The 20th century

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Unlike many of the major Irish writers of the Irish literary renaissance—such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and AE (George William Russell)—James Joyce, Ireland’s greatest and most influential modern novelist, was a Roman Catholic. His religion and his complex, critical relationship to it—in which early devotion gave way to a deep agnosticism that was yet indebted to the symbolism and structures of Catholicism—remained a central preoccupation. The Joycean artist-hero occupies a messianic (and, as some have argued, pervasively autobiographical) role in Joyce’s aesthetic; this figure is most clearly embodied in the character of Stephen Dedalus, who is incrementally developed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922).

Joyce’s lifelong literary engagement with Ireland was conducted, geographically speaking, elsewhere. His major works were written in exile—Zürich, Paris, Trieste—and were initially published with difficulty, often serially in small magazines and pamphlets. Joyce’s fictional debut was Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories. These tales stand in sharp contrast to the idealized versions of Irishness that colored much writing of the renaissance; they are filled with the sense of paralysis that Joyce perceived as constricting the Catholic Dublin society of which he wrote. He perfected what he famously called a style of “scrupulous meanness” for Dubliners, as befitted the bleak, claustrophobic world of his characters. But in the final and best-known story, The Dead (written as a kind of coda for the collection, in part as an effort to lift its unremitting mood of pessimism), Joyce produced the powerful lyrical tone that would characterize his later work. Dubliners was a turning point in the genre of the short story, a genre that would become central to Irish writing as the 20th century progressed.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote a Modernist bildungsroman in which the young, developing scholar-artist Stephen Dedalus emerges from the restrictive religious and linguistic conventions within which he has been raised, able, as he says, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Joyce’s style reflects his protagonist’s spiritual and artistic journey (the novel opens with nursery-rhyme language) as well as his own conviction, as he described it in his essay “A Portrait of the Artist” (1904), that “the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents.”

But it was Ulysses (1922) that transformed the European novel. Written between 1914 and 1921, as war altered the European landscape, Joyce’s epic—loosely organized on Homer’s model of Ulysses’ journey home to his wife and son—is set in Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904. The Dublin of Ulysses (unlike that of Dubliners) is full of lively talk, sex, and song, as well as isolation, betrayal, and loneliness. In the novel’s “succession of presents,” Stephen Dedalus reappears, along with the other main character, a Dublin Jew called Leopold Bloom. The novel moves between Stephen’s and Bloom’s perambulations around the city, relaying their thoughts of fantasy, fear, and the everyday through its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. In Ulysses Joyce reconstructs the basic forms of fiction and creates a new kind of novel in which he can attend to myth, history, naturalistic detail, epic, epiphany, and love in a frequently bewildering range of styles. Joyce created new words, played with existing ones, and turned traditional syntax topsy-turvy. Needing to find ever-more-flexible language to express his vision of humanity, he went still further in Finnegans Wake (1939), his last novel, creating an almost impenetrable, apparently (though not in fact) chaotic prose poetry.

Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien

The magnitude of Joyce’s influence on European Modernism is unquestionable and colossal. It also pervades subsequent Irish literature, but in this respect two very different Irish writers stand out: Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. But these were no mere imitators of Joyce. Indeed, the very differences between their imaginative worlds—one Roman Catholic, cynical, and playful and the other Protestant, bleak, and intense—stand as testimony to the capaciousness of the Joycean inheritance. O’Brien—the pen name adopted by Brian O’Nolan, who also used the name Myles na gCopaleen as a columnist for The Irish Times—sent a copy of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), to Joyce. “That’s a real writer with a true comic spirit,” Joyce remarked. At Swim-Two-Birds, a book about books within a book, mixes and subverts genres—from cheap American westerns to Irish myths—and sports multiple narratives and characters never entirely under the control of their “authors.” Once thought of as Modernist, the novel today seems to parody late 20th-century postmodernism even as it anticipated it. At Swim-Two-Birds is a bravura performance, all the more remarkable when viewed against the background of the pinched, provincial world of censorship and social conformity from which it emerged—and, indeed, which it satirized. One of the most successful and funniest satires of the pieties of the Irish Free State and of the popularity of so-called peasant narratives marketed as the memoirs of rural Irish speakers was O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht, published in Irish in 1941 and translated into English in 1973 as The Poor Mouth, which remains an Irish comic classic. Three more novels followed, the last published posthumously: The Hard Life (1961), The Dalkey Archive (1964), and The Third Policeman (1967).

Unlike O’Brien, but like his mentor and friend Joyce, Beckett did not conduct his literary career in Ireland. He spent almost all his adult life in France, and he moved freely between writing in French and in English. His first fictions—the short stories in More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—were in English, but Beckett increasingly turned to French, providing his own English translations. His international reputation rests ultimately on his audacious, spare, challenging drama. En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot) transformed European theater just as Ulysses had transformed the European novel. In the play the two characters (often called tramps, although Beckett never described them as such) Estragon and Vladimir, later joined by passersby Pozzo and Lucky, engage in seemingly directionless banter while waiting for Godot, who in the end never arrives. Like all of Beckett’s work, Waiting for Godot is linguistically lean and reveals its author’s immense philosophical learning. Beckett was interested not in politics or literary movements but in the big existential questions, and his work shows the influence of René Descartes, who was his favorite philosopher. His stagecraft was minimalist, a characteristic that reached its acme in Not I (1973), which features a disembodied mouth, encased in darkness, from which an endless flow of words cascades. Many of the plays—including Fin de partie (1957; Endgame), Krapp’s Last Tape (1960), and Happy Days (1961)—are characterized by Beckett’s tendency toward silence. As his career lengthened, Beckett’s plays became even shorter and sparer. In 1969 he became Ireland’s third Nobel laureate in literature.