Irish Studies: Alcohol and Irish Identity
Organizer: Rob Doggett, SUNY, Geneseo
doggett@geneseo.edu
Secretary: Tom Zelman, College of St. Scholastica

Scott L. Rogers

University of Louisville

srogers1@unm.edu

“Just You Try It On”: Pub Culture and Intoxicated Rhetoric in James Joyce’s Ulysses

In this paper I examine the representation of pub culture in Joyce’s Ulysses and the manner in which Joyce may (or may not) be using that space to complicate stereotypical notions of Ireland and the Irish. By 1904, the still prevalent association of Ireland with alcohol was already well established and Joyce’s representations of consumption and temperance—in Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom respectively—signal an awareness of stereotypes on Joyce’s part. I suggest that, of the many political/cultural subtexts to be found in Ulysses, the tensions that arise over alcohol are the most useful for mapping out the conflict between the desire for an autonomous Ireland and the realities of an Ireland still subject to British rule. Additionally, I argue that the many intoxicated characters of Joyce’s novel are speaking from a previously undefined rhetorical space, that of intoxication, and that from this rhetorical position they both reaffirm and challenge notions of what it means to be a native son in Dublin at a critical moment in Ireland’s history. By analyzing the ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episodes in particular, I attempt to articulate Joyce’s strategic use of alcohol as both catalyst and conduit for a discussion of personal and political Ireland.

Kelly J.S. McGovern

University of Maryland, College Park

mcgovern@umd.edu

(703) 979-5658

1425 S Eads St #908

Arlington, VA 22202

“No point in drinkin’ out of the bottle, huh?”: Masculinity and Disability in Irish Film

Wheelchair races. Bendy straws. And Guinness. These motifs structure two recent Irish films, John Crowley’s Intermission (2003) and Damien O’Donnell’s Rory O’Shea Was Here (2004), which present contemporary Irish masculinity in the midst of an identity crisis, searching for ways to imagine itself as simultaneously sensitive to difference and also authentically Irish. Both rely heavily on the consumption of Guinness, even Guinness drunk through a bendy straw, to signal that authenticity. Intermission scrambles to present a version of Irish masculinity, enriched by sensitivity, that will successfully emerge from the Celtic Tiger, despite mounting anxieties about the boom’s long-term stability. For its part, Rory O’Shea Was Here takes a closer look at how disabled subjects can earn independence in contemporary Ireland by exposing Ireland’s institutional structure as disabling the disabled; the film follows Michael’s emotional development, which can only occur after he leaves the institutional confines of Carrigmore Residential Home. On the other hand, a 1989, pre-Celtic Tiger film, Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, displays Christy Brown’s as enabled by institutional services, having struggled to assert his subjectivity. My paper will explore the role alcohol consumption plays in registering Irish configurations of disability and masculinity in order to examine how the Celtic Tiger economy has affected masculine and disabled Irish identities.

Rob Doggett

SUNY, Geneseo

217B Welles Hall

Geneseo, NY 14454

Doggett@geneseo.edu

W. B. Yeats and a Series of (Unfortunate) Drinking Songs

Late in life, Yeats wrote a series of poems that were intended to double as drinking songs. They are certainly not his best poems, and it is doubtful that any “Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter” has ever accompanied the singing of, say, “Come Gather Round Me Parnellites,” with its corny final lines: “But stories that live longest / Are sung above the glass, / And Parnell loved his country / And Parnell loved his lass.” For his part, Yeats preferred sherry to Guinness and aristocratic drawing rooms to pubs, yet his attempts at writing drinking songs are understandable when considered in terms of his conception of national communities take shape. For Yeats, modern society, with its emphasis on rationality, mechanization, and political rhetoric, enforced what he described as artificial or “abstract” connections among individuals. As an alternative, Yeats envisioned a community organically or (even) mystically bound together, a community that takes shape outside of the rational world of modern culture. In this talk, I will first suggest that Yeats’s drinking songs are an attempt, at the level of peasant culture, to engender precisely these types of connections. I will then go on to show how the poems reveal the anxieties and political contradictions at the core of Yeats’s peculiar vision of unified Irish nation.