• Forging the Nation: James Joyce and the Celtic Tiger

  • by

    Michael Malouf

    Columbia University

  • Copyright © 1999 by Michael Malouf, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

    1. In 1993, around the same time that the Irish Republic joined the European Union, the Bank of Ireland re-issued their paper money, including James Joyce on the ten-pound note and the Sister Catherine McAuley on the five-pound note. The marked contrast between the heretical Joyce and the founder of the order of the Sisters of Mercy could not be more striking nor more emblematic of the contradictions of contemporary Irish culture. [1] This essay looks at how Ireland’s changing conception of itself in a global context is reflected in the changing social value of the contemporary, posthumous reputation of James Joyce. To paraphrase Gabriel Conroy, I ask what James Joyce on the Irish ten-pound note is a symbol of? The answers appear on (at least) two fronts: one, the popular image of Joyce as an official, tourist-board approved, Irish historical figure; the second is the academic discourses of postcolonialism and postnationalism which emphasize his exiled status and his critical relation to language, tradition and empire. Both fronts have their contradictions: for academia there are constant negotiations between Joyce as a first and a third world writer; as canonical and anti-canonical; as apolitical (distant, removed from political events in Ireland) and as a political writer. For the popular images of Joyce there is the difficulty of reconciling his European exile with his Irish subject-matter, not to mention the process of reinventing a rebellious, even blasphemous figure as a national icon. But these contradictions do not arise in isolation; rather, they have their counterparts in the social contradictions of the "Celtic Tiger" economy and its associated processes of national self-fashioning.

    2. One way of approaching this range of contexts, from Irish globalism and heritage centers to multinationals and Dublin walking tours, is to recall that the artist’s image is always being produced ideologically as part of a larger historical narrative. Historical revision is not limited to academic debates but involves a dialectical exchange between academic history and popular, national memory. It is through their relation that we can understand how some narratives are produced and others are silenced. The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that these silences are part of the production of historical narratives at different moments: in the creation of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of "history" or retrospective significance. As he writes, "any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences" (27). The ways in which these silences are repressed or addressed is not necessarily accomplished vertically, top-down, by the academic "historical guild." Rather, history as it is known and lived by most people emerges from diverse sources: media, national representations, religious groups, tourist centers, national currency and the list could go on. The devaluation of Yeats and the rising ascendancy of Joyce as a national figure suggests how the image of the artist remains a crucial part of an Irish national self- image. If Yeats was the figure of a cultural decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism, then Joyce appears to be a consolidating figure for a late twentieth-century discourse of postnationalism.

    3. When Conor Cruise O’Brien argued in "Passion and Cunning" (1965) that Yeats’s poetics influenced the Blood Sacrifice ethics of the IRA, he was taking part in a critical revision of Yeats that was integral to a larger reinterpretation of Ireland’s colonial past. Yet the nationalist image of Yeats that O’Brien was revising was itself neither unmediated nor continuous but largely a creation of the de Valera post-colonial Free State. In turn, O’Brien’s revisionary argument coincided with the movement away from the protectionist economic policies of the de Valera era toward a more open, free market economy and membership in the European Economic Community. The revised view of Yeats, therefore, was part of a process of repressing Ireland’s colonial past and its attendant nationalism for a less Anglophobic, more Europeanized identity. This relationship between Yeats, nationalism and free market economies is not unprecedented: as a Senator he designed the coinage of the postcolonial state and later his image adorned the twenty-pound Irish note. However, in an ironic turn of events that remarks upon Yeats’s posthumous reputation in Ireland, this note was taken out of circulation when the IRA began circulating forgeries in the early 1990s. The notion of a forgery as a reproduction that devalues the original suggests something of the posthumous life of the artist in society, which is also a process of reproducing a reputation at a higher or lesser value than the original.

    4. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the posthumous critical validation of a particular artist involves a "production of belief" through conflicts over "legitimate" interpretations. Once the conflict itself becomes a self-legitimating practice the artistic figure becomes consolidated as a unified whole. [2] Paradoxically, the production of the posthumous reputation involves a dispersal of the work while at the same time it insists on the autonomy of the oeuvre. For example, when a selection from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake appears on the back of the Irish ten-pound note, the work is dispersed into a manifold number of contexts -- as a national symbol, as a commodity -- but under the assumption that this dispersal does nothing to the work itself. The decontextualized passage is able to function as a metonym both for the autonomous aesthetic work and for the "Ireland" it represents. As one journalist asked regarding the increasing commodification of James Joyce in Ireland, "is Joyce a great writer or a global marketing opportunity?" [3] The historical figure of Joyce is consolidated as a unified entity, the Irish author, whose own autonomous value legitimates the state or even the airline or hotel which sponsors him. It has often been noted that when artists are appropriated posthumously for a specific cause, as Wagner was by the Nazi’s and Yeats by the IRA (among others), their actions during their lifetime become retrospectively endowed with a specifically political significance. In these cases, however, there were elements of anti-Semitism or romantic nationalism that could be activated by these respective causes. But what does it mean when an artist is not appropriated by a specific political party but by the more amorphous -- yet equally ideological -- forces of global capital?

    5. The boom of the "Celtic Tiger" arose in the 1990s as part of a long-term development strategy by the Irish Industrial Development Authority (IDA) of attracting foreign investment. While this strategy proved negligible and even disastrous in the 1970s and ‘80s it began to pay off after 1993 due to changing global structures of investment. Between 1993 and 1997 (when the Republic felt the effects of the Asian economic crisis as transnational corporations (TNCs) moved companies to the now less-expensive Eastern Tigers), the attraction of major industries in electronics, chemicals and cola concentrates produced the most rapid growth rates in Europe and brought down the Republic’s traditionally high unemployment. However, their movement from a protectionist to a productionist ideology has brought with it some of the contradictions of an economy dependent on Western TNCs. For example, as Denis O’Hearn argues in his comparative study Inside the Celtic Tiger (1998), while Ireland has Europe’s most rapid economic growth rates it also has the least rapid investment growth rates (84). Not only has their dependency on TNCs benefited external regions and classes more than the Irish economy, it has also destroyed any indigenous business infrastructure. As a result, the Celtic Tiger lacks much of the autonomy of the East Asian Tigers due to their dependency on US corporations and European Union monetary policies. [4] At a time, then, when a organization such as the IDA is central to development strategy, it is no surprise that a national symbol also becomes a national commodity since the nation is in the business of selling itself. In such a situation, Bourdieu’s community of believers do not need to be responding to the artist’s work, whether of Yeats or Joyce. They only have to believe in its importance and its autonomy as a superior, edifying or "representative" narrative.

    6. One of the sites around which such a narrative takes place is national currency, which constructs an argument for the legitimacy and autonomy of the state. Counterfeiters are a threat to the state partly because they undermine the security the state promises as part of its legitimacy. Counterfeiting raises the possibility that the state itself can be duplicated and that its value (the state’s and the currency’s) arises in part from processes of consensual belief. Because there is no technical necessity for money to be produced by a monopolist state, the monopoly itself becomes a legitimating activity. [5] But the symbolic role of currency is not only internal -- maintaining loyal subject-citizens -- but external; as Martha Salazar notes in writing about the Mexican Peso, "what is often overlooked is the communication potential of money -- it is widely circulated and visually examined by other cultures. It can be thought of as perhaps one of the primary pieces of national corporate identity" (281). So the "nationalism" of any currency is always under the aspect of the transnational impulses which determine its interpretation and standard of value. As a form of communication, though, money design varies from examples of revolutionary change, depicting generals and war heroes, or continuity, depicting natural imagery or royalty. What needs to be conveyed is a sense of "believable value" (Salazar 281) constructed out of a national imaginary.

    7. For a postcolonial state, deriving its own national currency is a form of gaining recognition and establishing its legitimacy. After one hundred years of assimilation under the currency of the United Kingdom, the Irish Free State issued its own distinctive coinage in 1928. In choosing between a propagandist or a neutral design, the advisory committee for the design, which was chaired by Yeats, preferred a neutral design that showed continuity rather than radical change. [6] The decision was to forego images of sports and industry, and especially "no effigies of modern persons" (qtd. Ó Muimhneacháin, 32).The inscriptions were in Irish with a harp on one side and symbolic animals of Ireland on the reverse. When they were issued, however, the horse, salmon, bull, wolf-hound, hare, hen, pig and woodcock that graced the eight denominations were largely criticized as "pagan symbols, unsuitable for a the coinage of a Christian country" (Ó Muimhneacháin, 36). This conflict suggests one of the contradictions of the postcolonial state which has to choose between diverse and sometimes contradictory models of tradition. In many ways, the images coincide with the cultural nationalism of Yeats’s Revival where, as in Synge’s plays, the "culture" does not always coincide with the version of bourgeois nationalism (expressed, for example, in the anti-Playboy riots), instituted by the State. Around the same time, the decision was made to design a series of legal tender notes with a "portrait of an Irish colleen, allegory of the New Ireland" (qtd Ó Muimhneacháin, 125) leaning on a harp with hills and lakes in the background. The famous subject for this portrait was Lady Hazel Lavery, who was born in Galway, raised in Chicago and married to the Belfast-born painter, Sir John Lavery. With the revived interest in Michael Collins she has received renown for her romantic affair with the revolutionary leader during the infamous Treaty negotiations in London in 1921 and is even credited by some with enabling the treaty’s conclusion. Hence, the history of this original currency reveals some of the problems of constituting national identity in the postcolonial state. Just as Yeats’s "pagan images" represent the anti-colonial nationalism now repressed by the bourgeois state, so the virginal image of the Irish Colleen represses the actual representation of an Irish-American-English socialite. Of course, this is only to replicate the contradictions inherent in even the notion of a national currency since its value depends upon a transnational standard -- in this case, it was still measured by the Bank of England (Ó Muimhneacháin, 129). [7] Thus, the "nationalism" of the currency is effective in so far as it masks the actual economic dependency of a now neocolonial relation. The choice between representing a continuous Celtic past or a radical revolutionary change is emblematic of the false developmental thesis imposed by colonial discourse. What is hidden by the allegory of the New Ireland is its lack of anything "new"; here, the post in postcolonial is the same as the post in postmodern as defined by John Frow, "a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own impossible autonomy" (63).

    8. This production of a symbolic autonomy is even more pronounced with Joyce’s image which appeared in 1993, around the same time that Ireland was preparing itself for inclusion in the European Union and the common currency. Like the mostly middle-class emigrants returning to work for the Celtic Tiger, Joyce, too, has returned from his exile. On the front side there is a contented image of Joyce with Howth hill next to his head. On the other, non-Gaelic side there is an image of Anna Livia and a quote from that most cosmopolitan of texts, Finnegans Wake, superimposed over a map of Dublin. The two sides of the ten-pound note illustrate Tom Nairn’s celebrated description of the ambivalence of nationalism as "Janus-faced": one side healthy, rational, modern; the other side morbid, irrational, ancestral. On one side there is Joyce as the face of modernity, liberal democracy, postnationalism; on the other, Anna Livia, Celtic ethnicity, and the "mythic-realism" of Dublin. It is ironic that Joyce, who created in the Circe chapter of Ulysses a critical demystification of commodity fetishism, has become such a magical object himself. But the relevant text here is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the state-sponsored image is that of the reified Artist "above and beyond his creation, paring his fingernails." Not that this is without any ambivalence. The green-shaded portrait with its calm demeanor and half-smile replaces the notoriety of the blasphemous artist for a kinder, gentler figure. In fact, juxtaposed with the "mother language" and a traditionally feminized landscape, Joyce as a patriarchal, castrating figure is removed once he is reconstituted as a national symbol. Phrases such as "simpering, genial figure," and "avuncular and mawkish," describe the "wry grin" which appears in Robert Ballagh’s portrait. [8] It is as if Ballagh, a well-known Irish artist and Republican activist (he has been accused of being the "arty wing" of the IRA), had reinvented Joyce for the pounds note. While this neutered image is a response to the contradictions of using the heretical Joyce as a national icon, the portrait also makes an historical argument by erasing the critical status that comes with exile. While the dates under his portrait, 1882-1941, suggest that his lifetime encompassed the major events of Irish history in the twentieth-century, they repress the fact that he was absent for all of them. Yet it is precisely this absence that marks Joyce’s social value; he is valued for transcending traditional sectarian divisions rather than for expressing a critical perspective by virtue of his exile. And while he is made uncontroversial within Irish history, his value as a Modernist hero is sanctioned from Europe. Even the new pounds note was accused by one dissatisfied customer as merely "in the mainstream of the contemporary currency design" and, in replacing the earlier, more unconventional designs were meant to "bring us into line with Europe" (Hogan, 17). Thus, just as paper money receives its value against an external measure, so Joyce’s social and economic value comes against a European standard.

    9. But is Joyce as a national symbol merely an advertisement for foreign investment? And what does it mean for a nation to be appropriating an image of the artist during a time of globalization? If we recall Yeats’s prohibition against any contemporary images, then Joyce’s modernity is a change of direction from Lady Lavery’s Irish Colleen. Because Joyce is such a modern figure whose value lies elsewhere, the design represents the State’s own anxiety of autonomy resulting from its own entry into "modernity." It is possible to see Joyce as a symbol of the new cosmopolitan Irish culture which has thrown off the "divisions of the past." For example, a postmodernist might interpret the open-endedness of the Liffey running vertically through the bill as combining with the passage from Finnegans Wake to pose an argument against the originary narratives associated with, say, the Easter Rising. In a similar sense, since Anna Livia’s status as a national symbol coincides with Joyce’s own canonicity since 1982 (the fountain on O’Connell Street first appeared as part of the centennial celebration of Joyce’s birth), the modern figure of Joyce now ushers in the "archaic" as part of his postmodern novel. Joyce can here be seen as liberating the State from its divided past and supplying it, via Anna Livia, with an alternative mythic narrative.

    10. But this postmodern reading ignores the legitimating value of the note. In contrast, a second answer might be found on the back of the note where the montage of the head, map, quote and signature portray a narrative of origins that links the archaic with the modern. The montage of the archaic head and the map of the modern city does not disturb, rather it naturalizes an historical relation. Any potentially radical or postmodern interpretation is contained by Joyce’s signature that almost takes the place of the mark of the official treasurer, validating the currency as legitimate tender. Along with the handwritten quote and archaic head, the signature lends the note a "believable value" that the portrait does not confer by itself. Significantly, by choosing a passage that ends in a specific, historically-verifiable location, Howth Castle, the designers engage with the "annotated" aspect of Joyce that is so valued by academics and tourism. In completing the montage with the value-making signature, they activate an image of the artist as an authenticating and authentic-making figure. If Joyce is a liberating figure, then what is he liberating Ireland into?

    11. Thus, it could be said that the city underlying the signature achieves a European identity by its association with Joyce. His hold over the city, apparent in the maps of Dublin which appear on both sides of the note, is an example of how the figure of Joyce mediates for a nationalist identity refashioning itself for Europe. Not only is Dublin there to be "taken in at a glance," as the fetishized city of Joyce’s imagination, but the city is a national fetish whereby the state, by limiting the "nation" to Dublin and its environs, resolves its anxiety of autonomy. In order to imagine itself whole, the state needs to mask the dependency on foreign capital as well as the castrating fact of partition, through the map of Dublin. At the same time, it naturalizes the increasing difference between the "cosmopolitan" city and the rural west. One of the destabilizing effects of the Republic’s globalizing economy has been an increasing inequality between the west of Ireland and the Dublin environs, which are integral to luring foreign investment. [9] Joyce’s cosmopolitanism is able to mask two temporal contradictions in Ireland’s changing economy: the historical problem of the North and the uneven development of the West. As our expectations of a nation-state’s sovereignty change with increasing globalization, so do modes of state-legitimization. Here, it is Joyce’s autonomy as an artist that lends the Republic the required reputation of "autonomy" to become part of a community of purported equals. This reverses Seamus Deane’s old formulation of the Irish writer who, existing on the political periphery, writes himself into the center; in this case, it is the writer who conveys the political establishment into the European center.

    12. When James Joyce signed the postscript, "Trieste-Zurich-Paris," to the end of Ulysses he was not only acknowledging the novel’s migratory process of composition but unwittingly signaling his own future life as a cosmopolitan commodity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Cosmopolitan as "at home throughout the world or in many spheres of interest." In the case of Joyce criticism, however, this world has until recently been limited to a European context -- either as a modernist contemporary or as an anachronistic throwback to Rabelais. Postcolonial criticism such as Vincent Cheng’s Joyce, Race and Empire (1995), Enda Duffy’s Subaltern Ulysses (1994), and Emer Nolan’s Joyce and Nationalism (1997), has gone a long way toward deconstructing this image of Joyce as a cosmopolitan humanist with an aversion to the messiness of Irish politics. This has been accomplished partly by new research and also by a significant reconsideration of the bounds of the political in narrative and colonial contexts. Yet this has also produced a situation where a canonical author has become activated as part of a counter-hegemonic politics. Vincent Cheng has recently suggested that as a result of his transformation from one canon to another, Joyce is in danger of becoming a figure who is used to contain the radicalism of oppositional discourses from both the first and third worlds (1997, 84). There is the possibility, Cheng notes, that postcolonial criticism has only extended Joyce’s hegemony to cover the Third World and that by depicting him as a precursor to canonical figures such as Rushdie and Marquez postcolonialism has only contributed to Joyce’s contemporary reputation. Ireland’s anomalous position as a European colony has been reflected in postcolonial discussion of Joyce. Terms such as "mythical realism," and "radical modernism" with their third and first world associations show the strain for some critics in reconciling the canonical Joyce with a postcolonial context. [10]

    13. This tension between first and third world status cannot be separated from Ireland’s role in a global economy. As Luke Dodd has written, "Ireland’s ‘third world’ past has been replaced by a first world economy. While the influx of multinational funds and the advantages of European Community membership have not stemmed emigration or created sustainable employment, they have provided a kind of reassurance by casting Ireland’s problems in global, as opposed to purely national, terms" (99). Contingent on this, Dodd notes, there has been the rise of cultural tourism as one of the "most important growth areas in the Irish economy." While we are debating "Irishness" as a heterogeneous and unstable concept, Joyce is being produced by Aer Lingus and Bord Fáilte as an emblem of modern Irishness. In fact, Conor McCarthy, the head of the Ryan Hotel group, has proposed that Joyce is crucial for Ireland’s tourism strategy, in order to "chase the quality tourism product rather than chasing volume" [11] (this is reminiscent of Joyce’s claim that he did not want a lot of readers, only a few who would read him closely. Now, those few readers are expected to stay in Ryan Hotels).

    14. If the figure of the artist is so crucial in the marketing of Ireland then what is the relation between the construction of the artist in the academy and in the global marketplace? While academics invent and re-invent Joyce as a modernist, post-modernist, and postcolonial Irish figure, he is also being commodified as a figure in the local Irish imagination through events such as Bloomsday and Dublin walking tours. The complicity between strains of postmodern and postcolonial discourse and the cosmopolitan rhetoric of transnational corporations has been noted by recent critics. [12] The fact that the nation-state utilizes an artistic figure whose reputation appears ready-made by the academy does not limit the role of critical practice any more than its use totalizes the historicity of the artist. But in so far as the academy has a legitimating role within society, its canonizing practices contribute to ongoing constructions of national identity. In a country such as Ireland where poets and authors occupy a central place as national figures, their appearance in symbolic forms like currency or as statues along O’Connell Street make the conflicts over exclusion and inclusion construct a field of possible national identities. [13] One such example is the contemporary ascendancy of Joyce over Yeats. As national commodities, not only are Joyce and Yeats allegories for different conceptions of Irish identity, but their own allegorical representations of Ireland inform the tourists’ apprehension of Dublin and the landscape. Their works take on the form of literary Baedekers -- Joyce for the city, Yeats for the country -- that lend an available language to express the tourist experience. As an experience structured through allegory, tourism makes this "temporal difference" (either in visiting heritage centers or "primitive" sites) its constituting narrative. The allegory of the tourist experience prevents this temporal difference, which is a process of historical rupture related to specific socio-economic conditions, from being recognized as disruptive. The work of Joyce and Yeats, as it becomes part of a commodified Irishness, provide precisely the "language in the void" for this historical condition. Again, this is not a strictly a question of what their work is "really" about; rather, it is to consider the social function of the oeuvre.[14] In so far as they are used to naturalize a disruptive, unruly past into a consumable, continuous present the allegorical language of Joyce and Yeats are integral to the tourist experience.

    15. In his discussion of Yeats’s poem "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," David Lloyd notes how Yeats creates an allegorical poetics. [15] But if it is true, as Lloyd writes, that Yeats’s "hyberbolic performance" follows the "principle of contemporary advertising" then we should be able to follow it into another unlikely context. For example, the ad campaign by IDA (see their website at www.idaireland.com) designed to bring in foreign investment, sponsored the slogan: "Missing the Industrial Revolution was the best thing that ever happened to the Irish," accompanied by picturesque images of the Irish landscape. The IDA campaign elides Ireland’s history by invoking a comparison with another historical experience, that of England and Europe. [16] Like Yeats, their representation is informed by a version of Celticism which can be traced back to Matthew Arnold. Both IDA and Yeats are involved in a process of recovering the land by rewriting its past. They want to find new relationships to the landscape and the past (albeit one spiritual, one material) through a language that overcomes actual temporal and historical difference. But where Yeats was aware that "Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone," IDA perpetuates an illusion of an immediate relation to the landscape. The fact that European and U.S. tourism value Ireland for its underdevelopment at the same time that their TNCs are bringing about its modernization is one of the contradictions of a Celtic Tiger economy based on foreign investment. It is IDA’s purpose to overcome this contradiction by conveying an image of a nation that is simultaneously pre and late capitalist at once. When the IDA homepage (www.idaireland.com) advertises the Irish workforce as the "Young Europeans," it reconstructs a relationship to the present that elides the possibility of a history which might present an alternative narrative, such as declining indigenous manufacturing. In their description of Ireland’s "compact cities and beautiful countryside,"(emphasis added) they perpetuate an illusion of a pre-captialist society existing alongside a late capitalist information economy. Not only does this illusion suggest that the new economy can be localized in its effects, but it posits an originary narrative in which this economy develops organically from a pre-Christian, precolonial Ireland. It is in this ambiguous relation to origins that IDA is able to mobilize a nationalist sense of the past -- the continuous, "immediate" past of Pearce and Yeats -- as a way of naturalizing the imposition of new socio-economic relations.

    16. Just as Yeats’s Romanticism cannot be separated from IDA’s use of the Irish landscape, so the commodification of Joyce has made it difficult to distinguish his iconic image from the iconoclasm of his work. One result is the problem cited by Cheng, where any critical production on Joyce, however revisionary, only contributes to his canonicity. But just as any criticism has to contend with the institutional figure called Joyce, so does anything produced in and around the city of Dublin. One example is the public installation called "For Dublin" in which neon signs were placed around Dublin city center displaying fragments of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Now this last event is remarkable, not just for its ironic title, but because of its basis in a contest sponsored by the Nissan Public Art Project. [17] As a public event sponsored by a transnational corporation, it shows how Joyce’s particular cosmopolitanism mediates national identification with foreign, private multi-nationals. According to one of the artists, Frances Hegarty, their desire to show Joyce’s universalism was frustrated by the city itself. "We started off looking for pieces in Ulysses which were very non-specific. I was interested in the way that this female persona could exist in any city in the world. So we looked for an extract which didn’t make particular references. But then, when we got to Dublin, all that changed. We really had to take on references to Joyce, bronze plaques, and trails for tourists to follow, from physical marks on the city to guided history and literary tours" (qtd Clancy). The difficulty of resisting commodification is a problem for any public installation since it so closely resembles the postmodern art-form, the advertisement. As a city-wide installation, Hegarty’s and Stone’s work was subject to the contingent meanings produced by its environment, not the least of which is Joyce’s overdetermined identification with the city. Traversed by walking tours and plaques, Dublin as a tourist entity, and as a European metropolis, derives its self-conscious identity in a large part from Joyce. Where Bord Fáilte and the IDA tame the Irish countryside for TNCs and tourists, Joyce is mobilized to tame and normalize the anomalous urban space of Dublin.

    17. From what I gather from news reports (not being there myself), one concern expressed by the popular press was whether the art installation was able to convey the "ironic attitude toward the Joyce industry" that the artists’s claimed. Like most postmodern works, it blurred the line between authenticity and commodity and as a result arguments about what this installation did to the "real" Joyce prevailed. Because of the public nature of the installation, judgment on it as a work of "art" was secondary to a perception of it as a tourist gimmick. As one journalist wrote, if the installation was "For Dublin" why didn’t they mount it in December at the low tourist season rather than the summer when it is quite high? It appears that a certain allegory of Joyce is being enacted in which his autonomy is being consolidated while he is also being dispersed as a sign of an essentialist Irish character. The continuing "hagiography of Joyce," as Luke Clancy put it in the Irish Times, has this more iniquitous side: "the idea of James Joyce these days is frequently used to underline some dubious ideas, such as the ‘intrinsic’ literary nature of the people of Ireland." Again, I do not know whether this specific work provokes these "dubious ideas," but Clancy’s criticism is an example of how a number of conflicting cultural discourses converge around Joyce. As a result, the conflicts produce Joyce as a legitimating figure who has the capacity to authorize an identity for a nation undergoing the historically disruptive processes of globalization.

    18. In 1979, Seamus Deane noted the cultural effect of this disruption in an editorial for The Crane Bag where he interrogates the relation between history and art in terms of continuity, origins, and allegory. He wrote that history and art "scrutinise origins from the point of view of the end (which is the here and now) which those origins produced." It is at this point that allegory and the question of the representation of origins becomes necessary. A problem for the postcolonial state is the conversion of its colonial past: how does an oppositional discourse convert to an authoritative one? What happens to memory in the process of this conversion? How does a national state represent (in the sense of "stand for") the nationalist ideologies which brought it about? The 1937 Constitution, and de Valera’s 1943 speech "The Undeserted Village Ireland," with their nationalist, Catholic values allegorize the nation’s history as continuous. In this process of historical production, Yeats and Joyce are incompatible as national allegories. The figure of "Yeats" is precisely what the figure of "Joyce" repudiates in modern Ireland. Deane confronts this in his reflection on the Republic’s change in attitude following acceptance into the European Community, where "defending her way of life is more important than dreaming towards one that is yet to come." As he writes, "Despite Bloody Sunday and the proroguing of Stormont, Dublin was politically muted. The burning of the British Embassy was no more than a gesture, an allowed release of energy after which attention turned to the real consequences of those late January days -- the effects upon the Republic’s trade and tourism."

    19. As the state becomes more consolidated within a global context its capacity to produce its own narratives is constrained by modes of foreign investment that limit the state’s autonomy. In this context of rapid growth and increasing dependency, the discomfort with the past -- as represented by IDA’s advertisements -- expresses an anxiety of the present. This anxiety appears in the defensiveness that Deane describes, where the state has to ignore the presence of a residual history as part of its own modernity in order to meet externally imposed expectations. Joyce’s absence from the Rising, the Anglo-Irish and the Civil War make him the perfect figure for this official historical amnesia. But while the Tiger economy constrains, it does not necessarily prevent other narratives of state and citizenship from appearing. One such form is postnationalism where Joyce again finds his role as an allegorical figure.

    20. Originating as an intervention into the conflict in the North -- an intervention that influenced John Hume, among others, in the drafting of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement -- Richard Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland (1997) conceives a mode of European citizenship that would supplement the economic relations of the EU. Kearney’s "postmodern political philosophy" (61) imagines a "Europe of Regions" based on a multi-layered system of regional, national, and transnational associations. Joyce’s cosmopolitan rewriting of Dublin in Ulysses, and especially Finnegans Wake, is central to this ideology as his stylistic mediation between Irish and Continental sources is seen as indicative of a new Irish consciousness. Joyce also exists as a medium for a transnational Irish cultural tradition which pre-existed him (the island of Saints and Sages) and persists in the internationalism of contemporary Irish poetry, fiction, film, and music. Through his capacity to mediate the local and the cosmopolitan -- while resisting narrow-minded nationalism -- Joyce becomes a sort of philosopher-king of Kearney’s "Fifth Province," that imaginative space which connects the "parish to the cosmos." In one example, Kearney brings together the Protestant John Hewitt with the Catholic Seamus Heaney by arguing that "both subscribe to the Joycean version of a ‘postnationalist home.’" Kearney defines this by a quote from the poet Jacques Darras: "The concept of a birth-place, a homeland, which has nourished European nationalism for the past two centuries, has done more evil than good, carrying as it does notions of territoriality and conquest, of segregation and exclusion . . . Joyce clearly believes there is no better birthplace than the one we are traveling towards. The journey may end where it started; but what a wealth of experience is gathered en route" (107). The utopian, Christian overtones here suggest an even older cosmopolitanism, that of Kant’s Cosmopolitan Citizen in his essays on Universal peace. While I do not want to use this to characterize all of Kearney’s complex philosophy, it is significant that he uses Joyce as an allegory of a transcendent mixture of local and cosmopolitan identity so that where his image is used on the ten-pound note to provide an illusory sense of sovereignty, here he is employed to contradict the sovereignty of the nation-state. While Kearney likes to quote Joyce’s comment that he would like to "Europeanise Ireland and Hibernicise Europe" his Postnationalist formulation ignores the unequal power relations of Ireland’s involvement in the European Union. The fact is, it appears likely that the Europeanization (and Americanization) of Ireland may be more prevalent than the Hibernicization of Europe, which in itself may not amount to much more than Riverdance.[18]

    21. Kearney’s dependency on Joyce as a cultural figure ignores his commodified image as a legitimating artist-figure who masks rather than supplements the actual economic relations of the Union. Where postcolonial criticism has tried to politicize Joyce’s aesthetics, Kearney’s postnational appropriation of Joyce aestheticizes his politics. In this formulation, Joyce becomes merely anti-nationalist, another version of the apolitical, sophisticated, cosmopolitan modernist. For example, he uses Finnegans Wake, "a prototypical postmodern text" (65), as an example of a postnational consciousness that can teach us how to be "true to ourselves" in a postmodern era.

      Joyce portrays culture as a ‘circumbendibus’ of multiple aspects, a transmigration of perspectives which -- like the Vico road -- goes round and round to end where terms begin. To be true to ourselves, as Joyce put it, is to be ‘othered’: to exit from our own time frame in order to return to it, enlarged and enriched by the detour. This signals a new attitude not only to culture but to history. The very notion of evolving historical periods (tradition, modernity, etc.) following each other in causal order is put into question. Thus the modern idea of a millenarian state in which cultural and political differences might be subsumed into consensus, is challenged by the postmodern preference for dissensus -- diversity without synthesis. (Kearney, 65)

    22. The argument here is in favor of a disrupted history (becoming "othered"), that seems to occur without any violence. In a sense, this is reminiscent of IDA’s version of Irish history in which previous underdevelopment ("Missing the Industrial Revolution") is rendered harmless (and, it might be said, also puts into question the "causal order" of history). The aestheticism of Kearney’s politics allows other groups to use his reading of Joyce for different ends. The fact is, "‘dissensus,’ diversity without synthesis" is also a useful description for the "flexible" labor practices of multinational corporations.

    23. While Kearney and Hume are certainly correct in detecting a need for a rethinking of citizenship to match changing socio-economic conditions, it is unclear that the apocalyptic tone of postnationalism is its necessary equivalent. As the stalemate over decommissioning illustrates, there is more to national affiliation than Kearney’s philosophy imagines. Partha Chatterjee has described discourses of postnationalism as an elaboration on the former Western universalist concept of nationalism which has now become taboo: "Like drugs, terrorism, and illegal immigration, it is one more product of the Third World that the West dislikes but is powerless to prohibit" (4). By his emphasis on cultural arguments, Kearney neglects attempts at reworking civil society within Ireland which might avoid or stem the dependency implicit in existing transnational relations. In fact, one long-standing version of Irish nationalism has tried to overcome sectarian divisions by moving beyond colonial binaries to find an inclusive national identity that James Goodman calls "cosmopolitan nationalism." This did not die with the aspirations of the 1798 Rising but, as Goodman argues, has appeared in three versions this century. First, part of DeValera’s treaty negotiations included a proposal (rejected by Unionists) where Ireland would exist in a form of bi-national state until its eventual unification. The rejection of this proposal by Britain led in part to the irredentist nationalism of the 1937 constitution. Through its different and, at times contradictory, permutations (other moments are the LeMass government and the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s) this cosmopolitan nationalism shares a desire to escape the political positionings imposed by colonial relations. The British reaction to de Valera’s original proposal of a bi-national state formation is telling: "no man can be a subject of two States. He must be either a subject of the King or an alien, and the question no more admits of an equivocal answer as whether he is alive or dead" (qtd in Goodman 94). The dichotomy proposed here of "subject or alien" is rooted in a conception of national sovereignty with its formal expression in geopolitical boundaries and national currency that are currently being contested by globalizationn. [19] By his integration of local/regional and transnational/federal entities Kearney responds to a narrow sectarianism with an expansive secular identity that unfortunately replicates the model of identitarian politics it is supposed to overcome. As Saskia Sassen has argued, this binary of subject/alien does not wither away under globalism any more than does the nation-state. While postnationalism’s celebratory rhetoric of "dissensus" articulates a genealogy where global trade leads to reformed concepts of citizenship based on an erasure of borders, it neglects the other effect of economic success, immigration. The fragmentation of immigration policy through the confused interaction of TNCs, international human rights policies, and local regions is an example of the multiple positions and interests existing in the new global order. Ironically, while this fragmentation suggests the weakening sovereignty of the nation-state, immigration also provokes a resurgence of nationalism. The national debates in Ireland and the rest of Europe that arise around the citizen-status of immigrants are an example of the crisis of sovereignty on the part of the nation-state that is not so easily dispensed with by postnationalist theories.

    24. This crisis provokes a number of contradictory dualities. For example, globalism and immigration: where the former describes the free movement of capital across borders, the other describes the free-movement of people; while the first argues for the breakup of the nation-state, the second consolidates the nation. In postnationalism, and on the ten-pound note, Joyce is similarly expected to sustain a number of dualities: he is a representative national figure who is simultaneously valued for his cosmopolitanism. But in the ten-pound note these do not remain separate; rather, he is nationalized in order to mask the dependent, transnational nature of the state. Within postnationalism, the hagiography of Joyce produces a larger than life subjectivity that contradicts Kearney’s argument for a borderless world. This transindividual subject, "Joyce," appears like a Blakean body through whom the community is expressed. What is missing from Kearney’s narrative is the place for the reader. Who reads Finnegans Wake has something to do with its effectiveness as a political text. It is interesting at this point to resurrect the argument Colin MacCabe made in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1978), that Joyce’s texts are politically ineffective because they lack "any definite notion of the audience to which they are addressed" (156). MacCabe argues that a text is not political due to any specific political content but in so far as it is read politically by an audience which can identify with the author’s social and political position. For some writers, such as Brecht, this identification can occur through an awareness of the political conjectures out of which he wrote. But Joyce, like Mallarmé, requires an imaginary identification with himself. As a result, MacCabe argues, there exists an isolated individual, Joyce, at the limit of texts dedicated to subverting that very category. To adapt MacCabe’s argument to Ireland’s present moment, it is possible to say that just as immigration consolidates nationalism as it violates it, so Joyce as a cultural figure consolidates national identity while his work subverts it. Because postnationalism depends upon the authenticating figure of the artist as much as the nationalist Bank of Ireland, this millennial philosophy appears to be only another expression of the crisis of sovereignty occurring in a culture of globalization. Kearney’s use of Joyce as the model for a certain type of fluid and transnational Irishman also has to be aware of how his commodification suggests that this postnational identity might only be a new form of Irishness being prepared for export. As we saw with the installation, For Dublin, there is no use of Joyce now that can escape his commodification and production as a national figure. The question then becomes how that public figure is read.

    25. Blooms Hotel in Dublin advertises itself on its homepage with an "extract from James Joyce’s Dubliners": "The tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we in turn must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us". Of course, this is from Gabriel Conroy’s Christmas toast in the short story, "The Dead," and is directed as a compliment to his two aunts and their student Mary Jane, the "Three Graces" of Dublin. As the last description suggests, the speech is not without its irony. In fact, Gabriel spends much of the story imagining how he can escape from suffering under the weight of that very Georgian hospitality he applauds in his speech. Again, like the Finnegans Wake selection on the ten-pound note, the text’s radicalism is contained by the effect of its decontextualization. But what is the effect of this dispersal of meaning? I want to suggest that it is not sufficient to say that this misunderstands Joyce’s work and "gets him wrong" by missing that crucial component of the modernist work, "Irony." Rather, it raises the difficulty confronted by the "For Dublin" installation discussed earlier concerning the limitations of irony as a literary versus a social value. Where Hegarty and Stone tried to overcome Joyce’s ideological hold over the city only to become subsumed as an emblem for tourism, as legitimating a transnational corporation (even accused in part of racism), the proprietors of Blooms Hotel actively convert Joyce’s meaning so that he appears to convey the very bourgeois sensibility which his work was rebelling against. In all three contexts -- the currency, post-modern installation, and Hotel advertisement -- what is being activated is the idea of Joyce as the autonomous artist-figure with powers of consecration and legitimation. [20]

    26. Now, what occurs when we set beside this another image; one almost equally well known, yet maybe less reputable. While the commodified image on the ten pound note points east, this image points west. This mural in a bar in a traditional site of Irish immigration (An Beal Bocht in the Riverdale section of the Bronx), imagines Joyce in a different context. These are two versions of Joyce’s cosmopolitanism. While the ten-pound note overdetermines Joyce in terms of his own imagery (his portrait, the map, Anna Livia, Howth), the latter contextualizes Joyce in terms of diverse Irish memorabilia: Gaelic street signs and Guinness posters. Rather than Joyce incorporating the nation, here it is incorporating him: where we see Ireland differently through the figure of Joyce, here a different version of Joyce is produced. In a bar simulating "Ireland" Joyce appears as only another aspect of commodified Irish culture. Far from the "irreproducable" ten-pound note, the mural is derivative --- a copy from the poster Irish Writers, itself a product of the Irish heritage industry (by a group calling itself Real Ireland); yet, in its derivation from poster to mural, it is a commodity returning to a pre-capitalistic iconic value. As a form of kitsch, it opposes the claims of authenticity made by the state-sponsored, handwritten and signed ten-pound note. David Lloyd has remarked on how forms of cultural nationalism, specifically religious artifacts, devolve into kitsch and then become reactivated as sites of resistance. It is often the case that for migrant cultures certain icons are valued more for their transfer than for their supposed authenticity. "The icon functions to contain memory: it at once serves to preserve cultural continuities in face of their disruption, and to localize, as it were, the potentially paralyzing effects of trauma and anomie" (Lloyd, 1996, 151). Unlike art judged according to aesthetic principles (or paper money judged against a standard of value), the value of this portrait is borrowed from its particular context and the community for which it speaks. [21] Here, the "continuities" Joyce’s portrait preserves is that of an Irish identity that is not lost after the dislocating effects of emigration. In contrast to the imperial binary of subject/alien, the mural argues for a more nuanced sense of a bi-national citizenship.

    27. But even paper money has a use value, and as local, tangible representations, both the ten-pound note and the mural are subject to the daily "work of the imagination" as Arjun Appadurai puts it, the regular consumption of media images and national and religious representations encountered in a globalized culture. This may range from the cultural debates that take place in and around the site called "Joyce," to the carnivalizing appellation, "Prick with a Stick" given by Dubliners to his statue on O’Connell street. But the mural’s presence on the bar wall amid other Irish bric-a-brac is a reminder that Joyce’s new cosmopolitanism cannot be separated from the larger commodification of Irish experience occurring under globalism. Only this site suggests a cosmopolitan space that is neither domestic nor wholly public and which provides different terms for identifications to be made. In fact, the mural’s basis in a previous representation suggests the complexity of transatlantic identification with Ireland. The fact that much of the Celtic Tiger culture is based on American expectations of Ireland, from tourism to TNCs, contributes to the culture’s anxiety over a loss of autonomy. Where the ten-pound note uses Joyce to legitimate an illusory concept of the sovereignty of the Irish Republic, this latter image is a reminder that the concept of the nation is not limited to geopolitical concepts such as national currency and borders.

    28. In this framework, it is clear that Joyce as a new cosmopolitan icon, whether imposed vertically as in the ten-pound note, or laterally as in the mural in the Irish-American bar, is continually being produced by conflicting sets of power relations. It appears that the hagiography of Joyce could develop according to two distinct narratives. In the first, the uncontroversial Joyce of Finnegans Wake and of the ten-pound note, could grow into bizarre, Elvis-like proportions. Or, conversely, as the reaction to the installation "For Dublin" suggests, Joyce could become the object of a resurgent conservatism replete with anti-EU sentiment as well as resistance to the increasing commodification of Irishness on a global scale. But these conflicts are not unaffected by academic debates. The academy invented James Joyce and he is a national figure as a result of this original canonization. Yet so long as criticism, whether the most traditional or iconoclastic, neglects the contingent meanings being produced alongside Joyce’s image, it only contributes further to his role as a national symbol. The problem is the variability of this symbol: while Joyce can certainly represent a "cosmopolitan nationalist" consciousness, one which overcomes the imperialist subject/alien dichotomy, [22] this symbol can as easily lend credibility to a Celtic Tiger culture with its unequal social and economic development. As a cultural figure in the contemporary national/global dialectic, James Joyce on the ten-pound note is not an innocent symbol.

    29. During my own experience of Bloomsday this year I found much that confirmed my own apprehensions about the paradoxes of Joyce as a national icon. On the one hand, there were a number of semi-official, city-wide events led by the irrepressible Joyce publicist-critic and Irish Senator, David Norris. These events included dressing up in Edwardian garb and eating Bloomsian meals; however, not at Bloom’s prices. The fact that the events took place in arenas such as the Joyce museum and the now upscale Davey Byrne’s Pub and Restaurant suggested that Joyce now helps legitimate Dublin’s elitist -- "New Ascendancy" -- upper-middle class. And, as Victor Luftig has observed (1997), Bloomsday provides amusement for American and British tourists looking for "literary Dublin." On the other hand, there were some progressive groups who seized the opportunity to hold events that saw Joyce as a figure of inspiration rather than memorialization. For example, on the steps of the National Library on Kildare street there was an open, informal reading by Irish Women Writers reading their own work, as well as readings of favorite poems and passages -- some Joycean, some not -- by the Library’s employees. In another event, a group called Pavee Point held a day-long conference at the Free Church in Mountjoy Square on the crisis and condition of the Travellers in Ireland. A spokesman for the group stated that "they had taken the theme of ‘wandering rocks’ in Ulysses in order to focus on specific forms of bigotry -- religious bigotry against Protestants, anti-Semitism and racism, including anti-Traveller racism" (qtd in Coulter). By seeing Bloomsday as an opportunity for a critical intervention into new and pervading problems in Irish society, Pavee Point makes Joyce an active cultural figure. Both events were conscious of aspects of Joyce’s life and work that are repressed in the more conventional celebrations and in the nationalist image reproduced in the currency.

    Notes

    1. Luke Gibbons argues convincingly in his essay "The Myth of Modernization in Ireland" (1994) that the rapid economic growth has prompted an increasing social conservatism, as was evident by the Papal visit in 1979 and the divorce referendums in the 1980s. Denis O’Hearn (1998) also emphasizes the conservative social effects of globalization on Ireland, not the least of which is the undermining of a nascent labor movement. This essay is indebted to Professor Gibbons’s lectures at NYU in Spring of 1999 as well as conversations after I presented an earlier version of this essay at the Miami James Joyce conference in 1998. Back

    2. See The Rules of Art (1996): "The discourse on the work is not a simple side-effect, designed to encourage its apprehension and appreciation, but a moment which is part of the production of the work, of its meaning and its value" (170). In this essay, I extend Bourdieu’s description of the "event" of critical discourse to include the extra-academic discourses and representations of nationalism. Back

    3. Kim Bielenberg, "An Irishman’s Diary," The Irish Times, September 24, 1996. For more on the role of Joyce as an aspect of the Irish Heritage Industry see Victor Luftig’s article "Literary Tourism and Dublin’s Joyce" in James Joyce and the Subject of History (1997). Back

    4. See Denis O’Hearn (1998), 57. Back

    5. See David Glasner, "An Evolutionary Theory of the State Monopoly over Money" in Dowd & Timberlake (1998), 40. Back

    6. "The designs on modern paper currency are primarily intended to indicate clearly the issuing authority and denomination of the note and to make the note as difficult as possible to forge [choices are often either] propagandist or carefully neutral, emphasising either change or continuity" (Williams, 1997). Also, for an excellent history of Irish currency see Currency and Central Banking in Ireland, 1922-1960, by Muiris Ó Muimhneacháin (1975). Back

    7. See Frank van Dun, "National Sovereignty and International Monetary Regimes" (Eds. Dowd & Timberlake, 1998) 47-76. As O’Hearn notes, Ireland was dependent upon the British sterling until 1992 when it converted to European Union monetary policies. Back

    8. These are selections from various press clippings: "New Banknotes and Old"by Paul Hogan; Paul O’Kane’s "Joyce is in Deed a Noted Author"; Shane Hegarty’s "Blagger’s Guide"; The 1999 Dublin Bloomsday Guide. Ballagh is a complicated figure considering the politics explicit and implicit in the new design. As a Republican activist and member of the Irish National Congress, Ballagh certainly sees Joyce as part of an Irish cultural tradition, yet he appears to be part of a contingent of Irish intellectuals who neglect the complex cultural ramifications of Ireland’s new economic relationship to Europe (see Patrick Doyle’s letter to the Irish Times 4 March 1994). Back

    9. The specific emphasis on Dublin as a cosmopolitan city is evident in the IDA website (www.idaireland.com) where it stands out against the other "compact" cities and the local counties. Also, O’Hearn notes that the uneven development derives from the agglomeration of services within the Dublin area (1998), 156-60. For more on the different emphasis placed on Dublin versus Galway see Luftig (1997). Back

    10. As Luke Gibbons has aptly noted, "Ireland is a first-world country with a third-world memory" (1). For examples of these terms, see Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1996); this is not to say that these terms are inaccurate, rather I just want to note the negotiations involved when postcolonial criticism is applied to Ireland. Back

    11. Quoted by Bielenberg (1996), p.13. Back

    12. See Timothy Brennan (1997), 155-163. Back

    13. In a sense, the Irish nationalist canon structurally resembles the late nineteenth century Parisian Salon as Bourdieu describes it: "thus it is that the salons, which distinguish themselves more by whom they exclude than by whom they include, help to structure the literary field...(1996, 52). As a description of how "autonomy" is achieved, the Salon example emphasizes the oppositional conflict as more fundamental than what is repressed, rather it is the conflict itself that confers legitimacy. Back

    14. This is not to say that such work is irrelevant or not without a role as a necessary intervention; rather, my purpose here is to illuminate how conflicts over "correct" readings confer a legitimacy that is not always easily contained within academic terms. The "production of belief" that Bourdieu describes (1992, 162), masks the conditions that make the discussion possible. It is those conditions that I am interested in here. Also, my use of allegory here is indebted to Paul de Man’s essay "Rhetoric of Temporality" (1990). Back

    15. See David Lloyd’s essay "The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State" (1993) 59-87. Back

    16. As Gibbons writes: "the most striking feature of IDA promotional material is that it does not simply acknowledge but actively perpetuates the myth of romantic Ireland, incorporating both modernity and tradition within its frame of reference" (86). Also, for a sense of American complicity in this view of Ireland see Warren Hoge’s New York Times article of 23 March 1997 where he naturalizes IDA’s slogans by reproducing their claims verbatim. Back

    17. Sponsored by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Nissan Public Art Project is designed to promote art in the public domain. Nissan gives 40,000 pounds to fund the program each year. Nissan has been a presence in Ireland since 1978, with a seven acre corporate headquarters outside of Dublin and as a major Fianna Fail contributor (see Irish Times, April 1, 1998, p. 27 and April 30, 1999, p.5). They also own the Korean Daewoo plant in the North where, O’Hearn notes, Irish wages are often lower than in East Asia (1998, 133). Back

    18. See O’Hearn on the myth of Irish convergence with Europe (1998, 64-8). Also, an article in The New Statesman (1996) discusses the standardization of Ireland as one result of their opening up of the economy. It would be interesting to consider, however, what affect Ireland has had on the culture of the Continent since it has become one of the largest tourist destinations. What does the image of a romantic, pre-capitalist Ireland mean for a late capitalist Europe contending with its own changing identity? Back

    19. Saskia Sassen has argued that while the changing relations between the nation-state and the global marketplace requires a reconception of the nation/global duality this does not entail the state’s demise but rather a new "geography of power" rooted in certain powerful nation-states. See Sassen (1996), 4-5. Back

    20. As Bourdieu writes about the politics of the nineteenth-century Parisian Salon: "The salons are also, through the exchanges that take place there, genuine articulations between the fields: those who hold political power aim to impose their vision on artists and to appropriate for themselves the power of consecration and of legitimation which they hold" (51). Back

    21. Lloyd writes: "... the mural as a form exists in situ, and often gains its exact meanings from its relation not only to a very definite community, but also to the forces of state power against whom the mural speaks in its very vulnerability and relative poverty of material resources" (1992, 154). Back

    22. James Anderson identifies this "cosmopolitan nationalism" as a strain of Irish political thought, with its basis in the United Irishmen, that stands opposed to Kearney’s postnationalism. This position doesn’t assume an end to the powerful narratives of nationalism but considers actually existing models of cross-border relations in areas such as trade unions and women’s coalitions (231-32) as forms of popular democracy that can be built on. "Political space would be opened up for mobilising around non--national identities, interests and practices...which span the North’s sectarian divide and the border" (232). Back

      Work Cited

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      ---, ed. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1990.

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      Hegarty, Shane. "Blagger’s Guide." Times (London) 12 Sept. 1999: Features.

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      Joyce, Joe. "New Punt Meets Its Match as Forgers Rise to Challenge." The Guardian (London). December 14, 1992. p.8

      Kearney, Richard. Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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      ---. "The Recovery of Kitsch." Distant Relations: A Dialogue among Chicano, Irish & Mexican Artists. New York: Smart Art Press, 1995.

      Luftig, Victor. "Literary Tourism and Dublin’s Joyce." James Joyce and the Subject of History. Eds. Mark Wollaeger, Victor Luftig and Robert Spoo. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

      MacCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: Macmillan P, 1978.

      O’Hearn, Denis. Inside the Celtic Tiger: The Irish Economy and the Asian Model. London: Pluto P, 1998.

      O’Kane, Paul. "Joyce is in Deed a Noted Author." Irish Times 18 Sept. 1993: 5.

      Ó Muimhneacháin, Muiris. Currency and Central Banking in Ireland, 1922-1960. Dublin, Gill & Macmillan for the Central Bank of Ireland, 1975.

      Salazar, Martha. "The Peso: National Currency as Rhetoric." Visible Language 32:3 (1998). 280-293.

      Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. Columbia UP, 1996.

      Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

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