Did James Joyce speak Irish?
His census entry does not tell the full story
According to the Census of 1901, nineteen-year-old James Joyce was a speaker of English and Irish. This was, as the Irish would put it, a cod or fanciful exaggeration. His father, John Joyce, had filled in the form and was typically indulging in a little social gamesmanship.
The interesting thing the census entry reveals is the newly elevated status of the Irish language amongst the Dublin middle classes. What once had been culchie — the derogatory term used to describe unsophisticated country folk — was now a sign of social status. John Joyce, who had insisted that his son not be educated with ‘Paddy Stink and Micky Mud’, was now keen for him to be associated with the Gaeltacht (native-Irish speakers) the poorest of the poor.
Gaelic Revival
English had been the majority language in Ireland since the early Nineteenth Century, and from much earlier in Dublin. The gaeltacht was devastated by the Great Famine (1845–52) when there was massive depopulation of the countryside. By the 1890s it was restricted to a small number of remote areas in the west, most notably the Aran Isles.
The Gaelic revival grew in tandem with the growth of a more militant nationalism. This linkage became was made explicit in November 1892 when Douglas Hyde gave a lecture to the National Literary Society entitled “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” Hyde argued that the nationalists should provide the means — through schools, classes, courses etc. — to reintroduce the Gaelic to the general population.
A more realistic goal was to reverse the decline of a ‘dying’ language. In this the Gaelic League was remarkably successful, growing from an initial three city branches (Dublin, Galway and Cork) to 400 by 1910. It also managed to introduce the subject into schools: by 1903 over a thousand schools had Gaelic classes of some description.
Nationalism
From the Hyde perspective, James Joyce exemplified the failure of Irish intellectuals to engage in ‘nation building’. Joyce had studied French and Italian at University College but not Irish. He was far more familiar with the masters of European literature, than Celtic mythology, the source material for what was already being described as the literary renaissance.
What Joyce did know about the leaders of language revival filled him with unease. A parochial, confining nationalism was one of the ‘nets’ Stephen declares he will ‘fly by’ in A Portrait.
Though admiring W.B Yeats, the acknowledged leader of the new literary movement, Joyce recoiled at the older poet’s credo that ‘the mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” Art, he believed, came from the commonplace rather than the mystical.
As Richard Ellmann pointed out, this fundamental difference in perspective arose from the contrasting backgrounds of the two writers. Joyce, like Dickens, experienced a precarious childhood in a large urban Catholic family. Though the Joyces were nominally middle class, they experienced constant debt and disorder. Tales of the Four Fields of Ireland and the Countess Kathleen held little appeal.
Despite their literary differences, Yeats offered the younger man generous support and made no demands in terms of his choice of subject matter or his approach to literature.
Others were less welcoming and though Joyce was on the fringes of the original Sinn Fein he was never going to toe the party line. Always a Parnellite at heart, he was never comfortable with physical force nationalism. In the clash between the Bloom and the Citizen it is clear where the author’s sympathies lie:
Irish classes
About the Irish language the young artist was initially more open to persuasion. His brother Stanislaus writes that he studied Gaelic ‘for a year or two’, attending a course recommended by his friend George Clancy (Davin in A Portrait). This was taught by Patrick Pearse, the future leader of the Easter Uprising.
The two future superstars did not get on. In Stephen Hero, a teacher clearly modelled on Pearse is portrayed as ‘a bad poet, monomaniacal hibernophile, and artistic philistine.’ The Irish Ulysses. Pearse, for his part, may have agreed with Davin in A Portrait that Joyce/Stephen was a ‘born sneerer’. It should be stressed that Joyce did not sneer at the Rising, however. Like Yeats, he was conscious of a ‘terrible beauty’ and felt ‘pity’.
In conversation with Frank Budgen, Joyce said that he became increasingly alienated from the classes ‘because Patrick Pearse found it necessary to exalt Irish by denigrating English, and in particular denounced the word ‘Thunder’ — a favourite of Joyce’s — as an example of verbal inadequacy.’ (Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce)
Joyce was not alone in bypassing Gaelic classes. None of the major figures of the Celtic Twilight were native speakers or wrote their major work in Irish. Synge’s claims to immersed himself in the particular cadences of the Aran Isles were disputed — with few expert enough in Gaelic to have an opinion either way. What mattered in aspirational middle class circles was not proficiency in Irish but a commitment to its promotion.
In The Dead (1914), the earnest nationalist intellectual, Miss Ivors, berates Gabriel as a ‘West Briton’:
“O, Mr. Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer? We’re going to stay there a whole month. It will be splendid out in the Atlantic.
“The fact is,” said Gabriel, “I have just arranged to go — — “
“Go where?” asked Miss Ivors.
“Well, you know, every year I go for a cycling tour with some fellows and so —”
“But where?” asked Miss Ivors.
“Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,” said Gabriel awkwardly.
“And why do you go to France and Belgium,” said Miss Ivors, “instead of visiting your own land?”
“Well,” said Gabriel, “it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.”
“And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with — Irish?” asked Miss Ivors.
“Well,” said Gabriel, “if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.”
Aside from this fleeting discussion between Gabriel and Miss Ivors, the Irish language does not feature in the naturalistic Dubliners. Its characters do not speak Irish or about it. In later works allusions creep in, most notably in the place names in Finnegan’s Wake. These reach back to a time when the majority of common people did speak Gaelic.
Fluency in several European languages meant that Joyce would often quote without dictionaries or reference books. The Gaelic references he would add later, after consulting his A Smaller Irish-English Dictionary for the Use of Schools. Memory of the Irish he had learned twenty-five years earlier could no longer be relied upon. Notably, however, it is the second of the languages listed as contributing to the writing of Finnegan’s Wake.
