Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Literary Revival: historical perspectives
- 2 Joyce's magic lantern
- 3 Music: the cultural issue
- 4 Modernism and revolution: rereading Yeats's ‘Easter 1916’
- 5 Shakespeare and the Irish self
- 6 Irish literature and the Great War
- 7 Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s
- 8 Post-modernists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien
- 9 Patrick Kavanagh: religious poet
- 10 MacNeice's Irelands: MacNeice's islands
- 11 Louis MacNeice and the Second World War
- 12 MacNeice and the puritan tradition
- 13 John Hewitt and memory: a reflection
- 14 Michael Longley and the Irish poetic tradition
- 15 Seamus Heaney: the witnessing eye and the speaking tongue
- 16 Derek Mahon: the poet and painting
- 17 Telling tales: Kennelly's Cromwell and Muldoon's ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’
- 18 Redeeming the time: John McGahern and John Banville
- 19 ‘Have we a context?’: transition, self and society in the theatre of Brian Friel
- 20 Hubert Butler and nationalism
- 21 The Irish Dylan Thomas: versions and influences
- Index
- References
2 - Joyce's magic lantern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Literary Revival: historical perspectives
- 2 Joyce's magic lantern
- 3 Music: the cultural issue
- 4 Modernism and revolution: rereading Yeats's ‘Easter 1916’
- 5 Shakespeare and the Irish self
- 6 Irish literature and the Great War
- 7 Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s
- 8 Post-modernists: Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien
- 9 Patrick Kavanagh: religious poet
- 10 MacNeice's Irelands: MacNeice's islands
- 11 Louis MacNeice and the Second World War
- 12 MacNeice and the puritan tradition
- 13 John Hewitt and memory: a reflection
- 14 Michael Longley and the Irish poetic tradition
- 15 Seamus Heaney: the witnessing eye and the speaking tongue
- 16 Derek Mahon: the poet and painting
- 17 Telling tales: Kennelly's Cromwell and Muldoon's ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’
- 18 Redeeming the time: John McGahern and John Banville
- 19 ‘Have we a context?’: transition, self and society in the theatre of Brian Friel
- 20 Hubert Butler and nationalism
- 21 The Irish Dylan Thomas: versions and influences
- Index
- References
Summary
Pope Leo XIII published his poem Ars Photographica in 1867, recognising a new era when the light of the sun would allow marvels of realistic representation far beyond anything the pencil had hitherto achieved. Ironically, the future Holy Father chose to celebrate this augury of a new age in one of the languages of the ancients. But in English his poem might run:
Drawn by the sun's bright pencil,
How well, O glistening stencil,
You express the brow's fine grace,
Eye's sparkle, and beauty of face.
O marvelous might of mind,
New prodigy! A design
Beyond the contrival
Of Apelles, Nature's rival.
It was Apelles, the fourth-century Greek painter, whose artful grapes were so realistic that the birds are reputed to have pecked them. Photography, it is implied, will perform even greater mimetic miracles in the future. And the light of the sun is the source of this new art.
This poem is the only item of ecclesiastical history which the mock-synod conducted around a Mr Kernan's bed in Joyce's ‘Grace’ in Dubliners in fact manages to get right. All other matter in this catechetic class conducted for the benefit of the unfortunate Mr Kernan is a litany of what Hugh Kenner has been pleased to identify as Irish fact, in which prejudice and half-remembered detail achieve the condition of mythology. Why Joyce should have allowed Martin Cunningham in the story to remember the detail of the Papal poem aright is something scholarship has ignored.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Literature of IrelandCulture and Criticism, pp. 27 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010