Terry Eagleton is usually a good read, and his LRB review of Frank Callanan's *James Joyce: A Political Life* is exactly the kind of thing that makes you want to cancel your evening. He opens by insisting that Joyce, that haughty young recusant, was not some aesthete who floated above the fray but "a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell." Which is to say, the man who wrote *Ulysses* was not above the mud of history; he was elbow-deep in it, trying to pull out a specific, narrow, almost-buried thing. This is the razor clam of the whole conversation. Everyone else reads Joyce as a modernist who transcended politics, but Eagleton, bless his slippery brain, points out that Joyce's politics were not absent, just displaced, refracted through the broken prism of Parnell's fall. You don't get to skip the messy stuff because you're busy playing with parallax. The mess is the point.
And here's where we have to squirt some water at our own readers' assumptions. Because we write a lot about language and memory around here, don't we? We've talked about how A Name Emerges: Family, Memory, and the Secrets We Bury digs into the buried things that shape us, and how Five Years of Spanish Class? Turns Out, Actual Fluency Takes a Little More pokes at the gap between learning a language and living in it. Joyce is that gap, made flesh and bile. He knew that you can't just inherit a nation; you have to construct it, word by word, and then let it fall apart. His loyalty to Parnell wasn't nostalgia. It was a strategy. It was a way of saying that the nation is not a given, not a blood-and-soil inheritance, but a story you tell yourself so convincingly that you start to believe the punctuation. Which is why Eagleton's take matters: he's not just explaining Joyce, he's explaining how modernism itself was a political act, a refusal to let the Empire dictate the grammar.
But here's our honest take, and it's a little spiky. Eagleton is right, but he's also, in that infuriatingly brilliant way, missing the feral part. Joyce wasn't a political writer because he had a programme. He was political because he refused to let anyone else own the narrative, not even the nationalist heroes he admired. He's like the kid who learns the anthem but then starts humming it off-key, just to see who flinches. That's what we'd tell a reader who asks, "So should I read Callanan's book?" Yes, but bring a shovel. Because the real takeaway, the one that burrows into your brain and refuses to surface, is that loyalty to a cause and loyalty to the truth are not the same thing, and Joyce spent his entire life forcing them to share a room. He was Parnell's disciple, sure, but only because Parnell lost. And losing, for Joyce, was the only winning move. Watch for that in the text: the way he romanticises failure not as a tragedy but as a style. That's the detail to hold onto. That's the narrow thing that squirts.
