Abstract

In 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital," Jameson argues that, in contrast to the first-world cultural texts, within which are often embedded the unconscious structures of national allegory, third world national allegories are conscious and overt. Open to this interpretation, Joyce's Finnegans Wake may be less impenetrable than its notorious anticipation of an "ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia" (120.13-14) would warrant. In this essay, I will argue that central to the convoluted structures of "A Scene in the Pub" ( II ,iii) is an allegory for the birth of the Irish Free State in 1922. While Joyce's agenda coincides with the cultural-nationalist interest in establishing a national literature during the Irish Renaissance era, it diverges from the revivalist aspiration to represent a pure Irish race by highlighting the racially-linguistically hybrid state of neocolonial Ireland. Inscribed with vestiges of colonisation, betrayal and internal strife, Joyce's Ireland emerges as a new-born nation, at once ancient and modern, xenophobic and cosmopolitan, where the invader and the native are indistinguishable from each other. This hybrid state, I would suggest, is thematically displaced onto the recurrent fall and resurrection of an inauthentic Irish subject through sexual transgression, and reiterated through a marriage of storytelling, a native oral tradition privileged by Irish revivalist, and idioms of commodified cultural texts fraught with ideologies of consumerism. With this double strategy of thematic-stylistic hybridity, Joyce acknowledges and celebrates Ireland's fall to colonial dislocation instead of redeeming the nation through his narrative. By displaying "the continuities and the discontinuities of colonial and imperial power," Joyce's hilarious celebration of hybrid languages and styles should not merely be understood as a satisfaction of our "commitment to a rhythm of modernist innovation"; rather, it is a third-world writer's attempt to transcribe traces of cultural hegemonies in neocolonial Ireland.

Key Words: "A Scene in the Pub" - Finnegans Wake