17 - The Irish Revival

Summary

The Irish Literary Revival – a movement which was concerned with reviving Irish culture and creating a national literature – was flourishing in Dublin during the earliest years of Joyce's formation as a writer. Set in motion by Yeats and a handful of his peers (most notably Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, George Russell and Douglas Hyde), it was immediately obvious to some that Joyce would not participate directly in this movement. In August 1902, for example, George ‘AE’ Russell breathlessly told Yeats he must meet ‘a young fellow named Joyce … an extremely clever boy who belongs to your clan more than to mine and more still to himself’. Though he was later to be haplessly ridiculed by Joyce in Ulysses (‘A.E.I.O.U.’, ‘Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels’, U 9.213, 9.280), Russell's identification of this ‘youth of 21’ with ‘intellectual equipment, culture and education’, who ‘writes amazingly well in prose’ was to prove on the mark. For Joyce did prove to be a ‘clan’ of his own, choosing not to engage with either Yeats’ activities in establishing an Irish theatre, or Russell's various enterprises as a writer, mystic and organiser of agricultural co-operatives. Yet it is clearly the case that Joyce could not have evolved as he did had it not been for his exposure to revivalist enterprises, and his engagement with other writers who were trying to establish self-consciously Irish modes of writing.