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“OMNIUM GATHERUM”
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Young Irelanders, whose attempts at reviving Gaelic elements
inspired Revivalists such as Hyde and Yeats. The Revivalists’
appeal to Gaelic materials and De-Anglicization, so far as Joyce
is concerned, is not only parochial but impractical: the
indulgence in past glories and the attempt to eliminate British
influences from Ireland is retrospective and pointless,
disconnected from both daily life and present reality. As Terry
Eagleton remarks, the Gaelic took it home “in the hearts and
minds of the intelligentsia,” not in the day-to-day life of the
rural people (1995: 263). Joyce himself claims the hybridity of
Irish culture, in which Anglicization plays a part: “Our
civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements
are mingled . . . In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a
thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having
undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread” (1989:
165). Presenting a speech on Celtic Revival through the
caricatured MacHugh’s mouth, and portraying the pressmen as
indulging in past triumphs and empty talks, Joyce insinuates
his disapproval of Young Irelanders and Revivalists’ stance,
indicating the nostalgia, parochialism, and impracticality of
these intellectuals’ ideas. Eagleton perceives a “traditional gap
between rhetoric and reality in Ireland” (1995: 257). This gap
is manifested in both fictitious and factual Irish intellectuals.
Joyce’s representations of the “talents” in “Aeolus,” in this
respect, reveal not simply the deterioration of certain
intellectuals who failed to be the conscience of the nation in
1904; subtly but significantly, Joyce inserts into the episode his
critique of, or dialogue with, those who have shaped Ireland.
It is noteworthy that Stephen, the literary talent, is among
the “OMNIUM GATHERUM” in the office. As mentioned
earlier, Stephen’s rebellion and nonconformity makes him an
intellectual to Joyce’s mind
—
the younger Joyce when
composing
Portrait
. Stephen’s participation in “Aeolus,”
however, is complex: on one hand, he rejects the editor’s