GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

—When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.

—Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man's country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.

—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"It would be grand to fight with your friend beside you," Jim said. "We'll be asked to fight for Ireland, sure I know that."

"But what is Ireland that you should want to fight for it?" asked MacMurrough.

"Sure I know that too," he said, "It's Doyler."

"Doyler is your country?"

"It's silly, I know. But that's how I feel. I know Doyler will be out, and where would I be but out beside him? I don't hate the English and I don't know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I'm sure of that now. And he's my country."

—Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

The title of Jamie O'Neill's 2001 Irish historical novel makes an obvious gesture to Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, but one of O'Neill's most sustained intertextual conversations is with James Joyce. Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young [End Page 1] Man, At Swim, Two Boys is a coming-of-age narrative set in 1915–16 in Sandycove, and its exuberant delight in language play is distinctly Joycean.¹ Its trajectory, however, diverges significantly—and with ironic self-awareness—from Portrait, particularly as At Swim, the winner of the 2002 Lambda Literary Award, is an unabashed homosexual romance. Invoking Joyce's novel as an intertext within the context of the 1916 Easter Rising, the gay divarications of O'Neill's novel strategically disrupt and reconfigure the models of selfhood, nation, and history found in Portrait to shape a (re)visionary structure of both Irish gay subjectivity and queer literary transmission.²

In the first epigraph above, Stephen Dedalus rejects nation, language, and religion as dangerous "snares of the world" that hinder his burgeoning artistic soul.³ Shocking and alienating his close friend Davin, a devoted cultural nationalist, Stephen also effectively disavows friendship as yet another net. Similarly, he distances himself from familial bonds, comradeship, and community, preferring to cultivate the "joy of his loneliness," out of the belief that he "was different from others" (71, 67). True to his mythological namesake, Stephen is a lone artificer who epitomizes the modernist artist in exile, an exile resonant with the novel's setting. Like all Irish citizens colonized under British rule, Stephen is exiled within his own country; however, he embraces this exile and fears being consumed by a feminized, cannibalistic nation: "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow" (220).

With a similarly gendered metaphor, Stephen also rejects the will to historical memory as a feminized retrograde attachment. Endorsing his schoolmate's opinion that "all women" are mired in history and "[remember] the past," Stephen concludes, "Statues of women . . . should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her own hinder parts" (273). In contrast, Stephen's temporal philosophy obliterates history: the past is "consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future" (273). Looking ahead, not nostalgically behind, Stephen—like Joyce—declares his difference from his literary and national predecessors. Rejecting Yeats's Michael Robartes, who "remembers forgotten beauty, and . . . presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world," Stephen proclaims his "desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world" (273). Accordingly, to express his spirit "in unfettered freedom," Stephen marshals "silence, exile, and cunning...