'As Good As Any Bloody Play in the Queen's Royal Theatre': Performing the Nation in the 'Cyclops' Episode of Ulysses (James Joyce) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In their introduction to a seminal collection of essays, Semicolonial Joyce, Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge observe that 'The rise of postcolonial perspectives in Irish studies has generated a good deal of controversy, nowhere more so than in Joyce scholarship; in a 1996 review, Colm Toibin quipped that "the battle for the soul of Joyce has become almost as intense in recent years as the battle for the GPO in Easter Week."' (1) In the course of this intense and unresolved battle, commenced in the early 1990s, the unified portrait of Joyce as an apolitical modernist and cosmopolitan aesthete has become splintered into multiple, often conflicting portraits. Thus, Joyce has been described as a modern Irish writer with variously assessed nationalist leanings; (2) an Irish writer, whose textual politics can be associated with subaltern practices; (3) an author occupying the same strategic location as Irish revisionist historians; (4) or a split colonial subject partly caught in the discursive nets of nationalism. (5) In the course of postcolonial re-readings of Joyce's texts the 'Cyclops' episode of Ulysses has attracted particular attention, since it is in 'Cyclops' that Joyce most explicitly deals with issues of imperialism and nationalism. With the postcolonial turn the almost unanimous critical conception of the chapter's politics in terms of the author's moral and satirical repudiation of Irish nationalism has become diversified into often conflicting assessments. This has greatly been facilitated by the increasing tendency to read the text against diverse discursive backgrounds. My reading of the chapter aims to participate in this ongoing critical enterprise by revisiting how it engages with the discourses of cultural nationalism. More particularly, I shall focus on how the perfomative dimension of the episode renegofiates Irish cultural nationalism. (6)