25 - Irish and European politics: nationalism, socialism, empire

Summary

Benedict Anderson has maintained that notions of nationhood and constructions of nationalism derive from a mode of collective imagination. Anderson contends that ‘a nation’ comprises an ‘imagined political community’ in the sense that its constituent members will never know or come into direct contact with the vast majority of their imagined or virtual associates. However, ideologically they commune with one another, indeed among themselves alone, in a manner that constitutes the communal framework for the sense of nationhood. The material basis for this imagined national unity of consciousness, according to Anderson, is a consequence of ‘print-capitalism’. Accessible, mass-market script enables the creation and maintenance of exchange and ongoing communication among people who will never meet one another in person. However, this bourgeois and distinctly state-oriented construction of ‘nation’, nationhood and nationalism neglects local, linguistic, ironic and playful constructions of nationality in the interests of fore-grounding proto-imperial representations of a national imaginary. Joyce would dissent.

Joyce's political writings, moreover, provide some of the more telling instances of his attitudes toward nationalism, socialism and empire and point toward the constellations of these political aspirations in his more revered literary works. A quotation in Irish-American dialect of 1890s Chicago and from a world of literary journalism well known to Joyce the literary author and political journalist, though, affords a starting-point:

I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll show me th' people fightin', getting dhrunk, makin' love, getting' married, owin' th' grocery man an' bein' without hard-coal, I'll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. Historyans is like doctors. They are always lookin' f'r symptoms. Those iv them that writes about their own times examines th' tongue an' feels th' pulse an' makes a wrong dygnosis. Th' other kind iv histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tells ye what a country died iv. But I'd like to know what it lived iv.