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However, as we shall see, much of Joyce’s interest in Scottish literature and philosophy stems from his attempt to create a kind of Celtic consciousness (or unconscious, to be more specific) as a cultural response to what he saw as an overwhelmingly materialist English civilization. Scottish writing and history is drawn into Joyce’s powerful response to British imperialism in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, through a kind of ethno-philosophical aesthetic that seeks to undermine colonial values. Furthermore, attention paid by Joyce to racial or psychological doubling points towards another type of postcolonial legacy, that of cultural and psychic division. So, regardless of whether or not we can consider Joyce a “true” postcolonial writer or Scotland a “valid” postcolonial society, Joyce’s work displays all the classic hallmarks of postcolonial literature—obsessions with language, “hybridity,” power struggles, and so on—while persistently raiding Scottish culture in order to create a response to, or diagnosis of, a colonial legacy. For Attridge and Howes, it is best to adopt a “semicolonial” template, which they describe as “a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes, not reducible to a simple anticolonialism but very far from expressing approval of the colonial organizations and methods under which Ireland had suffered during a long history of oppression” (Attridge and Howes, 3).
Despite being informed by postcolonial theory and discourse, this text is more concerned with viewing Irish and Scottish historical connections in terms of processes of ongoing seaborne exchange in a timeframe that includes, but is more extensive than that of, the British Empire. Such a model can consider the relationship between Ireland and Scotland as an evolving pattern of contacts connected by industry, politics, culture, and migrations rather than as discrete components of a Celtic “periphery,” “fringe,” or “margin” to an English “center.” As Ray Ryan has noted, “the need now is for more alternative analyses and comparisons, histories and causalities, than can be produced under a single methodology like postcolonialism or a single notion like identity”(10–11). Reading the Scottish aspects of Joyce’s work complicates and undermines the standard historical and critical British (read English)/Irish binary relationship as exemplified in texts such as Joyce, Ireland, Britain by stressing not only Joyce’s awareness that the term Britain is not synonymous with England, but that Ireland and Scotland have had their own distinct relationship and attendant processes of cultural and social exchange. Considering Joyce’s extensive work on Scotland will also challenge the standard “colonial-postcolonial” binary system in accordance with current critical developments. This type of reading will be in line with “recent work in Irish studies [which] tends to problematize binarity by focusing on contradictory, multiple and fluid historical conditions and social spaces” (Castle, “Post-colonialism,” 100). Furthermore, this approach allows us to explore Joyce’s unique vision of Celtic identity, one based less on Irish Literary Revival–type concerns of “authentic” folklore, primitive vitality, and linguistic or cultural “purity” and more on an idiosyncratically Joycean concept of a shared philosophical culture of skepticism and idealism. Admittedly, it is a strange state of affairs where the most modern of modernists draws heavily from eighteenth-century philosophy. However, much of literary modernism is decidedly backward looking.
Joyce’s various representations of Scottish culture and history destabilize the traditional binary representation of Ireland and Britain as two detached, contrasting, and homogenous entities, an enterprise that is part of his overall project aiming to undermine the traditional structures and categories that exerted such an influence on the imaginations of his peers: “The complexity of the Joycean cultural critique was its refusal to inhabit the binaries of Celtic or Saxon, Catholic or Protestant, modern or traditional, national or cosmopolitan, English or Irish—the binaries that so transfixed his contemporaries (and later commentators). Yeats,for example, reversed the value systems of Celtic/Saxon, raditional/modern, but still left the binaries intact. Joyce rejected the categories, instead seeking to dismantle the binary system itself ” (Whelan, 66–67). I would suggest that instead of rejecting the categories, Joyce finds new ways of deploying them and for new ends. However, as Megan Quigley rightly points out, “historical dynamics make taking a post-colonial approach to Irish literature necessary. That said, they must always be carefully weighted against other historical factors which stretch beyond any simple Ireland/England, colonized/colonizer binary” (172). We will see the extent to which Joyce reinvents the classic nineteenth-century Celtic/Saxon binary and how he investigates and blurs the binary relationships of Ireland and England by bringing Scotland into the equation.
Sometimes Joyce replaces one set of oppositions with another less obvious pairing, or places a binary set within another to produce a kind of mise en abîme structure. The net effect is a constant clashing of identities and language where no origin or resolution can be found. However, the very incertitude this confusion creates, the disordered and enigmatic universe these patterns are set into, is, I will argue, a representation of Joyce’s summing up of Celtic culture. Although the standard binary systems of postcolonialism—center and periphery, colonizer and colonized—are steered clear of here, close attention is paid to Joyce’s use of contrast and duality in relation to Ireland and Scotland (and to the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon). For this study G. Gregory Smith’s concept of the “Caledonian Antisyzygy”—his theory that Scottish literature is marked by the coming together of contraries—is adopted. This idea can be profitably applied to much of Joyce’s work, especially Finnegans Wake, where Joyce creates what may be termed a “Hibernian Antisyzygy” in order to reflect both the pre- and post-partition internal divisions of Ireland and to register a type of Celtic “spirit.” On the whole, however, it is wise to bear in mind Thomas Hofheinz’s caution that “an obsession with axiomatics often reveals a temptation to reduce Joyce’s texts to data accessible through theoretical programs” (Hofheinz, 54). If ideas can be communicated without extra complications, then Occam’s Razor should be applied. Finnegans Wake is complicated enough as it is.
Joyce’s final and most ambitious work provides a far more advanced and nuanced sense of Scotland’s identity and role in Irish history than has previously been supposed.
(Excerpted from the Introduction)
