Jamie O'Neill: At Swim, Two Boys

Excerpt from Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism

Chapter excerpted from my book Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

With Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (ASTB) a return to the era of literary modernism could hardly be more evident. It is not just that the title recalls the modernist writer Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. We are self-consciously placed in the territory of Joyce’s Ulysses. Much of the action takes place in the Dublin (or Glasthule) locale that Joyce used as the opening scene of his novel: Sandycove, the Martello tower, the Forty Foot site for swimming, the tiny island called the Muglins visible across the bay. In Joyce’s novel, Buck Mulligan leads Stephen Dedalus and Haines down to this swimming area and plunges into the water. They wonder where the currents of the bay will finally let surface the body of a recently drowned man. In O’Neill’s novel, the lead character, the adolescent Jim Mack, resolves to take up swimming from that very spot so that he can eventually accompany a boy he loves on a dangerous swim to the Muglins, where the two will plant an Irish flag and then, with a serious risk of drowning, make a return trip to shore. If Joyce’s novel takes place in 1904, O’Neill’s occurs in 1915-16.

Jim’s father, Arthur, seems made somewhat in the image of Leopold Bloom and is given something of Bloom’s stream of consciousness. “Brambly path through shadowy wood. Birds singing on all sides. Mess of nettles, cow-parsley, could take a scythe to them. Light green frilly leaves would put you in mind of, ahem, petticoats.” (ASTB 16-17) “Brewery men at Fennelley’s. Mighty clatter they make. On purpose much of the time. Advertise their presence. Fine old Clydesdale eating at his bait-sack. They look after them well, give them that. Now here’s a wonder – paper stand deserted. Crowd of loafers holding up the corner.” (ASTB 20) (We may be reminded here, with this description of brewery men, of Joyce’s line in the “Aeolus” episode: “Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float.”) Arthur runs a small store and, like Bloom, has a strong interest in advertising, enlisting his son Jim, to Jim’s embarrassment, in the enterprise. Also like Bloom he is an Irishman who maintains considerable affection for the British empire, for which he served as a soldier in Egypt, India, and southern Africa. Both Leopold and Arthur can be made into petit-bourgeois figures of fun, with one a cuckold and the other socially clumsy while earnestly seeking social improvement, but there is an important moral resemblance. Both stand out as ethical heroes genuinely concerned with the welfare of others. It is Leopold in the novel who consistently shows the greatest sympathy for those in distress, who is often thinking of engineering plans that might improve the lot of the Irish people, and who befriends Stephen when he is in need. In Arthur’s case he shows his merit when he takes into his home an infant born out of wedlock as well as the infant’s young mother, who was the girlfriend of his son Gordie, a soldier who died at the Dardanelles. The Catholic church, with its punitive attitudes toward sex and childbirth outside of marriage, has, as a consequence, removed Arthur from honorary parish posts that he very much coveted as a sign of his moving up in the world in terms of the respect owed to him. Arthur’s young wife died on the boat trip home from South Africa, where he was serving in the Boer War, shortly after she gave birth to Jim. He has raised his son well as a single parent, and we can guess that Bloom would have been a devoted father to Rudy, if his only son had lived instead of dying within weeks of his birth.

Further echoes are abundant. Early in Ulysses Joyce has a character refer to a woman named MacMurrough, who long ago supposedly helped bring the English to Ireland because of an affair she was having. O’Neill will have, almost in reply, an Eveline MacMurrough who is an aristocratic Irish patriot, ready to transport arms to Irish rebel groups. “A nation’s muse. la belle Irlande. A celebrated lady poet. Lionizing hostess.” (ASTB 113) We are thus being reminded of Oscar Wilde’s mother, who is mentioned in the “Cyclops” episode in Joyce. The suggestion is made clearer when we are told that her son Anthony has just recently returned from being imprisoned in England for two years of hard labor for having had relations with a chauffeur-mechanic. In the “Hades” episode Simon Dedalus, when told by Bloom that he has seen his son Stephen, asks whether Mulligan, his “fidus Achates,” was with him. Jim Mack, trained in his class in translating the Aeneid, wishes to think of the boy he loves as his “fidus Achates.”

If O’Neill is engaging in something of a rewriting of Joyce, his project will focus especially on four key themes regarding which Joyce can be ambivalent or dismissive or distant: Irish nationalism; same-sex relations between males; the Irish attempt to claim a fundamental identification with the ancient Greeks as opposed to the Romans, who are linked with England; and the importance of political action. Joyce in Ulysses seems to be continuing the attitudes he assigned to Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” When Gabriel is told he should learn the Irish language and should take a summer excursion to the west coast of Ireland, where that language is still spoken and where a native Irish culture still flourishes, he replies that he would prefer to go to Europe and to brush up, in his cosmopolitan manner, on his European languages. While Ulysses references many Irish patriots as well as Irish rebel songs such as “The Croppy Boy,” those who are most emphatic about their Irish identity, such as the Citizen, come off rather badly, as narrow and bigoted. Those who seem concerned with listing Irish contributions to civilization appear often to be producing an empty rhetoric after a period of drinking. Joyce himself would leave Ireland while young and spend most of his time on the European continent, in places such as Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Much of the musical background of the novel is formed by Italian and French opera. It is the more cosmopolitan Bloom, with all his flaws and with his complex identity as both Jewish and Irish, who gains a more heroic stature through the course of the novel, not the narrow Irish patriots.

In the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses (U), when several men are gathered in the newspaper office, Professor MacHugh tries to distinguish the Irish from the British by making a contrast between the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans. The Romans, he says, brought sewers, engineering, and commerce. It was Greece that produced lofty expressions of the mind in philosophy and poetry. Now today, the British may rule the world, he continues. But they mark their empire by advanced plumbing, by constructing water closets, so they likewise specialize in commerce and engineering. It is the Irish who are capable of contributing the lofty intellectual and aesthetic activities of the sort that characterized the ancient Greeks. In the opening “Telemachus” episode Buck Mulligan says that he wants to “Hellenize” Ireland and he invites Stephen Dedalus to accompany him on a trip to Greece. The Irish are identified at one point with Pyrrhus, the Greek general in southern Italy who eventually must surrender that area to the Romans and who reminds some of the Irish speakers that they have always backed losing causes. Yet Joyce in laying out his novel does not seem to offer much support for this Hellenizing stance, which usually tends toward the empty and rhetorical. The viewpoint of Bloom ultimately trumps the callow one of Mulligan and Stephen. Bloom’s meditations show that he is rather on the side of the British and the Romans, at least as Professor MacHugh has laid out these issues. Leopold’s speculative thoughts are especially about plumbing, engineering, improved tram lines for transporting cattle, water tunnels, commerce, advertising, inventions, and the like. He is a “Roman” while the Catholic Irish seem to engage in high-level speeches and musical performance. (Simon Dedalus sings beautifully but makes little effort to provide for his family.)

On the matter of “Hellenizing” Ireland, Joyce has Stephen show anxiety about one version of that process, insofar as it might lead to same-sex behavior. That remark of Mulligan’s about a Hellenizing tendency makes him think immediately of “Cranly’s arm.” Cranly was Stephen’s classmate in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one whose attachment to Stephen seemed to have homoerotic aspects. Mulligan, about to go swimming, compares himself to Walt Whitman with a quote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” At the Forty Foot swimming place he meets a young man swimming and when asked if he is coming in, says “Make room in the bed” while undressing, so that swimming naked with another man seems to take on connotations of entry into an oceanic, homoerotic realm of sexuality. (U 19) O’Neill will take up that very suggestion. A bit later in the novel Stephen is thinking about both Mulligan and Cranly. “Staunch friend. A brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.” (U 41) The episode that most brings out hints of homoeroticism is “Scylla and Charybdis,” which takes place in the National Library. The basic topic of discussion among those present, including Stephen, is Shakespeare. One of the discussants is said to have “Cranly’s smile.” Whitman is mentioned twice, once directly and once through reference to a “yankee yawp.” Stephen thanks Brunetto Latini, Dante’s sodomite, for making a particular Italian word available to him. We hear of Oscar Wilde’s essay claiming that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for a young actor, Willie Hughes, with whom he was in love. Of another speaker in the library it is said: “His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde.” (U 163) Buck Mulligan spies Bloom in the library and fears that “he is Greeker than the Greeks” because earlier in the day he saw him studying the buttocks of a marble statue instead of the breasts. When Shakespeare’s love for a young nobleman, as expressed in the sonnets, is mentioned, Stephen thinks once again: “Love that dare not speak its name.” (That line, from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover, had become well-known through being discussed at Wilde’s trial.) Near the end of the scene there is a jesting song by Mulligan, referring to some of those present, about bachelors who have no interest at all in marriage and who end up masturbating for all they are worth. Shakespeare’s young love in the sonnets is said to have had “Phaedo’s toyable fair hair,” so that there is an implicit reference to Socrates’s role in that Platonic dialogue. (U 177) At the episode’s very end Mulligan sees Bloom again and once more warns Stephen that he has erotic designs on him. “Manner of Oxenford,” Stephen thinks, referring to the homosexual practices supposedly common at that English university. (U 179)

These brief references are part of a larger narrative. Stephen and the others wonder why Shakespeare left his wife Anne Hathaway and moved to London for so long, living without her in the city. One speaker suggests that the answer lies in Shakespeare’s early poem Venus and Adonis, about the powerful goddess falling in love with a beautiful adolescent male. Shakespeare himself was just a teenager when he married Anne, ten years his senior. So the suggestion is that he felt overpowered by her sexual desire, that he felt passive and inadequate, even emasculated, in relation to it. As a consequence he fled to London where he could adopt a form of sexuality, with beautiful adolescent males who had something faintly feminine about them, that would not make him seem enfeebled by the engulfing presence of the more mature adult woman.

The discussion in general in the library is about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Stephen and the others are arguing about whether Shakespeare, in writing the play, identified himself with Hamlet’s father, who appears as a ghost, or with Hamlet himself. If the former, then Hamlet represents Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who has recently died. If the latter, then Hamlet’s distress about his mother Gertrude’s sexuality, and about what seems to him her unfaithfulness, perhaps reflects Shakespeare’s attitudes toward the older Anne. But the discussion soon takes a theological turn, having to do with how Father and Son are related in the Trinity. A heretic is mentioned, the African Sabellius, who claimed that the Father was identical with the Son rather than a separate person. (U 171) And the playwright Maeterlinck is quoted as saying that whenever we go forth to meet others, we are meeting only ourselves. Both Sabellius and Maeterlinck are used to suggest that a relation to another person can blur easily with a self-relational structure, with the former collapsing into the latter. Stephen recalls the idea that in heaven glorified man, an androgynous angel, is a wife unto himself. (U 175) In culture’s advance we increase our mental complexity and richness as we turn activities of warning and advising and admonishing others into self-warnings, self-advisings, self-admonishings. That is a kind of engineering trick that makes our mental lives more sophisticated and reflective. But there is a danger that one might thereby lose a rich engagement with others. It may be that same-sex desire will have an especially intense blurring of self-relating patterns and other-relating patterns, in the way that the Father-Son relationship collapses for Sabellius into an identity. (Perhaps Joyce is suggesting this possibility in the chapter and we have seen above that Sedgwick takes this slippage as characteristic of modernism.) One may be attracted to a beautiful other who is an externalized version of the self, someone who can be identified with as displaying a more confident individuation. So this other can appear as both a different person and as the emanation of the self into an external existence, in a manner similar to the Christian structure of divinity. When we consider that structure of Christian incarnation, then we can see, as this Joycean chapter gradually admits, that Shakespeare, in writing Hamlet, can identify both with the father and with the son at Elsinore. In noting this point, we may reflect that father-son relationships are crucial to Ulysses. Stephen as Telemachus is seeking a genuinely supportive father-figure and will find him in Bloom-Ulysses, while Bloom in some sense is looking for a replacement for Rudy. Stephen’s own father Simon is shown to be woefully inadequate. In beginning of the novel Joyce is clearly identified with Stephen, who shares so many of his characteristics. But by the end much of that identification as a writing self has switched to Bloom. So he is like Shakespeare in Hamlet, in that at different times he identifies with the son and with the father, so that the two can be different aspects of his own identity. He is like the God of Sabellius who is identical with his own son and yet also distinct from him.

We might well end the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode in Joyce with a rather skeptical attitude about homoerotic attraction. The picture we have been given suggests that such a form of attraction may derive from anxiety about an engulfing adult female sexuality, so that one looks for less threatening objects of eros in slightly androgynous young males. Male homoerotic passion, this picture also suggests, tends to slip into a structure for which an enriching engagement with others easily collapses into a more impoverishing self-relation. It is infertile and leads to solitariness and perhaps to masturbation. That view may be reinforced when we note that mention is made in this episode of “Elsinore’s rocks” in Hamlet, and that the same reference is made by Haines, Mulligan’s English acquaintance, in the “Telemachus” episode regarding the view from the Martello tower. Two dangers seem symbolically paramount in Hamlet. On the castle wall we are told that one feels an enticing pull from the swallowing oceanic currents beneath. And then there is what Hamlet sees as the rampant sexual drive of his mother Gertrude, a threat that he handles by invoking inflated emotions of disgust. Those two dangers can appear to be the very ones designated by Charybdis, the swallowing oceanic whirlpool that would erase all individuation, and by Scylla, who has devouring doglike appendages from her midsection that would reach out and kill any males who might approach. So Joyce is right to link the discussion of Hamlet in his novel with reference to the ancient Scylla and Charybdis of Ulysses’s tale. We note that when Bloom passes between Stephen and Mulligan at the exit to the library, the latter accuses Bloom of having homoerotic designs on Stephen. There seems to be a suggestion that the homosexual is one who tries to pass between the two threats in question not by facing up to Scylla, as Odysseus/Ulysses was advised to do, but by avoiding her (the fantasy of a threatening female sexuality) while trying not to be swallowed by the powerful, de-individuating forces of nature. One way of resisting that swallowing may well be through art. Perhaps homosexuals, so this overall picture may be suggesting, turn to literature and art as a way of shaping a self-maintaining style of selfhood that can more confidently resist those forces of Charybdis, while managing at the same time to bypass those threats offered by Scylla. The heterosexual may seem to have a more dependable strategy: one has faced up to Scylla and so has less reason to pass close to, and to fear, Charybdis, or the dissolving of individual form into an oceanic abyss. In the background is Bloom’s full acceptance of, and pleasure in, adult female sexuality, of the sort that will be well represented by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. (The same is true for Joyce, for June 16^th 1904, the day on which the novel’s action occurs, commemorates his first date with Nora Barnacle, his future wife.) Again, homosexuality seems to fall rather short of a desirable outcome.

We might read O’Neill’s novel as an attempt to respond to Joyce on all four of the matters that I have just discussed: Irish nationalism, homoerotic attraction, a sense of Ireland as successor to Greece rather than to Rome, and serious political commitment. On the issue of same-sex attraction, the relationship of the teenagers Jim Mack and Doyler is presented as a powerful emotive attachment, not just a matter of sexual self-discovery. It is not only individually liberating but is also a bond that will lead to courageous activity in the service of a larger purpose. On Easter Sunday 1916, after almost a year of practice at swimming, they plan to swim out and plant an Irish flag on the Muglins. Doyler himself is deeply involved in the movement of Irish rebellion and Jim soon comes to support him in that enterprise. Jim at sixteen has had one unsatisfying sexual experience, a case of anonymous sex with a soldier in a dark, cavelike structure near the swimming place. He expresses his hope that just as he and Doyler are fighting for a new Ireland, so they are looking forward to the possibility of a new, more liberated kind of homosexual relation, one with real emotional power and endurance and no longer linked to anonymous sex with strangers. The vaguely homoerotic currents in the Joycean scene at the Forty Foot are turned into a vigorous sexual and emotive attraction in the same location. Although there is a degree of identification between the two, the self-to-other relationship remains vigorous as such and does not collapse into what is just a mirroring of the self in the other, as Joyce’s chapter suggests.

It is not clear how much O’Neill himself as writer wishes readers to agree with these hopeful attitudes of Jim and Doyler. For there are considerations that, in retrospect, make some elements of homoeroticism during this period problematic. Jim mentions the sacred band of ancient Thebes and has extravagant hopes for the cultural power of eroticized male friendship. Eveline MacMurrough has a moment for reflection as she watches the server at a Mass and thinks of the power of homoerotic eros that she has seen expressed in Roger Casement, whom she has loved; in Padraic Pearse, who has founded a school to train adolescent boys in traditional Irish culture and in the highest ideals of the ancient Greeks; and in her nephew Anthony, imprisoned in England for a homosexual offense. Though she is rather militaristic herself and an active and risk-taking supporter of the rebels, she thinks she understands that the power of a certain kind of homoerotic love makes war a male thing that she cannot fully participate in. In the novel we encounter Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion, engaged with the kilt-clad, Irish-speaking, beautiful male adolescents who seem to worship him and to be absolutely loyal to his ideals. From today’s viewpoint, Pearse’s relationship to these youths is thought to be suspect, though his homoeroticism may not have been expressed sexually. And Casement, we know, even as he did admirable humanitarian work in exposing terrible abuses in the Congo and in the Amazon, kept a diary in which he recorded the genital sizes of various young African and Brazilian males with whom he slept. Anthony MacMurrough, for his part, has sex with both Doyler and Jim. In the former case it is a matter of some roughness and of economic exploitation and in the latter case Jim’s youth, in his relationship with the older MacMurrough, will make it seem morally questionable to us today.

In the background is a much larger, European-wide phenomenon that is especially strong prior to the Great War. It was frequently claimed at the time that homoerotic bonds between men, including older-younger relationships, were a measure of the vital strength of nations, because they allowed erotic force to be channeled away from the affections of family life and sublimated into higher cultural goals. Hans Blüher claimed that it was a good thing that male homoeroticism abounded in the German youth movement, for this meant that Germany had a resource for a vital cultural power that could counteract modernity’s tendencies toward decadence, exhaustion, a lack of energetic commitment to larger ideals, and an overall failure of health. Thomas Mann wrote during the war that the kind of male eros that would create bonds among German soldiers fighting together would be so strong that after the war they would find any attachment to their wives to be much weaker. During the 1920s he tried to transfer that kind of male eros away from considerations of war into a resource for attachment to the Weimar Republic, through appealing to the work of Walt Whitman. The German magazine Der Eigene endorsed a masculinist homoeroticism that claimed that homosexuals, so long as they were not of an effeminate type, could be the most rigorously masculine individuals in a society, in the manner of Alexander, Caesar, and Frederick the Great. Writers for this magazine vehemently disliked Magnus Hirschfeld’s movement that identified homosexuals as a tiny group making up a third sex, halfway between masculine and feminine. Homosexuality for them might be an option for all men at various times, especially when it is a matter of achieving cultural goals, such as going to war or creating great art. They were quite self-consciously misogynist and favored arenas of society that joined men in emotively bonded groups that often excluded women. The feminization of the world with modernity, liberalism, and socialism, so they claimed, would necessarily lead to a weaker, uglier, more tired culture, one governed by materialist consumerism and incapable of achieving larger, more spiritual goals.

The social background of literary modernism that O’Neill is returning to, then, can be morally suspect when it comes to certain aspects of homoeroticism. There can be a proto-fascist sublimation of erotic energy into nationalist and militarist goals, through an emphasis on the beauty and the ready idealism of young males. There is the likelihood that such idealism may be exploited in cases of sexual abuse of the young, as O’Neill is well aware occurred with some frequency in Ireland. And there seems to be an implicit misogyny in the thought that male bonding is an especially powerful resource for larger cultural achievements. Jim, Doyler, and MacMurrough, since they are of their own time, do not raise these issues; it is unclear how much O’Neill wishes us to raise them in reading the book. We are offered, through Jim’s eyes, a heroic view of an eroticized male friendship that leads to a desire to serve larger goals and to express a fierce loyalty in the partnership. It is true that elsewhere in the book we are offered a case of homoerotic attraction that presents itself as more dubious. Jim feels guilt at first regarding his sexual feelings and regarding what the Catholic church finds to be a very serious mortal sin. He is encouraged to become a brother by Brother Polycarp, who teaches at his school. But Polycarp’s hands wander inappropriately when the two of them pray together. Jim is able more and more to detach himself from the church and to give up the thought of becoming a brother. The eros between him and Doyler, not as an idealized love but with a vigorous sexual expression, is presented as a liberating, maturing experience that brings Jim to larger political attachments.

O’Neill’s characters are allowed to be more explicitly political than Joyce’s. It is true that recent Irish political history may be on the minds of various figures in Ulysses. There are several brief mentions of Charles Stewart Parnell, the great Irish leader in the London Parliament who was driven from office because of an affair with a married woman. In the “Hades” episode several of the men, after burying Patrick Dignam in the graveyard, decide to visit Parnell’s grave and they wonder about the rumor that he is not truly dead, that he will one day return. And there are references to the Phoenix Park murders, where Irish nationalists, in 1882, stabbed to death two leading officials of British rule in Ireland. Joyce himself was sympathetic to Parnell, but for the most part there are not serious discussions of politics in the novel. In O’Neill, on the other hand, there is a clear description of various political positions. Doyler is a socialist and a follower of James Connolly, who appears in the novel and who was executed after the Easter Rebellion. Connolly has written Socialism Made Easy and, while he encourages rebellion against the English, he believes in a Marxist, socialist, working-class unity across different nations. Connolly and James Larkin have formed the Irish Citizen Army. (We hear reference in the novel to the Larkinites.) It arose out of labor strikes that were brutally put down and was designed at first to be a militia protecting workers during their demonstrations. Eventually Connolly’s group joins with the Irish Republican Brotherhood in staging the Easter Rebellion. It is important to Doyler that he is committed to the Citizen Army and not simply to the Irish Volunteers, many of whom are also involved in the uprising, though their leaders are not fully committed to it. This group had been formed in 1913 to oppose the Ulster Volunteers, a Protestant group who are vehemently against Home Rule for Ireland and are willing to fight to prevent it. Many in the Irish Volunteers would not approve of Connolly’s more radical socialist aims. There are those who simply want England to grant Home Rule to Ireland, with its own parliament, while Ireland would remain within the British Empire and would remain in principle loyal to the British monarch. The Irish Republican Brotherhood wants full status for Ireland as a self-governing republic independent of England. Doyler emphasizes the socialist, working-class aspect of his commitment to the Citizen Army and he mentions the great Lockout of a few years earlier, when tens of thousands of workers were locked out of their jobs as employers attempted to break their unions.

Jim, who has earlier been little aware of these various political factions, comes to identify with Doyler’s commitments because of his love for him. When Doyler, after nearly drowning during their heroic Easter Day swim to the Muglins, is too ill to respond to the call of the Citizen Army to come to Dublin the next day, Jim, like Patroclus, puts on Doyler’s uniform and take his rifle to the uprising. Doyler eventually makes it to Stephen’s Green in Dublin, along with MacMurrough, and dies while protecting Jim from a raking of machine-gun fire. Jim vows to kill as many British as he can in the future and in the book’s final paragraphs, we look very briefly forward to see that he has fought in both the War of Independence against England and in the Irish Civil War, where he apparently takes the more radical republican side against the Free Staters who will accept a compromise treaty with England. He dies in the arms of MacMurrough, who has been deeply in love with him. So O’Neill’s novel leads us deeply into the political struggles of Ireland in a way that Joyce’s quite deliberately does not.

I noted earlier that Joyce tends to raise considerable skepticism about the Irish goals of “Hellenizing” Ireland and of identifying with the heroic culture of ancient Greece, against a framework that identifies England with ancient Rome. Bloom’s more cosmopolitan identifications, as with his “Roman” interests in plumbing, engineering, and commerce, seem to win out over the romanticized Hellenism of Buck Mulligan and Professor MacHugh. O’Neill, in contrast, gives much greater force to the Greek identification of the Irish movement. Jim is deeply moved by the idea of the Sacred Band of Thebes, whose homoerotic bonds led them to victory until they were slain in battle by Philip of Macedon. MacMurrough, while in prison in England, befriends a British don who is also in jail for a homosexual offense. He calls him Scrotes, clearly a play on Socrates, and after his death, MacMurrough continues to remember him as a voice in his head, one that draws him into Socratic debates regarding the importance of male friendship in a society, the rightness or wrongness of particular instances of sexual activity, and whether homosexuals are a debased version of something else or are a natural group unto themselves. These debates frame such issues within a deeply Greek cultural world. While Joyce’s text gives us references to arias from European operas, we are more likely to encounter in O’Neill a band whose leader insists on their playing traditional Irish flutes, rather than the kind used in professional orchestras. One character is upset by the practice of using the adjective ‘Hibernian’ for the Irish, since that was the Latin name for Ireland and the Irish were never conquered by the Romans, as they hope now to throw back the English. There is a disagreement as to whether a priest should be better at speaking Erse (Irish) or Latin.      

With a book whose setting is in 1915-16, O’Neill will naturally have a more detailed politics to talk about then will Joyce, whose work is set in 1904. Joyce in general seems worried that Irish politics and Irish history will exert such a pull on him that he will be unable to emancipate himself for the great aesthetic projects that he aims to undertake. He must distance himself from Ireland in order to achieve the greatness in art that he desires. He prefers to come to understand himself and his artistic powers in Trieste rather than in Dublin. During the Easter uprising he is in Zurich writing Ulysses. During the War of Independence and the Civil War he is in Paris finishing Ulysses. His great selfishness as an artist is crucial to his success, but this means that he does not seem deeply committed to the various political maneuvers of the Irish. We see in his story “The Dead” that the great constellation he is working on is not so much a political one as that which joins together the psychological, the metaphysical, and the aesthetic. We are present as readers at a very local event, a dinner party given by two elderly sisters and their niece, at which Gabriel Conroy offers a somewhat over-rhetorical dinner speech. He notices a special look on his wife Greta’s face and imagines that she is thinking about an intimate interaction of the two of them at the hotel after the party. But it turns out she has heard an old Irish ballad that her boyfriend in the west of Ireland, long ago when she was a teenager, used to sing to her. When he was quite ill and she was leaving for convent school in Dublin, he came across the fields in the rain to say good-bye to her, and she heard later that he died soon afterward. Gabriel comes to understand that there are large areas of his wife’s emotional life that he is not central to, and that his attempt to live a more cosmopolitan European life must face up to the great force of the sadness, deaths, and fatalist heroism of Irish history. Then the stance of the story expands. It seems that we are viewing the small Dublin scene from a point above it as snow is accumulating on its buildings and roads. Soon we are taking in the whole of Ireland as a snowfall begins to obliterate its various markings, including the west of Ireland where Greta came from, the grave where her old boyfriend is buried, the waters of the Shannon, the graves of all the dead, and, finally, the dark waves of the ocean. That expansion of our viewpoint in space and time gives us a strong metaphysical sense of how minute, fragile, and ephemeral is any human life, how easily its markings are erased. And yet that viewpoint does not overwhelm the one that makes us take the small events of the dinner party as valuable, as worthy of being noticed and brought into a narration. Art is the great power that allows both those viewpoints to exist simultaneously without either destroying the other. Joyce in Ulysses will trace the smallest details in Bloom’s life, including many that are shameful, banal, and trivial. As when our aesthetic stance expands at the end of “The Dead,” Joyce uses his art to engender a perspective on Bloom that simultaneously acknowledges the trivial character of these events and grants them, even from the distance of time and art, a powerful value. The background framework of the Odyssey is not used to show off Joyce’s knowledge, nor is it a satirical way of showing how far the modern world has fallen from the heroic gestures of the ancient. That background stands for the framework of art itself, its capacity to give the kind of shape to a life that lets its significance emerge, as Henry James was always one to insist. Bloom with all his flaws is genuinely a hero. Joyce will join an aesthetic-metaphysical stance on the world with the most minute possible exploration of the psychological life of an individual self.

O’Neill’s attitude toward the aesthetic stance is somewhat less clear. We might note that his novel is different in one respect from most of the other recent gay novels that I am investigating. The main characters of these other ones generally are involved in an aesthetic mode of life, whether as writers or as individuals who spend much of their lives arranging significant aesthetic experiences. MacMurrough in At Swim, Two Boys may have some of these aesthetic leanings, but Jim and Doyler are resolutely committed to their relationship and to their political commitments, not to the experience of literature and painting. O’Neill often writes beautifully and, with Joyce and others in the background, he is clearly giving an aesthetic shape to the experiences of his characters. Yet we note as well how he at least appears to give unskeptical support to Jim’s desire to be like the lovers of the ancient Theban Band. He allows Jim to be naïve in thinking that he and Doyler can express their pure love through joining the Citizen Army in a hopeless uprising, and he seems to allow himself as a writer a certain closeness to that naivety, whatever might be his actual views as an Irish citizen today. Joyce allows the disenchanting view that could easily undercut and discredit Bloom’s life, and then he offers an overall aesthetic stance that overcomes that perspective and lets us see such a life as having an intrinsic worth. O’Neill’s writer’s stance is close to Jim’s and does not permit a great deal of space for disenchantment to arise. For many writers, the aesthetic stance is supposed to encapsulate a distinctive and enduring style of experiencing, of taking in and appropriating what is difficult and challenging: matters of loss, ambivalence, and separateness, as well as the threatening pressures of the world. There may be a profound lack or emptiness at the base of things that must be countered by an aesthetic shaping. In Jim and Doyler’s relationship, in contrast, there is little ambivalence or a falling short of an ideal. The aesthetic stance is hardly needed to bring that relationship into view in a transfiguring manner that allows us to accept its features in the way we accept the features of Bloom’s life. 

A related difference concerns the level of psychological investigation. The great literary modernists, as much as they were experimentalists in new forms of narrative and the possibilities of language, wished to probe as deeply as they could into the complexities of the psychological lives of individuals. Proust wanted to study human mental processes the way a great scientist or engineer would, with a willingness to find layers and ambivalences that other writers had not brought out. Eliot in The Waste Land performs as rigorous a dissection of his psyche as one can find almost anywhere else, with images and references from the Western canon becoming a scaffolding for extremely complex psychological states. Henry James wants to approach the finest level of subtlety and nuance in his presentation of human motivations. Joyce tries to show every aspect of Bloom’s mental life, whether good or bad. O’Neill, it seems, does not work to find such complexity in Jim’s psyche. There does not appear to be an internal parliament in Jim whose unwieldy coalitions make him respond inconsistently, both positively and negatively, to his relationship with Doyler. Yet it can be a strength that O’Neill is willing to present Jim’s attitudes with the naïve power they might truly have held for certain individuals back in 1916.

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