Finnegans wake: Mapping a national consciousness
Citation:
Travis, C., Finnegans wake: Mapping a national consciousness, Atlas, 10, 2005, 83 - 92Abstract:
In James Joyce's Finnegans wake, the political and sexual mores placed upon
Irish culture by the presence of the British Empire and the Catholic Church during
the late colonial and early post colonial period of modern Irish history, are
extirpated in a re-telling of the Biblical fall from grace. From a historical
perspective, the political fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Protestant Irish Home
Rule leader, in the late nineteenth century, which is echoed in Joyce's text, presaged
the return of violence as a means to achieve independence from Britain. But Joyce
sensed that despite the achievement of an Irish state, personal liberation in the
terms that would later be defined by Frantz Fanon in his chapter 'On National
Consciousness' in Les damnes de la terre (1961), did not accompany the emergence
of Irish nationhood. Finnegans wake published in 1939, can be read as Joyce's
mapping of the damaged terrain of a national consciousness, psychologically
dominated by the Irish Free State polity and censoriousness of the Catholic Church
of the 1930s. A brief exposition of the Parnell affair and its link to the emergence
of a modern Irish consciousness expressed in the violence and literature of the fin
de siecle, will presage a discussion of Joyce's last work.
Author's Homepage:
http://people.tcd.ie/ctravisDescription:
PUBLISHED
Author: Travis, Charles
Type of material:
Journal ArticleCollections
Series/Report no:
Atlas;10;
Availability:
Full text availableKeywords:
Ireland, Colonialism, Irish Free State, CatholicismSubject (TCD):
Identities in Transformation , Making Ireland , Irish HistoryMetadata
Show full item recordLicences: