Terry Eagleton · Starveling Rabblement: Joyce’s Politics
Starveling RabblementTerry Eagleton
Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookEmailPrintSearch
Close
Close<br>AcceptClose
Close
CloseMy Account<br>·Sign out<br>Sign in
Newsletters<br>Home<br>The PaperLatest Issue<br>Letters<br>-->Archive<br>Contributors<br>About the LRB
SubjectsArts & Culture<br>Biography & Memoir<br>History & Classics<br>Literature & Criticism<br>Philosophy & Law<br>Politics & Economics<br>Psychology & Anthropology<br>Science & Technology
Blog<br>Podcasts & Videos<br>Events<br>ShopBookshop<br>LRB Store
Subscribe
CloseSearch<br>More search Options<br>Search by contributor<br>Browse our cover archive
Browse by Subject<br>Arts & Culture<br>Biography & Memoir<br>History & Classics<br>Literature & Criticism<br>Philosophy & Law<br>Politics & Economics<br>Psychology & Anthropology<br>Science & Technology
Vol. 48 No. 13 · 23 July 2026
Starveling Rabblement<br>Terry Eagleton
Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookShareEmailPrint<br>2841 words
James Joyce: A Political Life<br>by Frank Callanan.<br>Princeton, 944 pp., £38, March, 978 0 691 22797 9Show More
Show More
That James Joyce had a political life might seem surprising. The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for political independence.<br>Frank Callanan, a distinguished barrister and historian who died in 2021 leaving this magnificently erudite book unfinished, devotes its many pages to demonstrating that the young Joyce, like his rumbustious father, was a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, and that he clung to this allegiance all his life. An extra-marital affair with Kitty O’Shea forced Parnell to retire as leader of the Irish nationalists in 1890, after which he was hounded by an unholy alliance of clerics and politicians, dying of pneumonia a year later. Joyce was only nine at the time, but Callanan argues persuasively that Parnell’s dramatic fall from grace was the primary scene that hurt him into politics. He wrote a precocious poem on Parnell’s death, which he later claimed had been printed and circulated in Dublin. The reviling of Parnell by the Catholic Church, which feared nationalism as a rival to its own sovereignty over the people, was an important source of his visceral anti-clericalism.<br>If it’s easy to mistake this haughty young recusant for a critic of nationalism, it’s largely because, with the Parnellites plunged into division and disarray over the fate of their leader, Joyce was now politically homeless. Parnell’s brand of nationalism had been civic rather than ethnic, political rather than cultural, constitutional rather than revolutionary and inclusive rather than sectarian (he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant). Joyce championed all these views, but found none of them adequately represented by the nationalist currents on offer after Parnell’s death. If Joyce’s politics were hard to decipher, it was partly because he concealed his Parnellism behind something of the politician’s reserved and enigmatic demeanour. There’s a touch of Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the youthful Joyce’s imperious, lip-curling, faintly demonic manner.<br>Though much of the patriotic sentiment of the time was parochial, Irish nationalism had an internationalist dimension. Thomas Davis, leader of the 19th-century Young Ireland movement, wrote against British colonialism in India and Afghanistan, and some later activists campaigned against the Boer War or threw their weight behind the anti-colonial movement in Egypt. Joyce himself was deeply sympathetic to the cause of Greek independence. As Perry Anderson wrote, ‘few rhetorics have been more repetitively general in [the 20th] century than claims for the ethnically particular.’ Nationalism is by definition international: if you are entitled to self-determination as a people, the same must go for everyone else.<br>Joyce despised the clericalism and chauvinism of some of his fellow nationalists, but that doesn’t mean that he had any love for the British. He grew up steeped in the nationalist culture of his country, during the first rumblings of the only political revolution the British Isles witnessed in the modern era. Ireland was Britain’s oldest colonial possession, as well as the first British colony to achieve (partial) independence in the 20th century. Joyce once wrote that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ suggesting a direct connection between his literary modernism and his anti-colonialist politics. Nobody who grew up in Dorking or Hastings...