In a recent review of Edna Longley's latest collection of essays—The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland—Norman Vance notes that “Irish Literature, fraught with tradition, has a reputation for endlessly re-reading itself, not necessarily with value added, under the misapprehension that it is reading ‘Ireland,’ whatever and wherever that might be” (43). At times, such re-readings may be accused of self-serving revisionism, and “It requires great faith in literature to believe that Irish literature itself can correct ideological astigmatism and promote new ways of seeing …” (43). As Vance and Longley point out, perhaps there is a need to discard “anachronistic critical tools, such as the ‘post-colonial pastry-cutter’” (43). Certainly there is something of an exercise to sifting through modern Irish literature for discourses on the “Irish Question” and the colonial legacy, especially if one merely looks for what Vance calls the “archaic forced oppositions” that characterize the nationalist/unionist conflict (44). There is also nothing original about the notion that Irish literature itself often examines the ongoing fallout of past political upheavals with greater acuity than the arid polemics of political theory. However, re-reading Irish literature for tensions other than the usual binary conflicts of culture and creed reveals the pervasiveness of the myth that ethnic identities in Ireland can be pegged out by simply constructing exclusive religious, cultural, and political hierarchies.

Two short stories that explore the complexities of Irish identity are James Joyce's “Two Gallants” and William Trevor's “Two More Gallants,” a clever adaptation of Joyce's tale. Like Joyce, Trevor recounts an act of deception: this time a college student enlists an old woman in a scheme to humiliate a Joyce scholar who believes he has discovered Joyce's source for the “slavey” in “Two Gallants.” Apart from the narrative similarities between both stories, Trevor's depiction of contemporary Dublin and its citizens serves as an updated commentary on the legacy of Ireland's colonial experience. Both Joyce and Trevor's stories obliquely reveal how Irish men, conditioned by the historical weight of colonization, are partly responsible for their inability to transcend their sense of cultural alienation and inferiority. In the course of the two stories, both writers unveil the gulf between ordinary Dubliners and those Dublin landmarks whose political and cultural significance represent how difficult it is to construct an homogeneous Irish identity. In addition, both writers portray a paralyzed and self-destructive patriarchy whose exploitation of women results from a diverted aggression against the prevailing cultural and political status quo. Another consequence of Ireland's colonial past that Joyce explores is the way in which Irish cultural icons become politicized emblemata enlisted to serve the nationalist cause. Trevor also deftly probes the Irish response to the colonial experience by examining how some Irish men's lack of self-esteem is manifested in an astringent anti-intellectualism. A closer look at both stories' submerged narrative tensions may also clarify Joyce and Trevor's shared perspectives on the complexity of Irish identity and the self-defeating construction of opposing political and cultural homogenies that embrace narrowly exclusivist interpretations of Irish ethnicity and history.

Ireland's landscape is imbued with such an overwhelming awareness of the past that history, religion, and politics constantly interfere with the interpretation of current experiences. Such is the case in Joyce and Trevor's short fiction. Bernard Benstock notes that in Dubliners “700 years of English rule weigh heavily in the atmosphere of these stories …” (46). Trevor himself acknowledges that “In Ireland you can escape neither politics nor history, for when you travel through the country today the long conflict its landscape has known does not readily belong in the far-away past as Hastings or Stamford Bridge does for the English” (A Writer's Ireland 51). Certainly, Joyce and Trevor's depiction of Dublin reveals a political and cultural gulf between the characters and the landmarks they frequent. This alienation between character and landscape indicates not only how Ireland's colonial past continues to promote a sense of cultural submissiveness in some Irish men, but also how a constricted nationalist ethos contributes to a general sense of “apathy and defeatism” (Benstock 46).

In “Two Gallants,” Corley and Lenehan's odyssey through the heart of Dublin takes the reader on a tour of several centuries of Irish history. Among the more noteworthy sights they pass together or separately are Rutland Square, Trinity College, Kildare Street, the Duke's Lawn on the “west side of Merrion Square West,” and Dame Street (Gifford 60). Apart from the obviously ironic juxtapositions—Corley brags to Lenehan about his ensuing “dodge” with the “good slavey” while they saunter past some of Ascendancy Ireland's notable landmarks—Joyce's meticulous recording of Corley and Lenehan's routes also reminds us of the extent of Anglo-Irish influence on Irish history. More importantly, though, the historical significance of these landmarks and Corley and Lenehan's perceived alienation from them suggest that “the Anglo-Irish tradition was a threat to the ideal of a distinct Irish nationality,” and Joyce saw this “battle of the two civilisations … [as] pointless” (Manganiello 25). He also endorsed a more inclusivist definition of Irish nationality. In his essay “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce argued that “to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible, and 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 …” (Critical Writings 161-62). Clearly Joyce rejected the assumption that Irish identity must be linguistically and culturally grounded.

Closer examination of Corley and Lenehan's routes reveals the ubiquity of Ireland's colonial past and the extent to which these representative Irish men are marginalized from the prevailing cultural ethos. When we first encounter the two young men, they are coming “down the hill of Rutland Square” (Joyce, Dubliners 52). Named after one of Ireland's first Lord Lieutenants, Rutland Square had been home to “eleven peers, two bishops, and twelve M.P.'s” (Clarke 80). The fact that so many of Dublin's grandees lived in this residential area and that the square is named after one of them reveals the geopolitical significance of the city's landscape. Places like Rutland Square recall Ireland's colonial heritage and illustrate how one tradition subjugates another by privileging its own historical narrative. (Joyce may have enjoyed the irony that Rutland Square was later renamed Parnell Square shortly after the formation of the Irish Republic.)

Later, Corley and Lenehan pass another reminder of Ascendancy privilege—Trinity College. As Ireland's oldest college, Trinity was for centuries where the Anglo-Irish establishment sent its sons to be educated, and Catholics were not admitted until 1873 (Clarke 122). As Corley and Lenehan walk past Trinity, the College's “railings” signify the school's cultural and political elitism and mark the boundary between a privileged Ascendancy and ordinary Dubliners (Joyce, Dubliners 57).

Not much later, Corley and Lenehan reach the Kildare Street club, another symbol of Ascendancy entitlement. The original club burned down in 1860, and a new structure—the one to which Joyce refers—was erected farther down the street (Clarke 106). However, this relocation did not alter its reputation as a “landlords' club,” where pro-unionist and anti-Home Rule sentiment still prevailed (108).

Finally, after Corley and Lenehan separate, Lenehan passes the Duke's Lawn, allowing “his hand to run along” the railings (Joyce, Dubliners 60). This landmark has political and cultural importance, too: named after the Duke of Leinster, it was “the lawn of Leinster House,” and in 1900, the Royal Dublin Society was located there (Gifford 60). Once again, the “railings” signify the exclusivity of Anglo-Irish culture.

While Corley and Lenehan represent a self-defeated race still suppressed by colonial rule, Joyce also implies that their moral and cultural paralysis directly results from their inability as Irish men to locate an identity outside the dominant colonial culture; in fact, its architecture surrounds them. However, Corley and Lenehan are hardly passive victims; they contribute to their own cultural and political disenfranchisement. Corley's shallow consciousness of a broader vision of himself and Lenehan's failure to act despite recognizing that his life consists only of nugatory routines (“shifts and intrigues”) demonstrate how both men act out their assigned roles as marginalized elements at the bottom of a colonial hierarchy (Dubliners 62).

Joyce also identifies a more subtle consequence of colonialism's smothering presence. As representative Irish men, Corley and Lenehan passively accept their diminished role. For example, the height of Lenehan's ambition is to “settle down in some snug corner and live happily” with a “simple-minded girl” (Dubliners 62). If Corley and Lenehan's apathy is symptomatic of their status as the colonized, it also implies that they, too, reject the idea that Irish ethnicity and culture consist of several religious, cultural, and political strains that blur traditional fault-lines. By accepting their cultural and political subjugation, Corley and Lenehan subscribe to the notion that Irish history can be largely interpreted as an ongoing conflict between two rival traditions.

While Joyce's catalogue of Dublin's historical landmarks serves as a political backdrop to emphasize the common citizenry's cultural disaffection, William Trevor's contemporary depiction of the city streets' historical resonances obliquely reveals how Irish men still struggle to come to terms with their country's colonial past. Though not as obtrusively weighted by the Ascendancy's legacy as Joyce's Dublin, Trevor's city landscape still retains visual reminders of the colonial past, a past that keeps the reader “conscious of political and historical forces and circumstances that limit individual freedom and fulfillment” (Schirmer 124).

In Trevor's “Two More Gallants,” the narrator listens while Fitzpatrick, one of the story's two protagonists, recounts how over 30 years earlier his former friend Heffernan had masterminded a cruel act of deception on Professor Flacks, a Joyce scholar. Heffernan absurdly took offense to the professor's gibe about the length of Heffernan's tenure as a student at the College. As the story is recounted, both the narrator and Fitzpatrick sit in College Park watching a cricket match. Several ironies emerge here. First of all, there is the reminder of Trinity's Ascendancy tradition of cultural elitism. As a sport, cricket has always been a major colonial export. Its evocation of gentlemanly competitiveness, its associations with English village Arcadia, and its imperial hubris and decorum (players wear white linens and break for “tea”) demonstrate the inherent values of the ascendant culture. The narrator and Fitzpatrick play the passive roles of spectators. By the end of the story, they are still “watching cricket in College Park” (News [The News from Ireland and Other Stories] 261). Also noteworthy here is how cricket functions as a leitmotif that signifies how vestiges of colonialism still remain part of the fabric of Dublin society to this day. Our two speakers' physical immobility during the retelling of the tale contrasts their native inertia to the ongoing vitality of the colonial presence.

Another landmark laden with historical import that features prominently in Trevor's story is St. Stephen's Green. In the eighteenth century, this square was Dublin's most exclusive residential area, and today, it is the site of a memorial to the poet Yeats (Clarke 75, 79). Like Joyce, though, Trevor introduces a situational irony to reveal the two Dubliners' complicity in their own subjugation. Both Heffernan and Fitzpatrick loiter on St. Stephen's Green on summer evenings “in the hope of picking up girls” (News 257). The two students' carnal exploits contrast vividly with the Green's rich cultural past and present, and this ironic juxtaposition subtly displays how the Ascendancy's imposing cultural ethos distorts any native attempt to construct an aesthetically enlightened alternative culture.

While Joyce and Trevor's references to important Dublin landmarks illustrate the pervasiveness of Ireland's colonial past in the modern Irish experience, both writers' narratives possess another subsurface tension. In both stories, the exploitation of women represents a parasitic Irish patriarchy's active corruption and degradation of Irish women. Joyce and Trevor's sordid portrayal of Irish manhood suggests that a major by-product of colonialism is the emasculation of the Irish male ego, and the deprivation of traditional male roles for many Irish men leads to them sublimating their rage against the ruling order by resorting to crime. While “Joyce's ‘Two Gallants' prey upon the naive romanticism of gullible women” (Brunsdale 16), Trevor's “Two More Gallants” implicate an old woman in their ignoble conspiracy and thus make her a willing accessory to her own moral degradation.

In “Two Gallants,” Corley and Lenehan view women as simple, naïve creatures who exist only for sexual and material gratification. Corley recalls with obvious pleasure how the “fine tart” he spotted under “Waterhouse's clock” brought him cigars and paid the return fare for them both on the Donnybrook tram (Joyce, Dubliners 53-54). He also gloats about how easy it is to deceive women: “She thinks I'm a bit of class, you know” (54). And later, he dismisses courtship as a “mug's game” (56). Lenehan's attitude toward women is not as self-arrogating, though. With unconscious irony, he tells Corley that “You can never know women” (55) but later reveals his own Cro-Magnon estimation of a woman's worth when he confesses to himself that all he really needs is a “good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready” (62). Corley and Lenehan's retrograde treatment of women and their subsequent corruption of the girl “broadens the issue beyond man's betrayal of woman to a debasement of Ireland itself” (Brunsdale 16). The shameless subterfuge they employ to obtain a gold coin from the girl's employers indicates how Corley and Lenehan operate outside the Anglo-Irish establishment's social order, but their complicitous role in demeaning themselves, Irish womanhood, and their country uncovers another indirect consequence of colonial rule: Irish male chauvinism.

On numerous occasions in his essays and fiction, Joyce made it clear that he could not tolerate the “extremes of chauvinism”; indeed, he believed that “chauvinism has often been the natural concomitant of a nationalistic awakening, and has been spurred rather than discouraged by an accompanying defeatism” (Benstock 81, 70). Certainly in “Two Gallants,” we see female disempowerment as the end result of the work of two specious, exploitative deviants, yet Joyce's unflattering portrayal of the Irish male ego does not simply insinuate that Corley and Lenehan's patronizing behavior toward women is due to the lingering side-effects of colonialism. As the politically and culturally disenfranchised, Corley and Lenehan continue to bear the burden of the colonial past, but their exploitation of women is a covert act of complicity with the colonialist ideology that subjugates them. Even if we can excuse their deception as a rather pathetic attempt to retaliate against the presiding Anglo-Irish establishment and go as far as to classify it as a political act, there is still the preservation of the gender status quo to confront. In her essay on the depiction of women in contemporary Irish poetry, Patricia Coughlan argues that in Irish literature women are constantly “associated with that which is material,” and that beneath the critique of political systems, Irish women are portrayed as either “icons of ideal domesticity” or as passive creatures who exist for men's pleasure (90, 99, 108). In “Two Gallants,” Corley and Lenehan's “dodge” illustrates how, as Irish men, they shirk the responsibility of responding to the Anglo-Irish presence in a constructive and self-actualizing fashion. By denying Irish women respect, they further degrade themselves and reinforce the Irish lout stereotype popularized by colonial supremacists. The victims have become the victimizers.

Trevor's “Two More Gallants” also reveals a submerged gender conflict. Both Heffernan and Fitzpatrick view women as sexual playthings, too. In fact, sexual conquests function as a game in which the male ego seeks self-affirmation from a successful score on game night. When Heffernan recalls the night he came up with the idea of deceiving Professor Flacks, he jogs Fitzpatrick's poor memory by reminding him that “It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum” (News 255). Fitzpatrick's attempt to recount the details about that “great girl” is quickly swept aside by Heffernan's self-absorption with his own scheme (255).

If Fitzpatrick's desire for sexual conquest signifies his misdirected aggression toward the ruling status quo, there is also something of the mock-heroic about it. While Heffernan helps his friend recall important dates from their personal history by recollecting one of Fitzpatrick's evenings of debauchery, the Dublin landscape honors the names of those who helped shape modern Ireland. In contrast to this civic commemoration of Dublin's historical past, Heffernan and Fitzpatrick mark their shabby little achievements by recalling cheap, prurient encounters with a debauched Irish womanhood.

Apart from the obvious reduction of women to chattel, Trevor's story illustrates another form of female exploitation. In this case, Heffernan recruits an elderly maid who works in Fitzpatrick's digs in Donnybrook to play her part in the subsequent hoax. Heffernan instructs the old woman to tell Flacks how as a young girl working as a maid in a dentist's office she had met Joyce and told him about her sad affair with Corley and the loss of her job. In the ensuing entrapment, in which the old maid convinces Flacks that she is the source for Joyce's “Two Gallants,” Heffernan contributes to the old woman's delinquency in order to gain revenge for an offhand remark Flacks had made concerning Heffernan's longevity as a student (News 253-55). Once again, an Irishman resorts to unchivalric means to enact a mean-spirited reprisal at the so-called establishment. Heffernan restores his fragile ego only through the abnegation of the feminine ego. By bribing the old maid, he attempts to regain his self-worth by imagining that his act is a rejection of the system (Flacks and the College), but he achieves his goal at the cost of degrading an Irish woman.

Unlike Joyce's “slavey,” who appears to be an unwitting dupe of Corley and Lenehan's, Trevor's elderly maid actively participates in her own degradation. She delights in playing her role in the ruse, for “she'd do anything for a scrap of the ready” (News 256-57). In this case, selfish gain is not exclusive to gender, and Trevor wisely insinuates that human frailties can not always be attributed to environmental factors: the old woman was simply “possessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her” (257).

Ultimately Joyce and Trevor demonstrate the failure of some Irish men to construct a self-affirming response to colonial tyranny, and their consequent inferiority complex leads many of them to treat Irish women as a depository for their repressed aggression. Another effect of Ascendancy rule in Ireland that Joyce explores is how Irish cultural icons become endowed with political connotations to render them serviceable to nationalist ideology.

In “Two Gallants,” Corley and Lenehan pass by a harpist playing in front of the club on Kildare Street. In this scene, Joyce skillfully interplays several ironies that provide implicit commentary on the legacy of colonialism. First of all, Ireland's political and cultural symbol is demeaned. A busker plays the harp outside the club for the “entertainment … [of] the affluent representatives of Ireland's conquerors …, prostituting his talent … for a scrap of daily bread” (Brunsdale 17). We also see Irish art degraded as the harpist plays “heedlessly” and glances “wearily also, at the sky” on a shabby Dublin street (Dubliners 57). Joyce recognizes how colonialism debases Irish culture. The harp, Ireland's most poetic and visionary symbol, no longer celebrates a Celtic ethos, for, like Irish men, it has been rendered irrelevant by an intrusive alien culture and now produces a “mournful music” despoiled by tawdry commercialism (57).

Endowed also with an imaginative richness, the harp represents Irish expression and identity. A reminder of Ireland's Gaelic past, its notes play the plaintive melodies of a submerged Irish culture. In this respect, the harp personifies for many nationalists the whole idea of a Celtic identity set apart from an intrusive Anglo one. With considerable irony, Joyce depicts how important a role symbols play in mustering up allegiances to a sense of nationhood. The advent of colonialism led nationalists to eagerly reclaim ancient Irish symbols like the harp, and, as Joyce's portrayal of the harp's degradation implies, the harp's aestheticism is not as important now as its political associations. For all of its rich evocations of Irish art, the harp now stands as Irish nationalism's most ostentatious symbol, and the greatest irony of colonial conquest is that colonialism necessitated the creation of the myth of an heroic national struggle. It is no secret that before the plantation of Ireland, no true sense of national identity existed in Ireland: “Ireland was characterized by a fragmented polity: [there were] varieties of peoples, defining their ‘Irishness’ differently” (Foster 3). Joyce's portrayal of the harp's degradation in front of the club ultimately reveals how contemporary nationalist ideology owes its consolidation to the colonial occupation.

Just as Joyce's story examines the politicization of Irish cultural symbols, William Trevor's “Two More Gallants” explores how Irish anti-intellectualism is a by-product of Irish men's repressed aggression against colonial rule. In Trevor's story, rebellion against the colonial ethos is expressed through the repudiation of the Ascendancy's most prestigious center of learning.

A vigorous disdain for intellectuals exists throughout the “Two More Gallants” narrative. Heffernan, the perennial student—the College porters recall his “presence over fifteen years”—avoids graduation in order to receive a legacy that will expire once he is no longer a student (Trevor, News 251). When a fellow student offers tutorial help for the proficiency test in “general studies,” Heffernan dismisses him as a “minion of Flacks” (257). Indeed, Heffernan's conspiracy paranoia is superseded only by his intellectual jealousy: he regards Professor Flacks as nothing more than a “bloody showoff” (253). Other details imply that Heffernan's hatred of the intelligentsia is due in part to his equating academia with an alien culture. The College's Anglo-Irish heritage is obvious, but it is noted that Professor Flacks is “a man from the North of Ireland,” which implies that Heffernan may associate Flacks with an Ulster culture that does not conform to his own concept of Irishness (251). Whatever the case, Heffernan's personal vendetta feeds his hatred for intellectuals, and his actions once again illustrate that his need for self-affirmation can only be achieved through the subjugation of another ego. By squandering his academic opportunities and seeking fulfillment through a spiteful act, Heffernan secures his own spiritual paralysis. Going nowhere, he gains fleeting pleasure from an absurd little game of one-upmanship. Like many of the characters in Joyce's Dubliners, Heffernan's journey toward self-awareness rotates within the same small orbit, cut off from any higher plane of experience. Years after the Professor Flacks affair, Heffernan still frequents the same public houses, ignoring the advice of his doctor (250). However, his malicious act not only destroys a man's reputation and sends him to an early grave—Flacks dies a year after his public humiliation—but also betrays a fellow Irish man. Heffernan's deception ultimately lends credence to Joyce's barb that it is Ireland who sends “Her writers and artists to banishment / And in the spirit of Irish fun / Betray[s] her own leaders, one by one” (Critical Writings 243).

Fitzpatrick's failure to intercede and prevent Heffernan's hoax also demonstrates the self-defeatism of Irish anti-intellectualism. During the whole intrigue, Fitzpatrick blithely accepts Heffernan's account of Professor Flacks's character despite the fact that he has never met the man. He also shows little knowledge of Joyce, the writer, for he initially assumes that Heffernan's recitation of the “Two Gallants” narrative is “about a couple of fellow-students whom he couldn't place” (Trevor, News 254). Later when Heffernan asks Fitzpatrick to attend Professor Flacks's lecture on the exciting new discovery of Joyce's source for “Two Gallants,” Fitzpatrick suspects that the whole “occasion was certain to be tedious” and perhaps “he'd be able to have a sleep” (258). Like Heffernan, Fitzpatrick appears incapable of self-discovery and, content with his low-brow existence, observes life rather than lives it, accepts life as ritual rather than actual. However, unlike Heffernan, who is snared by his misperceptions about his immediate reality, Fitzpatrick later outgrows his mental myopia. He tells Heffernan “to go to hell” when the hoax's implications become apparent, and, 30 years later, he works as a partner in a law firm and cycles to work everyday in obedience to his doctor's orders (News 260, 250). Fitzpatrick evidently outgrows the hypersensitivity to ego and lack of commitment that bury the life of his erstwhile friend.

Clearly William Trevor's most caustic portrayal of the Irish man's anti-intellectualism, though, emerges in Heffernan's public humiliation of Professor Flacks and the exploitation of Irish literature. During the conference organized by “The Society of the Friends of James Joyce,” Heffernan discloses that the elderly maid's story is a fabrication (News 257). His victory over Flacks is a Pyrrhic one, though. Far from merely representing the ruling Anglo cultural elite, Flacks has actively supported Irish writers and Irish literature. Indeed, he has initiated the sponsorship of a “Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life” (252-53). Flacks also engaged in his own form of cultural endorsement, championing Joyce's work while many mainstream British authors “were all bundled away …” (252). Heffernan's deception, then, assumes broader implications, for he betrays a compatriot who actively supported the development of Irish art and literature. This deceit also recalls the many historical parallels in which Irish leaders have been betrayed by their own people. Another bitter irony here is how Joyce—an Irish literary institution himself—becomes a weapon wielded in the service of an ignorant grudge. Heffernan takes advantage of the attention given to an Irish author in order to ridicule an Irish scholar, and his act not only reveals the destructive nature of internecine conflict (Heffernan v Flacks), but also implies how Irish self-defeatism becomes so ingrained that any attempt at cultural or political amelioration is regarded either with suspicion or contempt, especially if it is erroneously perceived as an act of collusion with the ruling order.

Trevor also recognizes the absurd lengths to which some modern scholars pick over Joyce's work like fastidious monkeys grooming for fleas (an American woman “spoke briefly about Joyce's use of misprints”), but despite the risible jabs at academia, we never lose sight of the more serious ramifications surrounding Heffernan's deception (News 260). Flacks's “gaffe” becomes “quite famous,” and his sudden death confirms the tragic import of Heffernan's deed (261). But perhaps Trevor's story concludes with the implication that not all of Ireland's problems can be traced to the stress of responding to the colonial legacy, for he locates Heffernan's false pride, the old woman's “miserliness,” and Fitzpatrick's self-confessed “laziness” within “our cobweb of human frailty” (261).

If Ireland's colonial past leads some Irish men to exploit it as a comfortable crutch for all the sources of their inadequacies, thus enabling them to accept their roles as minor characters in an ongoing drama, then a possible panacea for this conditioned dependency lies in Fitzpatrick's courageous recognition that such passivity eventually contributes to the diminution of the individual will. Heffernan's actions illustrate how in Ireland it is often easier to cling to coherent miseries in a land where thought is too often replaced by the paralysis of memory.

In light of the submerged cultural tensions found in these two stories, it is tempting to read Joyce and Trevor's stories as a political diptych: a sort of during and after portrayal of Ireland's colonial experience. No doubt such a reading could imply that Joyce foresaw how Ireland's unresolved disputes and potentially explosive internecine animosities would soon spill over into a national crisis. Likewise, it could be argued that Trevor's story implies that Irish apathy and self-defeatism may be attributable to a severe bout of post-imperial tristesse. Unfortunately, such interpretations echo with naïve gravity the customary binary response to the “Irish Question”: that it remains a simple issue of national identity involving the two hostile camps of nationalism and unionism. While Joyce saw how the effects of colonial rule in Ireland continue to complicate the quest for an inclusive Irish identity, his and Trevor's depiction of the frailties of ordinary Irish people suggests that political, religious, and cultural rivalries are always muddied by human error and weakness. To this end, their portraits of common Dubliners in all their shabbiness and petty jealousies remind us that Ireland's inter- and intraethnic and cultural conflicts cannot be solved if nationalists and unionists continue to subscribe to constricted views of history and practice their own brand of cultural essentialism.

Works Cited

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Vance, Norman. “Light in the Twilight.” Fortnight Nov. 1994: 43-44.