Epilogue: Writing Dublin after Joyce

Abstract

It has been a recurring theme of this book that Irish writing about Dublin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in some respects, inflected by a broad sense of anticipation that some form of Irish independence was by then inevitable, and that the representation of the city reflected the cultural tensions that it engendered. The question that occurs, then, is what challenges face the writer in representing Dublin after that moment, forming as it does a kind of illusory telos towards which the imaginary re-inscription of the city as a site of meaning had hitherto been aimed? Perhaps more pertinently, Ulysses itself appeared to mark a more comprehensive endpoint for the act of novelistic representation itself, let alone that of Dublin city. Benedict Kiely’s 1950 assertion that since Joyce ‘the Irish novel has failed to keep up with the development of modern Dublin’ has since gone largely unchallenged (although, of course, that assertion came too early to account for James Plunkett’s Strumpet City) (47). Augustine Martin’s 1984 essay ‘Novelist and City: the Technical Challenge’ focuses primarily on Joyce, who is treated as having few significant Irish pre-cursors or imitators. Those who do emerge, he argues, ‘revert to the older pre-Joycean patterns’ in their approach to the city (48).