'Slightly out of Synch': Joycean Strategies in Ciaran Carson's "The Twelfth of Never"

'Slightly out of Synch': Joycean Strategies in Ciaran Carson's "The Twelfth of Never"Author(s): David ButlerSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 337-355Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504934 .

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David Butler

'Slightly out of Synch': Joycean Strategies in Ciaran Carson's The Twelfth of Never

That the influence of James Joyce on contemporary Irish poets has

come to eclipse that of W. B. Yeats has been gaining much critical

currency in recent years. If Robert Garratt's 1986 study1 limits this

influence to thematic concerns, singling out Austin Clarke, Patrick

Kavanagh, and Thomas Kinsella as having been particularly

responsive to Joyce's obsession with Catholic, inner city Dublin, a

decade later Dillon Johnston2 has amply demonstrated that the Joycean influence has extended to prosody most notably in the orchestration of

discourse in longer poems such as John Montague's The Rough Field

and in the linguistic prestidigitations of such 'post-moderns' as Ciaran

Carson and Paul Muldoon.3 The present study aims to show the extent

to which Carson's 1998 collection The Twelfth of Never4 has drawn upon both the linguistic and thematic innovations that were ushered in by

Joyce, specifically those of the revolutionary 'Aeolus', 'Sirens', and

'Circe' episodes of Ulysses.5 In doing so, it has the more ambitious aim

of reanimating the debate as to the precise nature of Joyce's influence

on contemporary Irish poetics. While the main focus remains The Twelfth of Never, the present study

suggests that since the publication of The Irish for No in 1987, Carson's

poetry has been in continual dialogue with Joyce. In particular, Carson's foregrounding of the treacherous nature of language and

translation, and his dominant conceit of the city as semantic construct,

relate closely to similar concerns in Joyce. Much as occurs with the

latter half of Ulysses, The Twelfth of Never marks a departure for Carson

in formal rather than in thematic terms, indeed the collection adopts

many of the strategies developed therein by Joyce, notably in relation

to the fragmentation and distortion of the popular ballad. The study concludes that Carson's approach to contemporary history is

identifiably Joycean insofar as it assembles a montage of discourse

from which the lyric, interpreting T is conspicuously absent.

A contemporary poetry collection that takes the form of a sequence of seventy-seven sonnets is, naturally enough, more likely to draw

comparison with John Berryman than with James Joyce. Nevertheless, Carson's opening sonnet, 'Tib's Eve', contains the first clue that he is

indeed in dialogue with the Dublin novelist. The sestet of this poem

337



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

offers This is the land of the green rose and the lion lily' (Twelfth, p. 13), the unusual adjectival choice of which rose recalls the early childhood

chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the opening page of

Joyce's novel, it will be recalled, Stephen Dedalus misappropriates the

song 'O, the wild rose blossoms / On the little green place' to give 'O, the

green wothe botheth'.6 This unwitting transformation of language later

becomes the basis of his speculation, while leader of the York faction in

Clongowes Woods College: 'White roses and red roses: those were

beautiful colours to think of ... But you could not have a green rose.

But perhaps somewhere in the world you could' (Portrait, p. 9). Colour symbolism throughout Joyce has, of course, been the subject

of a great deal of critical investigation, and its manifold subtleties are

beyond the ambit of the present study.7 Nevertheless, it is clear that the

most obvious dimension of the substitution of green for red is

nationalistic. Formulations such as 'Green above the red, says he. Wolfe

Tone'8 are common throughout Joyce's work, while in The Twelfth of Never an analogous colour coding permeates the language of flowers, as for instance in a number of Aisling poems: T fell into a dream / Confronted by a red dragoon, a green gossoon'(Twelfth, p. 18); or again

'Her gown a shamrock green, her cloak a poppy red' (Twelfth, p. 25). If

metonymic usage frequently extends to plants (shamrock, poppy,

potato, rose), it is worth noting that the rose is itself a neutral signifier until its colour has been specified

? white rose of York, red of Lancaster, Roisin Dubh of traditional Ireland. One of Carson's sonnets is indeed

titled 'Dark Rosaleen' (Twelfth, p. 31), although characteristically, Roisin

Dubh has first undergone a translation.

Colour usage involving substitution of metonymic values, as

outlined above, persists throughout Joyce's work. Thus Stephen's words, so inflammatory to Private Carr (one of two 'redcoats') in the

'Nighttown' section of Ulysses, are 'Green rag to a bull' (Ulysses, p. 483). In like manner, an appearance by The Orange Lodges (Ulysses, p. 467) is immediately counterpointed, apocryphally, by The Green Lodges

(Ulysses, p. 468). It is worth noting that Carson 'corrects' the green rag in the flower species 'Soldier, Red-rag, Cusk, or Poppy-head', though several sonnets later a comparable substitution recounts in regard to an

encounter with Captain Wilde in the Liberties, 'He wore a green carnation in his buttonhole' (Twelfth, p. 25 and p. 32).

Stephen, whose inimical nets he has himself identified in A Portrait as

'nationality, language, religion', (Portrait, p. 171) meditates as a child

that you could not have a green rose, but immediately qualifies the

statement with 'perhaps somewhere'. The present study suggests that

Ciaran Carson's sonnet sequence sets out with the ideal of that Never

Never Land (a variation on Joyce's 'New Bloomusalem') of the 'green rose and the lion lily' in which two irreconcilable traditions have

338



SLIGHTLY OUT OF SYNCH

become entangled, their shibboleths undermined by conflation and

hypallage. It finds its most obvious antecedent in the dream recounted

in The Ballad of HMS Belfast', in which the eponymous dream-ship, crewed by Catestants and Prothelics, gives way in the grey dawn to

'the prison ship Belfast'.9 However, much as occurs during the

Walpurgisnacht of 'Circe', nightmares of history continue to intrude in

the form of grotesque 'returns of the repressed', and given the nature

of Homer's enchantress, it is of interest that one of a series of

transformations in Carson's sonnet 'Sod of Death' should allude to this

Joycean/Homeric episode: T was the pig. She was the mud' (Twelfth,

p. 23). There is an oneiric, mutable progression throughout the sonnets, as through the 'Nighttown' sequence, of distorted figures of history and folklore, set to the discordant music of the off-centre ballad.

It is well known that, for a decade following the publication of his

first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976, Carson turned his attention

to traditional music rather than to poetry, and this interest has

pervaded his poetic output to an extent not seen in Irish literature since

Joyce.10 If Joyce adapted a musical fuga per canonem as a structural

device in 'Sirens', Carson has written of his own work: The way the

line moves is not unlike the movement of a reel. The basic 8-bar unit of

the reel ? which can be further divided into smaller units, 2 or 4 or

whatever ? corresponds roughly to the length of, and stresses within,

the poetry line'.11 Moreover, the manner in which both authors

liberally rework and fragment the traditional ballad is, as will be

demonstrated, to broadly similar effect. This is not the only, nor

perhaps the most obvious, point of convergence between the two

writers, however. Carson's work has consistently demonstrated an

unease with the English language that is commensurate with the

much-anthologised concern expressed by Stephen Dedalus during the

course of his encounter with the English-born Dean of Studies: 'His

language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired

speech. I have not made or accepted its words' (Portrait, p. 159). In

Carson's case, the speech is more literally acquired since, as is well

known, he was raised in an Irish-speaking household, and any post colonial anguish is consequently more guilt-laden:

'You seem/ she says, 'to have a problem with the language, Since you've abandoned it for lisping English, Scribbling poems in it exclusively, or so I'm told. Turncoat interpreter, you wonder why I languish?7

(The Display Case', Twelfth, p. 74).

To an extent, the origin of Carson's malaise is antithetical to Joyce's, for

while the latter feels that his use of Hiberno-English is inferior or

339




inadequate, Carson rather fears that 'My Irish is corrupted by the

English tongue' (Twelfth, p. 83). Carson's Irish upbringing thus lends ambivalence to the title of his

1993 collection First Language, a collection which might indeed be read

as a poetic exploration of that colonial unease articulated by Joyce's young artist and which informs all of Joyce's subsequent work. 'I'm

ashamed I don't speak the language [Gaelic] myself laments the

toothless milkmaid who enters the Martello tower in the opening

episode of Ulysses, and we are in no doubt that she is intended as an

incarnation of the scan bhean bhocht: 'Silk of the kine and poor old

woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form

of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer' (Ulysses, p. 12). Joyce was no revivalist, however, still less an advocate of

revolutionary violence, and it is as the sinister 'Old Gummy Granny' that the milkmaid returns in the Circe episode when, thrusting a

dagger towards Stephen's hand, she goads him on: 'Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free'

(Ulysses, p. 490). It is not too fanciful to see in Horse Boyle's recalled

porcelain milkmaid, 'offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk' a

reincarnation of this ambivalent figure, particularly when, at the end of

the four-poem sequence which introduces The Irish for No, a milkman

materializes out of the dawn, content that 'tomorrow yawns ahead

with routine promises; tomorrow, after all, he will be free'.12 These kinds of inter- and intra-textual reworkings will be returned to

at length, though it is germane at this stage to note the early presence of Joyce in Carson's work. Thus the memory of the snuff-taking

grandma of 'Calvin Klein's Obsession' is a clear recurrence of Fr Flynn from Joyce's earliest story, 'The Sisters'; indeed she gives utterance

verbatim to his 'idle' words 'I'm not long for this world' (Irish for No, p. 21). For the present, the main point is that language, for Joyce as for

Carson, is treacherous, even when it is at its most mellifluous ? as is

well illustrated by the incident of an argument over money, in Italian, which elicits very different responses in Bloom and in Stephen Dedalus

during the 'Eumaeus' chapter of Ulysses. It is curious, then, that of the

trilogy of 'nets flung at [the soul] to hold it back from flight'

(nationality, language, religion ?

Portrait, p. 171), language should

have attracted the least critical commentary in terms of its pernicious nature.13 Declan Kiberd, however, has suggested that the various

rhetorical forms and 'the fragments of endless quotation' which

constitute the 'Aeolus' and 'Scylla & Charybdis' episodes 'bespeak a

nervous provincialism and the pedantry practised by a repressed

people who fear that they may be second rate'.14

Carson, of course, is a writer much given to translation, and his

collections have drawn liberally on texts from the French, Irish, Welsh,

340




Latin, Rumanian and, with his present interest in Dante, Italian.

Liberal, too, is the extent to which he allows his reworkings to wander

from the lexis, metre, imagery, even purpose of the original (here he is

working in the broad tradition of Robert Lowell and,

contemporaneously, Paul Muldoon). John Goodby is particularly

insightful in his estimation of this aspect of Carson's oeuvre when he

writes that 'the 'translation' Carson is interested in is less that between

languages as of translation itself as an ontological condition'.15 Once

again, Carson is in the revolutionary tradition of Joyce, since A Portrait

of the Artist is the first text of which I am aware in which language is

foregrounded as just such an ontological condition. The rite of passage of Stephen Dedalus is, above all, a struggle to assimilate and take

charge of the varieties of discourse, none of them neutral, with which

he is surrounded from early childhood. To adapt Ludwig Wittgenstein, the limits of his language are the limits of his world. Translation may

be here understood as one of the most significant subsets of language as ontology. In choosing a title for his 1922 masterpiece, Joyce elected the translation of Odysseus into its Latin cognate, Ulysses, and thought

up a protagonist whose surname is a translation of the Hungarian

Virag. Furthermore, Bloom himself is the author of a secondary translation, this time within the language, when he signs his

correspondence with Martha 'Henry Flower'. Within the context of

Belfast, such translations are intrinsically politicized, as is illustrated in

Carson's mischievous twin dedication to his father which prefaces Belfast Confetti: 'Do m'athair, Liam Mac Carrain / For my father,

William Carson'.

One of the more interesting 'translations' in Carson's 1998 collection

is the sonnet entitled 'The Lily Rally', very much of a kind with his

earlier renditions of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. If his free adaptation in

The Twelfth of Never of the ninth-century poem 'Pangur Ban' as

'Catmint Tea' taps into the Gaelic stream of the 'dual tradition' of Irish

poetry posited by Kinsella, the chief difference with this poem consists

in the fact that the 'original' is itself already in English. Moreover, this

original, a ballad entitled The Ould Orange Flute', belongs more

properly to the Protestant canon. Carson's 'translation', reducing the

ballad's length, reconfiguring its idiom, altering its title and,

unusually, voicing it as a first-person narrative, seems to suggest that

translation is as necessary between traditions as it is between

languages. One is reminded, not only of Stephen Dedalus's unease

with English ? 'How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master,

on his lips and on mine!' {Portrait, p. 159) ?

but, as we will review, with the degree to which cultural hegemony is seen by the two

authors as encrypted into the text of the city, whether Edwardian

Dublin or contemporary Belfast.

341




Donald Torchiana has closely examined the Ascendancy significance of the street names so meticulously catalogued by Joyce in Dubliners, and this is a usage that continues throughout Joyce's oeuvre.16 That the

'Cyclops' rant of Ulysses should take place in a pub in 'Little Britain

Street' has a consummate irony, but the proliferation of Ascendancy names also suggests the degree to which Dubliners are de facto alienated from their native city. This form of exclusion is a staple of

Carson's earlier collections, and in The Twelfth of Never resurfaces in a

new guise. Of The Irish for No, Neil Corcoran writes 'the nature of the

exclusion is plain when the meticulously itemized street-names map their Irish streets with British imperial names (Raglan, Inkerman,

Odessa and so on)'.17 Whether or not this kind of usage in Joyce and

Carson may be categorized as post-colonial, the point is the degree to

which history is an ineluctable modality of the city as text. Such usage is different both in kind and tone to John Montague's deployment of

the trope of the scripted landscape, where a revivalist sense of the past inheres: The whole landscape a manuscript / We had lost the skill to

read, / A part of our past disinherited'.18 To characterize Belfast, Carson has recourse to the trope of the city as

labyrinth, as is clear from the epigraph to Belfast Confetti:

Not to find one's way about in a city is of little interest... But to lose

one's way in a city,

as one loses one's way in a forest, requires

practice ... I learned this art late in life: it fulfilled the dreams whose first traces were the labyrinths on the blotters of my exercise books

? Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood around the Turn of the Century.

Here once again it is pertinent to point out that, as Joyce was keenly aware, it is Daedalus who is the original founder of the Cretan

labyrinth from which he must subsequently escape. Thus: 'the map as

a trope of cultural and political inscription, as imprisoning maze and

labyrinth, is made explicit in "Smithfield Market" ... If human subjects are dispersed along the labyrinthine grid of a map in The Irish for No,

however, suffering the history they are plotted into/ Corcoran goes on,

'they are markedly dispersed into other kinds of inscription in the

volume too: in particular, into brand name, advertising slogan, and list

or catalogue.'19 It is germane to note that the labyrinth in Carson's

estimation is as much a linguistic construct as is the city, hence the

concealed nod to Ariadne when, losing his way in the layered, partial narratives of 'Dresden', he notes: T could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread' {The Irish for No, p. 16). Curiously, Corcoran fails to consider

the degree to which this kind of inscription, too, has its most striking

precedent in Joyce. It is no accident that the central, one might say

defining, consciousness of Ulysses should be precisely a newspaper

342




advertisement canvasser. Alongside the cultural-historical topography, the counter-cultural ballad, the newspaper headline, the riddle, rhyme, anecdote, and political epigraph that continually impinge onto the text

of Ulysses through the consciousness of its various narrators and

focalizers, there is a proliferation of brandnames, commodities, and

advertising slogans, everything from Plumtree's potted meats to the

wandering sandwichboard 'HELY'S' (perhaps a translation of the

Greek word for Greece), from a cake of lemon soap to an advertisement

for the House of Key(e)s.20 The extent to which these and other previously mentioned cultural

signposts recur and mutate in both 'Circe' and The Twelfth of Never is

explored at length below. For the present, it is sufficient to locate these

kinds of proliferation within the more general bricolage of sign and

discourse that characterize both Ulysses and Carson's oeuvre. Writing of the systematic use of heteroglossia in John Montague's 1972

sequence The Rough Field, Dillon Johnston has suggested that 'the

poet's voice is counter-pointed by historical documents, Elizabethan

journal entries, passages of bigoted hate mail, and old rhymes, the

effect of which is to dissolve any sense of an authoritative causal

history into separate documents defining sectarian histories'.21 The

debt to Joyce is obvious, and the effect in Carson analogous, although as discussed below Montague retains that organizing lyric ego largely absent in both Joyce and Carson. As will be shown, the degree to which

Carson's texts are dialogic and unstable precludes the possibility that

the poet might be a mythmaker, apologist, or mystifier, precisely those

functions which he accused Heaney of assuming in his much

discussed criticism of North.22

'It would be tedious to give a full account of the folk-song influences on the poems' writes Carson himself in the acknowledgements to his

collection (Twelfth, p. 91). It would be tedious indeed to compile an

exhaustive catalogue of citations from traditional ballads, whether in

Carson or in Joyce's Ulysses. What is far more germane to this thesis,

however, is the degree to which these quotations have been combined

and distorted. The effect is broadly consistent with that dubbed by Freud, in his 1919 essay, 'Das Unheimliche', as the 'uncanny' ('unheimlich'), the characteristic form, upon its return, of that which

has been repressed. In the German, the word has associations not only of 'unhomely' or 'unfamiliar', but also 'unconcealed'. The uncanny, for

Freud, is thus simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar insofar as it has

been transformed, and therein resides its disturbing quality. Almost

every reappearance during the course of 'Circe' partakes of just such

uncanniness, although it is clear from the dates of publication that

Joyce could not have read Freud's essay prior to, or coterminous with, its composition.23

343




Within the essay, Freud's literary analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann's The

Sandman' provides perhaps his clearest paradigm of the uncanny in the

figure of the mannequin, which always threatens to come to life. The

mannequin figure will be returned to below. A second important dimension for Freud in the Hoffmann story is that of symbolic castration, inherent in the continued threat to the child's eyes. Castration (or

'unmanning') is, of course, quite an explicit threat to Bloom at the hands

of Bello/Bella Cohen in the 'Circe' episode, and is implicitly present in

the accumulation of instances of amputation throughout the Twelfth of Never sequence. In both cases, amputation and unmanning are

subsumed into a phantasmagoria of mutation and role reversal.

Before turning to examine the ballads in some detail, let us look

briefly at a different mutation. I have already mentioned the porcelain milkmaid in the poem 'Dresden', who survives Horse Boyle's childhood as a disembodied 'creamy hand [and] outstretched pitcher of milk', and suggested how she might be understood as a

reincarnation of the milkmaid who enters the Martello tower at the

opening of Ulysses (The Irish for No, p. 16). Several lines before this, the

narrator of the poem also posits, in the destruction of Dresden, 'an

avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs, /

Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone

fragments' (The Irish for No, p. 15). Much as Bloom's lemon-scented bar

of soap or the figure of Alexander Keyes resurface, transformed,

during 'Circe' (Ulysses, p. 340, p. 399), so these allegories resurface as

commodities in The Twelfth of Never : There is a drink called Hope, a

cigarette called Peace' ('Adelaide Hall', Twelfth, p. 16). 'A pack of

cigarettes called Peace' recurs in The Irish Exile Michael Hinds'

(Twelfth, p.29). Joyce too, incidentally, allows figures from earlier works

to resurface, grotesquely transformed, within Bella Cohen's brothel:

(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head ofFr. Dolan springs up.) FATHER DOLAN

Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye' (Ulysses, p. 458).

The consciousness to which the sundry hallucinations are appearing is

a much-discussed problem with respect to the episode, though in this

instance we have little difficulty in assigning the origin/destination to Stephen. Whenever it is glimpsed in the course of the 'Circe' episode, the

ballad quotation is a fragment within one of a number of jostling musical traditions, among which might be listed all sorts of registers

from opera through music-hall numbers to Moore's melodies and

344




nursery chants. To this extent, musical quotation is a subset of the

pluralist, demotic montage of discourse throughout the novel as a

whole. Thus, without attempting an exhaustive catalogue, one finds, in

Zack Bowen's survey,24 re-workings of nationalist ballads such as 'The

Boys of Wexford' (p. 260), 'Follow Me up to Carlow' (p. 263), 'The

Minstrel Boy' (p. 283), 'Johnny I Hardly Knew You' (p. 295), 'The

Croppy Boy' (pp. 298-9), 'The Green above the Red' (p. 298), 'The

Wearing of the Green' (p. 299), and 'Garryowen' (p. 301), rubbing shoulders with the Italian operatic tradition, 'Tutto e sciotto' (p. 268,

p. 283), 'La ci darem' (p. 256, p. 259, p. 286), 'M'appari' (p. 283 ? here

in English 'translation'), 'La causa e santa' (p. 280); with popular songs from the English music-hall, 'Seaside Girls' (p. 287), 'My Girls a

Yorkshire Girl' (p. 294), 'The Girl I Left Behind Me' (p. 297); with

Hebrew chant, 'Kol Nidre' (p. 267), 'Shema Israel' (p. 287), and with

Irish melodies, 'There is a Rower that Bloometh' (p. 261, p. 281), and

'Love's Young Dream' (p. 285), 'Love's Old Sweet Song' (p. 258, p. 272,

p. 281). There are even references to 'God Save the King' (p. 301) and to

the Unionist chant 'Kick the Pope' (p. 302). As a list it is deceptive, however. The allusions recur in snatches, in echoes, in misquotations,

much as does almost every utterance within the episode. They are, to

adopt another concept from Bakhtin, 'double-voiced', a concept to

which we will have recourse with regard to The Twelfth of Never.

Most of the ballads listed above have appeared, in one form or

another, earlier in the novel, and are reappearing now either as variants

in themselves or with the effect of dislocating their original context or

associations. Of the line 'When love absorbs my ardent soul', from the

ballad 'Love and War', for instance, Bowen suggests: 'It will be recalled

that Ben's rendition of the song in the Sirens chapter prompted Bloom's

stream-of-consciousness passage about the size of Ben's genitals ...

The present reference is an externalised reflection and distortion of

Bloom's stream of consciousness from the earlier passage'.25 Again, the

question that the sinister Old Gummy Granny wails at Stephen, 'You

met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?' (Ulysses, p. 486) refers directly to his earlier thought sequence of 'Proteus':

I taught him to sing The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: Saint Canice,

Strongbow's castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me,

Napper Tandy by the hand.

O, O the boys of Kilkenny (Ulysses, pp. 36-7)

In fact, Stephen has here conflated the ballad 'The Boys of Kilkenny' with 'The Wearing of the Green', whence the lines: T met with Napper

345




Tandy / And he took me by the hand, / And he said "How's pour ould

Ireland / And how does she stand"?' There is, perhaps, an echo of the

figure in Carson's T caught one by the buttonhole, and asked him plain / And proud, if ever dear old Ireland would be free?' ('Dark Rosaleen',

Twelfth, p. 31) The ballad that is used to best effect by Joyce in Ulysses is, arguably,

The Croppy Boy', sung by Ben Dollard in the 'Sirens' episode of the

novel and there referred to by him as 'Our national Doric' (Ulysses,

p. 232). There are echoes of the ballad in Carson's sonnets 'Dancers'

and The Ay O'Haitch' (Twelfth, p. 50, p. 58). In fact Ben Dollard's

'trenchant' rendition is first mentioned in the 'Hades' episode, while

the Croppy Boy himself makes, as we shall see, a hallucinatory return

and is hanged in the 'Circe' section, singing a corrupted version of his own song (Ulysses, p. 75 and pp. 484-5 respectively). For Bowen, the

ballad 'is about particularly Irish things: betrayal, religion,

sentimentality, and war'.26 I would suggest that Joyce's interest

extends to an entire nexus of concerns. In the first place, the figure of

the Croppy Boy has resonance both for Stephen Dedalus and for

Leopold Bloom, the former insofar as 'for his mother's rest he forgot to

pray', the latter in his being the 'last of his name and race' (Ulysses, pp. 233-4).27 Secondly, it is of importance in that the ballad mentions the

three colours metonymically related to the Church, Ireland, and Britain

which come to prominence in both the 'Sirens' and 'Circe' chapters. Thus the false priest, an impostor for Fr Green, wears beneath his black

soutane the scarlet jacket of a yeoman captain. In the third place, the

Croppy Boy, hanged upon his return in 'Circe', becomes a further

instance of a nexus of martyrs and scapegoats, from Christ ('Hades') to

Robert Emmet and Joe Brady, the Invincible ('Sirens', 'Cyclops'), who

have spilled their seed upon stony ground. It is worth dwelling briefly on this series of martyrs, in that they

themselves form increasingly grotesque variations on a theme

intimately associated with Bloom, and which finds its quotidian

counterpart in his recourse to masturbation (Ulysses, p. 303). It is he, in

Glasnevin cemetery, who muses that 'It's the blood sinking in the earth

gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy' (Ulysses, p. 89), and who in the same episode first thinks of Robert

Emmet (Ulysses, p. 94). Emmet's gruesome death is referred to in

'Wandering Rocks': 'Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord

lieutenant's wife drove by' (Ulysses, p. 89). The link between hanging and erections becomes explicit during 'Cyclops' in relation to Joe

Brady's execution, with a scientific explanation offered by Bloom

(Ulysses, p. 250). This sequence culminates in the grotesque return of the

Croppy Boy during 'Circe'. As he is hanged, the stage instruction reads:

'He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm

346




spouting through his deadclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs

Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with

their handkerchiefs to mop it up.' (Ulysses, p. 485) The scene incidentally recalls the old women who, in Stephen's parable in 'Aeolus', spit their

plum seeds from Nelson's Pillar onto the cobbles below.

When, towards the violent climax of the 'Circe' section, the Croppy

Boy, together with his antithesis, the citizen, effect their nightmarish return, a noose about the boy's neck distorts his words until they are

all but unintelligible: 'Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest' (Ulysses,

p. 485)28 Almost intelligible, yet in them we detect a reference to

Stephen's repressed guilt with respect to his own mother, whose ghoul eaten shade has so recently appeared to him. The chapter as a whole

might indeed be understood as a Freudian procession of grotesques, each with a fragmentary catchphrase or song in counterpoint to what

has immediately preceded it, each returning from a recess of memory,

personal or tribal, in carnival garb. Within this phantasmagoria, the

word 'grotesque' must be extended so as to include the hallucinatory articulations of kisses, sins, a boot, a fan, a gas-jet, a bar of soap, and so forth.

If we now turn to the sonnet sequence of The Twelfth of Never, there is a comparable dynamic at work. Half-recognized snatches of popular

folk-song and ballad jostle and return as figure, trope, symbol, and

metonym move through a rapid series of transformations. The text

itself self-consciously suggests that history, both personal and national,

might 'abide / Like emblems of a rebel song no longer sung' ( '1798',

Twelfth, p. 39). Typically, a sonnet's title or allusive firs): line appears to

recall a ballad, reel, or folk-song, though the incongruity rather than

the appropriateness of the choice is most likely to strike one. Titles such as 'The Irish Exile Michael Hinds', 'Wrap the Green Flag Round Me', 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley', 'The Tailor's Twist', 'Mountain

Dew', 'Clonmel Jail', and even 'No Tengo Mas Que Dar Te' are typical, while first lines include 'The pale moon was rising above the green mountain' (Twelfth, p. 19, introducing the sestet), 'Tis well I remember

the old Kerry dances' (Twelfth, p. 23), 'One morning in May as I

carelessly did stray' (Twelfth, p. 27),There's muskets in the thatch, and

pikestaffs in the hay' (Twelfth, p. 47), and Tf you ever go across the sea

to Ireland' (Twelfth, p. 78). The last mentioned continues 'You'll find

they speak a language that you don't know', and goes on to subsume

both 'McNamara's Band' and 'The dawning of the day'. Indeed, several sonnets include both title and line, introduced from different

sources, and brought into incongruous juxtaposition. This can be quite innocent, as when 'Let Erin Remember' subsumes 'the rows and the

ructions at Lanigan's Ball' (Twelfth, p. 36), but more often has a

sectarian implication. Thus the sonnet entitled 'The Rising of the

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Moon', a song from the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen, begins 'As down by the glenside I met an old colleen', a line from a ballad of

the later Fenian rebellion, while 'at the rising of the moon' itself

appears in a sonnet mischievously entitled line The Londonderry Air'

(Twelfth, p. 19, p. 60). The idea that a title may bear scant relation to what follows is a staple

of Carson's work.29 Again, there is a clear precedent in Joyce, in the

increasingly erratic headlines of the 'Aeolus' chapter. Thus Declan

Kiberd notes that 'headlines often seem here to have little connection

with ensuing material, as if composed by someone other than the

author proper', with a clear implication that Joyce is interested in

undermining the position of author as authority.30 Carson evinces a

similar scepticism in the final sonnet of The Twelfth of Never: 'there are

many shades of pigment in the spectrum, / And the printed news

is always unreliable' (Twelfth, p. 89). Ellmann, too, sees the Aeolus

chapter's equivocation as critical in the reader's evolving response to

the narratives: 'By whomever composed, the headlines serve as a

warning that the view of reality so far presented may not suffice

indefinitely, that the world may move less reliably in later chapters than it has so far'.31 There is a comparable centrifugal impulse in the

dislocation between title, allusion, and content throughout the sonnets

of The Twelfth of Never. What is more, motif, shibboleth, and symbol are

being continually re-contextualized to such a degree, and with such

rapidity, that no definitive interpretation is allowed to emerge.

Perhaps the single most important symbol is the poppy ?

scarcely a

neutral flower in Northern iconography ? which recurs in some

fifteen sonnets.32 It is characteristic of Carson that it should be,

ambivalently, both the flower of remembrance ('Populated by poppies, these fields of '14', Twelfth, p. 69) and, as an opiate, of forgetfulness (thus 'Salt of the Earth' invokes the shade of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

Twelfth, p. 17). The poppy may indeed be both simultaneously: 'Red

crepe fake felt paper poppy petals with their dot / Of laudanum in

everybody's buttonhole' (Twelfth, p. 14). The flower first appears and

is, one might say, defined in the final line of this second sonnet (entitled The Poppy Battle'): 'Poppy the emblem of Peace and the Opium Wars', but the identification is, within four mere pages, displaced by another

closing line: 'Poppy the emblem of Death and the Special Powers'

(Twelfth, p. 14, p. 17). Compare this to Declan Kiberd's assertion vis-a

vis Joyce: THisl attitude to the past was ambiguous. He wanted to

liquidate it, but in the very act of doing so to make its energies current

in the present. He compared the progress of Ulysses to that of a blast, each successive section leaving behind a burnt-up field ... In that sense, its structure has much in common with those newspapers that

supplant one edition by the next'.33

348




If the poppy is metonymically associated with the British through its

colour ('Her gown a shamrock green, her cloak a poppy red', Twelfth,

p. 25), we must be on our guard. Red is as likely to be associated with

Catholic (Papal or Spanish) transubstantiation as with England: 'Her

pallid lips were red with Papal Spanish wine' (Twelfth, p. 39); Then all

of us imbibe the haemoglobin wine' (Twelfth, p. 40). Notice also the

dislocation of 'the host, / Which represents the transubstantiated

moon' (Twelfth, p. 40). Red may even recall the French Jacobins: 'She

spread the madder red skirts of her liberty' (Twelfth, p. 19). The red

Phrygian hat is elsewhere recalled ('a bloody fine cap', Twelfth, p. 18).

Indeed, much of the sequence is later concerned with Napoleon's Grande Armee. Madder, a military shade of red, recurs in 'Jarrow'

(Twelfth, p. 55) and in the tonal review of 'Trooping the Colours'

(Twelfth, p. 81). However, the 'little petalled parasols of madder dye' of

'1998' (Twelfth, p. 40) are, presumably, Remembrance poppies. What is more, the introduction of Orange as a metonym for the

Unionist tradition ('Wallop the Spot', 'Yellow', 'Twelfth Day') is equally unstable. Change the semiotic context, and meaning will immediately be altered, as is exemplified in the traffic-light 'sequences of poppy, amber, emerald' of 'The Irish Exile Michael Hinds' (Twelfth, p. 29),

which has a mischievous ambiguity in its opening line, 'Your air had a

border like the Tricolour', since this may be read as either green-white orange (Nationalist) or red-white-blue (Unionist). The traffic-light semantic context recurs in 'orange-syncopated reds and greens' of

'February Fourteen' (Twelfth, p. 75). Such instability can lead readily to

such conflation as 'Easter lily, Orange bold' (Twelfth, p. 56), while red,

green, and black, the colours mentioned above with respect to the

Croppy Boy, are equally context-dependent, becoming, in The Tobacco

and Salt Museum', the colours associated with gambling (Twelfth, p. 15). Within the context of Ulster iconography the poppy is most likely to

be associated with the Unionist ancestral memory of the Great War, and it is counterpoised throughout The Twelfth of Never with the potato,

metonym from that other national trauma, the Great Famine. In an

image that perhaps recalls Seamus Heaney, an Irish soldier of La Grande

Armee 'for a moment thought of dear old Ireland: / Fields of corpses

plentiful as dug potatoes', and it is characteristic of the off-symmetry of the collection that this image is 'answered' within four pages by a

field of 'wavery poppies, / Like bandaged veterans of former bloody wars' (Twelfth, p. 84, p. 87). Much earlier in the sequence, 'Next to

Poppy in the Herbal is Potato' is the opening line of the sonnet 'Lir', a

poem whose 'blasted heath' seems to conflate Lir with Lear and which

moves irrevocably to the image of the famine exodus: 'coffins sail off

daily for Amerikay' (Twelfth, p. 24). There is even a hint of the mad

Sweeney: 'Why, then, do I wander like a scarecrow / Blown by the

349




autumn wind, like dandelion seed? ... becoming this wild phantom

goose'. With the potato crop blighted, grass, dandelion, and nettle

became the poor staple of the populace. 'Our green fields have been sown with these Lion's Teeth' laments the wandering Lir, lion's teeth

being, etymologically, 'dents-de-lion'. Several sonnets before this, a

narrator has a vision of an old colleen who 'stung me with the gaze of

her nettle-green eyes' in a place 'where poppies, not potatoes, grew in

contraband' (Twelfth, p. 19). If elsewhere one may kiss 'poppy lips' or

lips 'red with Papal Spanish wine', in the present poem the narrator, in

a sinister image, 'kissed her grass-green lips' (Twelfth, p. 43, p. 39, p. 19

respectively). A later poem, The Arterial Route', recycles imagery from

The Rising of the Moon': They kissed me with their starved lips. You

feel the sting?' (Twelfth, p. 77). There is, however, a second layer of meaning associated with the

potato-poppy antithesis. As mentioned above, the poppy as narcotic runs as an explicit counter-theme through the sequence. If the poppy has '"Nodding buds with four crumpled petals, showy red, / Orange or white flowers, exuding milky juice" ?', the stalks and leaves of the

potato too 'are narcotic as the hemlock brewed by Plato; / Mashed-up,

they make a pottage fit for renegades' (Twelfth, p. 19, p. 24). It is worth

pointing out how Carson reworks the image of 'exuding milky juice' in

subsequent poems, though displacing it onto 'these Lion's Teeth, / Whose broken stems exude a bitter milky juice' ('Lir', Twelfth, p. 24) or

again, 'the dandelion's milky ooze' ('Milk of Paradise', Twelfth, p. 52). The title 'Milk of Paradise', in turn, is subsumed into the sonnet 'The

Arterial Route' which, as was noted above, harks back to the poppy

potato duality of The Rising of the Moon'. But, if we remember the

coded allusion to 'Circe' (T was the pig. She was the mud', Twelfth, p. 23) there is another level on which the potato is in counterpoint to

the poppy. As Gilbert has explicated, Odysseus was enabled to resist

the narcotic charms of Circe through Hermes's gift of a moly root, which in Ulysses has been transformed into the potato Bloom carries in

his pocket. Gilbert's description of the moly is also of interest: 'It was

black at the root, but the flower was like to milk'.34 Earlier, not only

during 'Lotus Eaters' but in the 'Hades' episode, Bloom's thoughts had

turned to the Orient: 'Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing

produce the best opium' (Ulysses, p. 89), though this was of course

before the poppy's association with the war graves of Flanders was

possible. Whether or not Carson had the Joycean precedent in mind, the point is that no symbol is allowed the stability that would be

required in order to shape the sequence into a univocal myth. In reading the collection, one has much the disturbing experience of

the viewer looking at Goya's Caprichos and Desastres de la Guerra

sequences. This is not only due to the juxtapositions of the fantastic, the

350




horrific, and the burlesque. The Twelfth of Never, like Goya's later work, is animated by precisely the kinds of ambivalence described by Freud

in his essay on the uncanny, 'in which the frightening is not always

distinguishable from the comic'.35 There is, further, a deep uncertainty in terms of Freud's mannequin-man duality, coupled with the constant

threat of castration and/or mutilation, running through both works.

The same is true of Bloom's encounter with the formidable Bella Cohen

during the 'Circe' episode. Amputation is an explicit trope in a number

of sonnets (The Wind that Shakes the Barley', The White Devil',

'Planxty Patrick Connors'), while images of hanging, beheading,

quartering, and mutilation recur with a startling frequency ('Wallop the Spot', The Hag with the Money', 'Dancers', 'Clonmel Jail', 'Centaur', The Display Case', 'Spraying the Potatoes'). But by far the

most significant trope is the disembodied hand, familiar as a contested

symbol of Ulster from Carson's earlier collections. The opening line of

'Nine Hostages', T cut my hand off at the wrist and threw it at the

shore' (Twelfth, p. 18), directly recalls the imagery from the much

anthologized 'Bloody Hand' which goes on to posit the ambivalence of

the metonym: 'Was it the left hand / hacked off at the wrist and thrown

at the shores of Ulster?/ Did Ulster / Exist? Or the Right Hand of God,

saying Stop to this and No to that?' (Belfast Confetti, p. 51). The image recurs almost verbatim in 'Legions of the Dead', part of the

'indecipherable babble of days of yore' (Twelfth, p. 83). Insofar as the

metonym can be recognized as synecdoche, it suggests the trauma of

partition. Thus 'the red hand still remained without a suture' is

immediately preceded by an ambivalent nod towards the

demographics of change: 'the ballot-box contained a condom time

bomb' (Twelfth, p. 21). Notice also: 'We will outbreed the others; we

have done our sums' (Twelfth, p. 58).

However, hands are as unstable a motif as any other in the sequence.

They appear in the fantastic, if sinister, fairy world of Hallowe'en, as

when 'a disembodied hand lifted the thin veil' (Twelfth, p. 41), or when

the dreamer-narrator is 'seized by disembodied hands' on board a

ghostship (Twelfth, p. 63). The recurrent theme of the ghost galleon

throughout the sequence taps into the old tradition of foreign aid

(whether Spanish or French) from across the sea. More importantly, hands are associated with writing. T know ... a disembodied hand, the

mode of automatic writing on the wall' (Twelfth, p. 44) points equally to the Biblical warning and to the tradition of the sectarian mural. This

latter remains a danger for the poet. The sonnet 'Digitalis' makes this

risk explicit, 'when Mr Stump takes over ... I succumb / To all his left

hand fantasies of fife and drum, / Where soldiers sometimes use their

guns as concubines' (Twelfth, p. 46). There may even be a criticism of

the bog-sacrifice mythology that underlies Heaney's North in the

351




poem's earlier 'something's always whispering in my ear / About the

murky underworld of goblin love'.

Finally, it is worth turning our attention briefly to that other

characteristic of the uncanny, the mannequin-man uncertainty. A

number of poems contain explicit imagery, as for instance, The former

puppet languished in an unmarked grave' of The Poppy Battle', or the

extended treatment of what might be a Geisha in 'Sake', which begins: The female puppet is legless. To make her walk / You must

manipulate the hem of her garment' (Twelfth, p. 14, p. 43). But these

animated dummies really form part of a subset which subsumes the

narrator of these ballads. The concluding sonnet contains the caveat

that 'everything is slightly out of synch', and this returns us to an

earlier image of a Japanese bar in which 'Karaoke singers mouth their

lip-synch rhymes' (Twelfth, p. 89, p. 76). Bakhtin's notion of the 'double

voiced utterance' would seem here to have found a concise objective correlative, as it does in earlier poems when 'Like a ventriloquist she

reads [the ancient carp's] silent lip' or when '[Captain Wilde]

murmured, with the voice of a ventriloquist, / fust read my lips'

(Twelfth, p. 48, p. 32).

Writing of the arbitrary associations that govern the layered narratives of Carson's 'Calvin Klein's Obsession', John Goodby contends that 'such associationism puts both narrative and the

coherent self to some degree of risk ... Further, it shows not merely the

exploitation but the internalisation of an understanding that there can

never be a single authoritative meaning to a text, only different

readings, since meanings circulate endlessly between the ideological and the textual'.36 The precedent in Joyce is beyond doubt. In

interpreting Joyce from a post-colonial perspective, Kiberd has

suggested that Joyce 'provided a model ... in the refusal of Ulysses to

ground itself in a narrating subject or an identifiable author: instead he

offered a text without any final authority'.37 In a society characterized by two opposing traditions, the refusal to

author history is necessarily a political choice, and an admirable one.

For Kirkland, 'the exhumation of history will always signify danger within Carson's poetic landscape and its invocation necessarily involves the dramatic, the displaced quotation'.38 Here, in essence, is

the most profound lesson that Carson has learned from Joyce, for in The

Twelfth of Never such an T as exists is really no more than the site of a

number of chance encounters, and the narrative is no more than the

conduit for a babble of voices, echoes, quotes, and sound-bites. There

is none of the lyrical consciousness which, as Goodby suggests, orchestrates and, in the last analysis, mythologizes the eclectic

discourse in John Montague's The Rough Field, so that: 'the merging of

autobiographical subject with that of the nation in a manner

352




characteristic of romantic Nationalism means that a slippage into

sectarian stereotypes is always a threat'.39 Once again, the Joycean antecedent is curiously unacknowledged.

In the much-quoted aesthetic that he expounds to Lynch, Stephen Dedalus avers: The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the

centre of an epical event' (Portrait, p. 180). In Carson's estimation, such a simple epical aesthetic would appear to be central to Heaney's

interpretation of contemporary history, and it is the persistence of the

'lyrical ego' at the centre of the epical which makes it possible for

Heaney to act, albeit unwittingly, in the capacity of 'a mythmaker, an

anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for "the situation"'.40 Carson's engagement with history differs radically from that of both

Montague and Heaney precisely to the extent that there is no lyrical ego at its centre, and hence no equivalence can be postulated between

the historical and the personal event. For Carson, as for Joyce, the

dramatic supercedes the epic, since here 'the personality of the artist...

finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself (Portrait,

p. 181), and the work thus becomes a polyphonic forum unmediated

by monologic authority.

NOTES 1. See Robert E Garratt, Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), especially chapter 3, 'Non serviam'.

2. Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997).

The Joyce legacy is set out principally on pp. 28-37.

3. John Goodby, in the introduction to his study Irish Poetry since 1$50: From Stillness

into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), is somewhat

disparaging of this new orthodoxy that reduces Yeats and Joyce to seminal polarities from which contemporary Irish poetry is viewed to have germinated. One of

Goodby's concerns is to extricate the nature of influence from what is perceived as

an excessively reductive framework.

4. Ciaran Carson, The Twelfth of Never (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1998). Further

references to The Twelfth of Never will be noted in parentheses. 5. According to the 'Linati schema', the techniques and arts of these chapters are

respectively 'Oratory (deliberative, forensic, public); Rhetoric', 'Fuga per canonem;

Music' and 'Vision animated to bursting point; Dance'. See Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), Appendix. It is with the

methods of 'Circe' in particular that the present study is concerned.

6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2000), p. 5. In fact, as Jeri Johnson points out in her introduction to this edition, the

ballad has already undergone an initial editing: the original has the wild rose

blossoming on a little green grave (p. xxiv).

7. The 'Gorman-Gilbert' schema suggests a dominant colour, of liturgical value, for

eight of the eighteen chapters. See Stuart Gilbert, fames Joyce's Ulysses (London:

Penguin, 1963), p. 38.

8. James Joyce Ulysses (London: The Bodley Head, 2001), p. 484.

353




9. Carson, First Language (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1993), p. 74. Declan Kiberd suggests the terms 'Catestants and Prothelics' were devised by Brendan Kennelly in a 1990

lecture delivered at Kavanagh's Yearly. See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, (London:

Vintage, 1996), p. 424 and p. 685.

10. For the degree to which music is interwoven throughout the Joyce text, see Zack

Brown's exhaustive Musical Allusions in the Works of James foyce (Dublin: Gill &

Macmillan, 1975).

11. Carson in an interview with Rand Brandes, The Irish Review 8, (Belfast, 1990), pp. 77

90.

12. Carson, The Irish for No, (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1987), p. 15, p. 28. The poem

'Dresden', in which the milkmaid figurine appears and is fragmented to a more

benign outstretched hand and pitcher, opens the collection in the Gallery edition. A

prefatory poem 'Turn Again', which was added to other editions of The Irish for No

(Bloodaxe, Wake Forest), instead introduces the collection Belfast Confetti in the

Gallery Press series. The title of the poem is, possibly, an allusion to the many transformations of Bloom himself during 'Circe', as when the chimes urge him:

'Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!' (Ulysses, p. 390).

13. This is by no means to deny that language, per se, has become the central critical

focus in recent years. Hugh Kenner's influential study Joyce's Voices, (London: Faber

& Faber, 1978) is particularly insightful in regard to Joyce's novel use of language. 14. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 348. Since, in the course of 'Aeolus', rhetoric and wind

are given a mythic equivalence, it is pertinent to point out that it is through Aeolus's

gift of a bag containing the winds that Odysseus, like Moses and Parnell, is first

brought into sight of the promised land. Once the crew open the bag, however, the

moment is lost. Such rhetoric as adopted by the irredentist Irish, as for instance in

the speech by John F. Taylor which makes explicit the Parnell-Moses parallel, 'is

couched in pure Victorianese, scarcely an assured basis for its own separatist

argument' (Kiberd, p. 348).

15. Goodby Irish Poetry since 1950, p. 295. Translation extends, too, into the non

linguistic, as for instance: 'We blow a fife tune on our red accordions' in 'The Ay O'Haitch', Twelfth, p. 58.

16. Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce's 'Dubliners' (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

The less than neutral cataloguing of street names is most apparent in Two Gallants'.

See pp. 91-108.

17. Neil Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1999), p. 187.

18. The Rough Field (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1979), pp. 34-5).

Montague's title is, of course, a translation of his native Garvaghey. If landscape is

here already written, Kirkland notes that 'After a poetic silence of a decade, Carson's 77k Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989) defiantly returned Belfast

to the state of a scriptible city, and in doing so fundamentally questioned the status

of the inchoate narrative as the governing principle of historical existence'. Richard

Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965, (London: Longman, 1996), p. 42.

19. Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland, p. 187.

20. In 'Smithfield Market', Carson places an ambiguous key at the centre of the city's

labyrinth, and the image returns in the present collection in 'Green Tea': 'The

writing everywhere on walls illegible to me. / The faces in the crowd

unrecognisable. / The labyrinth to which I hadn't got the key' (Twelfth, 22). Both

Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are, of course, keyless from the very moment that they set out on the morning of the 16th of June.

21. Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce, p. 193. One has little difficulty identifying, in the

Victor Brown illustration on the jacket cover to the Gallery edition of The Twelfth of Never, an allusion to the novel usage of the wood-cut in Montague's sequence.

354




22. Ciaran Carson, 'Escaped from the Massacre?', The Honest Ulsterman, 50 (Winter

1975), pp. 183-6.

23. Robert Spoo has argued the case that the 'deep structures' of the much earlier story The Dead' operate on the principle of the return of the repressed. Spoo, 'Uncanny Returns in The Dead?, in Joyce, the Return of the Repressed, edited by Susan Stanford

Friedman (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 89-113

24. Bowen, Musical Allusions. Numbers in parentheses refer to this study. 25. Bowen, Musical Allusions, p. 282, emphasis added.

26. Zack Bowen, 'The Bronzegold Sirensong', in Literary Monographs I, edited by Eric

Rothstein and Thomas Dunseath, (Madison; University of Wisconsin, 1967), pp. 288

291; cited in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical essays, edited by Clive Hart and David

Hayman, (London: University of California Press, 1974), p. 239.

27. On hearing these words, Bloom immediately reflects 'I too. Last of my race/ The

lines from the ballad 'I bear no hate against living thing' are also associated with

Bloom's reconciliatory position when faced with the citizen's bigotry, and indeed

are spoken by the Croppy Boy as a retort to the citizen's rant during 'Circe' (Ulysses,

p.484). For more on the identification of Stephen with the Croppy Boy, see Frederick

Sternfeld, 'Poetry and Music', in Sound and Poetry, edited by Northrop Frye, (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 26-31.

28. On the previous page, the citizen has materialized as a caricature-fenian wielding that much-sung weapon of the folk tradition: 'with a huge emerald muffler and

shillelagh'. Carson makes comparable use of such stage-Irish props:' "lis there you'll

find the woods of shamrock and shillelagh' {Twelfth, p. 78).

29. The eleven Latin tags chosen as titles to the middle sequence in 'Opera Et Cetera'

(Meath: Gallery Press, 1996) are an earlier instance.

30. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta Books 2000), p. 466.

31. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1972), p. 73.

32. Twelfth, 'The Poppy Battle' (p. 14), 'Salt of the Earth' (p. 17), The Rising of the Moon'

(p. 19), 'Lir' (p. 24), 'Wolf Hill' (p. 25), 'Wallop the Spot' (p. 27), 'The Irish Exile

Michael Hinds' (p. 29), 'Let Erin Remember' (p. 36), '1798' (p.39), '1998' (p. 40), 'Sake' (p. 43), Who Ploughed the Lowlands Low' (p. 44), 'The Hag with the Money'

(p. 45), 'Mustard' (p. 69), 'The Ambassadors' (p. 87). The poppy has become

particularly charged since the Eniskillen Remembrance Day bombing of 8

November 1987.

33. Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 471.

34. See Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses, pp. 270-298. The quotation is on p. 273.

35. Spoo, 'Uncanny returns in "The Dead"', p. 90.

36. Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, pp. 291-2.

37. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 339.

38. Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland, p. 44.

39. Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, p. 148.

40. Carson, 'Escaped from the Massacre?', p. 186.

355



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'Slightly out of Synch': Joycean Strategies in Ciaran Carson's "The Twelfth of Never"

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