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Joyce and Trevor's Dubliners: the legacy of colonialism
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Jim Haughey
In "Two Gallants," Corley and Lenehan pass by a harpist playing in front of the club on Kildare Street. In this scene, Joyce skillfully interplays several ironies that provide implicit commentary on the legacy of colonialism. First of all, Ireland's political and cultural symbol is demeaned. A busker plays the harp outside the club for the "entertainment . . . [of] the affluent representatives of Ireland's conquerors . . ., prostituting his talent . . . for a scrap of daily bread" (Brunsdale 17). We also see Irish art degraded as the harpist plans "heedlessly" and glances "wearily also, at the sky" on a shabby Dublin street (Dubliners 57). Joyce recognizes how colonialism debases Irish culture. The harp, Ireland's most poetic and visionary symbol, no longer celebrates a Celtic ethos, for, like Irish men, it has been rendered irrelevant by an intrusive alien culture and now produces a "mournful music" despoiled by tawdry commercialism (57).
Endowed also with an imaginative richness, the harp represents Irish expression and identity. A reminder of Ireland's Gaelic past, its notes play, the plaintive melodies of a submerged Irish culture. In this respect, the harp personifies for many nationalists the whole idea of a Celtic identity set apart from an intrusive Anglo one. With considerable irony, Joyce depicts how important a role symbols play in mustering up allegiances to a sense of nationhood. The advent of colonialism led nationalists to eagerly reclaim ancient Irish symbols like the harp, and, as Joyce's portrayal of the harp's degradation implies, the harp's aestheticism is not as important now as its political associations. For all of its rich evocations of Irish art, the harp now stands as Irish nationalism's most ostentatious symbol, and the greatest irony of colonial conquest is that colonialism necessitated the creation of the myth of an heroic national struggle. It is no secret that before the plantation of Ireland, no true sense of national identity existed in Ireland: "Ireland was characterized by a fragmented polity: [there were] varieties of peoples, defining their `Irishness' differently" (Foster 3). Joyce's portrayal of the harp's degradation in front of the club ultimately reveals how contemporary nationalist ideology owes its consolidation to the colonial occupation.
Just as Joyce's story examines the politicization of Irish cultural symbols, William Trevor's "Two More Gallants" explores how Irish anti-intellectualism is a by-product of Irish men's repressed aggression against colonial rule. In Trevor's story, rebellion against the colonial ethos is expressed through the repudiation of the Ascendancy's most prestigious center of learning.
