Coincidance - Principia Discordia

88 COINCIDANCE
Joyce's first use of death and absence as positives, in Dubliners, is the
marvelous short story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." A group of
minor political hacks are sitting around drinking Guiness's stout and
carefully avoiding talking about anything serious. Gradually we discover
that it is Ivy Day—October 6th, the anniversary of the death of Charles
Stewart Parnell—and that all of them had, in one way or another, betrayed
him. It is Parnell, still called "the Chief," who is physically dead and absent
but very much alive and present in the haunted consciences of every man in
the Committee Room.
(Parnell organized the rent strikes of the 1880s, which for a time made it
impossible for English landlords to collect Irish rents. He did not invent but
popularized the boycott, which cut deeply into English profits in Irish markets.
He became the leader of the "Home Rule" party and the most popular man
in Ireland, called "Erin's uncrowned king," but fell from power after being
denounced by the Roman Catholic clergy as an adulterer. After his political
downfall he died quickly of pneumonia and, with what now seems prevision
of 20th Century psychosomatic medicine, his few loyal followers insisted
bitterly that "the Chief" had died of a broken heart.)
"Ivy Day" ends, with superb Joycean irony, when a loyal Parnellite named
Joe Hynes arrives and reads a poem in praise of the dead Chief. The poem is
wretched, mawkish, awful, shot through with every dreadful cliche of
popular Victorian verse; and, precisely because it is not great literature but
the simple expression of genuine emotion by a simple man, it is strangely
moving. The closing line of the story gives the reaction of Crofton, the most
vehement anti-Parnellite in the Committee Room:
Mr. Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.
The evasion of the meaning of the poem is obvious; whether Crofton is
also hypocritical in praising the non-existent literary merits of the piece is
unclear; maybe, like the author, Joe Hynes, Crofton is ignorant enough to
think the verse is well written. Joyce, who believed ambiguity is the prime
feature of human existence, loved to leave his readers with little mysteries
like that. What is important is that the lyric, trite and dreadful as it is, makes
Parnell the hero of the story:
He is dead. Our Uncrowned King is dead.
O, Erin, mourn with grief and woe
For he is dead whom the fell gang
Of modern hypocrites laid low
In palace, cabin or in cot
The Irish heart where'er it be