|
|
|
|
|
vidyal wrote: > chandra and others , Here it is Vidya! Hope that I have not taken too long a time over it! Terence Brown was (is?) Professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the Trinity College, Dublin. He says: "Not all Irishmen and women were content to acquiese in the provincial lethary and colonial subjugation which Joyce so intently documented in Dubliners .....One important movement was, since the 1880s, the Irish Literary Revival, the cultural brain child of w.B.Yets, Lady Gregory, etc .. who sought to reinvigorate a depleted Irish cultural condition through contact with an ancient Celtic spirituality by means of an English language literture which might rekindle the authentic national fire..... while he (Joyce) recognised Yeats' genius, the elder man's way of discovering an artistic vocation through contact with the soil and in an idealization of a heroic Celtic past was scarcely his, committted disciple of Ibsen and instinctive socialist he was. "Ancient Ireland," he asserted " is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal." (I wonder whether it would be correct to insert here the words, ancient India??)...Joyce was altogether less than enchanted by the poetic effusions of those many imitators of Yeats, minor irish poets of dubious talent, who, in his considerable shadow, composed poems of supposed Celtic Twilight spirituality and actual inanity. Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud" imagines himself a putative part of this movement, though the fact that his dreams are all too materially of success indicates that Joyce considered the Celtic Twilight school to be opportunistic and lacking in artistic integrity. It was a means to easy literary success, especially in England. Indeed the portrait of Little Chandler in this story may be read as a satiric commentary on the Revival itself. For Little Chandler, so preoccupied with his hopes of a literary future when "The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems ..." fails .. to make any real contact with the life of his own city in his walk to Corless's public house ... Surrounded by the squalor and misery of Dublin he becomes merely "sad" in a literary and affected manner: "little Chandler gave them no thought. He picked his way deftly through all the minute vermin-like life." Little Chandler ... is a damning indictment of the artistic impulses of the Literary Revival as the youthful Joyce understood them." Very interesting introduction, right? What Brown writes about symbolism in Dubliners is also VERY interesting too! Chandra |
|
|
|
|
|