Snotgreen

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During the decades just before and after 1900, many non-governmental organizations arose not only to promote new Irish writing but also to help revive the language and culture of the past. The implicit or explicit aim of all of them was to resist the forces of imperial assimilation that were, it was felt, slowly turning Irish men and women into “West Britons” (a term that was coined in the 1890s). Among the organizations devoted to this goal of decolonializing Ireland were:

• the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884 by Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin, which aimed to revive traditional Irish sports like hurling and Gaelic football, as well as Irish language, music, and dancing;
• the National Literary Society, founded in 1892 by Hyde, Yeats, and John O’Leary, which publicized Irish literature, folklore, and mythology;
•  the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 by Hyde, which promoted the speaking of the Irish language, as well as music, dancing, games, and industry;
• the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by Yeats, Moore, Gregory, and Martyn in 1899, which presented plays on nationalist subjects and later became the famous Abbey Theatre; and, less cultural than the rest,
• the Society of the Gaels, founded by Arthur Griffith in 1900 to promote Irish self-reliance and abstention from British parliamentary politics. In 1907 this group merged with two others to form Sinn Féin. The failure of the 1916 Easter Rising and the political ascendancy of Sinn Féin in the years just after effectively destroyed the cultural Revival.

Joyce’s feelings about the Revival were mixed, at best. With Synge and Yeats he felt that the time for an Irish national literature had arrived, but he dismissed Yeats' overtly nationalistic Cathleen ni Houlihan as "political claptrap" (Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 187). While a student at University College Dublin he studied Irish with Padraig Pearse (later one of the leaders of the Easter Rising), but he broke off the lessons because Pearse "found it necessary to exalt Irish by denigrating English, and in particular denounced the word 'Thunder'—a favorite of Joyce's—as an example of verbal inadequacy" (Ellmann, 61). All of the major writers of the Revival were "wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestants mining Irish peasant themes," and Joyce considered this kind of sentimental writing "a provincial fantasy" (Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, 20).

Joyce wrote his fictions about life in Ireland, but he lived abroad while writing them and felt that his country could not assume its proper place in the community of nations by retreating into nostalgic mythologies. In the final story of Dubliners, Molly Ivors accuses Gabriel Conroy of being a West Briton and lacking sufficient interest in his own country, people, and language. Gabriel retorts that “Irish is not my language” and exclaims, “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” But despite his desire to escape east to the continent, he ends the story feeling that “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.”

In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen feels excluded from the nationalist literary circle. He has not been invited to a gathering later in the day at George Moore’s house to which all the other literati in the library—including Mulligan, a Catholic but well-off and educated at Trinity College—are planning to go. But as these men animatedly discuss the fact that “Our national epic has yet to be written,” the literary theory that Stephen has been expounding to them predicts how he will write that epic. In imagining "snotgreen" covers for Irish books Joyce takes advantage of Mulligan’s sneering tone to smear the movement of which he was never a part. Beneath his scorn for the Revival's aesthetic, though, runs a deep current of anti-colonial sympathy with its aims.