Assimilating Shem into the Plural Polity

Professor Levi Brullo introduces the Burrus and Caseous tale of Finnegans Wake 1.6 with the parenthetical (the of Professor Ciondolone's too frequently hypothecated Bettlermensch) (fw 161.02-03). Historically, butter has been the Ubermensch of the Irish dairy industry and the easiest way for Irish dairy farmers to make quickquid within British imperial systems of trade. Joyce explicitly roots the tale in the time-is-money, cashdime paradigm (fw 161.04) to critique the way imperial capitalist economics rewards and encourages quick, profitable monocultures, which are incredibly difficult for newly independent states to disentangle themselves from. In the absence of government intervention to encourage a wider range of dairy produce, the Irish system had become self-perpetuating, forcing conformity and submission to its butter-is-best logic. Ultimately, the Wake's linguistic violence serves as a model for acculturation and a mode of thinking, yet remains sceptical about the possibility of a truly plural political system, in which power is decentred and spread among a multiplicity of equitably treated actors. A close-reading of the Burrus and Caseous tale that contextualises it within the history of Irish dairy production reveals how economic and political power resists assimilating difference into its systems. Through its treatment of the Irish dairy industry, the Burrus and Caseous tale offers a cautious vision of a plural polity that values difference within the body politic but remains ambivalent about the polity's ability to equitably integrate difference.The Wake foregrounds both in its linguistic form and in its many stories of conquerors sweeping across Ireland. It does not assimilate in the primary sense listed in the oed, make or be like.1 This definition requires a loss of identity, conformity to whatever prevailing customs a majority might hold; in short, homogenisation. In this sense of assimilation, power systems remain unaffected, the status quo carries on as it always has, and immigrants are expected to learn the language of the majority and start working minimum-wage jobs to justify their right to live within state borders. In current public discourse, especially with recent rightward swings in us and eu elections, this seems to be the prevailing sense of assimilate. The Wake's celebration of difference directly challenges this sense of the word. Instead of the model of conformity and uniformity, Joyce's text illustrates a mode of assimilation in its second definition: absorb and incorporate, become of the same substance; to become absorbed or incorporated into the system.2 Of the same is the important departure from how many people might define assimilation. This sense grants the Other the same substance as a free, enfranchised, corporate member of the polity. This does not mean that one becomes invisible or must blend in with dominant cultural mores. Immigrants retain their sense of identity yet also participate in the life of the city. To twist the Dublin city motto: as long as everyone obeys the laws (provided they are just), everyone will remain happy.In 1907, Joyce himself used a metaphor for this kind of assimilation in Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages. The oft-quoted depiction of civilisation as a large fabric reads:Our civilisation is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which Nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. 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. What race, or what language (if we accept the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland

Economics · Irish · Linguistics · Microeconomics · Plural · Political science · Polity · Production (economics) · Programming language · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy

• Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

  Robert Baines•Philosophical Allusions in James…•2023

  Add to list