James Joyce’s Home Rule Comet, Elvis Costello’s Anglo-Irish Agreement

• Main Author: Dermot Kelly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses 2007-03-01
• Series: Estudios Irlandeses
• Subjects: James Joyce; Elvis Costello; Discrimination; Catholicism; Punk; Diaspora; Emigrants; Nationalism
• Online Access: http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/JoyceCostelloDermotKelly.pdf

It is a truism that Anglo-Irish relations did not progress in the eighty odd years between Joyce’s Trieste lectures and articles and Elvis Costello’s King of America album. If anything they regressed. As Declan Kiberd and others have noted, Joyce foresaw the partitioning of Ireland and, as Greil Marcus has shown, the dark melodies of Costello’s 1986 album are an acrid response to Thatcherism. Tracks like “Sleep of the Just” and “Little Palaces” are threnodies of diaspora. Of course Joyce was prophetic and my reading of Ulysses enables me to fill in the backstory of Marcus’s visceral lines about “Little Palaces” in his 1986 Artforum review: for instance, Bloom’s speech from the dock when he is accused of assaulting the serving girl Mary Driscoll actually reveals the unhappiness of this immigrant’s son. My paper traces continuities of Irish dispossession from Joyce’s “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” lecture to Costello’s “Little Palaces” on the one hand and from the Trieste lecture on Mangan to “Sleep of the Just” on the other. I conclude with reflections on Irish absurdism and the seachange in Joyce studies occasioned by the work of critics like Seamus Deane who foreshadowed the Northern Ireland peace process with essays like “Joyce and Nationalism” (1982).