Stoneybatter Road is the name, for a short while, of a
thoroughfare that starts at the quayside of the Liffey as
Blackhall Place, running north from the site of the new (2003)
James Joyce Bridge. Turning northwest, the avenue becomes
Stoneybatter for several blocks and then Manor Street. At the
beginning of the Stoneybatter stretch a residential lane
called Arbour Hill departs to the southwest, and it is here
that "An old plumber named Geraghty" dwells, refusing
to reimburse a grocer "by the name of Moses Herzog."
§ This
location would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that,
at the time represented in the novel, two pillars of British
imperial power straddled the Arbour Hill road only one block
further west. Just south of the road sat the huge Royal Barracks, housing the
largest assemblage of British troops in Dublin. In 1798 Wolfe
Tone and two other leaders of the United Irishmen rebellion,
Henry and John Sheares, were imprisoned in these barracks.
Tried by court-martial and convicted of treason, Tone either
committed suicide or was murdered in prison; the Sheares
brothers were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Cyclops
later mentions all three, inspiring the hilarious parody of an
execution report: "And the citizen and Bloom having an
argument about the point, the brothers Sheares and Wolfe
Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for
your country." The Sheares brothers' mutilated remains, and
possibly those of Robert Emmet as well, were buried in the
crypt of the nearby St. Michan's church, which also figures in
the chapter.
This much is part of the historical record for the people in
the bar, but Joyce would have been aware of another piece of
history that they could not know because it had not yet
happened. Just north of the Royal Barracks, across Arbour Hill
road, lies the Arbour Hill military prison. In May 1916,
fourteen leaders of the Easter Rising who had been executed by
firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol were taken there and buried
without any ceremony—shoved in the ground and covered with
quicklime. The burial site at the edge of the prison was used
as an exercise yard, though it may technically have been part
of the prison cemetery grounds. Bishop Thomas O'Dwyer declared
that the British had denied the men a Christian burial by
interring them in unconsecrated ground, and there was a public
outcry that helped turn popular opinion in favor of the
rebels.
After the establishment of the Irish Free State, the
government resolved to make Arbour Hill a place of heroic
commemoration rather than shameful obscurity, and these
efforts have continued during the era of the Republic. Today,
the mass grave is backed by a wall inscribed with the names of
the 14 men, and their deaths are commemorated every year in
May. The wall also reproduces the text of the 1916
Proclamation in both English and Irish.
It might be objected that Joyce, so philosophically committed
to realistic depiction, would not have evoked the events of
1916 in a novel set in 1904. But the more one digs into the
densely woven fabrics of Ulysses the less tenable this
hypothesis becomes. Nestor evokes the carnage of the Great War (1914-18) by
seeing "slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of
the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied
guts" in a hockey game played by boys with names like
"Armstrong" and "Sargent"—boys who, a decade later, might well
have been dying in the trenches. That chapter also introduces
news of a foot-and-mouth
disease outbreak that would not actually come to Ireland
until 1912, and the alarm over this development continues in Cyclops.
Eumaeus slyly evokes the sinking of the Titanic
(1912) through numerous references to lookouts, icebergs, shipwrecks, lifeboats,
drowning, and individuals connected with the disaster.
It is entirely conceivable that Joyce, as he wrote Cyclops
in 1919, could have intended "Arbour Hill" to resonate with
meanings looking both backward and forward in time from 1904.
One of his literary heroes, Dante Alighieri, who held
similarly grand notions of literary truth-telling, performed
that trick repeatedly by exploiting a similar temporal gap
between the setting of his poem (1300) and its composition
(ca. 1308-20). Dead people in the Commedia refer
obscurely to important future events that they can see from
the perspective of eternity but that the relatively uninformed
pilgrim cannot. Given the outrage that greeted the summary
execution and burial of the leaders of the Easter Rising,
Joyce could hardly have failed to know that Arbour Hill had
gained a second grisly claim to geopolitical fame. And, given
the fact that Cyclops is the chapter of Ulysses
most singlemindedly devoted to the subject of violent Irish
nationalism, he could hardly have failed to realize that when
he chose Arbour Hill as the spot to begin the chapter he was
piling one allusion on top of another. The narrator's
debt-collecting visit to that spot is narratively
inconsequential but intellectually supercharged.
