Luke Gibbons

“A deeply original work . . . part of a refreshing new wave of literary criticism that is written in clear, hospitable prose, driven by genuine passion.” —Irish Times For decades, James Joyce’s modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe’s urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In Joyce’s Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that Joyce’s Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce’s stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce’s language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the “shout in the street,” that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis. Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce’s achievement. “Nothing short of brilliant.” —Vicki Mahaffey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Reauthorizing Joyce “Engaging [and] important.” —Choice “Sure to appeal to every persuasion and rank of Joyceans.” —Maria DiBattista, Princeton University, author of First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction “Excellent.” —Fredric Jameson, Duke University, author of Post, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

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Field Day Review 7

Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as "subject matter" or "content," but as "form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forces--technology, empire, urbanization--off the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.

John Ford's "The Quiet Man" (1952) is the most popular cinematic representation of Ireland, and one of Hollywood's classic romantic comedies. For some viewers and critics the film is a powerful evocation of romantic Ireland and the search for home; for others, it is a showcase for the worst stereotypes of stage-Irishry. Much of Irish cinema since the development of an indigenous film industry in the 1980s has set its face firmly against these mythic images of Ireland, but no film has yet attained the enduring appeal of "The Quiet Man". In this radical reappraisal of Ford's Oscar-winning film, Luke Gibbons traces its development from Maurice Walsh's original story (1933) and argues that its romantic excesses are a symptom of much darker undercurrents in the literary text, and the displacement of trauma that often underlies nostalgia. Moreover, Gibbons ably demonstrates how the film, rather than indulging in escapism, actually questions its own romantic illusions and the dream of returning to an Irish paradise lost.

Luke Gibbons

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