“Our civilisation is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed ... it is pointless searching for a fabric that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby ... What race or language ... can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland.”
James Joyce made these remarks in a lecture entitled Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages in 1907. They were quoted last week by John McCourt, author of a book on Joyce’s time in Trieste, to argue that recombinations, not zero-sum purity, characterise Ireland’s place in European culture, literature and languages. Ireland understands Europe from within and we are Irish through Europe. Each is a bridge to the other; they are not isolated piers – defined by Stephen Dedalus as disappointed bridges in Ulysses.
McCourt spoke at a conference in Trinity College Dublin to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the university’s chairs in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The papers are based on chapters in a forthcoming book examining the impact of languages across Irish intellectual, economic and political life, looked at from a wide variety of academic disciplines. It is a rich and multifaceted approach, delivering many insights on the creative role of languages in contemporary Ireland.
Joyce’s lecture was an exuberant celebration of Irishness as a pluralist identity open to many cultural influences and languages. It was a pointed case to make in Trieste’s Università Popolare, given its strong commitment to Italian irredentism – reunification with Italy after 500 years of rule by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Joyce stood apart from this type of Italian nationalism, just as he opposed the exceptionalist Catholic and Gaelic version of Irishness championed by the scabrous Irish journalist DP Moran in his newspaper The Leader.
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The German novelist Ulrike Draesner, in an opening address, said national monolingualism is a 19th century invention which “set out to make us forget that multilingualism is our point of departure” – in life as in literature. “Languages are not things but emergent processual weavings: vast fluid spaces of thinking and feeling, of connecting and of generating realities”, grounded in human bodyness. They draw on migration and the exchange of people in which translations transfer and transform human experience.
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Her remarks were a warning against commodification of languages and translation through artificial intelligence (AI) controlled by big capital – a false multilingualism of unambiguous speed and flatness. So were those from Yves Citton, the French writer and academic. In his work on curiosity he says that whereas AI’s algorithms instantly generate electronic summaries, mental processes are more like the digestive systems, which move food through our stomachs.
President Catherine Connolly, speaking at the conference, congratulated Trinity for pioneering the study of modern languages 250 years ago. She grounded her thoughtful remarks on languages in a critique of their exploitation by powerful corporations pursuing “endless unsustainable growth, consumption and extraction”, and now using that crude utilitarian ideology to justify their control of AI. Learning a language is instead “a voyage of discovery” in the meaning and use of words.
“Expanding our vocabulary in one language deepens our understanding of other languages” by confronting us with different perspectives and ways of thinking. “One particularly beautiful aspect of language learning is that it invites us into another culture, allowing us to get to know, and crucially, to care about, its people and history ... a profoundly human process of connection that AI can never reproduce.”
And we need “look no further than our own country to see the benefits and opportunities presented by a multicultural and multilingual population”, with more than 200 languages spoken by newcomers, of whom 15 per cent speak a language other than English or Irish at home. The growing gap between the 4 per cent studying languages at third level and the official commitment to the competitive use of languages for economic resilience perhaps reflects that market capture of language, the President said, rather than “a wonderful opportunity to enrich our lives, break down barriers, build bridges and champion diversity”, based on mutual respect.
These philosophical reflections on language in Ireland have valuable lessons for cultural shocks that may yet come. Far-right threats to diversity in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, championing nativist monoculturalism, are one such potential shock.
Another comes from constructive preparation for a united Ireland bringing together very different cultural traditions. The Irish language revival movement has much to learn from these ideas about weaving recent inhabitants’ linguistic energies imaginatively into a new Irish civilisational fabric – drawing on James Joyce, not DP Moran.
Joyce would undoubtedly approve of Seamus Deane’s remark in a 1970 essay: “Irishness will be the result of unity, not the precondition of it.”
