joycean parody and the good friday accord

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Joycean Parody and the Good Friday AccordAuthor(s): Dermot KellySource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Dec., 1998), pp. 89-95Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515253 .

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Joycean Parody and the Good Friday Accord

DERMOT KELLY

The peace deal signed in Northern Ireland on April 10, 1998, the Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations, as it is officially called, is a text of

Joycean ambiguity and instability. Readers may be surprised at how the Good

Friday accord includes the rhetoric of Irish republicanism alongside that of

Ulster unionism in a painstakingly evenhanded way. But Nobel Peace Prize win

ners John Hume and David Trimble must have realized some time ago that con

flict resolution for the new millennium demands terms that are nothing if not

flexible. In this sense the British and Irish statesmen who sculpted the language of the historic deal are as much the inheritors of James Joyce's modernist prose as the authors of the American Declaration of Independence were practitioners of a rational periodic eighteenth century style. The closest things to the language of the Multi-Party Agreement in Ulysses would be the parodies of legalese begin

ning in the Cyclops episode and culminating in the pseudoscientific catechism of

the Ithaca episode. But beneath all this is the philosophical incertitude of the

void first referred to by Stephen Dedalus in his Shakespeare lecture (Joyce 266) and later reiterated by the Ithacan catechist (Joyce 818, 866). For the late twen

tieth century has been an age of moral relativism with parody as the operative mode and in this sense the malleable and ductile narrative of Ulysses was time

ly, even prophetic. It was Joyce's achievement to write uncertainty into the lin

guistic fabric of the book, highlighting with his parody the fictive nature of both Irish nationalism and English imperialism. As Seamus Deane wrote in a semi nal essay published for the Joycean centenary, Joyce "had learned from Irish nationalism the power of a vocabulary in bringing to existence that which other wise had none except in the theatre of words" (Deane 105). It is to the credit of the Multi-Party Agreement's authors that they have given the competing fictions

of Irish republicanism and Ulster unionism equal status in their remarkable doc ument.

So a reader of the Multi-Party Agreement might be taken aback to see no

less than four instances of the phrase "united Ireland" in separate clauses under the heading "Constitutional Issues" at the very beginning of the document (2).

The lower case letter u in the word united distinguishes this concept as a putative one while the word "Union" is capitalized, referring to the existing status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. (It should be noted that this august term, redolent of Tory and monarchist sentiment, appears only twice in the same four clauses.) One can imagine the various participants in the multiparty talks

haggling over just such details. But, as Fintan O'Toole noted in the New Yorker

just days after the Good Friday signing, it is a significant event, albeit one not



90 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

without precedent in Anglo-Irish relations, to see the language of Irish

Republican Army communiques framed in an intergovernmental text. It is the

purpose of this essay to suggest that it is a Joycean rather than a Jeffersonian

event as well.

Thomas Jefferson made it seem eminently reasonable that "the

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" should "dissolve the political bands which

have connected them" to "the state of Great Britain" (Jefferson 28,34). James

Joyce made it seem as if no discourse was immune to his mocking pen, but in a

strange way, so undiscriminating was his parody, he made all discourses equal,

particularly those, like the discourses of Irish nationalism and English imperial ism, which had previously been decidedly unequal. Such an achievement really

does make Joyce a forerunner of the Good Friday signatories whose text repre sents an attempt to right past inequities in the political sphere.

At this point it is necessary to define parody as it relates to the notoriously flexible styles of Ulysses. In A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth

Century Art Forms (1985), Linda Hutcheon explains parody in terms of a duali

ty in the word's etymology: the Greek prefix para can mean not only "counter" or "against" but "beside" as well. In the latter connotation Hutcheon sees "a sug

gestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast" and the possibility of an

irony that "can be playful as well as belittling" (Hutcheon 32). Such a definition

uncannily applies to the disputed territory of Joycean style in the later episodes of Ulysses where a series of public discourses ?

journalism, science, the law, the English novel, political orations ? is relentlessly and often ambiguously

spoofed. The episodes to which the term parodic is most often applied, basical

ly from Sirens through to Ithaca, represent the travails of a whole new way of

writing being born. What has been called parody in Ulysses is in reality diabol

ically varied. As Declan Kiberd has written, in an inspired paragraph which uses Hutcheon's theory as a

springboard:

Ulysses illustrates the dictum that every great work of litera ture not only destroys one genre but helps to create another.

Radical parody of this kind has the effect of speeding up this natural development of literary form: its ensuing narrative frees itself sufficiently from the targeted texts to constitute a

fresh and autonomous form, a further proof that (in literature, as in politics) the urge to destroy may also be a creative urge. (Kiberd, 342)

It is possible to witness subversion turning into liberation in passages like the mock-Biblical account of Bloom's ascent in Cyclops or the pseudo-astro nomical rendering of his heavenly wanderings in Ithaca (Joyce 449, 858). There

mockery becomes poetry as styles that would have been considered subliterary by other writers are magically renovated by Joyce like the stone the builders



Good Friday Accord 91

rejected becoming the cornerstone in the Gospel phrase. Stylistically this

process is not unlike the penetration of republican phrasing into Anglo-Irish

intergovernmental documents. A nationalist might argue such discourse repre sents the catholicizing of the British mind just as surely as Joyce's transforma

tions represent a greening of the English novel. And a Unionist might argue that

the language of the Good Friday agreement constitutes a recognition of the par titioned northern statelet by the southern Irish government as well as an affirma tion of the principle of consent for the majority in Northern Ireland. The kind of

language needed to accommodate the two traditions in the Northern Ireland con

flict owes not a little to the precedent of supreme linguistic malleability and duc

tility offered by Ulysses. In fact such malleable and ductile language, corre

sponding to an archetypal image of the soft feminine, stands in rather stark con

trast to Presbyterian rhetoric with its notorious inflexibility. In the case of the

negotiators on the Catholic or Republican side it could be argued that their his toric disadvantages make them inheritors of that Joycean flexibility. The classic

thinking on this issue is in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism. In a memorable section, Weber outlines the difference between the

Calvinist living under the dogma of predestination and the Catholic able to purge himself in the confessional:

The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified

system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed

sin. (117)

Agreements conceived as peacemaking in territories riven by dispute need

language that is dialogic and polyglot. Indeed, as Fintan O'Toole has observed, the British and Irish governments have been forced "to act more like poets and novelists than like politicians: massaging fixed meanings so that they become

supple and fluid; complicating the definitions of words so that they become open and ambiguous" (56). There is no room for rationalism taken to extremes, no room for the feeling Max Weber identified as a consequence of the doctrine of

predestination, that is, the "feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the sin

gle individual" (104). Instead there is the warier, more mercurial view of the medieval Catholic layman who in Weber's account, "lived ethically, so to speak, from hand to mouth" (Weber 116). Translated into literary terms, such a view

corresponds to the radical instability of a narrative like Joyce's Ulysses. And to criticize the deliberate fluidity and ambiguity of the Multi-Party Agreement seems churlish, somewhat like espousing Edmund Wilson's opinion that the par odies and pastiches of the Cyclops and Oxen of the Sun episodes "spoiled the

story" (Wilson 215). Declan Kiberd has pointed out that, as early as 1907 in his Trieste lectures,




Joyce foresaw the partitioning of Ireland (335). And Stephen's conversation with

Garrett Deasy demonstrates Joyce's awareness of the fierce sectarianism of the

northern counties (38, 676). Similarly, the attitudes shown by Stephen and

Professor MacHugh to such Anglo-Saxon or Yankee maxims as "I paid my way" or "time is money" underscore the wryly Catholic Joycean position (37, 169). Taken together these rather fugitive intimations make it just believable that the

great author himself would have seen his narrative technique as a possible vehi

cle for reconciling the differing traditions on the island. In the Multi-Party

Agreement, as in Ulysses, it is the plucking of magnanimity from the jaws of

meanness that counts. In the end all parties and both governments undertake to:

recognize the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to

identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or

both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that

their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted

by both Governments and would not be affected by any future

change in the status of Northern Ireland. (2-3, 34)

Such generous openended ambiguity is a triumph of the kind of sweet civic

mindedness Bloom preaches to the drinkers in Barney Kiernan's (430-32). There is even an annexed declaration about the parentage or residence requirements for the designation "the people of Northern Ireland" (35), echoing Bloom's attempt to define the word "nation" in the pub. The subjunctive mood lends a sanguine

quality to the relativism about the future of the province or statelet. The sub

junctive mood fits with the Bloomian tone of the catechism in Ithaca. As Bloom and Stephen gaze at the stars the question of life on other planets arises:

Did he find the problem of the inhabitability of the planets and their satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easi er of solution? (820-21)

After a scientific disquisition on atmospheric pressure in the troposphere and

stratosphere the nihilistic catechism waxes Biblical with a wry allusion to Ecclesiastes:

...when proposing this problem for solution he had conjec tured as a working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more adaptable and differently anatomically

constructed race of beings might subsist otherwise under

Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an

apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite differences resulting similar to the whole and to one

another would probably there as here remain inalterably and




inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities of vanities and all

that is vanity. (821)

Irish critic Anthony Cronin wrote more than thirty years ago that the "ele

ment of play deepens the being of a work of art" and that without it "the com

position of works of art on the scale of Ulysses would scarcely be possible" (66). Cronin was describing the equilibrium Joyce achieves between playfulness and

formal elaboration. Political and constitutional mechanisms like the Multi-Party

Agreement also need the element of play if they are to function. It is precisely this sort of play between discourses that allows David Trimble, leader of the

Ulster Unionists, to tell his supporters that the deal does away with the hated

Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 while Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein can celebrate

the repeal of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act ("Trimble says"; Adams,

"Rights"). Although each leader's claim is literally true, the kind of explaining they did to their respective constituencies probably drew on the mythic realism that informs the kaleidoscopic neo-Joycean text.

To conclude on an editorial note then, it has to be said that the historically disadvantaged party will be the one to benefit from any moving of the goalposts in a power relationship. So, in that light, the greater magnanimity has been

demonstrated by the Unionist signatories who must have confronted their own

fears as they gave some ground to Nationalist aspirations. The permutations of

Ulysses suggest that Joyce foresaw how postcolonial constitutional documents, like modernist narratives, would be founded on shifting sands. The painstaking clauses of the "Constitutional Issues" section, which are to form part of what is called "a new British-Irish Agreement," really do sound like the knowing absur dities of Joyce's Ithaca catechism. It is as if the politicians are finally catching up with Joyce's premise for the styles of Ulysses: that no representation of events is ever irrevocable. For the statesman, as for the novelist, this premise, and its

corollary that an absurdity is only so because of the position from which it is viewed, can be liberating. Bloom the amateur astronomer understands the impli

cations, reminding Stephen Dedalus "of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars" (Joyce 819). The writers of the Multi-Party Agreement have

managed to find language that does not so much resolve the conflict as accom modate its differing terms, just as Joyce found narrative strategies that could

simultaneously include the consciousnesses of Bloom and Stephen when they finally meet. Of course the most dizzying accommodation in the entire peace deal is that which is achieved between the seemingly irreconcilable principles of consent for the majority in Northern Ireland and self-determination for the peo ple of the entire island. Unionist and Nationalist vocabularies are as clearly reg istered in the accord as the cadences of Bloom and Stephen are in the Ithaca

episode. The language of diplomacy blunts sharp edges so that the loyalist cry of "No Surrender" becomes "it would be wrong to make any change in the sta tus of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people" and the




republican graffito "Brits Out" is clinically but no less potently rendered as:

if, in the future, the people of the island of Ireland exercise

their right of self-determination on the basis set out in sections

(i) and (ii) above to bring about a united Ireland, it will be a

binding obligation on both Governments to introduce and sup

port in their respective Parliaments legislation to give effect to

that wish; (2)

Again, as in the Ithaca catechism, the key factor is the conditional or subjunctive mood, the mood of wish, supposition, contingency, hypothesis, conjecture, of

minority movements everywhere. It is the mood of possibility, one Joyce's nar

rative strategies increasingly freed him up to indulge. Early in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus reflects that the defeats of history "are not to be thought away" (Joyce 30), but recent studies of Joyce suggest otherwise. In her 1995 book James Joyce and Nationalism Emer Nolan builds on some of Deane's intimations:

...what cannot be thought away may, as Seamus Deane implies,

be written away, once fiction has broken its hampering alliance

with history, which is maintained through narrative. In its pro

ject to encompass and give expression to all the infinite, lost

possibilities of language and history, therefore, it could also be

argued that Joyce's writing abolishes history by destroying the

pastness of the past. (Nolan 70)

Joyce's colossal shadow may have been disabling for some Irish writers, but for

negotiators seeking new language to frame a political bargain, the legacy of

Ulysses seems to have cast an enabling light. By destabilizing the entire narra

tive tradition of the English novel at a time when British rule was ending in most of Ireland, Joyce shows that the pen is at least as mighty as the sword. A small but telling example can be seen in the Ithaca catechism, a narrative that seems

placidly omniscient but is yet so fractured that it can contain the voices of

Stephen and Bloom. In the consideration of the stars from the garden in Eccles

Street, Bloom's awe can be detected in phrases about "the annular cinctures of Saturn" and "the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns" while Stephen's cyn ical intelligence creeps in moments later with lines like "the monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms" and "the posited influ ence of celestial on human bodies" (821-22). Just as the Good Friday accord's

wording is admirably tentative, Joyce's catechism uses sanitized diction to chase

away the spectre of Victorian omniscience and finality. Mikhail Bakhtin has identified the image of the meeting as a universal literary motif (Bakhtin 98) and the encounter of Stephen and Bloom gave rise to Joyce's most malleable and

ductile writing. Similarly, the Multi-Party Agreement documents a meeting of minds enshrining the principle of consent and affirming Republican aspirations

in miraculously neutral language.




WORKS CITED

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Cronin, Anthony. A Question of Modernity. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1966.

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