Ruiz A " zorín"). Written in Bulgarian: ( , , “ ”). Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. WORKS CITED Book by one author , . , : . . ---. . : , , 2003. , : , 2004. Chapter in edited book Senn, Fritz. “The Challenge: “ignotas animum” (An Old-Fashioned Close Guessing at a Borrowed Structure)”. James Joyce's “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook. Ed. Mark A. Wollaeger. OUP, 2003. Journal Article Heffernan, James A. W. “Cracking the mirror: self-representation in literature and art”. Queen's Quarterly, 115:4 (2008): 2–21. Levenson, Michael. “Stephen's Diary in Joyce's Portrait”. English Literary History, 52:4 (1985): 1017–1035. Electronic sources/Web publications OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 1 September 2015. 151 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 151 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM THE ODYSSEY OF MY MACEDONIAN TRANSLATION OF JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES Marija Girevska St. Clement of Ohrid Faculty of Orthodox Theology Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje Translating James Joyce’s Ulysses is not an easy task in any language. Oftentimes the text of Ulysses seems unreadable and difficult to interpret, since every episode changes in technique, perspective, style, and register. Yet, the translator strives to do his or her best not to interpret, but to translate, to transfer, to carry, and to bear the intent of the original text into the second text – the translation. To quote Walter Benjamin’s “Aufgabe”, the “task” or the “defeat” of the translator is certainly never-ending and unremitting.1 Otherwise, everything turns out to be “met him pike hoses” (Ulysses 211) in the words of Ulysses’s heroine Molly Bloom. Translating Ulysses is nothing similar to any experience you will have with any other English novel. Every translation may be said to confirm the capacity of a given language to convey multiple and manifold layers of meaning, incorporating innumerable subtle wordformations, broken syntax and magnificent style. It challenges Macedonian and puts to the test the one’s ability to deconstruct Joyce’s method of writing. “Telemachus”2 Stately, Buck Marija came from the library stairs, bearing a plump greencovered book of Ulysses. Date of publication 1937. Reprinted 1955 on Little Russell Street. It was in the year of the millennium. I was a freshman at college and it took me three months to read during winter. “The very dead of winter” (Eliot 99). I had been drawn to Joyce’s encrypted texts over the previous decade and a half. I felt a personal connection with him, even imagining meeting this grand literary figure walking with his ash-plant or drinking his wine, as Woody Allen later did with Dalí and T. S. Eliot, and with the Fitzgeralds in his movie Midnight in Paris. When I did my master’s thesis research on the reception of the Surrealistic movement in England, it was thought-provoking to come across the notion that Eugène Jolas’ transition – where Joyce serialized Finnegans Wake in the 1920s and 30s – was one of the key literary journals that published Surrealistic texts in English. And yet Joyce never met with André Breton, the 152 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 152 5/12/2017 8:41:12 AM Magus of Surrealism, in Paris in the 1920s; but he did meet Philippe Soupault with whom he worked on the French translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle – the “elusive dream”. Although not quite the same, Breton’s idea of automatic writing somehow reflects Joyce’s “interior monologue” style in Ulysses, and later in Finnegans Wake. Athough Breton insisted on spontaneity, and Joyce was all about being the “master-mind” or “puppeteer”, they were working on similar ideas simultaneously. Indeed, literature can, in the end, be viewed as an unceasing process of mutual interweaving, entwining and pervasions, continually being renewed. “Nestor” “You Cochrane!” (Ulysses 20). In 2012, the Macedonian writer and the Translation Project editor Mr Mitko Madzunkov decided to commission Ulysses, and I, albeit terrified and overwhelmed, accepted the task with a merry heart. In the midst of May, I began the project from scratch. I decided to do it in full form, and incorporate a large selection of annotations, comments and allusions (amounting to 2717 footnotes), always trying not to bypass any major issues. You may, of course, enjoy reading the entire corpus of texts without them; however, I kept them since they prove very helpful in deconstructing the author’s intentions, decoding his personal world and his thoughts on how to create a novel. 1) What were his philosophical and religious motifs? 2) How did Joyce pull his writing strings, and 3) what were his main discoveries as a writer? The streams of consciousness and interior monologues of Dedalus, Bloom and Molly and his links to Biblical texts and mythology? Finally, what reverberates within Western culture of the twentieth century because of him? However, what I was looking for, and was fascinated by was his lucidness. The joy and rejoicing felt reading and re-reading Joyce and Ulysses was an aim to be achieved in my translation. “Proteus” “Ineluctable modality of the visible” (Ulysses 31). Ineluctable task of the translator: be true to the original. Signatures of all things I was here to read. “Shut your eyes and see” (ibid.) commands Joyce. He commands and I am obeyed (Soupault, “Sur L’Ulysses” 296).3 Heeding his command, I vowed to follow in his footsteps. I stumbled, floundered, hesitated. I tottered, teetered. I pondered. The original was too clever to be “trapped” within a translation. The author was dead. I could not consult him personally. I took his words very seriously; treated them lovingly and in detail. I was not whimsical like Molly. 153 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 153 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM The translation must have its own life, its own course of living, ergo, its own struggles in life. “Calypso” “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fouls” (Ulysses 45). The editors divided up the inner organism of the Macedonian translation of Ulysses into two volumes. In June 2013 the first volume was published (containing episodes 1–13) and the second volume (holding the much more complex episodes 14–18) came out the following December. In regards to my source texts, I used Hans Walter Gabler’s 1986 corrected text of Ulysses, Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, and Sam Slote’s 2012 Ulysses with Annotations. Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was also of great assistance, alongside the Macedonian translation of the Bible by Archbishop Gavril, Shakespeare’s Complete Works by Dragi Mihajlovski and Homer’s Odysseus by Mihajlo Petruševski. The day opened wide and I began to climb the mountain. “Lotus Eaters” By rory4 along the Stone Bridge I walked soberly, past the river, with three crimson hardbound copies of the first volume on June 5, 2013. All those sleepless nights, “with voices singing in [my] ears that this was all folly” (Eliot 99), came to an end. “This birth was hard and bitter agony for me, like Death” (ibid.), my death. “[The day] was (you might say) satisfactory” (ibid.). Befuddled by Bloom’s theological musings, I strived hard to decode his inner monologues, yet another instance of firm refusal by Joyce to succumb to English syntax. “Hades” At first it was like walking in the dark, but I was very enthusiastic and stubborn. Then you begin to see quite clear, as your eyes adjust to the darkness. When I re-read the text, my memories from that winter return, particularly those concerning the struggles I experienced. The original language tormented me and I tumbled into an abyss of language. Sometimes its unanswerable questions were nerve-racking. Who is the mysterious Macintosh in chapter 6? Is Bloom is part of the twelve apostles? Is he Christ? Is it Joyce himself? It is a test, that’s what it is – Ulysses tested confirmed the capacity of my mother tongue. The translation decidedly strove to convey the entire complex inner orchestration of Ulysses, which was invisible, and it proves that even 154 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 154 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM though I come from a small country, the Macedonian language is not essentially insignificant; instead, it is rich and has the capacity to express everything that is essentially important in this master work: to trace and articulate every nuance, shade, tone or touch. Überleben. “Aeolus” IN THE HEART OF THE MACEDONIAN Compared to English, it is quite difficult to create ambivalent meaning or create homonyms or homophones as they are quite rare in my mother tongue. There are at least a dozen synonyms for glow in English, but only a few in Macedonian. Hence, new ones were invented in my translation. Do as the Master does. “ Ш ”( I 176). So, following Benjamin’s “instructions” – “liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne”, (“lovingly and in detail”) (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” 18) – I tried to form a text of Ulysses according to the manner of meaning of the original (Art des Meinens): “to make both recognizable as the broken parts of the greater language, just as fragments are broken parts of a vessel” (“The Monstrosity of Translation” 84). Since every translation is essentially a fragment, an absolute or definite meaning can never be fully realised. Instead, it must resound according to its own character and intentions. “Lestrygonians” “Pineapple rock. Lemon platt, butter scotch” (Ulysses 124). Reading closely. Stay faithful to the original, yet stay free. As Paul de Man states, “[translation] can only be free if it reveals the instability of the original […]” (33). For instance, the message given to the hapless Denis Breen in this chapter – “U.P.: up?” (Ulysses 131) – is tremendously ambiguious and difficult to translate. In chose “ . ” ( I 204), the Cyrillic transliteration of “P.D.”, which if pronounced “pe-de” or “peder” has the pejorative meaning “a jerk” in Macedonian, or a “gay” or “homosexual”. I am aware that this choice is not a perfect one, as “U.P.: up” suggests many other connotations. However, improvements on translation can be infinite. According to Benjamin, the translator by definition always fails – cf. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task [Defeat] of the Translator”). As Paul de Man puts it: The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very 155 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 155 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM beginning. He is per definition underpaid, he is per definition overworked, he is per definition the one history will not really retain as an equal, unless he also happens to be a poet, but that is not always the case (20). We, as translators, are looking for the “intent” that is in general similar to the modes of the thought in the original text. To quote Benjamin: “To set free in [one’s] own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language, to liberate the language imprisoned in the work by rewriting it” (“The Translator’s Task” 163). Non-native speakers read the original from the perspective of the translation. For sure, to translate Finnegans Wake one must rewrite it in his or her own language. “Scylla and Charybdis” “Urbane, to comfort them the quaker librarian purred” (Ulysses 151). You need a fresh perception. I was fortunate. I had the best helper I could have ever imagined. His thoughts were formed in a very similar way as Jim’s. Certain passages prefer a male perception of things. “Wandering Rocks” The Superior, the Very Reverend my father read the “Lotus Eaters” episode when Bloom visits All-Hallow’s church. He adhered to the lines at first, but then mildly protested against those same words, telling me to be careful about what and how I translated. What Joyce wrote and mocked, I could soon recognize with my own eyes at the Seminary. Yes, because, as Swinburne sings in “The Garden of Prosperine”: “even the weariest river/ winds somewhere safe to sea” (78). Pro domo sua – always return to yourself. Khoruzhy was right. Joyce himself wrote in Ulysses: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves” (175). “Sirens” Browse and burn in “Sirens”. That is what you do. You burn. This was the most particular piece of translation in the book. The music. The word play. The alliteration. “Jingle” (Ulysses 210). Yet, the Macedonian language survived. “Bronze by gold” (210). Hard, but tried to make the text sound as close as possible to the original. I hope I have achieved that harmony spoken of by Benjamin : “the translation’s language can, indeed must free itself from bondage 156 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 156 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM to meaning, in order to allow its own mode of intentio to resound, not as the intentio to reproduce, but rather as harmony, as a complement to its language in which language communicates itself” (“The Translator’s Task” 161). “Cyclops” I was just passing the time of day when the Association of the Macedonian Literary Translators decided to pay tribute to , whereupon I received a “Golden Pen” Award in September 2013. However, the Cyclop-like eyes of the readers seem to be blind in Macedonia. Time passes slow in this region. “Nausicca” “The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace” (Ulysses 284). The second volume of was nearly completed. “Cuckoo” (313). It reminded me of the beautiful melody of the 13th century medieval English rota: “Sumer Is Icumen In”, “Lhude sing cuccu!” (Quiller-Couch 1). “Sing cuccu”. Seeking not to “obscure the original” by mistranslating, I consulted both the (authorised) French and German translations. As for the Russian version, I believed that some of the translational solutions contained too much freedom, whereas the Serbian manuscript unfortunately had some mistranslations. I tried to follow my own path in accord with the law of fidelity in the linguistic development of the original. “Oxen of the Sun” Ulysses is a conglomerate comprising various linguistic and syntactical variations, complex compounds, changes in register, slangs and jargons, and idiomatic phrases. It parodies the entire corpus of English and European literary tradition, including Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, and English Gothic novelists (such as Horace Walpole and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu). In addition, the historical and political background of Ireland, (at the time of Parnell and the British Empire), is discussed in detail, as well as unavoidably his religious background with the Roman Catholic Church. “Oxen of the Sun” was one of the most challenging episodes to translate. The literal English translation of Latin texts with references to Tacitus and Sallust. Twenty five pieces of parodies of Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. A selection of 335 footnotes. A constant transfer from one register to another. 157 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 157 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM “Circe” The marvellous dramatic piece, episode 15: “Circe”. The dream land of Ulysses wherein layers of reality constantly change, and foreshadow and prefigure Finnegans Wake. Humour. You encounter everything you know about literature in Ulysses: prose, poetry, drama. The translator’s responsibility is enormous. The challenge is colossal as a volcanic mountain. It extends beyond the limits of what we consider by definition to be a novel, or a strategic narrative. Understanding his strategy requires a deliberate strategy of our own. “Eumaeus” “Preparatory to anything else” (Ulysses 501). The Joyce translator has to prepare him or herself extremely well before embarkation. Read his entire corpus, enter his world, penetrate his way of thinking, his way of creating sentences, his syntax and pauses. If you are gifted with perceptiveness, all you need is the wherewithal, dedication and determination to treat every sentence with due respect and love so that the original text becomes alive in one’s translation. This is what gives life to the original text in a non-native culture. “Ithaca” What parallel courses did the original text of Ulysses and the translation of Ulysses follow? Starting united both at normal walking pace they followed the intention of the author. The translator followed the sound of the words, and consecutive sentences; she strived to disclose the meaning of the words, especially the meaning hidden in idiomatic phrases; deconstructing the layers of multiform meanings, always digging deeper. It never is what it seems. Always approaching. Never fully catching, but always approaching. Did the translator discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to the reception of the book in Ireland and in Macedonia? Both were sensitive to their own endemic reception. The literary critics prefer to be dead in Macedonia. There are no specialities on Joyce in our universities – not in the whole country. This is of course part of a general situation in Macedonia. There are still big sections of the humanities that are underdeveloped. Sergei Khoruzhy in a 2014 interview for The Moscow Times said in regards to the Russian translation of Ulysses, not far from the truth: 158 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 158 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM “Joyce is a special world and a special profession. Quite different from that of a translator of English novels” (“An Epic Journey: Translating ‘Ulysses’”). Did the translator obey the signs of Joyce? Yes, entering softly, she strived to grasp his carefully formed thoughts, his vigilantly monitored lapses of syntax, his nonsensical phrases, his puns, his “farts”, his “yawns”, his clever cunnings, his passion, his diligence, his persistence. Did the translator and Joyce find their educational careers similar? My father went to the Seminary as Stephen did and as Joyce did. If I were a boy, I would probably have gone too to my Belvedere. As Leopold Bloom said, life can be stranger than fiction. I started teaching English related theology in the Seminary the same year as I started translating Ulysses. Did the translator attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition? Coincidence. “Penelope” “Yes because I never did a thing like this before” (Ulysses 608). Yes because the closing “Penelope” monologue is odd and peculiar. Most critics emphasize the lack of punctuation and the stream of consciousness. Its rhythm is in a sense unrepeatable; not in a sense that it is unique, but in a sense that even if the passages are read a thousand times, each time they are read, they are read differently. Somehow the rhythm of joy prevails, always towards the end. It is not musical, but something completely different. Yes. Madzunkov’s great acumen. The struggles with the translation of this episode were partly mollified by Angeline Ball’s and Marcella Riordan’s filmic renditions of Molly’s soliloquy. Their recordings were effective in capturing and distinguishing the shorter or longer flows of thought and the transfer from one thought to another. I shall conclude with my Macedonian translation of the iconic final passage of Molly’s monologue in “Penelope”. For the purpose of this essay I have made alterations in my own published translation of this paragraph. “ ” is altered to “ ”, (the preposition “ ” denoting movement), and “ ” is now “ ”, a shortened and more melodic version, and thus closer to the original “my breasts all perfume”. This final note of the essay goes back to (or towards) its introductory premise: the “ineluctable modality” (Ulysses 31) of the process of translation. 159 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 159 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM ј ј ќ ј 2 ѓ ќ ќ ј ј ќ ј ј ј ( ј ј ј ј posadas ј ј ѕ ј ј II 533). NOTES 1 “Task” meaning problem and “defeat” representing surrender, and capitulation. Joyce's personal titles for the episodes of Ulysses respectively structure this article. 3 Paraphrasing Philippe Soupault’s words in a review of the French translation of Ulysses (1929): “Il commande et il est obéi” (“He commands and he is obeyed”). 4 Cf. “By Lorries along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher’s, the postal telegraph office” (Ulysses 58). 'Rory' (obsolete) defines something which is 'covered with dew'. 2 WORKS CITED Book by one author Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems, 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Quiller-Couch, Arthur. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. London: Oxford University Press, 1918. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Selected Poems. Ed. L.M Findlay. New York: Routledge, 2002. 160 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 160 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM ј , ј . : .( ). . ј . ј : , ј, , 2013. Chapter in edited book Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. IV/1, S. 9–21. Frankfurt/Main, 1972. Article in journal Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task”. Tr. Steven Rendall. TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997: 151–165. De Man, Paul. ““Conclusions” on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator””. Yale French Studies 69. Yale University Press, 1985: 25–46. Reprinted in The Resistence to Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986: 73–105. Jacobs, Carol. “ “The Monstrosity of Translation: “The Task of the Translator””. In the Language of Walter Benjamin, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999: 75–90. Soupault, Philippe. “Sur L’Ulysses de James Joyce”. Littérature et le reste. Ed. Lachenal, Lydie. Paris: Gallimard, 2006: 292–299. Article in magazine/newspaper Hamilton, Tracy Brown. “An Epic Journey: Translating ‘Ulysses’”. The Moscow Times. 29 June, 2014. Web. 30 Aug. 2015. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/502670. html 161 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 161 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Dominik Wallerius is a Junior Lecturer and PhD candidate at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. His thesis is on narrative and masculinity in the works of James Joyce. His publications include “Forms of Unnarration in Joyce’s “The Boarding House”” in Jena Electronic Studies in English Language and Literatures (2015), “How Final is Finality? Apocalyptic Closure in Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat” in Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies(2014), “‘A traitor, an adulterer!’: Public and Private Masculinities in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man“ in Political Masculinities, (2014), and “An Intersectional Approach to Narrative: Gender, Class and Nationality in James Joyce’s “Counterparts”” in New Approaches to Narrative, (2013). His areas of academic interest include Modernist Culture, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Masculinity Studies, Gender and Space, Narrative Theory. Yarmila Daskalova is assistant professor at University of Veliko Tarnovo (“St Cyril and St Methodius”). She teaches British Romanticism, postRomanticism and Modernism, and summer school courses in Bulgarian for foreigners. Recent publications include: “Oracular Faces and Tomb Haunters: W. B. Yeats’s Cuchulain Comforted” in Language, Culture, Identity (2010), “Receptacles of the Foreign: Aspects of Intertextuality and Ontological Self-Reflexivity in Two Contemporary Bulgarian Novels” in Comparative Critical Studies Vol.9.2 (2012), and „ I: „ ” ”, „ ” (2011). She and has published two poetry collections and is a multiple time recipient of awards by the Bulgarian Translators Union. Nikolai Todorov is a PhD candidate in the history of western European literature at the Faculty of Slavic Studies, Sofia University (“St. Kliment Ohridski”). His research activities focus on literary modernism by Spanish, Spanish-American, English and French authors. He has translated works by the following writers, amongst others, into Bulgarian: Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Miro, Rabindranath Tagore, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost and Maurice Maeterlink. 162 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 162 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM Marina Snesareva wrote her PhD thesis “Distribution of Palatised and Non-Palatised Consonants in the Speech of L2 Irish Speakers” at Moscow State University, successfully defending it in 2016. She is research assistant to Dr Viktor Bayda, working on The Category of Determination in Modern Irish project, funded by the Russian Fundamental Research Fund, and also works at The Embassy of Ireland, Moscow, as PA to the Consul. Boryana Bratanova is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Veliko Turnovo (“St. Cyril and St. Methodius”), Bulgaria. She has published research on the issues of causatives and causation in English and Bulgarian, the cross-linguistic study of phraseology containing ethnonyms, and the issues of language policy and multilingualism in the globalizing world: including, “Native vs. Foreign: Masculinization of Anglicisms in French” in Proceedings of the International Interdisciplinary Conference Dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo (2014), “Patterns of Linguistic Economy in English and their Bulgarian Counterparts: the Case of EU Papers” in Cross-linguistic Interaction: Translation, Contrastive and Cognitive Studies. Liber Amicorum in Honour of Bistra Alexieva (2014), and “The French Kiss, the Spanish Fly and the Dutch Uncle: National Stereotypes Encoded in English Phraseology” in Comparisons and Interactions Within / Across Cultures (2012). Her main research interests are in the fields of general linguistics, contrastive linguistics, cognitive studies, multilingualism, and language technologies. Jonathan McCreedy is an assistant professor in English literature at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Sofia (“St. Kliment Ohridski”). His publications include the Genetic Joyce Studies articles “Ocone! Ocone!: ALPs 3D Siglum and Dolphs Dainty Diagram” (2011) and “‘Everyword for oneself but Code for us all!’: The Shapes of Sigla in Finnegans Wake”; “An Argument for Characterology in the “Wake’s Old I.2” in Polymorphic Joyce (2011), and “The Death of a Joyce Scholar and Further Adventures of James Joyce: The Crossroads of Two Reading Publics” in Why Read Joyce in the 21st Century (2012). He co-edited the Literaturen Vestnik ( ) special issues “ (Joyce) in Ballygarry” (2013) and “Visions of Yeats” (2014), and wrote the foreword to Colm Herron’s The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) (2014) and Seamus Heaney’s obituary in / Kultura (2013). His scholarly interests include James Joyce, Genetic criticism, Northern Irish culture and “Troubles” literature, Shakespeare, D.A.F de Sade, Dante, and Schoenberg. 163 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 163 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM Zelma Catalan is associate professor of English Literature and Stylistics at the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University (“St. Kliment Ohridski”). She is also Co-chair of the Master’s Programme in Translation (EMT member), offered jointly with the Department of Romance Studies. Her publications include the full-length study The Politics of Irony in Thackeray’s Mature Fiction (2009), a monograph entitled Wonderful Divergencies: Tellability in Dickens’s First-Person Novels (forthcoming) and journal articles on the Victorian novel, as well as literary stylistics and stylistic issues in translation. Vesselin M. Budakov is an assistant professor in English literature at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Sofia (“St. Kliment Ohridski”). His publications include, among others, “E-mails and Fiction: Douglas Coupland, S. Paige Baty, and Jeanette Winterson” in Globalization in English Studies (2010), “Dystopia: an Earlier Eighteenth-Century Use”, Notes and Queries 57.1 (2010), and “Cacotopia: An Eighteenth-Century Appearance in News from the Dead (1715)”, Notes and Queries 58.3 (2011). His research interests are in eighteenth-century epistolary fiction as well as in satire, utopia, and dystopia. He is currently working on a study that considers the relationship between politics, utopia, dystopia, and speculative science fiction of the late nineteenth century. Ludmilla Kostova is professor of English and head of the English and American Studies department at the University of Veliko Turnovo (“St. Cyril and St. Methodius”), Bulgaria. She is president of the Bulgarian Society for British Studies. Her publications include the edited collection Travel Ethics: Theory and Practice (2012), together with with Corinne Fowler and Charles Forsdick, and the books Liberating the Poetic Genius: William Blake and MidLate Eighteenth Century Literary History (1999) and Tales of the Periphery: the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (1997). James Gallacher is a third year Ph.D candidate at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Livepool. His thesis concerns the identification and definition of a literary movement in mid-20th century Dublin and more generally an examination of the relationship between socio-cultural environment and consequent literary expression. Additional research interests include the cultural history of sport and the progression of Gothic stylistics. He also currently serves as a co-editor of the Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies. 164 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 164 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM Marina Dobrovolskaya is an associate professor in the Department of English Philology at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. She is the author of / Media Text, a Russian language textbook recommended for B2 and higher level learners. She has also written, amongst others, the articles “The Text Translation and its Interpretation: Theory and Practice” in Russian Language and Culture in the World Culture Space (2015), “Understanding Implicit Meanings” (2010) in Russian Language Abroad, and “Teaching to Understand Media Text” in Russian language and literature in time and space (2012). Her research interests include the history of world literature, the methodology of teaching foreign languages and literature, and the cognitive approach of studying media language. Teodora Tzankova is a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a part-time lecturer at Sofia University (“St. Kliment Ohridski”), where she holds a PhD in Western Literature. She specialises in translating the works of Hispanic authors into Bulgarian, including works by Camilo José Cela, Javier Marías, Rubén Darío, Mario Benedetti, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Fernando Sorrentino, and Silvina Ocampo. Her literary articles include “The Literary Generation in Spain: mode d’emploi” in Bulgarian Literature: Comparable and Incomparable and she has two forthcoming publications in 2016: “Cortázar Turns 100: Jazz, Myths and Secret Weapons” in Littera et Lingua, and “Francesca da Rimini’s New Life according to Leigh Hunt” The Parahuman: A Collection in Honour of Prof. Miglena Nikolchina. Marija Girevska is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at Skopje University (“Ss. Kiril and Methodius”), Macedonia. She is a translator of literary works and criticism into Macedonian, which include James Joyce’s Ulysses (2013), William Burroughs (in Amerikanski avangardni poeti/American Avant-garde Poets (2015)), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (2012, with Jasmina Ilievska). She has two forthcoming publications: Čuvari na nesvesnoto: angliski nadrealizam/ Guardians of the Unconscious: English Surrealism, Ч : and The Gothic Novel and the Fantastic Short Story. Her research interests include James Joyce studies, literary theory, literary translation, the Gothic novel, and 20th century Avant-guard movements including Dada and Surrealism in literature and art. She is currently part of the online “Gaudeamus” project. 165 IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 165 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 166 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 167 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM IRELAND-EUROPE.indd 168 5/12/2017 8:41:13 AM