S: “While scientists still do not know much about why or how we dream, some have suggested that we typically spend more than two hours dreaming each night,” according to The National Sleep Foundation (you won’t catch them napping.)
Here, but a few minutes into HCE’s dream – that’s where we are, yes, no? – the Big Man dreams his way into death’s dream kingdom. A massive, elaborate coffin is presented (no small bier) and a tomb gravely excavated by means high explosives. And he joins the underground.
What follows is “a row and ruction” and a period of “shillelagh law,” in the words of the stage Irish ditty. (Fraternal warfare follows the death of the father. Maybe they ‘et ‘im! Don’t be afreud to go there.)
The Fighting Irish
“from both Celtiberian camps (granting at the outset for the sake of argument that men on the two sides in New South Ireland and Vetera Uladh, bluemen and pill faces …” FW 78 25, 26.
A common synonym for a brawl in Donneybrook, named for a village on the high road out of Dublin, the site of a notoriously rowdy annual fair. C.f. Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867): “The only principle recognised … was akin to that recommended to the traditionary Irishman on his visit to Donnybrook Fair, ‘Wherever you see a head, hit it’.”
Consider that green-garbed, bellicose homunculus, the creepy mascot who jigs and jabs on the sidelines of all Notre Dame University games. He incarnates the “Fighting Irish,” a term originating in the anti-Catholic sentiment facing the Irish immigrants to America in the mid 19th century.
“Fighting Irish! It’s more than a name; more than a people. It is the Faith!” (University of Notre Dame Religious Bulletin, March 16, 1953)
The phrase appears in a poem by Joyce (“Trees”) Kilmer, titled “When the 69th Comes Back,” published posthumously in 1919. (Kilmer was killed in battle while serving with the 69th Regiment, New York.)
“God rest our valiant leaders dead, whom we cannot forget;
/ They’ll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting Irish yet!”
Kilmer’s WW I 69th was descended from the Union Army’s 69th New York State Volunteers, the nucleus of the “Irish Brigade.” Of the 7,715 men who served in the brigade’s ranks, 961 were killed and approximately 3,000 wounded. Their chaplain, Father William Corby, gave conditional absolution to the troops before the Battle of Gettysburg; they would go to heaven – provided they were shot IN THE FRONT.
Some 140,000 Irish served in the Union Army, and they dominated at least 20 regiments. Yet in the book Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, authors Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson make the case that the American Civil War was a conflict between Celts and Saxons; that it was the Confederates who were Irish, and lost because Southerners fought like their Celtic ancestors, who were intensely loyal to their leaders but lacked efficiency, perseverance, and foresight. (Six Confederate generals were Irish-born).
The Irish also took to fighting in the ring. 56.3% of the prize fighters in New York City, 1840-60, were Irish, as were nine of 19 world champions in the 1880s, and 40% of the top contenders, 1909 -16.
At home, the Irish appear to have enjoyed fighting so much that after winning their War of Independence from England, (1919-1921, with 2,014 fatalities) they went on fighting one another for another year, causing a minimum of 3,000 combatant and civilian deaths.
Curiously, the Irish nation remained neutral during World Was II and turned down a 1949 offer to join NATO. The Irish military now has a fine reputation as UN peacekeepers.
M: And of course, Joyce himself was never one to run from a fight, provided Hemingway was there to do the actual fighting. Saith Papa: ‘We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn’t even see the man so he’d say: “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!”‘ (As per Ellman’s James Joyce, 708, footnote)
sum mer de le wake 