FW75 Programme 2014

Commissioned for the FW75 hubbub
ANARCHISM, GEOGRAPHY,
AND LOVE
Gerry kearns, Maynooth University
The challenge of cosmopolitanism remains:
What would it mean to be an Irish citizen of the world?
In 1907, for a talk to an adult education class
in Trieste, James Joyce chose the title, Ireland,
island of saints and scholars. He spoke about
the Irish national ego in all its excusable
delusion. Joyce understood that English
colonialism had twisted Irish understandings of
their own place and purpose, but he worried
about a celebration, in reaction, of either purity
or piety. The problem of purity was both
universal – What race, or what language […] can
boast of being pure today? – and local – to deny the
name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock
would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the
modern movement. As for piety, he ejaculated: I
confess I do not see what good it does to fulminate
against the English tyranny while the Roman
tyranny occupies the place of the soul.
The first sketches that were later incorporated into Finnegans Wake were new
tales of some legendary Irish figures, but the nightscape of the novel as it
developed became as much geographical as historical. Among the books from
which Joyce spun his yarn, was a work of historical geography by a Russian
anarchist, Lev Il’ich Mechnikov [a.k.a. Leo or Léon Metchnikoff].
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