SOURCE: “The Irish Novel: Exile, Resignation, or Acceptance,” in Wascana Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1967, pp. 5-17.

[In the following essay, Caswell discusses the fiction of Brian Moore, Kate O'Brien, Frank O'Conner, and Brinsley MacNamara.]

It is a commonplace in the study of modern Irish literature that the Irish literary revival, with the somewhat doubtful exception of George Moore and with the singular exception of James Joyce, produced few novelists of note. Perhaps Joyce is sufficient for a multitude of novelists, but the fact of their scarcity is strange when we recall the plentitude of Irish poets, dramatists and short-story writers. However, between Moore's The Lake (1905) and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) no Irish fiction writer of significance chose to work in the novel form. An exception might be made for James Stephens' The Charwoman's Daughter (1912) and Demi-Gods (1914), but these works, being much closer to fantasy than to the realistic-symbolic novel of the twentieth century, are novels only in a special sense. Since the revival Irish novelists have increased in number, but, as concerns prose fiction, it is the Irish short story that is distinctive and not the Irish novel. How can this marked discrepancy be explained?

One way of accounting for the more significant achievement of the Irish writer in the short story rather than in the novel form is to say that he is simply incapable of the sustained long haul that the novel demands. Such a statement is, of course, altogether too arbitrary; moreover, even if we exclude Joyce, Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak (1931), O'Faolain's Nest of Simple Folk (1934), Hackett's The Green Lion (1936), Mary Lavin's The House in Clewes Street (1945) and MacMahon's Children of the Rainbow (1952) give evidence that Irish writers do possess the stamina that the long novel requires. Nevertheless, it has been said that “Irish genius works best, if not solely, in short explosions,”¹ and Vivian Mercier has stated in his introduction to Great Irish Short Stories that “Irishmen do have a special gift for the short story.”² Neither of these remarks really goes far enough to account for the discrepancy between the achievement of the Irish short-story writer and that of the Irish novelist.

Perhaps the best account of the discrepancy is to be found in the following remarks from Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Commenting on The Untilled Field, he says:

Moore made the Irish short story a fact. But where are the successors of The Lake and how have they developed on and superseded their model? Most Irish novels still tend to end as The Lake itself ends, by the hero's getting out of the country as fast as he can. The only Irish novel that compares with it for excellence—Daniel Corkery's The Threshold of Quiet—ends with the heroine's going into a convent, which is only the same conclusion seen through a veil of resignation. There has been no development comparable with the development of the short story, such as would even make it possible for a critic to speak of the Irish novel, and the reason is plain. There is no place in Irish life for the priest or the teacher, no future for them but emigration, as in Moore, or resignation, as in Corkery.³

Presumably when he polarizes the alternatives of emigration or resignation for the novelist what O'Connor has in mind is the novel that depicts, or in which the hero confronts or is a part of, the mainstream of modern Irish life. Certainly the alternatives do not apply, or apply only partially, in novels such as Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak or O'Faolain's Nest of Simple Folk—the one set in the nineteenth century and the other beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending in 1916, the great divisional date in modern Irish history.

On the other hand, exile or resignation should not have been exclusive alternatives in the years from the turn of the century, when the cultural revival and political rebellion offered a variety of ways to lead a meaningful life at home, to 1923 when the Troubles ended. Of course, as Brinsley MacNamara's novel The Clanking of Chains (1920) makes abundantly clear, achieving a meaningful life even in this fertile period was not always possible in much of Ireland. The novel's hero, Michael Dempsey, who is attuned to the ideals of the time, is finally defeated by the Ballycullen pillars of society and forced into exile. However, only since that time, a time that has seen the Irish short story come into its own as something distinctive in kind, have the problems for a developing Irish novel become evident, if not entirely explicit. In retrospect, Moore's The Lake and Corkery's The Threshold of Quiet (1917) thus become portents for Irish novelists in the post-Civil War period in Irish life. These novelists, according to O'Connor, can only play variations on the given themes of exile or resignation. The exile may take two forms: literal escape from Ireland or exile within the community. The latter, also a common theme in much of modern fiction, need not be the same thing as resignation. According to O'Connor either form, especially literal escape from Ireland, takes its cue from Moore's novel and may be found in such different novels as MacNamara's The Clanking of Chains, O'Faolain's Come Back to Erin, Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn, and Flann O'Brien's The Hard Life. Both forms find classic expression in the character of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and in Ulysses. If, on the other hand, resignation rather than exile is the alternative, then the cue, again according to O'Connor, comes from Corkery's novel and may be found in novels such as O'Donnell's On the Edge of the Stream, O'Faolain's Bird Alone, Wall's Leaves for the Burning, and McGahern's The Barracks. Presumably the complex and expansive form that resignation takes in the case of Leopold Bloom is the last word on this choice, and yet Bloom's resignation is not a product of circumstances singularly Irish.

However, for O'Connor the resigned, or underground, life, the life of the “submerged population” group (p. 18), the life of the “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” (p. 19), the life of “characters regarded as outcasts, lonely individuals” rather than “characters regarded as representative figures” (p. 55) is the essential concern of the short-story writer rather than the novelist. The short-story writer, says O'Connor, does not have to tell the whole story of his character, as does the novelist; he can, by concentrating on moments of intense loneliness in the lives of his submerged figures—figures which Irish life provides him with in abundance—avoid the difficulty implicit in the novel of bringing the hero into some full scale confrontation with institutions that will either force the hero into exile or into the life of resignation.

O'Connor's thesis is compelling because it does seem to account for what he feels is the failure of the Irish novel to develop a distinctiveness on a level with that of the Irish short story. Moreover, he has ready to hand the authority of Joyce, both in his life and in his work, who, if he did enjoy Ireland enjoyed it in the fashion of Tarry Flynn's uncle: “The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than three hundred miles.”⁴ However, the options of exile or resignation are a little too neat. Granted that Irish novelists have made abundant use of both alternatives, and granted that the alternatives have served the novelists as ready-made solutions for concluding their narratives, nevertheless one feels that they are not really the essential point at issue. The way of exile is too easy. The novelist simply has to present a series of conflicts between the hero and his society all of which gradually manoeuvre the hero into boarding the boat for England or elsewhere. Sometimes, as in Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn, the exile just seems to happen without the series of events that lead inevitably to the hero's exile. Kavanagh's novel is a good example of the dangers of the too readily available formula of exile, for it spoils the novel.

Resignation, on the other hand, is a much more complex solution for the novelist to use, especially if O'Connor's rather loaded word, clearly negative in his context, may be replaced by the word acceptance. Then the important thing becomes the quality of the hero's acceptance, and this acceptance may range from simple resignation to one's lot, however grim, to the discovery in the texture of Irish life those things which reconcile one with it and which make for a meaningful life. Moreover, unless Irish life is different from that of other countries in kind rather than in degree, there seems little reason why the experiences depicted in Irish novels that do not end in exile should not be metaphors for all men.

The resignation that O'Connor sees in Corkery's The Threshold of Quiet when Lily Bresnan decides to enter the convent, and which he sees as the only viable alternative to exile for the hero in the Irish novel, simply is not present. She does not make her decision on the basis of an antipathy towards Irish life as it is lived normally. In the first chapter of the novel, Lily's brother, Frank, apparently commits suicide because, it seems, his quite ambitious nature is frustrated of fulfillment in Cork. The apparent suicide weighs heavily on Lily, and after the death of her father, and after her brother Finnbarr's decision to go to sea, she is free of family responsibilities. When she enters the convent, it is to provide a nun's prayers for her brother Frank. The problem of resignation or acceptance is not an issue. Therefore, O'Connor is mistaken when he says that Corkery's novel is a complement to Moore's The Lake. Furthermore, no matter how meaningful as a symbol Father Gogarty's escape from Ireland was to Joyce, O'Connor, and presumably to others, an examination of the novel reveals that very little of what Gogarty rejects in his final decision to leave Ireland has to do with the specific nature of Irish life. In fact, Gogarty states a case for acceptance; his actual exile is due to the fact that he is, in a small Catholic country, a priest who loses his vocation.

The only significant action in The Lake that Moore presents directly is Gogarty's swim across the lake at the end of the book. The remaining significant action, the coming of Rose Leicester to the parish of Garranard, the effect of her beauty and of her musical performances upon the people of the parish, her illicit affair and Gogarty's sermon against her, and her sudden departure from Ireland, has all happened before the novel begins. Moore presents these incidents as recollections of Gogarty while he wanders the woods in the opening pages of the novel. Clearly there is enough material for a novel in the recollected incidents; equally clear is the fact that Moore does not wish to place the main emphasis on this material. Instead, he places this emphasis on the exchange of letters between Rose and Gogarty, which is the main structural device of the novel. The burden of this exchange of letters is twofold: first, the exchange gradually reveals to Gogarty that his motive for preaching against Rose and her illicit affair was not primarily the moral protection of his parish, but was jealousy, and that he is still in love with her. Second, the letters enable Moore to keep a running comparison between the life of the liberated Rose, first living and teaching music in London and then working as a secretary for the biblical historian, Mr. Ellis, with whom she travels on the continent and then to the Near East, and that of the Irish priest, who, before finally accepting it, fights against his own liberation.

In his defense of things Irish against the attacks of Rose, Father Gogarty, except for his recreation of the Irish landscape, is almost maddeningly vague. He is, moreover, the most inactive parish priest in literature. His days are taken up with walking the woods near the lake, writing letters to Rose, walking to post the letters, returning home where he thinks of something he should or should not have written, which in turn elicits another letter. Then, as likely as not, he walks the woods once again before going to bed. Certainly the endless walking, especially in the woods, predates, or foreshadows, the functional use that Joyce makes of Stephen Dedalus walking about the streets of Dublin in Portrait. The device is also one reason that the final scene in which Gogarty at last gets free of the woods and swims the lake to freedom is so evocative. However, if the ambulatory device is effective in presenting the turmoil in the young priest's mind, in another way it is seriously defective. Walking about the woods, unlike walking the streets of Dublin, is not a good way to discover or to reveal much in the way of Irish life. For example, apart from Gogarty and Rose, the only memorable character in the novel is Father Moran, the stolid curate who has a problem with drink, which he solves. Quite possibly this character is Moore's idea of the real rural priest. Again, apart from the scene in which Moran, accompanied by Gogarty, tries to walk out of the parish in order to get drunk for three days, and apart from the farcical “stage Irish” scene in which the two mothers-in-law, one a Protestant and one a Catholic, fight over which of their respective religions the baby will be baptized into—with the result that it is baptized into both—Moore, with the exception of the landscape around the lake and the lake itself, renders little in the way of locally colored life.

In addition to its physical beauty, the landscape about the lake contains a number of ruins from Ireland's past and present that Moore uses to suggest, somewhat hazily, that Gogarty is an inhabitant of a house of the dead from which first Rose and then he escape. Relics of the glories of seventh and eighth century Ireland are found in Kilronan Abbey and in the hermit-poet Marban's chapel, located on Castle Island; from the eleventh and twelfth centuries there are various castles built by Welsh and Norman invaders; from the eighteenth century there is Joycetown House, the Big House that is “the last link between the present time and the past,”⁵ and, finally, The Tinick Mills, a reminder of the town's previous affluence. Gogarty recalls to mind a cottage which he remembers from his pre-Maynooth days and in which his sister Mary had lived before entering the convent:

Mary had left the cottage and the garden a ruin and a waste. It was sad to think of the clean thick thatch and the whitewashed walls covered with creeper and China roses, for now the thatch was black and mouldy, and the roof was sagging. The doors were broken, and barely held together; and the garden was a still more disgraceful sight. Only a few stocks survived; the rose trees were all gone—the rabbits had eaten them, and they had barked the fruit trees. There was nothing but weeds; they overtopped the currant and gooseberry bushes; here and there was a trace of box edging. ‘In a few more years,’ he said, ‘the roof will fall in, and the garden will become part of the waste.’ (p. 77).

On the basis of all of the ruins in his parish, Gogarty, in a letter to Rose, is able to assert that Ireland itself is but a ruined house from which he must soon escape.

I am thinking now of an old, decrepit house with sagging roof and lichen-covered walls, and all the doors and windows nailed up. Every generation nailed up a door or a window till all were nailed up. In the dusty twilight creatures wilt and pray. About the house the doleful sound of shutters creaking on rusty hinges never ceases. Your hand touched one, it fell, and I found myself looking upon the splendid sun shining on hills and fields, wooded prospects with rivers winding through the great green expanses. At first I dared not look, and withdrew into the shadow tremblingly; but the light drew me forth again, and now I look upon the world without fear. I am going to leave that decrepit, dusty house and mix with my fellows, and maybe blow a horn on the hillside to call comrades together. (p. 256).

The first part of this passage clearly foreshadows those more naturalistically rendered houses in Great Britain Street (“The Sisters”) and North Richmond Street (“Araby”) in Joyce's Dubliners where the decayed houses are also metaphors for a decayed life. However, Joyce's metaphors are convincing because the whole texture of the stories supports what they suggest. Moore's handling of Gogarty, on the other hand, makes the priest's vision of Ireland as a house of the dead idiosyncratic. Moore's chosen method of presenting his hero prohibits him from rendering sufficient life outside of himself to convince the reader that what Gogarty has to say about Irish life and its particular problems is true or meaningful for anyone but himself at the moment.

Moore is a little more convincing in his evocation of the frustration that the sensitive young man encounters when trying to select a vocation that will enable him to lead a rich, full life in an essentially provincial country. Again in a letter to Rose Leicester, Gogarty describes the kind of life for which he seemed destined and from which he tried to escape:

You know we had a shop in Tinnick, and I had seen my father standing before a high desk by a dusty window year after year, selling half-pounds of tea, and hanks of onions, and farm implements, and if I had married my cousin Annie McGrath our lives would have reproduced those of my father and mother in every detail, and I felt I really could not undertake the job. For a long time I did not know why; I was pious, but I can see now that it was not my piety that sent me to Maynooth, but a certain spirit of adventure, a dislike of the commonplace, of the prosaic—that is to say, of the repetition of the same things. I was interested in myself, in my own soul, and I did not want to accept something that was outside of myself, such as the life of a shopman behind a counter, or that of a clerk of the petty sessions, or the habit of a policeman. These were the careers that were open to me, and when I was hesitating, wondering if I should be able to buy up the old mills and revive the trade in Tinnick, my sister Eliza reminded me that there had always been a priest in the family. And the priesthood seemed to offer opportunities of realizing myself, of preserving the spirit within me. In this I was mistaken; it offered no such opportunities to me. I might as well have become a policeman. (pp. 257-8).

With the various alternatives in life for the sensitive and intellectually gifted young man, shopkeeper, clerk, policeman, and priest, the outlook is one that has become familiar by now in Irish fiction. To discover that so far as realizing himself or preserving the spirit within himself he “might as well have become a policeman” gives some measure of the despair of the man. However, one is a little suspicious over the fact that Oliver Gogarty, the sensitive and enthusiastic seminarian who finishes at the top of his class, should have only the three alternatives to the priesthood from which to choose. Should not his ability open more opportunities for him, such as the law, medicine, politics, or teaching? True, these professions, like all others, contain a “repetition of the same things,” but such repetition is not peculiar to Ireland. Still, at the time that Oliver Gogarty makes his choice of a way of life it seems that the “certain spirit of adventure,” that desire for a life that will nourish the imagination is possible only by his becoming a priest.

Father Gogarty explains his decline from happiness as a young curate in the following way: “It might well be that his philanthropic instincts were exhausted” (p. 298). Even he is not satisfied with this explanation of his failure in the priesthood; nevertheless, it enables him to see that only a portion of his desire for a rich life has been satisfied by his duty as a priest. Rose Leicester makes him aware, both by her presence in the parish and, later, in her letters to him from England and from the continent, of other possibilities. She tells him, “You want life” (p. 213). His reply to this statement is: “I have never had any experience of life; you were my first experience” (p. 230). Still later he thanks her for “what you have done for me, for the liberation you have brought me of mind and body” (p. 259). Experience of life and liberation both answer the desire for adventure that Gogarty sought as a young man. Now, Rose points the way for him when she declares her “faith in my own personality to carry me straight on toward success” (p. 112). She implies that such an exploitation of personality in people like herself and the young priest is impossible in Ireland. She writes from England that

I was a dissonance in Ireland, I am part of the English harmony and it is such a pleasure to find one's self in harmony with one's surroundings … (p. 113).

Certainly Gogarty is not in harmony with his surroundings, but there is little evidence in the novel that the disharmony is specifically the fault of Irish ways of life. In fact on the eve of his departure, he states:

It matters little to me whether life is to be found at home or abroad, in adventure or in habits and customs. One thing matters—do I stay or go? (p. 301).

Moreover, when he formulates his goal in leaving the priesthood and Ireland, he says:

… his quest was the personal life—that intimate exaltation that comes to him who has striven to be himself, and nothing but himself. (p. 302).

If the implication, therefore, is that Irish life will deny him the right to this quest, such a denial is due much less to the quality of that life as Moore presents it in the novel than it is to the predicament of Gogarty's being the kind of man he is and of his being a priest. His quarrel, essentially, and presumably Moore's also, is with the religious traditions and beliefs that have been his since childhood and in which, like Moore, he no longer believes. It is from these traditions and beliefs that he seeks to escape and not simply from the Irish ways of life.

Gogarty completes his escape in the final memorable scene. He stages his swim across the lake so that his priest's clothes will be found on the near shore; he has placed his lay clothes on the far side. Under a full, almost Yeatsean moon, after having shed his old clothes, he stands poised

as on a pedestal, tall and gray in the moonlight—buttocks hard as a faun's, and dimpled like a faun's when he draws himself up before plunging after a nymph. (p. 300).

In this passage, which the young Joyce ridiculed, Moore most likely intended the image of the faun and the nymph to underscore the pagan or, for him, the naturalness of what Gogarty is now doing in contrast with his past life. The sexual note of the faun plunging after the nymph is perhaps more apparent than real. However, quite early in the book, Gogarty associates the departed Rose with the lake. Desirous of leaving Ireland on a vacation and yet unable to bring himself to do so, “he began to indulge in the superstitious fears lest Rose's spirit haunted the lake, and that his punishment was to be kept a prisoner always” (p. 45). A more evocative association occurs in a dream in which he

had seen Rose drowned. She wore a white dress, and this lake seemed like her; there were her knees, and the white gown floating, filling the stream. … Yes, the lake reminds one of one's guilt. ‘Every man has a lake in his heart.’ (p. 53).

The lake in addition to being, like Rose, a thing of natural beauty, is also a thing that disturbs his unconscious, his sense of guilt at having wronged the girl. The surface and the depth of the lake parallel those in the man. In the day-dream scene above, the sense of guilt becomes articulate. Much later he writes to Rose that he was

unconsciously affected by your example. You dared to stretch out both hands to life and grasp it; you accepted the spontaneous natural living wisdom of your instincts when I was rolled up like a dormouse in the dead wisdom of codes and formulas, dogmas and opinions. (pp. 256-7).

From dormouse to faun is the pattern of Gogarty's development in the novel. The plunge of the faun after the nymph, of Gogarty after what Rose is to him, is at once an immersion in his guilt in the sense of a full recognition of his violation of “spontaneous natural living wisdom of [the] instincts” and an acceptance of that wisdom.

The obvious baptismal quality of the lake scene is quite apparent to Gogarty. Resting on one of the islands in the lake, he recalls the double baptizing of the child that morning.

Now one of his baptizers had been baptized, and by emersion he had experienced great benefit from the sacrament, and in a few minutes he would plunge again in the beneficent flood. (p. 307).

Later, “the night was so still and warm that it was happiness to be naked. … ” (p. 307). Both the spiritual and the physical man are in harmony. He is free of his sense of guilt for his offense against life as Rose represents it for him. His final words on the subject are the last in the book: “There is a lake in every man's heart. … And every man must ungird his loins for the crossing” (p. 309).

One final illustration may be in place to point up what has been stated several times previously: that in the novel Moore does very little to place convincingly the source for Father Gogarty's problem in the Irish ways of life. In a passage that sounds as though Moore had been talking with Yeats about the unity of being, Gogarty writes the following to Rose:

When the brain alone thinks, the thinking is very thin and impoverished. It seems to me that the best thinking is done when the whole man thinks, the flesh and brain together, and for the whole man to think the whole man must live; and the life I have lived hitherto has been a thin life, for only my body lived. And not even all my body. My mind and body had been separated; neither were of any use to me. (p. 255).

Whether or not Moore intended it, or whether we approach such a passage haunted by the Joycean strictures on Ireland as the land of the dead, there seems to be an implication in the passage that such a vision of life cannot be realized in Ireland. The implication receives support from the paragraph that follows (and which has already been quoted) in which Gogarty seems—because he does not say so specifically—to equate Ireland with the old house whose generations of inhabitants had boarded up the windows and from which Rose freed him. As pointed out earlier, the details for such a comparison in the rest of the book are not sufficient to substantiate or to nourish it. In this sense the comparison feeds on itself and, therefore, lacks the richness of the final symbol in the novel: Gogarty's crossing of the lake. That symbol contains the entire novel.

If Moore intended The Lake to be a depiction of the thinness of Irish life, and in part he must have intended something of the sort, the novel is unconvincing. If, on the other hand, he intended The Lake to be a metaphor for the restricted life that is a product of beliefs that prevent the whole man from living, then he is more successful. Certainly Gogarty's remarks on true thought as the product of the thinking mind and body, and his final remark that every man has a lake within him that must be crossed support the second alternative. Most likely Moore's intentions vacillated between both views.

Father Gogarty's decision to leave the priesthood is almost synonymous with the leaving of Ireland. For the spoiled priest in a small Catholic country, any kind of satisfactory life would be almost impossible. Moreover, Gogarty does not wish to bring shame to his sisters or to his parishioners. Freedom for him must come in exile. The case, of course, is different with a lay figure; he usually has an alternative to exile, namely acceptance. The first of these alternatives, even when as inevitable as it is in Joyce's Portrait or MacNamara's The Clanking of Chains, is seldom, if ever, wholly satisfying. However convincingly the writer presents the necessity for exile as a fact of Irish life, is remains just that: a phenomenon of Irish life that may not have much to do with life on the rest of the planet. Moreover, exile surely caters to a desire in men to chuck it all for a change of environment, an escape from dullness of habit. Acceptance, on the other hand, and the quality of the acceptance, is of much more significance than escape because it speaks directly to the common experience of man. In this respect, the acceptance of life in, say, Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen is a richer and more satisfying possibility than is the flight of Stephen in Portrait. However, as Benedict Kiely has pointed out, “acceptance, unless accompanied by other feelings that sweeten the bitterness of saying yes, is unusual among Irish novelists.”⁶ He also states that “if acceptance is to go beyond a stoical suffering of fools it must become praise; it must become gratitude” (p. 135).

Exile and resignation are the Irish novelist's Scylla and Charybdis. Both are dangerous, and safe passage between them cannot be negotiated by following the initial response of Odysseus' men in abandoning the oars. Such abandonment is tantamount to an easy acceptance of the formulas either of exile or of resignation. Moreover, the ready acceptance may also lead to the novel's being no more than an image of the phenomena of Irish life and, consequently, of little relevance to those who do not live in Ireland. There is an alternative to surrendering to the lure of the easy way: the Odyssean way of self-possession and the acceptance of adversity as synonymous with life. In this sense, Kiely's statements orient the Irish novelist's problem in the right direction and emphasize the burden of his task. Acceptance, assuming the fineness of its quality, will enable safe passage between the Irish Scylla and Charybdis of exile and resignation.

Acceptance of Irish life, as with the acceptance of life in any country, is no simple matter; there are no formulas. What the novelist finds acceptable and the place where he finds his locus of joy will of necessity be distinctly individual. Moreover, as O'Connor has said, his chosen genre may well pose difficulties that Irish short-story writers do not have to face. However, the great Irish writers of the twentieth century have all, sooner or later, come to face openly and candidly the necessity of accepting and, ultimately, of affirming life. The acceptance and the affirmation, and the manner in which the writers express them, is the reason that they are so great. For example, in material drawn from his essays “Drama and Life” (1900), and “James Clarence Mangan” (1902), together with some new material, Joyce could, in 1904-6, define the problem in Stephen Hero in the following ways:

… he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.⁷

Defining what he calls the “classical temper,” Joyce states that it is

ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves imperishable perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift. (pp. 78-9).

The “gift of certitude” is a product of “the sane and joyful spirit” that enables man to give reverence to life. Surely the pursuit of such a goal, or vision, is worth more than the pursuit of the polarized view of exile or resignation. In this instance, Ulysses should be the proto-novel and not The Lake, The Threshold of Quiet, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce writes

The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification [the artists] the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation. (p. 80).

And that is what Joyce is about in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake: “a continual affirmation” while using material candidly acknowledged as grim.

Using material nearly as grim as that of Joyce and working under circumstances proportionately as difficult, Synge, in his Preface to The Playboy of the Western World (1907), could rightly state:

On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.⁸

The joy in Synge's plays is not acquired at the expense of reality nor is the “superb and wild,” which he found in the rural areas of Ireland, limited to those regions. O'Casey found it in Dublin, just as did Flann O'Brien, the young Beckett, Behan on occasion, and Hugh Leonard in Madigan's Lock. John B. Keane continues to find it in the west of Ireland.

Finally, and on a level as broad as that of Joyce but without his easy confidence, Yeats came to terms with the problem. Richard Ellmann describes the poet's approach to the problem as one of “affirmative capability, for it begins with the poet's difficulties but emphasizes his resolutions of them.”⁹ Yeats himself, in a Journal entry for January, 1929, notes that “The one reason for putting our actual situation into our art is that the struggle for complete affirmation may be, often must be, that art's chief poignancy.”¹⁰ Taking the phrase “our actual situation” in a narrower sense than Yeats uses it in this entry, we can say that the reason for letting as much Irish life as possible into the novel is not to justify the necessity for exile or resignation; instead, the justification is that the acceptance, which may become affirmation, will have as its foundation an open-eyed awareness of what is singularly grim in Irish life as well as an awareness that much of what is grim in it is common to life generally. Even if the affirmation cannot be complete, the poignancy of the struggle becomes the poignancy shared by all men who care for such things. If, therefore, the Irish novel is to become a distinctive thing, the novelist will have to avoid the formulas of exile or resignation and concentrate on acceptance in the rich variety of modes suggested by the great modern Irish writers.

Notes

1. Devin A. Garrity, ed., Irish Stories and Tales (New York, 1957), p. vii.

2. (New York, 1964), p. 8.

3. (Cleveland, 1963), p. 206.

4. Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn (London, 1962), p. 186.

5. (New York, 1920), p. 73.

6. “Praise God for Ireland,” The Kilkenny Magazine (Spring-Summer, 1966), 129.

7. (Norfolk, Conn., 1963), p. 76.

8. (New York, 1935), p. 4.

9. The Identity of Yeats (New York, 1954), p. 238.

10. Op. cit., p. 240.