Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright

By Sheldon Brivic

In Irish fiction, the most famous example of the embrace of damnation in order to gain freedom—politically, religiously, and creatively—is Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His "non serviam," though, is not just the profound rebellion of one frustrated young man, but, as Brivic demonstrates in this sweeping account of twentieth-century Irish fiction, the emblematic and necessary standpoint for any
artist wishing to envision something truly new. Revolutionary fervor is what allowed a country with a population lower than that of Connecticut to produce so many of the greatest writers of the twentiety century.

Because Irish culture was largely dictated by the Catholic Church and its conservatism, the most ambitious Irish writers, like Joyce, Beckett, and the ten others Brivic presents here, saw the advantages of damnation and seized them, rejecting powerful norms of church, state, and culture, as well as of literary form, voice, and character, to produce some of the most radical work of the twentieth century. Brivic links the work of writers such as Flann O’Brien, Patrick McCabe, and Anne Enright to the theories of Alain Badiou. His mathematical procedure for distinguishing what is truly innovative informs the progressive political and philosophical thrust that these writers at their best carry on from Joyce and Beckett to unfold a fierce tradition that extends into the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: May 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780815653578

Book preview

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Introduction

The Radical Irish Renaissance and Badiou

The Radical Irish Renaissance

Irish literature in the twentieth century was moved by a revolution that intensified its insight and innovation, propelling it into a radical philosophical advancement that put it in the vanguard of modern intellectual striving, as exemplified by the international resonance of Joyce and Beckett. New ideas of freedom generated by these writers inspired a series of Irish novelists to write searching works that interrogated the political, psychological, and philosophical organization of society and pointed toward new conceptions for Ireland and the world. This revolution in thought began with a renaissance that shifted the country from a colony to a nation, and transformed it from a mindset dominated by medieval notions to a modern one. I will examine a series of brilliant Irish novelists from Joyce to Anne Enright, or from 1915 to 2015, to trace the unfolding of this intellectual breakthrough.

Declan Kiberd explains this transition in comprehensive cultural terms in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, focusing on such independent innovations as the self-invented man or woman (1995, 6). But Kiberd’s outlook is more humanist and less theoretical than mine, and our interpretations rarely overlap. Vicki Mahaffey indicates why the liberating drive of Ireland led to such patterns as fortuitous and transitory connections that work against a stable object or attitude that resists play in States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (1998, 5). Her alignment of postcolonialism with radical philosophical ideas (mainly Gilles Deleuze’s) has much in common with my thinking. But Mahaffey ends with Joyce, the figure with whom I begin, and does not examine either of the novels of his that I discuss.

Joyce said that the Ireland he grew up in was a medieval world (Power, 1974, 92), and the medievalism that was rife in Irish culture late in the nineteenth century sprang from programmatic decisions by Church leaders, as I will indicate.¹ I hold that Joyce’s militant Jesuit education prepared him to rebel into stronger innovations than moderation might have generated. I will delineate extreme features of the idea of a renaissance to explain why Irish fiction has had such far-reaching effects on European and American thinking. The main European Renaissance brought out systems of belief that were alternatives to Catholicism, such as Protestantism, occultism, and classical mythology—all features of the Irish renaissance, with the classics complemented by Celtic myths. In the Irish, Southern, and Harlem renaissances, feudal societies were confronted with modern ideas.²

C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler say the Renaissance passes from a ritual and ceremonial view of life with absolute assumptions about meaning and reality, toward a psychological and historical view (1986, 19), a shift from the sacred to the profane. The Christian Shakespearean Ewan Fernie argues in The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2013) that modern culture begins in the Renaissance with an emphasis on what is damnable as the source of individualism, and modern experience remains based on demonic opposition (De, 3).

A renaissance may be the strongest stage of cultural production because it juxtaposes the intensity of absolute belief with the intellectual vitality of freedom.³ Earlier writers had limited ability to choose perspectives, while later ones can choose more freely, but their choices have less weight. The dreadfulness of the choice to displace tradition may charge the writer with a conviction that drives her onward. The most powerful choice takes one outside of what is acceptable, and the stronger one’s attachment to tradition, the more this step resembles sin that leads to damnation.

When Stephen Dedalus begins to pursue vice in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, an action of self-expression that leads toward his becoming an artist, he feels that his soul lusted after its own destruction (P, 104), but this awareness seems to spur him onward rather than stopping him: knowing how harshly it is forbidden may make freedom more attractive. Saint Augustine, one of Joyce’s main sources,⁴ analyzes his youthful attraction to sin: I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for what I had fallen but my fall itself (City of God, 14.13). This passage is cited by Fernie (De, 14), who argues that evil, in its rejection of what is accepted, involves a potential for creativity that may be a central component of the Good in modern culture (De, 10). In line with this tendency, Stephen consistently maintains that the only way to develop himself is through sin (P, 103, 203).⁵

Such a turn toward resistance extracts the imaginative aspect of religion from its restrictive one so as to reformulate its creative ideals. One must engage outright damnation to clarify the limits of grace in the sharpest way, so damnation in its sensuosity has the power to comprehend new fields of perception that are barred by proper language. Likewise, one must separate the creative aspect of sin from its evil. Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, claims that evil is based on claiming to know a total truth that feels justified in attacking what it excludes: Every absolutization of the power of truth organizes an evil (2001, 85). Here the essence of malice is a positive sense that one’s action is warranted.

Hell, in contrast, is the ultimate negative choice, the exclusion from hope, order, and support; yet the fact that hell is excluded by the proper world defines it as a source of new possibilities. The strictures of orthodoxy make hell attractive in its alignment with freedom, so for those enclosed in a medieval or authoritarian world, a focus on hell may approach renaissance consciousness. Dante is drawn toward hell, but condemns it, thus developing Gothic horror by describing torture as punishment for sin. His denial of the Renaissance in advance is exemplified by his condemnation, in canto 10 of the Inferno, of the heretic Farinata degli Uberti, an Epicurean, one who seeks happiness in the world rather than in the afterlife. Joyce admired the novel Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater ([1885] 1970).⁶

Stern as Dante is in excoriating the damned, he cannot help being attracted to a few of them, including Capaneus, with whom Dante faintly prefigures Blake’s statement that Milton was a true Poet, and [therefore] of the Devils party without knowing it (Blake, 1988, 35). Capaneus was a warrior who exclaimed that Jove could not stop him. For this he is in the Seventh circle with the blasphemers, so that flames rain down on him incessantly. Capaneus seems to scorn the fire / … so that the rain seems not to torture him; he cries that if Jove were to use up all of his flames, he would have no joy in his revenge (14.46–60) because Capaneus would never flinch. Dante refers to Capaneus, who is a giant, as a "grande, and Robert and Jean Hollander translate this as hero" (Dante, 2000, 238–39, line 46), though the usage is mostly ironic.

Dante often gives vital personalities to the damned, whereas the dogma of Joyce’s time insisted they were quite inert. The article on Hell in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says under Characteristics of the Pains of Hell that the damned have no joy whatever, but it is hard to imagine consciousness subsisting in such a state. Joyce’s enormous involvement with Dante, which is treated in two ample books (Reynolds, 1981; Boldrini, 2001), afforded him a conception of hell at variance with views that were held to be unchangeable in his time.

Capaneus, who is denounced for his pride, is a concrete image of people who were bad enough to be defiant when they were tortured or burned. Giordano Bruno, who provided one of the main philosophical foundations for Joyce’s works, seems to have been such a person. J. Lewis McIntyre, whose book on Bruno Joyce reviewed in 1903 (Joyce, 2000, 93–94), reports that when Bruno, after having been interrogated by the Inquisition for seven years, was told that he would be burned at the stake in 1600, he replied, Greater, perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it (McIntyre, 1903, 94). One of Bruno’s chief offenses was to support Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolved around the sun, but he also attacked the Church. Near the end of Portrait Stephen speaks with his Italian teacher Ghezzi: He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned (249). We will see that Bruno’s ideas match not only Joyce’s, but those of Badiou.

Geert Lernout, in Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (2010), shows that Bruno was widely regarded as a martyr by the freethought movement struggling against the Church in the nineteenth century. Inspired by the American and French revolutions, secular politicians succeeded in expanding an area of freedom for themselves in much of Europe, but not in Ireland. Lernout points out that after the death of Parnell in 1891, secular Irish politicians, who had formerly disagreed with the Church, were afraid to say anything that did not follow Church directives: the Irish bishops had acquired a de facto political monopoly that was unique in Europe and that would last for almost a century (46). John Banville, in his editorial A Century of Looking the Other Way, says, Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state ruled—the word is not too strong—by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions (Banville, 2009).

Terence Brown says in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History that the Free State set up a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926 (1985, 54) as part of a campaign to extirpate infidel writings. The public libraries of Galway, for example, put the works of George Bernard Shaw under lock and key, and elsewhere foreign newspapers were burned (58). In this context, Joyce’s belief in art and his attack on the Church were powerful political stances. Lernout describes his letter to his beloved Nora of August 29, 1904—in which he says that he hates the Church fervently and will devote his work to making war upon it (SL, 25–26)—as the closest Joyce ever got to explaining his ideological and political commitment in writing (2010, 103). That is, it indicates the political actuality within which Joyce’s devotion to socialism and anarchy—documented by Dominic Manganiello (1980) and explicated by Tudor Balinisteanu (2012)—bases its field of operation.

Joyce’s opposition to strict nationalism also fits this cultural context. Andrew Gibson shows in The Strong Spirit that Joyce favored a radical wing of Irish nationalism that was inclined toward internationalism, socialism, and skepticism (2013, 18). But the mainstream of nationalism, which had more power, was more conservative. Brown explains that the Irish Ireland movement sought to cultivate a properly Irish racial mind preoccupied with religion, nationalism, and the land (1985, 53). Thereby it could escape from the artificial cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance and maintain a brotherhood of feeling with … pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation Catholic Europe (Brown, 1985, 54). Central to the strongest nationalism is the maintenance of a purity of belief that goes back before the complications of the Renaissance.

The medievalization of Ireland was enforced by Church officials led by Archbishop Paul Cullen. As Gibson explains, Cullen was sent from Rome in 1849 with a mandate to tighten Roman control over the Irish Church (2013, 75). In his thirty years as a primate, he implemented many reactionary policies, including the use of retreats and domination of the educational system by scholastic philosophy. Stephen’s saturation with Aquinas reflects a Church/state turn against Renaissance values.

As Fernie indicates (2013, 46–49), the work that brings the Renaissance to England with full force may be Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus ([1591] 1963), about an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge. Marlowe establishes the model for Elizabethan tragedy, and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes tend to be damned in his mature work. This is true of Brutus in Julius Caesar, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. Hamlet fears that he may be damned, and is saved only when Laertes forgives him for killing Polonius (5.2.351). In Ulysses Stephen refers to Hamlet as murdering nine people (U, 9.132). King Lear describes himself as bound upon a wheel of fire (4.7.47). Here the way to hell involves nobility, making the Early Modern view of hell dualistic: a dreadful ordeal that may involve a kind of grace.

The role of hell shifts through the centuries. Blake, whom Joyce referred to as a fearless and immortal spirit (Joyce, 2000, 179), sees the Renaissance poet Milton as being on the side of the devil in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), which William York Tindall refers to as one of Joyce’s favorite books (1969, 11). Blake is followed by a series of Romantic, Symbolist, and revolutionary writers who favored the diabolic and who appealed to Joyce, such as Lord Byron and Rimbaud. A similar pattern may be found in Yeats’s occultism, which has much in common with Faustus’s magic.

In nineteenth-century Ireland, possibly in reaction to public piety, several outstanding works of fiction had protagonists who were damned: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer ([1820] 1960), Bram Stoker’s Dracula ([1898] 2002), and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray ([1896] 1946). These works, which may be the best-known novels of the century in Ireland, control the potential of damnation by using Gothic frameworks that limit the sympathy the reader can feel for the damned central figures.

In my opinion, the greatest Irish novel of the nineteenth century is the diaspora Irish novel Wuthering Heights ([1847] 2003). Emily Brontë’s father, Patrick Brunty (possibly born O’Pronty), was a child of Irish peasants who had a career as a teacher in Ireland before he went to England in 1802, perhaps because of the terrible aftermath of the defeated rebellion of 1798. Brunty had trouble socializing in England because of his thick Irish accent (Wilks, 1975, 11–12). Though Emily was not born until 1818, her family remained isolated. The major treatment of Wuthering Heights as an Irish novel is Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996, 1–26). The central figure of the novel, Heathcliff, is ferociously demonic, and his beloved Catherine Earnshaw proclaims that she does not want to go to heaven (Brontë, 2003, 86).

All four of these nineteenth-century works are Gothic novels, and Siobhán Kilfeather, in The Gothic novel, sees the Gothic as prominent in almost all modern Irish writing and related to the horrors of Irish history (Kilfeather, 2006, 83, 87). She claims that the Gothic in Wuthering Heights indicates that Brontë was working through her Irish heritage (85). Kilfeather sees a major source of the Gothic in the Jacobean tragedy with its ghosts, extreme sexuality, and monstrous violence (91). This takes us back to the Renaissance, and the first Jacobean tragedy was Macbeth, written to please James I. Virtually all of the books I examine have substantial Gothic features, leading up to the latest wave of the genre, the Bog Gothic led by Patrick McCabe, to which I will return.

In Joyce’s Portrait, for example, Stephen, haunted during the sermons on hell by demons from the bureaucracy that manages damnation, is terrified to enter his own room:

He waited still at the threshold…. Faces were there …

—We knew perfectly well of course that although it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to … ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary … (P, 136)

These devilish administrators may be aligned with the forces that terrorize Stephen into submitting to the Church.

The most sophisticated of the nineteenth-century figures, Oscar Wilde, is pre-Modern, yet Kiberd says, "Dorian Gray is a highly moral critique of … intensified experience" (1995, 425). Stylistically, it has the form of a Victorian novel. Before Modernism, with its new techniques and its liberation of the self, can be active in Irish fiction, damnation must be not merely endured, but affirmed. This is the task approached by Emily Brontë’s eternally straying adulterers and accomplished by Joyce’s apostate Stephen.

The acceptance of damnation has precedents in Irish politics, for Gibson demonstrates in The Strong Spirit that there was an Irish revolutionary tradition, the Fenians, that resisted the collusion of Church and state and engaged in dreadful blasphemy. They sometimes burned conservative priests in effigy, and were rumored by their enemies to actually burn the priests (2013, 82). In the Christmas dinner scene of Portrait, Simon Dedalus expresses Fenian sentiments, is scornful of Cullen, and refers to another bishop as a tub of guts (P, 33). In 1869 Cullen excommunicated the entire Fenian movement, and their excesses were later covered up (Gibson, 2013, 76).⁷

Stephen’s damnable decision to reject all existing institutions in his quasi-medieval world carries him toward a radical version of Modernism that sees through all truths that can be formulated and posits as its goal a perpetual reaching beyond, so that truth consists not in an entity, but in a path of shifting. This discarding of definable truth brings Stephen to a postmodern position, one that questions all certainty by techniques such as multiplicity of viewpoint, metafiction, and fragmentation to undercut the authority of language. Brian McHale argues that prior to the firm logic of the Enlightenment, the uncertain frameworks of postmodern literary techniques often appeared during the Renaissance (cited in Waugh, 1992, 55). This brings us to some theoretical points.

Damnable Theory

The prominent school of radical philosophy associated with the term poststructuralism may be said to begin with Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim, first published in 1916 after he died, that the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (1966, 73). That is, the relation between a word and what it stands for is created by the system or derived from the surrounding words rather than being a direct link between the word and its object. This loss of contact between the word and what it stands for is parallel to perdition as loss of meaning or entrapment in a mechanical order. Another main source for the tradition this inaugurates is Joyce, whose works relentlessly elaborate the distance between words and their meanings: Stephen, for example, meditates on emptying words of their sense (P, l78).⁸

Jacques Lacan, whose expansion on the bar between the signifier and the signified in the 1950s was highly influential, claimed to have met Joyce and to have consulted his works continually (Rabaté, 2001, 158–59). Lacan’s longest treatment of literature, his seminar on Joyce of 1975–76, Le sinthome, derives its main ideas from Joyce (Lacan, 2005).⁹ Jacques Derrida, Lacan’s most famous successor, said that all of his early, influential works were dialogues with Joyce (Derrida, 1984, 150–51). Hélène Cixous published the lengthy The Exile of James Joyce (1972), and Julia Kristeva wrote Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ (1988) and treats Joyce as the exemplar of the most revolutionary writing (1980, 92; 2002, 58). Fernie calls Derrida’s deconstruction the most influential philosophical movement of our time (De, 8), and the impact of these French thinkers on cultural studies has been far-reaching. In crucial respects these theories are extensions of the demonic vision of the Irish Parisian novelist.

Beckett, Joyce’s Parisian disciple, influenced the literature of existentialism and the absurd, which Fernie sees as a step toward deconstruction in its negativity (De, 9, 32). Beckett’s works are often seen as responses to the Nazi Holocaust, and this may be one reason that they are more rigidly tartarean than Joyce’s. Alain Badiou, the theorist whose ideas I make most use of here, has written three essays on Beckett that have been published as a book, On Beckett (2003a). In this work he says that he was devoted to and inspired by Beckett from his youth (38–40) and that he derives from Beckett some of his key notions, such as the subtraction of what is not essential (3). In this way, the tradition that runs from Lacan to Badiou, like the one that runs from Joyce to Enright, may be seen as Joycean.

Two current thinkers may help to explain the fictional confrontation with hell. JeanFrançois Lyotard would see it as an assertion of the greatest postmodern skepticism, taking apart every system of belief. For Badiou, whose ideas are more developed than Lyotard’s (both in this book and in their works), the equivalent of hell is an ordeal that has to be faced to attain purpose and hope in a revolutionary spirit that corresponds to a frame of mind in which Joyce was educated, the militancy of St. Paul. Both Lyotard and Badiou focus on the seemingly insoluble suffering of an urgent need to say something that cannot be expressed. Lyotard calls the point of the inexpressible the differend, an infernally difficult division between two options; Badiou calls it the event, a forward motion. For Lyotard hell should be engaged; for Badiou hell is the ordinary or order-giving world insofar as it cannot be left behind.

The foundation of Badiou’s skepticism is a belief that language cannot capture a reality outside itself, so the only reality we can know is symbolic structure. Badiou says in his second magnum opus, Being and Event, that his thesis is not about the world, but about discourse (BE, 8). To get an idea of how Badiou’s doctrine that language is separated from reality could apply to Ireland, we might glance at the powerful portrayal of Ireland’s hellish colonized state in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), which focuses on the separation of the Irish from their language. The play begins with two students in a rural classroom or hedge school in 1833, Sarah, who has difficulty saying what her name is and is considered locally to be dumb, and Jimmy Jack Cassie, for whom the language of classical literature is more real than any other (Harrington, 1991, 320–21).

Both her language deprivation and his indulgence in obsolete tongues are drastically out of touch with actuality, and the play finally seems to realize that language can never enclose the reality of history. For the schoolmaster Hugh concludes at the end that history appears through images … embodied in language and we must never cease renewing those images, because once we do, we fossilize. Hugh says he can provide the available words and … grammar, but he has no idea if that will help to interpret between privacies (Harrington, 1991, 373–74). The removal of language from adherence to knowable human reality can serve to reveal its abstract structure, which may be all we can trust.

Badiou’s Being and Event begins with a fundamental claim that mathematics represents being, or what actually exists, better than other languages do because mathematical formulations are equal to themselves, whereas words claim to define a reality to which they can never be equal (BE, 4–8). What exists most certainly is what can be expressed most definitely. This recognition that the word can never equal what it stands for can be confirmed by trying to define a word completely unless the word is enclosed by a mathematical frame. One could spend a thousand pages explaining what an apple is without covering it. But mathematics becomes capable of representing ontology (onto-logy … the sayable of being, BE, 133), for it presents presentation itself in its numerical forms seen as structures that map out the operation of existence. Verbal statements that claim to represent reality are wrong (cannot speak without imposition for what they attempt to define), but mathematics is right in presenting the order of presentation—a framework that takes responsibility for what it frames.

Badiou’s work derives political value from the claim that the state always tries to contain subjects within its terms. Here state refers both to a mathematical state of numbers and to a government. The classifications into which states insert people can never contain them because a subject is always more complicated than what a single term can cover, so this term precludes individual identity. Set theory, a mathematical system formulated by Georg Cantor in the late nineteenth century to group objects of thought in a totality without overlooking their differences (BE, 38. See Cantor 1955) and further developed in the twentieth century, allows mathematics to recognize the infinite number of subsets that make up a subject. A person, for example, can be seen as tall, nervous, pale, old, happy, unhappy, liberal, joined with someone else, and so forth.¹⁰ As Stephen Pollard states in his Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory, "The special concern of set theory is the development of an abstract account of the infinite (1990, 6). Set theory uses a series of axioms, or logical principles of extension, to derive larger and larger numbers until infinity can be expressed.¹¹ So Badiou shows that set theory allows the infinite to be seen as something actual rather than unattainable: Infinity has to be untied from the One (theology) and returned to multiple being, including natural being" (BE, 512).

The measure by which actuality exceeds the categories of the law generates the event, a revolutionary unleashing of new possibilities that is the only source of truth for Badiou, since categories that can be clearly defined impose the control of the state. There can be no general permanent truth, only a new one that springs forth: "I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to the event: that which this fidelity produces in the situation (Badiou, 2001, 42). This truth is created by the event as something that exceeds any existing identity, which is ordinary or follows orders. A fundamental principle for Badiou is that any unity, as opposed to a multiple, can only be formed by imposing rules or limits: The operation by which the law … submits to itself the one which it produces … I term forming-into-one…. and what is presented always remains a multiple …" (BE, 91). The excess beyond the one corresponds to the difference of both the unconscious and the masses, who do not fit within the laws without coercion.

The event is the discovery of a new term to include more of the subject than has been contained in established frames. The new term has not been known, so it is revolutionary and indiscernible. Both in the Renaissance and in the Christian event of St. Paul, the new element creates an active division of the subject in opposition caused by the need to believe in something that is impossible in existing terms. For Paul the impossibility is that Christ rose from death. The opposition between what is conceivable and what is not constitutes what Badiou calls the inconsistent multiple, and he defines this as a term that cannot be reduced to a rational number (such as 42) or counted as one (1×42) (BE, 25).

Such division is indicated in most significant words in Joyce’s texts insofar as they combine opposed meanings. Every time Joyce does something new with words—as he does on virtually every page—it is a differend trying to say something between its two meanings and an event that cannot be explained in existing terms. It approaches damnation by finding that the situation is impossible, with no conceivable solution. Fernie suggests that such bafflement can be productive: The demonic in [Karl] Jaspers is on the one hand the failure of everything I am…. But on the other hand it is all that I might be otherwise. It is vacant and infinite (De, 27).

Badiou is committed to the hope that the event will lead to a new freedom, but he sees that before this aim can be ventured, the world must be seen as hellish, a place of dead automatisms based on the fixed determinations of selfishness (2003b, 82–83), what Joyce calls paralysis. So the strength of the new vision depends on condemnation of knowable reality. This matches the outlook of Philip Weinstein’s brilliant Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, which emphasizes that Modernism abrogates the assumption that the subject who knows and the object that she knows share the same epistemological structure (2005, 2).

Such a disjunction gives force to damnation’s exclusion of every conceivable way out. Badiou reads St. Paul as finding that people are caught in death under the law and can only find life through the impossible event of resurrection by faith (2003b, 85). Lyotard focuses more on the problem than the solution. The insolubility of the crux that Lyotard dwells on is the grievance that leads to a breakthrough for Badiou. This breakthrough against all odds corresponds to the satanic wager that Gibson finds in the Fenians, their sense of having gone beyond all bounds (2013, 83), which repudiates every system in order to conceive of hell as a place that can be escaped, a demonic position.

Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition is incredulity toward any metanarrative (1984, xxiv), a move that is parallel to Badiou’s event that breaks out of the unified situation. For Lyotard, there can be no all-encompassing narrative, only a series of small narratives, none of which can claim totality. As Alan Wilde argues in Horizons of Assent, Modernism uses irony as a procedure to reach the truth; but in postmodernism, there are only a series of ironies, and it is misleading to find a real truth behind them (1981, 127–47). This accords with the intellectual edge of Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien, all of whom were postmodern before World War II. It also corresponds to Badiou, who defines truth as what cannot be known (2005, 512, 525).

What can be known for Badiou partakes of the falseness of the existing situation, and only what cannot be known has the potential to be realized. Badiou’s focus on hope for progress goes against the stereotype of postmodernism as absolute negation, but it aligns him with the searching aspect of postmodernism as a strict critique that aims at replacing assumptions to seek the most difficult hope.

One must confront hopelessness to dissect the knot that binds ratiocination to hope and then to engender a new foundation for thought that is freed from the bondage to hope, free to see things as they are rather than as we wish they were. The bondage to hope is a theme of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. One of the most fundamental principles of Stephen’s thinking is that ordinary good must be separated from the beautiful. He insists on this repeatedly in the fifth chapter of Portrait (P, 186, 207), and the good he rejects is conventional: In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good (P, 186). For if art is to portray actuality, the most serious danger is that it may be corrupted toward the view of actuality that is profitable within the existing system rather than the view that sees the need for change to eradicate the remainder of colonialism.

At the core of the separation of beauty from good is the imperative to sabotage the myth of heroism by portraying Stephen as someone whose faults go as far as possible toward being irremediable—in fact obnoxious. This is why Stephen has to derive his doctrine from Satan and commit himself to damnation eagerly; and why he must be condemned by those who support authority. The thinkers he favors take on a cachet by being damned.

A favorite thinker of Joyce’s who anticipated many of Badiou’s ideas was Bruno. In Cause, Principle, and Unity, one of Bruno’s speakers says, Poor Aristotle…. He failed to arrive because he halted at the genus of opposition and remained shackled by it; he thus did not go down to the species of contrariety, did not break through and set his eyes on the goal. Instead he strayed … by stating that contraries cannot come together in the same subject (Bruno, 1964, 149). Badiou also opposes Aristotle (BE, 70–77), and what Bruno defines here is essentially Badiou’s distinction between the consistent multiple (which is contained by a definition) and the inconsistent one (BE, 25). McIntyre explains that Bruno opposed Aristotle’s idea of the universe as a self-contained perfection with the idea of a universe that is endless and consists of an infinite number of worlds (McIntyre, 1903, 190–91). This idea matches theories of current physics,¹² and is equivalent to Badiou’s notion of actual infinity.

Another favorite thinker of Joyce’s who anticipated Badiou was Blake. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([1793] 1988), Blake has a conversation with the prophet Isaiah and asks him if it is true that he talked to God. Isaiah responds, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and … the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God … (Blake, 1988, 38). Here there is no God except honest indignation that is discontented because it sees the infinite in everything, which matches Badiou’s emphasis on revolution and actual infinity. Of course Blake believed that he actually saw Isaiah, but he also believed that no element of religion existed outside the human Poetic Genius (Blake, 1988, 2): All deities reside in the human breast (Blake, 1988, 38). Thus Blake showed Joyce how to detach the creative aspect of religion from its paternal authority so that he could activate himself as a priest of the eternal imagination (P, 221)—one who worships the human power to form visionary images as the source of religion. Blake’s idealism is an aspect of Joyce’s thinking bound to though distinct from his scrutiny of social problems.

Lyotard’s concentration on undecidability focuses on the existing situation, in which more possibilities are needed than we can know. This is analogous to the hell of colonialism powerfully portrayed in Translations, where the frustrated Irish woman Maire cannot help being attracted to the British Lieutenant George Holland, and her Irish lover Manus is bound to doom himself by attacking Holland. Their tragic entrapment in an oedipal hierarchical situation (the colonized as son rebelling against the colonizer as father) is without a solution because change does not seem possible. The novels I study generally follow the supposition that the survival of hierarchy indicates that the colonized mindset has not been left behind, that neocolonialism persists.

Tim Gauthier explains neocolonialism in "Identity, Self-Loathing and the Neocolonial Condition in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Gauthier says that Ella Shohat points to the inadequacy of the term ‘postcolonial’ for describing present-day situations" and quotes Shohat:

The term ‘post-colonial’ carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past …, concealing "colonialism’s economic, political and cultural deformative-traces in the present…. [,] the fact that global hegemony, even in the post–cold war era, persists in forms other than overt colonial rule. As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term ‘post-colonial,’ when compared with