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New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature

Series Editor
Kelly Matthews
Department of English, Framingham State University, Framingham, MA,
USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh

scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity
and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness
and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes
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Michael McAteer

Excess in Modern Irish Writing

Spirit and Surplus
Michael McAteer
Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Institute of English and
American Studies, Pá zmá ny Péter Catholic University, Budapest,
Hungary

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-37412-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-37413-6
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive

license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the
absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the
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Cover illustration: Louis le Brocquy,The Táin .Cúchulainn in warp-spasm
, 1969 Aubusson tapestry, 184 x 129 cm, Atelier René Duché Edition of
9 © The Estate of Louis le Brocquy

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For Tina,
Szeretettel
Preface
This book has its origins in some of the material that I taught as a
lecturer in Irish Writing at the former School of English, Queen’s
University Belfast, between 2002 and 2012. Working with old
acquaintances and colleagues Eamonn Hughes, Fran Brearton, Sinéad
Sturgeon, Mark Phelan and the late Siobhá n Kilfeather, I absorbed and
questioned a range of ideas about modern Irish writing as it developed
through the course of the twentieth century. Out of this I turned
towards Alain Badiou’s work,Being and Event , that was first published
in English translation in 2006. I was struck by how one of the most
important ideas in this work bore a direct relation to a particular
perspective on Irish writing and culture that could be traced back to
Matthew Arnold’s influential writing on Celticism: the idea of excess.
This idea gained renewed impetus during the 2000s with the dramatic
acceleration of the Celtic Tiger economy in the Republic of Ireland (and
also Northern Ireland), followed by the economic collapse of 2008 and
subsequent rebooting of the financial-corporate system. The issue that
arose for me against this backdrop was as follows. Is there a significant
relation between the Arnoldian (and later Wildean) idea of excess and
that of Badiou? Given the impact of Arnold’s idea of Celtic excess and its
subsequent transformation in the work of Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats
at the end of the nineteenth century, does this connection reveal an
important relation between excess in twentieth-century Irish writing
and excess as a distinguishing feature of modernity in its twentieth-
century phase? Situating Badiou’s approach in the context of the idea of
excess as it appears in modern philosophical thought from Hegel and
Kierkegaard through to Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Adorno,
Derrida and Sloterdijk, these are the questions with which my book is
primarily concerned in its discussion of a broad range of works by
major Irish-born authors through the course of the twentieth century.
Michael McAteer
Budapest, Hungary
Acknowledgements
Despite the persistent obstacles encountered, teaching Irish writing in
Hungary since 2012 at the Institute of English and American Studies,
Pá zmá ny University, Budapest, has enriched my perspectives on Irish
writing in its European contexts. This is so not just with regard to those
writers like Joyce and Beckett who are well known for their move to the
continent, but with equal regard to several other writers discussed in
this book, writers who lived predominantly in Ireland or England. This
enrichment is not just a result of different contexts that some students
whom I have taught in Budapest have brought to Irish texts, Hungarian
students in the main, but also students from surrounding countries and
west Asia. I include among these Orsolya Szű cs, Angelika Zheltysheva,
Erzsébet Petrá nyi, Klá ra Ladá nyi, Gellért Hujbert, Angela Sallai, Szó fia
Medgyessy and Zsuzsanna Balá zs. Since 2015, I have taught Irish
literature with my colleague Má rta Pellérdi as part of postgraduate
seminars on Celticism, colonialism and Postcolonialism in Irish,
Scottish and English literature during the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. This has influenced some of the critical perspectives that I
put forward in this book. The same also holds for the introduction
course in twentieth century British and Irish literature that I have been
teaching with Benedek Tó ta since coming to Budapest.
I appreciate the feedback given to an early draft of Chapter 2 of this
book at the ‘Work-In-Progress’ seminar managed ably by Shakespeare
scholar Natá lia Pikli at the School of English and American Studies,
Eö tvö s Lorá nd University (ELTE) Budapest. In particular, I am grateful
to Andrea Timá r at ELTE for pointing me in the direction of the work of
Peter Sloterdijk, a thinker who inflects the idea of excess with a
different stress to that of Badiou. Responses from Győ ző Ferencz,
Ferenc Taká cs and Dalma Véry have also been useful. In the course of
writing this book, I have been struck by the enthusiasm for Irish
literature that many scholars carry in Central and Eastern Europe.
There is the long-vibrant Irish Studies scene at Prague driven by Ondřej
Pilný, Clare Wallace and Justin Quinn. I have also encountered the
admirable efforts of Aidan O’Malley in Zagreb and Rijeka, Erika
Mihá lycsa in Clú j/Kolosvá r, Wit Pietrzak, Michael Lachmann and
Katarzyna Ojrznyska at Ló dž, Leszek Drong at Katowice, Paul Fagan and
Dieter Fuchs at Vienna and Stefan Pajović at Novi Sad. My journey in
writing this book in Budapest has been made rewarding in coming to
know the Hungarian literary translator and Armagh native, Owen Good;
modern Irish historian and Szeged native, Lili Zach; gender studies and
Irish poetry scholar, Borbá la Faragó ; Sadhbh De Barra and Zsuzsanna
Kiss. It has also been enriched by the visits of various Irish writers and
scholars to Budapest since 2013, especially Medbh McGuckian, Deirdre
Madden, Glenn Patterson, Gearó id MacLochlainn and Sorcha de Brú n.
The journey could not have been undertaken without the affection and
companionship of my wife Eglantina. I dedicate this book to her
indelible sense of fun; her ineffable patience; her love of frescoes, oil
painting and figure skating; her saintly capacity to summon a smile
when dealing with the delights of Hungarian administration.
Praise forExcess in Modern Irish Writing
“In his brilliantly exposed and finely nuanced study, Michael McAteer
demonstrates the centrality of various forms of excess in Irish writing
from the period of the Revival to the present. His meticulous and
incisive readings of a wide array of writers from W. B. Yeats, Oscar
Wilde, and James Joyce to Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Glenn
Patterson, and Medbh McGuckian unearth deep-seated connections
between their works. Above all, McAteer illuminatingly theorises the
multiple political and philosophical dimensions of excess as an
animating and variegated facet of Irish writing. His arrestingly original
account of the ongoing aesthetics of excess deftly reconceptualises
them and invites us to revise our views of a host of texts.”
—Professor Anne Fogarty,University College Dublin
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ It was William
Blake, most English of poets, who wrote this line inThe Marriage of
Heaven and Hell . Many decades later, Matthew Arnold identified the
Celtic peoples with an extravagance of imagination and a stubbornly
wayward refusal to confront the despotism of fact. By the end of the
nineteenth century Irish writers, Wilde and Yeats at their foremost,
were revaluating this association of Irishness and excess, rethinking
Arnold through Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as later
generations of writers would through Bataille and Heidegger, to spin
literary gold. In this remarkable study, written in a luminously clear
style and with real critical verve, Michael McAteer makes several
brilliant raids on modern Irish literature in the modernist and
contemporary moments and on French and German philosophies of the
abject and the ecstatic to show just how protean, productive and
complex the concept of excess remains even today. McAteer opens a
startling new turn in Irish studies where literature and philosophy, the
material and spiritual converge in brilliant detonations.”
—Professor Joe Cleary,Yale University
Contents
1 Introduction:​The Idea of Excess
Part I Mystical Excess
2 Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy:​Yeats and Joyce
3 Oriental Excess:​Wilde, Yeats, MacNeice
4 Transgressive Sacrifice:​Pearse, Yeats, Carr
Part II Material Excess
5 Money and Melodrama:​Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw
6 Disposable Living:​O’Casey, Beckett, Doyle
7 Trashing Ulster:​Patterson and Reid
Part III Mythic and Linguistic Excess
8 Mythic Excess:Finnegans Wake
9 Voiding the Subject:​Bowen and Beckett
10 Here Beyond:​Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
© The Author(s) 2020
M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing, New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_1

1. Introduction: The Idea of Excess

Michael McAteer1
(1) Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Institute of
English and American Studies, Pá zmá ny Péter Catholic University,
Budapest, Hungary

Michael McAteer
Email: michael.mcateer@btk.ppke.hu

Keywords Arnold – Wilde – Celt – Celtic Tiger – Cuchulain – Modernity

– Globalization

Within the field of Irish cultural and literary criticism that has
expanded enormously—excessively perhaps—over the past thirty
years, the extent of direct references to the idea of excess is
paradoxically moderate. The opening of David Lloyd’s Ireland and
Postcolonial Modernity hints at why this may be so: excess is simply
taken for granted in stereotypical ideas of Irishness. Considering the
human mouth as a primary locus of activity, Lloyd contends that what
goes on in an Irish mouth ‘does so to excess. We drink too much and
talk too much, at times even too well: we sing and we blather, bawl as
we brawl and wail as we grieve’.1 On the matter of alcohol consumption,
the idea of excess is embedded in the Catholic religious movement that
was founded to counteract it: the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association,
begun in 1898 by the Jesuit priest, James Cullen. The prayer of the
Pioneers refers to ‘the conversion of excessive drinkers’.2 Diarmuid
Ferriter points out that however much it might have been a stereotype,
the extent of ‘actually-existing alcoholism’ in late nineteenth/early
twentieth-century Ireland was remarkable. Over 13 million pounds
were spent annually on alcohol in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. In 1891–1892, 100,528 arrests for drunkenness were recorded
within a population of less than 3.5 million people. Ferriter draws
attention to the fact that, against this backdrop, the Pioneer Total
Abstinence Association went on to become the largest lay Catholic
organization in twentieth-century Ireland and ‘as a percentage of its
population, one of the largest movements of its kind in the world’.3 The
result was a society that combined excessive drinking with excessive
abstemiousness.
In contrast to such notions as transgression and subversion in Irish
criticism, the idea of excess in Irish writing and culture enjoys much
less consensus as to its emancipatory value. In her evaluation of the
performance of memory in modern Irish culture, Emilie Pine notes the
persistence of the figure of the ghost in Irish film and drama. Drawing
on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Pine considers how the ghost in Irish
culture manifests an ‘excess of memory’, the past exerting ‘an excessive
grip’ on identities and attitudes into the present times.4 In her powerful
attack on Martin McDonagh’s backfired attempt to Tarantino-ize the
Northern Irish Troubles with his 2001 play, The Lieutenant of
Inishmore, Mary Luckhurst refutes the notion that McDonagh’s ‘excess’
is radical. On the contrary, she argues, McDonagh trades in some of the
most jaded English stereotypes of the Irish temperament as violent and
stupid.5 Victor Merriman goes further in suggesting that the success of
McDonagh’s plays from the later 1990s measures the extent to which
Irish society was entering ‘a hyperactive phase of globalization’ that
was producing an indigenous new generation of millionaires for the
first time in the history of the Irish state. By this account, the nativist
excess of which Luckhurst writes becomes an inverse image of the
corporatist consumer excess of the globalized Ireland that Merriman
identifies as the ideal audience for McDonagh’s so-called ‘white-trash’
theatre, within which Irish historical experience is reduced to garbage,
surplus to trans-national corporatist capitalist requirements.6
There are moments in which Irish criticism endorses the view of
excess as a radical challenge to authoritarian and hegemonic
tendencies. In her consideration of Charles Gavan Duffy’s dispute with
W. B. Yeats over plans for a New Irish Library during the 1890s, Helen
O’Connell sees the pragmatist nationalism of Duffy as a socially
conservative ‘regulating force, fostering a necessary postponement of
gratification and a reining in of excess (both literary and political)’.7 She
notes that one of the books selected by Duffy for inclusion in the New
Irish Library, E. M. Lynch’s 1894 adaptation of a Balzac novel under the
title A Parish Providence, the author was adamant in his refusal to
idealize the Irish peasant in any way. O’Connell regards Lynch’s
representation of practical, materialistic Irish peasants as a deliberate
rebuttal of the spiritual otherworldly orientation that Yeats attributed
to them in his poetry and folklore writings of the 1880s. In keeping
with an ideology of improvement in Irish writing that O’Connell tracks
through the course of the nineteenth century, Lynch’s novel represents
Duffy’s practical nationalist rejection of the idea of the native rural Irish
people as ‘“highly strung” (and therefore given to excess)’, an idea that
feeds what O’Connell identifies as the aesthetics of excess in the 1890s
writing of Yeats, developed further in the 1900s dramas of Synge.8
Discussing what Synge referred to as ‘the Rabelaisian note’ when
defending The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, Bernadette Bourke
lauds Rabelais for bringing to the fore an old medieval peasant tradition
of ‘rituals and carnival excesses’ that returns on stage in the 1990s Irish
dramas of Marina Carr.9 Likewise, Má ria Kurdi praises Marina Carr’s
drama for its ‘Gothic excess’.10 Drawing on the thought of Georges
Bataille, Michael Mays offers a plausible argument for the idea of excess
as a central component in the hostility towards middle-class
commercialism that is a feature of Yeats’s poetry during the 1910s,
particularly the volume, Responsibilities. Mays identifies in this hostility
Yeats’s response to the coercive force of homogenization that bourgeois
society in Ireland was imposing upon the human impulse to creative
freedom and inventive living during his era. Mays judges the artistic
admiration in which Yeats holds the idea of excess to be his counter-
reaction to this homogenization, citing his 1897 essay ‘The Celtic
Element in Literature’ and his American lectures of 1932–1933 by way
of examples.11 Flore Coulouma observes the same counter-
homogenizing deployment of excess being undertaken in a very
different way and in a very different context: The Irish Times columns of
Myles na nGopaleen, pseudonym for Brian O’Nolan, more widely known
as the novelist Flann O’Brien. The very name of the newspaper column,
An Cruiskeen Lawn (the little brimming jug), discloses the function of
the satire that O’Brien deploys within it: working ‘by excess’ in order to
expose what Coulouma regards as ‘the vacuity’ of its various targets,
whether they be state practices of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, or
figures of importance in Irish society of the time.12
Both Mays’ reading of Yeatsian excess and Coulouma’s reading of
excess in O’Brien’s Myles na gCopaleen correspond in different ways to
the value laid upon excess within the distinction that Victor Merriman
draws between postcolonial and neo-colonial theatre in modern
Ireland. The latter endorses the contemporary moment of globalization
as a point of final arrival, the former instead draws upon the Irish past
‘as a libertarian struggle to exceed the coercive boundaries set by neo-
colonial conditions’.13 The problem with Merriman’s proposition,
however, is that it deploys excess to attack excess. Exceeding those
restrictive boundaries that Mays, drawing on Bataille’s concept of
excess, observes as symptomatic of a process of homogenization in
capitalist society, the postcolonial Irish drama that Merriman prefers is
positioned in opposition to excess as it appears in two inter-related
aspects. These profiles are that of historical Irish culture when it is
considered dispensable as garbage within the contemporary phase of
globalization; that of the exorbitant levels of consumerism and debt
within Irish society during the period of the so-called Celtic Tiger
economy of 1998–2008 and even in the current post-Celtic Tiger
economic phase of economic collapse and badly managed recovery.
Merriman’s contradictory attitudes to the notion of excess reach
back to the thought of Patrick Pearse at the start of the twentieth
century. Along with that of Christ, the mythical figure of Cuchulain was
Pearse’s greatest inspiration in leading him eventually to direct a
rebellion against British rule in Ireland in 1916. Philip O’Leary points
out that Pearse worked from the Book of Leinster medieval manuscript
version of the Táin Bó Cuailgne (War of the Bull of Cooley) when
reading of Cuchulain’s exploits and his defence of Ulster in the
legendary Irish saga. In doing so, Pearse avoided the accounts of the
Táin that are found in two other medieval Irish manuscripts, Lebor na
hUidre (UL) and the Yellow Book of Lecan (YL). Apart from the fact that
the accounts contained in these manuscripts are more fragmented than
that found in the Book of Leinster, they also present a more excessive
image of the Irish warrior. O’Leary mentions two incidents in the UL
and the YL that Pearse would have wished to avoid in the image of
chivalrous heroism that he cultivated for his students: Cuchulain
beating fifty members of the Boy Troop and subsequently hiding from
their parents: Cuchulain killing a servant for waking him up too early
(an understandable reaction, perhaps, in a country that the ancient
Romans called ‘Hibernia’). Rejecting the UL and the YL manuscript
versions, Pearse was also rejecting accounts that pictured Cuchulain in
‘an excessively violent light’.14 Pearse’s unease with violent excess in
this instance contrasts with his admiring evocation of Cuchulain’s
excess of service in another. In his famous attack of 1912 on the British
education system in Ireland, ‘The Murder Machine ’, he writes of
Cuchulain showing a ‘love and a service so excessive as to annihilate all
thought of self’, a display of humility that Pearse regards not only as the
inspiration of the tale of Cuchulain, but also that of the life of the sixth-
century Irish abbot, St. Colmcille.15 Pearse’s phrase may well have been
the direct source for a famous couplet that Yeats employs in his poem
commemorating the 1916 Rising, ‘Easter 1916’ , one in which the poet
wonders if the rebels had been bewildered by ‘excess of love’.16 Yeats’s
own attitude to excess on this occasion repeats the contradiction in that
of Pearse. Excess may have led Pearse and his comrades to their deaths,
deaths that may ultimately prove to have been ‘needless’ in Yeats’s
mind. If this was indeed the case, then the violence that the rebels
unleashed in Dublin in April 1916 would have to be considered, like
that of Cuchulain, as excessive in nature. Yet this same excess is
precisely the kind of counter-homogenizing freedom of spirit that Yeats
regards as the mark of the artist, the aristocrat and the wandering
beggar.
Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus takes this
conflicting attitude as its point of departure, tracing it to Matthew
Arnold’s idea of the Celt in his famous 1867 work, On the Study of Celtic
Literature , and the reaction to Arnold’s thought that we find in the
writing of Oscar Wilde. Arnold’s work has received widespread
attention in Irish criticism over the past thirty years. This is particularly
so with regard to what is seen as his colonial attitude to Ireland,
underwritten by a racial idea of civilization through which he supports
his case for political union between Ireland and Britain (Irish critics
have little to say on Arnold’s extensive discussion of Welsh literature as
Celtic in On the Study of Celtic Literature ).17 Arnold regards the Celt as
the ‘colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early
world’ and comments on the Celt ‘straining human nature further than
it will stand’.18 However much it carries the weight of racial assumption
that informed ethnological studies as they developed during the
Victorian era, Arnold’s judgement proves difficult to refute when
readers encounter the warp-spasm or so-called ríastrad that Cuchulain
undergoes in moments of untamed fury in the Táin Bó Cuailgne. These
are moments in which the warrior’s bodily organs not only inflate to
enormous proportions but also turn inside out.19
Arnold’s well-known argument is that whereas the civilization of
ancient Greece (his ideal model) exhibits measure and balance, that of
the Celts is marked by passionate excess, incapable of coming to terms
with what he calls ‘the despotism of fact’. This is a phrase that Arnold
borrows from his friend, the French priest Henri Martin. Martin
includes a chapter on the Celts in his 1830s multi-volume work, Histoire
de France.20 Joseph Valente categorizes this idea according to an
intriguing, if internally contradictory, definition of manhood pertaining
to the Victorian era as one of ‘self-disciplined excess’.21 In support of
this notion, Valente cites Arnold’s injunction that the Celt should not
have less passionate feeling, but that he should have more mastery of it.
Indeed, Arnold writes that one can never have enough of sensibility
—‘the power of quick and strong perception and emotion’—but only so
long as one remains its master and not its slave.22 There is a
fundamental contradiction at work here: by definition, excess of feeling
cannot be mastered. If it can, it is no longer an excess. Valente considers
Cuchulain’s ríastrad as the disclosure of this contradiction through the
impossibility of maintaining both of its terms. What Valente terms the
‘hypermasculinity’ of Cuchulain in this moment of fury at once
establishes and subverts the grounds of the warrior’s manhood, when
manhood is understood in Arnold’s Victorian terms: ‘the very
excessiveness whereby it [the ríastrad] comes to simulate an ideal of
masculinity simultaneously spells a loss of the rudimentary benchmark
of masculinity, the capacity for effective self-will’.23
 In her consideration of the influence on Oscar Wilde of Ireland’s
pre-eminent melodramatist of the nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault,
Sos Eltis turns to Wilde’s essay ‘The Critic as Artist ’ in the light of
Arnold’s ideas on passionate but impractical Celticism. Wilde directly
refutes the assertion that Arnold makes in ‘The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time ’ (1865). This is Arnold’s belief that the duty of
criticism across all branches of learning is ‘to see the object as in itself it
really is’.24 This statement bears a direct relation to ‘the despotism of
fact’ against which the Celt is constantly rebelling as Arnold sees it. In
his dialogue with Gilbert, the character Ernest in Wilde’s ‘The Critic as
Artist ’ pronounces ‘that the primary aim of the critic is to see the object
as in itself it really is not’.25 That which Arnold denigrates in On the
Study of Celtic Literature Wilde regards as a virtue; that which Arnold
considers as confined to past times (the Celt as interesting for his/her
past rather than his/her present condition), is now considered
modern.26 If the Celt is one who rebels against ‘the despotism of fact’,
then s/he epitomizes the spirit of modern criticism for Wilde. Eltis
considers Wilde’s turning Arnold’s thought on its head as a gesture of
immense significance. It is one in which Celticism becomes the
embodiment rather than the antithesis of the modern spirit: ‘Celticism
is no longer a decorative sprinkling of fairy dust on the vital project of
imperial expansion, industry and scientific progress; it is the driving
intellectual force of civilization’.27
The argument of Eltis is compelling, particularly when considered
in relation to Jarlath Killeen’s exploration of Wilde’s writings in relation
to nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism and Catholic–Protestant
doctrinal issues in England and Ireland.28 If Wilde radicalizes Celticism
as epitomizing the spirit of modern civilization, however, then this must
involve a concomitant revision of Arnold’s understanding of modern
culture as liberal, rational and progressive. The spirit of the modern age
moves from Arnoldian reason to Wildean excess. Wilde’s idea of the
modern spirit as one of perpetual creative invention stands squarely at
odds with Arnold’s insistence on balance and measure in On the Study
of Celtic Literature . It is in this aspect that Wilde’s affirmative
revaluation of Arnold’s idea of the Celtic temperament can be re-
conceived as emphatically modern—Wilde’s contemporary times (and
personal lifestyle) as one of excess. In doing so, however, those
Arnoldian notions of imperial expansion, industry and scientific
progress to which Eltis refers are thrown into crisis.
Considering the role of idleness in Wilde’s thought, Gregory
Dobbins makes a telling observation that illustrates this transition from
the Arnoldian conception of culture to the Wildean. Discussing Wilde’s
affectation of idleness in his writing and lifestyle as epitomizing his
attachment to English upper-class society, what Dobbins terms ‘the
leisure class’, Dobbins notices that Wilde introduces an element of
parody into his performance. He does so by ‘making it excessive, a
spectacle, something not “natural” but artificial’.29 Dobbins argues that
through this excessive-quality, the English stereotype of Irish laziness is
implicitly brought into consideration in the aristocratic leisure lifestyle
that Wilde represents.30 As a result, Arnold’s contrast of the Saxon
industry and sobriety against Celtic ineffective dreaminess is brought
seriously into question. Dobbins overreaches himself in attributing
idleness to the entire panoply of late Victorian English upper-class
society as presented in Wilde’s plays. An Ideal Husband , for example, is
a play in which British imperial policy is at stake. His argument is also
weakened by its lack of any reference to the seminal work on the
leisure class that was first published just a year before Wilde’s death in
November 1900: Thornstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
This being said, his blending of the idea of English upper-class leisure
with that of native Irish indolence through Wilde’s performance of
excess works against imperial values of industry, science and progress,
even if that blending is implicit only in Wilde’s writing. Wilde never
lived among the Irish migrant poor in England and whatever he may
have thought of their plight, he still moved in some of the most
privileged circles of London society until his trials and imprisonment in
1895. For this reason, Dobbins’s contention is in serious need of
qualification. Nevertheless, his suggestion remains an intriguing one:
through Wilde’s performance of leisure, English aristocrats appeared
virtually indistinguishable in temperament from Irish paupers, pointing
to the profound challenge within Wilde’s life and writing to colonial
relations between the English ruling class and the Irish poor. Dobbins’s
interpretation of Wilde thereby indicates a transition from the
confident modernizing ethos of the Victorian era to the insecurities of
modernism.31
Wilde is aware of this movement towards a modernist sensibility
when he speaks of ‘the object in itself as it really is not’. In this phrase,
he is doing something more than refuting Arnold. He is drawing a direct
relation between excess and negation, identifying a void in being itself,
the consciousness of which is a distinctive feature of a modern
temperament. On two occasions in On the Study of Celtic Literature ,
Arnold writes of the Celt’s ‘nervous exaltation’ as expressing its
‘feminine’ character and its gift of rendering ‘the magical charm of
nature’.32 While considerable attention has been given to the obvious
gendering of ethnicity at work in this statement, of equal interest is the
manner in which it anticipates what Regenia Gagnier observes as an
emphasis upon nerves, rather than the more ‘Romantic-Victorian
Senses’, as a feature of late nineteenth century decadence.33 We see this
transition from sensibility to nervousness through Wilde’s
reformulation of Arnold’s ‘nervous exaltation’ to an almost existential
condition of modern anxiety in the face of the inexpressible (one that
predisposed the Celt of antiquity to magical beliefs and practices). As
with the inexpressible dimension of Cuculain’s ríastrad, the Celtic
predisposition to imaginative excess registers a dimension of nullity in
existence itself. In the form of modernized Celticism, Wilde’s object ‘as
it really is not’ signifies the presence of a void within the object as it is
encountered, a void that generates a sense of crisis. Just as Arnold
associates the nervous sentimentality that he attributes to the Celtic
temperament with a long history of inevitable failure, likewise there is
an extensive list of modernist authors who came to literature from
personal traumas that left them susceptible to a nervous disorder.34
Indeed the imprisonment and death of Wilde himself conjoins this
history of defeated Celts with the collapses of the modernist and proto-
modernist Décadents. If the nineteenth century was so very British, the
twentieth was wildly Irish.
My discussion of twentieth-century Irish literature in Excess in
Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus develops in terms of an
intersection between the idea of excess as a characteristic of the Celtic
temperament and excess as a constitutive feature of modern thought. I
consider excess in the work of a broad range of influential thinkers
from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century when discussing
drama, fiction and poetry by Irish-born authors across the twentieth
century. These include contemporary thinkers who present excess
under different aspects. Foremost among these is Alain Badiou,
particularly with regard to his mathematical set theory account of
being for which the notions of excess and the void are fundamental.
Badiou’s ideas on excess are particularly intriguing in challenging the
view that modern Irish literature—with the major exceptions of James
Joyce and Samuel Beckett—is generally recalcitrant to mathematical
logic interpretation. My study draws upon Badiou’s notions on set
theory as they relate to his ideas of the void and the point of excess
when examining excess in works by Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Joyce, Louis
MacNeice, Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Michael Longley and Paul
Muldoon. Along with Slavoj Ž ižek, another important thinker of recent
times for whom the role of excess is central is Peter Sloterdijk. Of
particular significance to this study in Sloterdijk’s theory of the
spherical are his ideas of the body exceeding itself through absorption
of (or penetration) by external elements and the importance that he
attributes to artificial objects forming part of the human body, thereby
extending the ‘natural’ body into the ‘artificial’. This is particularly
relevant to the presence of excess in the form of artificial body parts in
works by Sean O’Casey, Beckett and Roddy Doyle.
Examining works by Yeats in Part I of Excess in Modern Irish Writing:
Spirit and Surplus, I discuss the ways in which the influence of Nietzsche
on Yeats’s thought (mediated by Yeats’s dedicated study of William
Blake) accounts in significant measure for Yeats’s image of the Irish
temperament as excessive in nature. What Arnold had identified as a
specifically Celtic phenomenon is, in Yeats’s work, a universal condition
such as Nietzsche identifies it in his writing on Dionysian excess: a
condition that may nevertheless appear in Irish culture in a
pronounced fashion. In his 1897 essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Celtic
Literature’, Yeats revises Arnold’s belief that ‘natural magic’ was a
distinctively Celtic belief and practice. Instead, Yeats regards the pagan
nature-worship of the Celts as ‘the ancient religion of the world, the
ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her’.35
However much Yeats’s argument can be contested, still it shows that
even in one as pre-occupied with Ireland as he, there is an
understanding of Irish experience as part of world experience.
Sinéad Garrigan Mattar has persuasively argued for the influence of
general anthropological notions of animism in Yeats’s writings on Irish
folklore during the 1880s–1890s, writings that perceived in accounts of
Irish supernatural experience the same animistic features that Yeats
detected in the Ainu tribes of Siberia as described by B. Douglas
Howard, for example.36 Garrigan Mattar’s regards animism in so-called
primitive societies through contemporary anthropological thought as a
radical form of ‘being-in-the-world’ rather than a long-gone set of
primitive beliefs. Likewise, when we recognize the consonance between
Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysian excess in The Birth of Tragedy out of the
Spirit of Music and this ‘troubled ecstasy’ before nature that Yeats
identifies in the Celt, we can see how his attitude to pagan Celtic
religion anticipates in various ways the place of excess in modern
thought. Significant in relation to this is Nietzsche’s acquaintance
during the 1860s with the German scholar Ernst Windisch at the
University of Leipzig. Celticist, philologist and Professor of Sanskrit and
Comparative Linguistics, Windisch worked on old Irish manuscripts
with Whiteley Stokes and taught Kuno Meyer at Leipzig. Meyer would
become one of the most important philological scholars for the study of
the Irish language and of old Irish manuscripts during the Irish Revival
of the late nineteenth century.37
In addition to Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing and the so-called
epiphany scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Part I
of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus considers excess in
the following works: Wilde’s Salomé and The Importance of Being
Ernest ; Yeats’s ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ ; Louis MacNeice’s Indian
poems ‘Didymus ’ and ‘Letter from India ’. Considering the role of excess
within Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, my discussion identifies an
important Irish dimension in relation to the view of Celtic excess as
Oriental in nature or origin. This Orientalist form of excess is examined
in relation to the idea and the function of excess within the modern
philosophical writing of Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille and Jacques
Derrida.
I conclude Part I with a consideration of sacrificial excess in three
plays from the twentieth century: Patrick Pearse’s The Master , Yeats’s
Purgatory and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … The modern critical
understanding of excess in sacrificial violence can be traced back to
Søren Kierkegaard’s famous reflection on the call of Yahweh to
Abraham to kill his son Isaac. In his 1843 work, Fear and Trembling ,
Kierkegaard conceptualizes one of the most important ideas for
modern philosophy in terms of this biblical narrative. Taking Abraham’s
circumstance as his model, Kierkegaard argues for the need to take
decisive action as the basis of authentic self-realization, without any
prior ethical calculation regarding the value of the action or its
consequences. Kierkegaard’s argument is an important precedent for
Bataille’s radical ideas on sacrificial violence in works written during
the 1920s and the 1930s. In Chapter 4, ‘Transgressive Sacrifice: Pearse,
Yeats, Carr’, I address sacrifice as presented in the plays by Pearse, Yeats
and Carr in terms of the excessive nature of Kierkegaard’s notion of
sacrifice in Fear and Trembling , thereby proposing a new
understanding of the politics of Pearse’s personal sacrifice as leader of
the 1916 Irish rebellion. In the process, I draw attention to the relation
between sacrifice as excess in the thought of Kierkegaard and Bataille. I
also consider these Irish theatrical representations of sacrifice in terms
of the modern interpretation of guilt that Heidegger proposes as a
constitutive dimension of Dasein in its primordial orientation towards
death.
Recognizing that the presence of excess is no more unique to
modern Irish experience than to that of any other modern society, it is
still important to acknowledge some of the distinctive ways in which
excess is addressed in works by authors from Ireland. Indeed, when
considering excess in its material aspect, the case of modern Irish
writing might be regarded as exemplary to some degree. Part II of
Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus addresses this
material aspect in two senses: (1) the relation between the kind of
emotional excess that Arnold attributed to the Celtic personality and
such economic forms of excess as debt and inflation; (2) excess in the
form of the waste product that is generated in the process of material
production. An obvious point of reference here is the impact of the
Great Famine in the 1840s that rendered a large section of the Irish
population as surplus to economic requirements. Excess in the form of
human beings as waste product was made strikingly apparent on one
occasion in this context when the British Liberal prime minister John
Russell described the Irish destitute who were emigrating to North
America during the years of the Famine as ‘the rubbish of the home
population’.38 My approach to these economic and political aspects of
excess in Irish contexts draws in the first instance upon the role of
excess in the forms of surplus value and waste product that appear in
Marx’s economic writings. In addressing the relationship between
emotional and economic inflation, I consider the ways in which Marx’s
idea of profit as a measure of the time that a worker spends working for
nothing is internalized existentially in Kierkegaard’s reflections on the
desire for self-annihilation.
The intimate connection between economic and emotional excess
appears strikingly under the aspect of marriage in Irish writing. In
Chapter 5, ‘Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw’, I consider
seminal dramatic works by Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde and George
Bernard Shaw in terms of the affective and financial issues relating to
marriage. In so doing, I identify how the presence of a void in these
plays marks a critical point of intersection between emotional excess,
the threat of bankruptcy and the recycling of leftover culture. This
analysis is extended in Chapter 6, ‘Disposable Living: O’Casey, Beckett,
Doyle’, to consider how—as leftover objects—human agents live off
leftover equipment in such a way as to survive in the realm of excess
produce. Looking at works by Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett and Roddy
Doyle, my interest is in the transformation of human agents in this
process, particularly when leftover equipment (such as a wooden leg)
becomes effectively integrated into the body. I discuss the
representation of human body parts in the work of these Dublin-born
writers in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s consideration of a contemporary
relationship between the human body and technology.39 Assessing this
in relation to characters like O’Casey’s Captain Boyle, Beckett’s Molloy
and Doyle’s Henry Smart, I contextualize Sloterdijk’s perspective in
relation to Heidegger’s post-war concept of human agents reduced to
the condition of a ‘standing-reserve’: a surplus maintained and ready to
be put into motion at any time for the generation of energy.40
Part II of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus concludes
with a discussion of violence and material excess in works of fiction and
drama from Northern Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s. I examine
the extent to which Northern Irish writing reflects a situation of excess
in the political sense: a state formation that has existed beyond the
relative civic order of the Great Britain since the 1920s, and one that
has perpetually remained threateningly beyond the administrative
authority of the Republic of Ireland. Over the course of the twentieth
century, Northern Ireland has elicited contradictory impulses from
British and Irish Governments to assimilate or to repel, a testament to
its political condition as exceeding the sovereign integrity of the
neighbouring nation-states. The crisis that the Irish border has
presented to the British and Irish Governments since the British Brexit
referendum of 2016 is just the latest example of a long-drawn
confusion since the border first came into operation in the early 1920s.
Drawing on Derrida’s idea of excess in the form of the parasite when
discussing Glenn Patterson’s 1988 novel Burning Your Own and Belfast
plays from 1986 and 1996 by Christina Reid, I consider how George
Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalist notion of revolutionary violence—with its
concepts of myth and infinity exceeding all norms of statehood—
presents a new form of understanding sectarian, paramilitary and state
violence in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s.
Part 3 of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus addresses
excess in modern Irish literature in terms of myth, focusing on the
question of language in the process. Beginning with a discussion of the
mythic and linguistic aspects of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , I consider how
Joyce inflates Irish mythology to an infinite degree through his
exploration of associations with eastern civilizations: linguistic,
historical and geographical. Drawing on Badiou’s set theory account of
the relation between excess and the void, I consider how Finnegans
Wake presents origination itself—both in the sense of the earliest and
of the new—as an act of violence through writing. In the process, I
situate Badiou’s concept of the event in relation to Sorel’s idea of the
mythic stature of a revolutionary situation. In the process, excess in
Finnegans Wake is contextualized in relation to the violence that
followed the 1916 rebellion in Ireland as it in turn connected to the
wider circumstances of political violence in Europe in the early
twentieth century.
I develop this evaluation of mythic and linguistic aspects of excess in
Irish writing by turning to Elizabeth Bowen’s London war-time novel,
The Heat of the Day , as it relates to Beckett’s trilogy of the 1950s. At
issue here is language itself as a form of excess. A relation between
infinity and the absolute minimum appears in these works, pointing to
that feature of the event as Badiou defines it, by which something
emerges from nothing. I consider the multitudinous references that the
narrative voice of The Unnamable makes to ‘nothing’ in describing the
figure of Worm.41 The sheer magnitude of nothingness that Louie Lewis
feels in The Heat of the Day is also brought into consideration, as is the
sense that Robert Kelway feels in Bowen’s novel of he and Stella Rodney
existing in a complete void.42 Addressing these features in terms of the
idea of nothingness as it appears in the thought of Heidegger and
Sartre, I also evaluate Beckett and Bowen’s novels in the light of
Badiou’s contention that the void can only be identified in excess of the
situation to which it is connected.43
The final Chapter 10, ‘Here Beyond: Heaney, Longley, Muldoon,
McGuckian’, examines varieties of excess in some key poems that
emerged from Northern Ireland since the outbreak of political violence
at the end of the 1960s. I consider Heaney’s poem from the early 1970s,
‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing ’, in terms of Badiou’s ideas on
belonging and inclusion, excess and the void. I discuss Michael
Longley’s poem on political violence in 1980s Belfast, ‘The Ice-Cream
Man ’, in connection with Bataille’s association of delicacy and death in
his theory of nature as an endless expenditure. Furthermore, I consider
the formal reticence that marks both poems in responding to violence.
Heidegger argues that reticence is the most appropriate form of
response to the shock of the event, triggered by the manner in which
the event suddenly exceeds meaning. It is through this idea of
Heidegger’s that I assess the poetic formality of ‘Whatever You Say Say
Nothing’ and ‘The Ice-Cream Man’.
One of the most interesting poems on the political situation in
Northern Ireland during the Troubles is Paul Muldoon’s ‘The More a
Man Has the More a Man Wants ’ from his 1983 collection, Quoof. I
discuss excess in this poem in terms of Badiou’s description of the limit
ordinal number: a number that guarantees the succession of a sequence
but that always occupies the place of the Other to the entire sequence
itself.44 Reading the central figure of Gallogly in this poem as an
instance of the limit ordinal number in operation, I illustrate the poem’s
congruence with the associative technique of Finnegans Wake. It
thereby becomes evident that Muldoon’s use of myth generates the
excess of the poem over the various contexts to which it alludes. A
similar pattern is evident in myth as it appears in the poetry of Medbh
McGuckian. Instead of bringing disparate circumstances under the
umbrella of a central mythic order, McGuckian employs mythic allusion
to exceed such order. By way of examples, I consider the manner
through which she interweaves the Irish legend of the absconding
lovers Diarmuid and Grá inne in her 1988 poem, ‘Grá inne’s Sleep Song ’,
with the love affair of Olga Ivinskaya and Boris Pasternak in Stalinist-
era Russia. I also discuss the various associated layers of ‘The Dream-
Language of Fergus’ from the same collection, On Ballycastle Beach. I
draw attention to the excess that is created through a specific process
of doubling in both poems, a process evident in Muldoon’s poem also
and one that can be traced back to the notion ‘Dyoublong’, from
Finnegans Wake. Doubling in these poems exemplifies the excess that is
generated in the procedure of ‘the counting of the count’, a notion that
Badiou draws from mathematical set theory.45 This procedure is in turn
analogous with the original doubling that Peter Sloterdijk identifies in
ancient cults of the magic vulva, a notion of special significance to the
topic of birth in McGuckian’s ‘The Dream-language of Fergus ’. In this
way, the centrality of excess to the poetic responses of Muldoon and
McGuckian to circumstances in Ulster during the 1970s and 1980s is
brought to light.

Notes
1. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000: The
Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 1.

2. ‘What We Do’, Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. https://​www.​

pioneerassociati​on.​ie.

3. Diarmuid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (London: Profile,

2004), 57.

4. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance

in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
 2011), 16.
5. Mary Luckhurst, ‘Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore:
Selling (-Out) to the English’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14/4
(2004), 34–41 (35).

6. Victor Merriman, Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s

(Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2011), 212.

7. Helen O’Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 184–85.

8. Ibid., 195.

9. Bourke, Bernadette. ‘Carr’s “Cut-Throats and Gargiyles”: Grotesque

and Carnivalesque Elements in By the Bog of Cats ’, in Cathy
Leeney and Anna McMullan, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr:
“Before Rules Was Made” (Bern: Peter Lang), 128–45 (130).

10. Má ria Kurdi, ‘Contesting and Reversing Gender Stereotypes in

Three Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Writers’, in Ciaran
Ross, ed., Sub-versions: Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish
Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 265–86 (285).

11. Michael Mays, ‘Yeats and the Economics of “Excess”’, Colby

Quarterly, 33/4 (1997), 295–304 (302).

12. Flore Coulouma, ‘Transgressive and Subversive: Flann O’Brien’s

Tales of the In-Between’, in Ciaran Ross, ed., Sub-versions: Trans-
National Readings of Modern Irish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2010), 65–86 (65).

13. Merriman, Because We Are Poor, 213.

14. Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–
1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), 256–57.
15. Patrick Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Political
Writings and Speeches (Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Company,
1917), 25.

16. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (1933) (London: Picador,

1990), 204.

17. See, for example, Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern
Irish Literature (London: Faber, 1985), 25–27; David Cairns and
Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and
Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 44–51;
W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and
Betrayal in Literary History, 2nd ed. (Cork: Cork University Press,
1994), 228–31; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of
the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 30–32; Aaron
Kelly, Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 7–10.

18. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith,

Elder & Co., 1867), 106, 108.

19. Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Táin: From the Irish epic Táin Bó
Cuailgne, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 150–53.

20. Arnold, On the Study, 102.

21. Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture,

1880–1922 (Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 14.

22. Arnold, On the Study, 107.

23. Valente, The Myth of Manliness, 144.

24. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism as the Present Time’,

in Essays in Criticism, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1875), 1–47 (5–
6).
25. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist ’, in Intentions (New York:
Brentano’s, 1905), 93–218 (144).

26. ‘It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the
Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for
much; it is in the inward world of thought and science. What it has
been, what it has done, let it ask us to attend to that, as a matter of
science and history; not to what it will be or will do, as a matter of
modern politics’ (Arnold, On the Study, 15).

27. Sos Eltis, ‘Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault and the Pragmatics of
Being Irish: Fashioning a New Brand of the Modern Irish Celt’,
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 60/3 (2017), 267–93
(284).

28. Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and
Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

29. Gregory Dobbins, Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the
Cultural Politics of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, in association with
the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at the University of
Notre Dame, 2010), 38.

30. Ibid., 38.

31. Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish
Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.

32. Arnold, On the Study, 90, 132.

33. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On

the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 92.

34. Arnold opens On the Study of Celtic Literature with the following
line from Ossian: ‘They went forth to the war, but they always fell’
(qtd. in Arnold, On the Study, xix). The quotation points to a
circular form of reasoning in the book: the Celts as sentimentally
 extravagant from a long history of perpetual defeat arising in large
measure from the sentimental character of the Celts. With
regarding to modernist anxiety by way of comparison: Chris
Baldick names an extensive list of British modernist writers who
suffered personal trauma. This includes Dorothy Richardson,
whose mother committed suicide; John Masefield, whose father
became clinically insane; Virginia Woolf, who was sexually abused
in childhood; Graham Greene, who tried to kill himself when a
teenager. Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 10:
1910–1940: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 40.
35. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, in Essays and
Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1955), 173–88 (176).

36. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, New
Literary History, 43/1 (2012), 137–57 (141–42).

37. Wayne Borody observes that Nietzsche himself returned to a

Celtic past when he took up residence at Sils-Maria in the Swiss
Alps after he become a Professor at the University of Basel. This
area was an important Celtic settlement in ancient times, an area
where stone dolmens are common, once sacred sites of worship
and burial for the Celtic druids several thousand years before
Christianity. ‘Nietzsche on the Cross: The Defence of Personal
Freedom in The Birth of Tragedy’, Humanitas, 16/2 (2003), 76–93
(91–92).

38. ‘Colonisation for Ireland’, The Examiner, June 6, 1847: 361–362

(362). In the previous sitting of the Westminster parliament,
Russell urged the need to subject England to expense in order to
prevent Ireland ‘from sinking into a state which he could not
contemplate without horror’ ‘Destitute Poor (Ireland) Bill’, The
Examiner, June 6, 1847: 360–61 (361).

39. Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun nor Death, with Hans-Jü rgen
Heinrichs, trans. Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e),
2011), 135
40. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954),
trans. William Lovitt (1977), in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic
Writings, new ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 267–306.

41. Samuel Beckett, Molloy , Malone Dies , The Unnamable (London:

Calder Publications, 1959), 349.

42. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948; repr., New York:
Anchor Books, 2002), 227, 207.

43. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham
(London: Continuum, 2005), 109.

44. Ibid., 155.

45. Ibid., 94.

Part I
Mystical Excess
© The Author(s) 2020
M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing, New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_2

2. Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy: Yeats and

Joyce
Michael McAteer1
(1) Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Institute of
English and American Studies, Pá zmá ny Péter Catholic University,
Budapest, Hungary

Michael McAteer
Email: michael.mcateer@btk.ppke.hu

Keywords Nietzsche – God – Itinerant – Ecstasy – Swedenborg

The Incomprehensible
A number of books published over the past ten years indicate a discreet
theological turn in recent Irish cultural and literary criticism. Siobhá n
Garrigan’s The Real Peace Process (2010) examines Christian religious
practices in everyday society of Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (a name
invested with profound Christian symbolism that, rather strangely, few
people have publicly contested).1 In Violence, Politics and Textual
Interventions in Northern Ireland (2010), Peter Mahon presents some
incisive new readings of Northern Irish texts in terms of René Girard’s
interpretation of Christian sacrifice.2 Gail McConnell moves beyond
assumptions about religious cultural identities in Northern Irish Poetry
and Theology (2014) when exploring theological questions of
iconography, iconoclasm and religious language within the Catholic,
Anglican and Calvinist influences in the Northern Irish poetry of
Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.3 In Irish Drama,
Modernity and the Passion Play, Alexandra Poulain presents a long-
overdue critical reading of the influence of Christian passion narrative
in twentieth-century Irish drama from the Irish Revival to
contemporary times.4 In Revolutionary Damnation (2017), Sheldon
Brivic engages the thought of Alain Badiou when exploring the religious
concept of damnation across a range of Irish literary works from Joyce
to Anne Enright.5 Beginning with the present chapter, Part I of this
study advances this body of theologically inflected criticism further by
addressing in philosophical terms the presence of excess in diverse
spiritual aspects within twentieth-century Irish writing.
What Alain Badiou terms ‘the point of excess’ carries an
ontotheological dimension in Badiou’s theory of the event, one that is
disclosed in his reading of the seventeenth-century mathematical and
theologian, Blaise Pascal. According to Badiou, Pascal was consistent in
his idea that faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ could only rest on a
belief in miracles. Badiou argues that the miracle accentuates the idea
that, more than a fulfilment of prophecies, the life and death of Christ
appear as an intervention in human history, standing in excess of the
circumstances within which they occur and appearing
incomprehensible as a consequence. Badiou interprets the function of
the miracle as ‘to be in excess of proof’. Furthermore, this function
‘pinpoints and factualizes the ground from which there originates […]
the possibility of believing in truth’.6 Yet this subscription to the excess
of the miraculous occurrence can only come about through
acknowledgement that the event in question is the death of God, the
essence of which is not found upon an original divine unity, but rather
upon the figure of two: the division of God into Father and Son.7 The
absolute singularity of the event in history—the death of God—is
further underwritten by the figure of two in the fact that it is only by
sustaining a belief that it is God who has died on the cross that the truth
content of the event is possible. Badiou regards St. Paul’s focus upon
God as Son in his Epistles as the expression of a ‘conviction that
“Christian discourse” is absolutely new. The formula according to which
God sent us his Son signifies primarily an intervention within History,
one through which it is, as Nietzsche will put it, “broken in two,” rather
than governed by a transcendent reckoning in conformity with the laws
of an epoch’.8 What is ultimately in question within this radical rupture
—through which Christianity is inaugurated—is Pascal’s wager: there
is either nothing or infinity.9 In Badiou’s terms, the wager forces one to
choose either libertarian nihilism or militant fidelity.10 Such fidelity is
always ‘in non-existent excess over its being’.11 In other words, as
‘undecidable’, belief in the divinity of Jesus must always appear in
relation to a void into which it risks disappearing. In this sense, such
faith opens to human consciousness the very void that it sets itself
against.
Badiou’s concept of religious belief as excessive in nature derives
from Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God. Nietzsche held Pascal in great
esteem as one of the ‘higher types’ although he was of the opinion that
Pascal’s Christian belief in the folly of intellectual pride was a depraved
influence on Pascal’s thought.12 In the famous section 124 of the third
book of The Gay Science , the reader encounters the story of a madman
who enters a marketplace looking for God. In response to the mocking
taunts of those present who have no religious belief, the madman
declares that he and they have killed God. Consistent with Pascal’s
wager that there must be either nothing or infinity, the madman goes
on to say that this ‘murder’ of God leaves human beings without any
direction, ‘continually falling’ and ‘straying as though through an
infinite nothing’.13 Presenting the death of God in this way, Nietzsche
proposes that the idea is as incomprehensible to human beings as the
idea of God itself. The death of God (and by extension the conventional
atheism that follows from it) is thus essentially a religious idea, one that
presents itself in its excess. Standing in excess of the situation into
which he enters, the madman disturbs and silences the traders in the
marketplace with his pronouncement. Indeed, by expressing the notion
through metaphor only, Nietzsche postulates that it cannot be
presented as a formal proposition because it violates the relation
between the particular and the universal.14
The dimension of excess and its relation to a void (the madman’s
‘infinite nothing’ of The Gay Science ) that characterizes the ‘death of
God’ idea from works by Nietzsche first published in the mid-1880s,
signifies an important relation to his first major work from 1872, The
Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music . While this book is heavily
influenced by the metaphysical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, a
perspective that Nietzsche largely rejects in his later work, its
interpretation of excess in the ancient Greek cult of Dionysius enables
Nietzsche to develop the concept of the death of God subsequently.
Despite the occasionally damning criticism that Nietzsche himself
directed against his first major work, the extent of the connection that
he observed between The Birth of Tragedy and his later thought is
evident in the fact that he published a new edition of the book in 1886,
the same year as the publication of Beyond Good and Evil . This was less
than one year after the publication of the final book of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and the year before the publication of On the Genealogy of
Morals .15 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian
spirit as excess in its ‘intoxication’, a drunkenness that involves a
complete forgetting of oneself.16 This intoxication anticipates the
imagery that the madman uses in the The Gay Science for the killers of
God: falling ‘backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions’, having
drunk up the sea.17 In the earlier work, Nietzsche expresses self-
abandonment in the drunkenness of the Dionysian spirit as the
individual becoming one with all other human beings, ‘as if the veil of
Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal
Oneness’.18 It is the very opposite to the spirit of Apollo as Nietzsche
describes it in The Birth of Tragedy. Considering Apollo to represent
moderation and self-knowledge, he regards ‘hubris and excess’ as
spirits hostile to that of Apollo, arising from ‘the age of Titans’ and ‘the
world of the barbarians’. Consequently, the spirit of Apollo could only
imagine Oedipus being ‘cast into a bewildering vortex of crimes’ for his
‘“excessive wisdom” in solving the riddle of the sphinx’.19

All as Nothing
While W. B. Yeats’s interest in the writing of Nietzsche has been studied
extensively since the 1960s, the predominant emphasis has been upon
Nietzsche as a model for Yeats’s ideas of aristocratic cultivation. The
significance of excess as an idea in Nietzsche’s writing for Yeats’s work
as poet and playwright in Ireland is still, however, unclear. Yeats was
made aware of Nietzsche’s writings through Arthur Symons’s essays on
Nietzsche in the 1890s, but he only begins to read Nietzsche seriously
in the early 1900s.20 By this stage it is evident that Yeats is already
interested in notions of excess. This is most clearly stated in his 1897
essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ when he quotes from Samuel
Palmer (a painter-devotee of William Blake), that the artist should
‘always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive’.21 In the
‘Proverbs of Hell’ section of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (1790), a
work with which Yeats was well familiar, William Blake writes that
‘[t]he road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ and ‘Excess of
sorrow laughs; excess of joy weeps’.22 After reading Nietzsche’s work,
Yeats described him as a modernizer of Blake in a letter written to John
Quinn, dated February 6, 1903.23 Quinn had seen a copy of Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra during a visit to George Moore’s residence at
Ely Place in Dublin. Suspecting that this was the trigger for Moore to
develop a ‘new messiah’ motive in his writing, Quinn sent Yeats a copy
of Zarathustra, along with a three-volume edition of Nietzsche’s
writing.
Reading Nietzsche was to have a profound effect on Yeats’s Celtic
folkloric, mythic and mystical pre-occupations. This comes through in a
number of compositions for performance that Yeats wrote between
1900 and December 1904, when On Baile’s Strand , his first play on the
Gaelic mythical hero Cuchulain, was produced along with Lady Augusta
Gregory’s Spreading the News for the opening of Dublin’s new Abbey
Theatre. Of Yeats’s plays during this period, none represents mystical
experience as wildly excessive more explicitly than Where There Is
Nothing . Yeats composed this work in an uneasy collaboration with
Augusta Gregory and Douglas Hyde under the influence of Yeats’s
reading of Nietzsche from 1902, following a major row with George
Moore over ownership of the idea for the play.24 This dispute had far-
reaching effects, as Adrian Frazier has shown. Moore threatened an
injunction should Yeats develop it on his own, though in fact the idea
had originated neither from Moore nor from Yeats, but from George
Russell: the poet, painter and theosophist A. E. Yeats wrote up the play
quickly in collaboration with Gregory, with help from Hyde and Quinn;
a version was then published in Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, The United
Irishman, on November 1, 1902. A New York Irish-American lawyer,
Quinn offered Yeats free legal counsel should the dispute go to court. As
for Moore, he was later to take a degree of vengeance in characterizing
Yeats himself as the figure of the histrionic mystic in Moore’s Hail and
Farewell!25 Despite the row over intellectual property rights, Yeats was
optimistic that the Stage Society in London, who had already put on a
number of G. B. Shaw’s works, would play Where There Is Nothing in
January or February of 1903. Yeats even claimed to have heard it
suggested that his painter-brother Jack B. Yeats should play the role of
Itinerant character Paddy Cockfight in the performance. In a letter to
Lady Gregory written in November 1902, he presumed that this idea
had been put out by Pamela Colman Smith, an American brought up in
Jamaica with whom Yeats became acquainted in 1899.26 Eventually, the
Stage Society put on three performances in late June 1904 under the
direction of H. Granville Barker.27
Richard Cave points out that Where There Is Nothing was originally
based on a report that a devout Catholic friend of George Russell was
believed to have gone mad because he determined to live fully
according to the teachings of Jesus, giving away everything that he
owned.28 In a subsequent letter to John Quinn in 1903, Yeats claimed to
have had the English utopian socialist William Morris in mind when
creating the figure of Paul Ruttledge, the revolutionary mystic in the
play.29 Whatever his source, Ruttledge is strongly reminiscent of
Nietzsche’s madman entering the marketplace to announce the death of
God: a figure that shows the disturbing impact of visionary ecstasy in
communities where religious orthodoxy has become one with social
convention.30 At first we encounter Paul Ruttledge in the play as a
country gentleman among magistrates who are regular acquaintances
at his mother’s residence. His closest friend is a monk named Jerome;
the conversation among other guests invited to the house is tedious to
Paul Ruttledge. At the appearance on the estate of an Irish Itinerant,
Charlie Ward, Ruttledge shocks the other dignitaries when he asks
Ward if he might be allowed to join their Itinerant community. Living
with the Itinerants, Paul marries Sabina Silver in a ceremony that
Jerome regards as blasphemous. After being beaten for subjecting the
magistrates to a mock trial—exposing their religious insincerities—
when they come to persuade him to return to his previous life, Paul is
delivered by Charlie Ward to the steps of a monastery. There he enters a
state of visionary trance at the foot of the altar and is later expelled
from the community for preaching a sermon that the abbot denounces
as heresy. Two monks named Colman and Aloysius follow Paul into the
countryside, but in the end he is beaten to death by a mob that believes
their presence as heretics is bringing bad luck to the area.
Paul’s inner quest for absolute experience, culminating in the
sermon that he delivers following his trance, is presented in the play as
that state of being which Heidegger terms ‘not-being-at-home’.31 This is
evident in Paul abandoning the comfortable upper-class environment
of a country gentleman to live the wandering life of the Itinerants. It
also appears in the disturbance that Paul’s presence brings to the
monastic community that he joins later, and the small breakaway sect
that he creates. These features of the plot express Paul’s condition of
being as propelled by a search for being, in which he is continually in
excess of who he is. In this aspect, he conveys the restless Dionysian
spirit that Nietzsche expresses most extremely in the figure of
Zarathustra. In a state of ecstatic intoxication in the last section of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra , it appears to his followers that the soul of
Zarathustra ‘fell back and fled before him and was in remote distances
and as if “upon a high ridge”, as it is written, “wandering like a heavy
cloud between past and future”’.32 Heidegger develops an
understanding of the profound restlessness within this image into the
idea that the most fundamental meaning of ‘to be’ is to be beyond
oneself at any moment: directed towards its ‘ownmost potentiality-for-
Being’, Dasein is in every instant ‘already ahead of itself in its Being’.33
Tommy the Song thinks that Paul will not survive the hardship of
the Itinerant way of life: ‘You were not born like us with wandering in
the heart’.34 Paul refutes this, speaking of how sick he has become of the
‘lighted rooms’ of his country house, feeling a need for darkness: ‘The
dark, where there is nothing that is anything, and nobody that is
anybody; one can be free there, where there is nothing’.35 In this
respect, Where There Is Nothing is part of the movement in Irish drama
of the 1900s in which, as Mary Burke points out, the way of life of the
‘tinker’ is presented as ‘the antithesis of the expanding Irish
bourgeoisie’.36 Burke also notes, however, that Where This Is Nothing is
the only Irish work of its time that is informed by Gypsylorist
scholarship: in 1901 Yeats wrote to the Gypsylorist John Sampson for
information on the Irish Itinerant way of life.37 Whether or not Paul’s
desire for darkness marks a point of intersection in the play between
beliefs and customs that Sampson identified with Irish Itinerant
communities and Yeats’s own interests in esoteric magic is a matter of
conjecture. In William Bulfin’s Rambles in Eirinn (1907), the author
claims to have met an Irish Itinerant who had heard about Yeats’s play
and dismissed it, asserting that nobody would ever know the secrets of
the ‘tinkers’ except the Itinerants themselves.38
The way in which Paul describes the ‘place’ of darkness—‘where
there is nothing that is anything, and nobody that is anybody’—
certainly indicates the attraction that Nietzsche’s idea held for Yeats of
Dionysian magic as the breakdown of all barriers, leading one person
not just to become at one with another: further, to actually become that
other person.39 Darkness is the condition for this sheer excess of being:
Zarathustra describes ‘the midnight hour’ as an ‘intoxicated poet […]
that has overdrunk its drunkenness’.40 This relationship between
darkness and excess in the spiritual ecstasy that Paul experiences in
Where There Is Nothing identifies a relation between nothingness and
infinity that Badiou observes at the core of Pascal’s understanding of
miracles and his concept of the wager. The place ‘where there is
nothing’ in Yeats’s play is also the place where there is infinite divinity.
It is important, however, to acknowledge that Badiou’s interpretation of
Pascal is based in the first instance on his numerical account of being as
sheer multiplicity and his mathematical set theory account of being as
event. Badiou points out that ‘nothing’ has a specific numerical value—
zero. He notes that zero counts as a single numerical set, containing
only itself and represented as follows: {ø}.41 Calling this ‘the null set’,
Badiou observes that, numerically, it generates two mathematical sets
from nothing. These are the set {ø} that counts zero as its sole member,
and the set that contains this null set as a subset of itself, represented
as {{ø}}. Present within every numerical set, this identifies the point of
excess within every situation as presented in numerical terms,
commencing ‘the unlimited production of new multiples’ that are each
‘drawn from the void’.42
 The relation between the void and infinity that Badiou identifies in
the null set as the point of excess appears in Where There Is Nothing
through nothingness as drunken ecstasy in Paul Ruttledge’s mystical
experience. When Charlie Ward finds Tommy the Song kneeling in
prayer, Sabina Ward tells Charlie that Paul was preaching to Tommy.
Paul explains that he was telling Tommy how Heaven would be ‘a sort
of drunkenness, a sort of ecstasy’. At this point in Where There Is
Nothing, Paul quotes a Latin verse from scripture: ‘“Et calyx meus
inebrians quam praeclarus est”’. In modern biblical versions, this is
numbered as Psalm 23 and translated simply as ‘my cup brims over’.43
The line identifies a biblical pretext for William Blake’s famous maxim
on excess in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Paul cites, responding
to the magistrates’ complaint that he encourages drunken idleness
among the poor by providing free drink in the public houses: ‘Some
poet has written that exuberance is beauty, and that the roadway of
excess leads to the palace of wisdom’.44 Although critical of the literal
and awkward ways in which Yeats incorporates the world-view of Blake
in Where There Is Nothing, still Harold Bloom had no doubt that it was
Yeats’s ‘most Blakean work’, a judgement that still stands.45 Linking
drunkenness to mystical ecstasy, Paul conflates divergent teachings on
physical and spiritual drunkenness in Old Testament and Pauline
writings (the First Letter to the Thessalonians in the Epistles of St. Paul
concludes with an injunction against drunken licence). Ruttledge’s
essential point, however, is that spiritual ecstasy is an entry into the
darkness of the void out of which infinite multiplicity unfolds: a
mystical idea that yet corresponds to Badiou’s set-theory account of
being.
Lying prostrate on the steps of the monastery altar in a state of
trance, Paul is encircled by monks performing a dance, the first and
second dancer singing consecutively the following Latin passages from
the original Psalm 23:

Nam, et si ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis, Non timebo

mala, quoniam tu mecem es [For though I should walk in the
valley of darkness, no evil will I fear]; Virga tua, et baculus tuus,
Ipsa me consolata sunt [You are there with your rod and your
staff to comfort me]; Parasti in conspectu meo mensam /
 Adversus eos qui tribulant me [You have prepared a table before
me, against them that afflict me]. Impinguasti in oleo caput
meum / Et calix meus inebrians quam praeclarus est [You have
anointed my head with oil and my chalice which inebriateth me,
how goodly it is].46
Paul had previously spoken of the need to overcome ‘law and
number’.47 The psalm that the monks sing in their strange dance at
night in the chapel combines nothingness (the valley of darkness) and
excess (the chalice of drunkenness) as the features of mystical ecstasy.
Most immediately, we can attribute the scene to ‘the intoxicated song’,
near the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which the prophet speaks of
‘a scent and odour of eternity […] a brown, golden wine odour of
ancient happiness, of intoxicated midnight’s dying happiness’.48 The
images of spiritual overflow also align Paul’s mystical state with the
negation of quantity and measurement itself that Hegel identifies in the
dialectical movement of spirit. Contending that the principles of
mathematical knowledge are inert ideas of space and number that are
purely external in nature, Hegel sees these reach their limit in ‘the
Notion, something infinite that eludes mathematical determination’.
Consequently, he asserts that the ‘principle of magnitude, of difference
not determined by the Notion, and the principle of equality, of abstract
lifeless unity, cannot cope with the sheer unrest of life and its absolute
distinction’.49
Emerging from his state of trance, Paul preaches a sermon of
spiritual annihilation, calling for the destruction of all laws, all towns,
the Church and, finally, the world itself: ‘We must destroy the World; we
must destroy everything that has law and number, for where there is
nothing, there is God’.50 This seems fundamentally at odds with the
mathematical set-theory framework within which Badiou develops his
idea of the point of excess. However, earlier in the play, Paul instructs
the friars to fix their minds on a single thought through which they can
get ‘out of time into eternity’.51 This concentration on one idea only
relates to the numeric one from which the point of excess derives.
Badiou inaugurates his set-theory account of being by returning to
Plato’s assertion near the end of the Parmenides discourse that if the
one is not, then there cannot be multiplicity: ‘But since unity is not
among the others, the others are neither many nor one’.52 Badiou
transcribes Plato’s statement as follows: ‘if the one is not, what occurs
in the place of the “many” is the pure name of the void, insofar as it
alone subsists as being’.53 As Paul reaches the climax of his sermon in
Where There Is Nothing by announcing the need to get rid ‘of everything
which is not measureless eternal life’, he repeats symbolically for the
fourth time the gesture of quenching a candle.54 Paul declares that
darkness and excess are conditions for divine experience as
measureless and eternal. His teaching corresponds to Terry Eagleton’s
idea that ‘to be prodigal, ecstatic, overbrimming’ is in the very nature of
what is meant by God, ‘one for whom excess is no more than the
norm’.55 Yet there is a counting procedure involved in Paul’s gesture
through which he discloses this idea of divine excess. The ecstasy of the
void in which everything is to be destroyed retains the numerical value
of a single thought—the thought of one—upon which Paul fixes his
mind during the four moments of his sermon. Thus a complex dialectic
of the one and the many informs Paul’s anarchist call for the
destruction of ‘Law and Number’. Unsurprisingly, the Superior of the
monastery expels him as a heretic at the conclusion of the sermon.

Away with the Birds

As Yeats was contemplating how Where There Is Nothing might be taken
to production, James Joyce appeared on the scene, staying with Yeats
for a day. Yeats introduced him to Arthur Symons and tried to get him
some work on the Academy and Speaker.56 Ellmann notes how Symons
was to be as important to Joyce in getting his earlier work published as
Ezra Pound was to be for later publications.57 Earlier in 1902, George
Russell had written to Augusta Gregory that he was ‘not going to touch
Little’ in apparent consideration of the person who might play Paul
Ruttledge in Where There Is Nothing, as the hostility between Yeats and
Moore over the play was glaring.58 ‘Little’ was Philip Francis Little; in
his address to the thirteenth annual dinner of the Irish Historical
Society, Russell remembers meeting him when Russell himself was
about eighteen or nineteen years old. In this 1928 address, he
described Little as ‘rather mystical like myself’, but ‘a Catholic mystic, a
man most determined to make the Christianity of his inner life
correspond with his outer life’. He went on to tell the story of his
family’s surprise at Little leaving home one day in a new suit of clothes,
only to return later that evening in rags, having exchanged his garments
for those of a beggar that he had encountered. The comparison with the
eccentricity of Paul in Where There Is Nothing is strong. According to
Little himself, his family paid him to live apart from them. Little had
once denounced Russell for something he said to shock him, ‘and he
raised his arms above his head and denounced me as Jonah might have
denounced Ninevah’.59 Having dismissed Little in his 1902 letter to
Gregory as an option for the role of Ruttledge in Where There Is
Nothing, Russell speculates on trying out another young man ‘looking
for a Messiah’. R. F. Foster remarks that this was none other than James
Joyce, ‘embarking on an odyssey which would echo in many ways Paul
Ruttledge’s determination to tear down the veil of the temple’.60
This momentary possibility that a twenty-year-old Joyce, an artist as
a young man, might have played Paul Ruttledge in Where There Is
Nothing lends a twist to the famous epiphany that Stephen Dedalus
undergoes towards the end of chapter four in A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man , set around the time of the beginning of the Irish Literary
Revival in the 1898–1903 period. His novel completed in Zurich in
1914, an enormous breadth of time and change separates Joyce as
author from the young man that he represents in A Portrait coming to a
moment of artistic self-realization. Still, it is significant that the woman
whom Stephen Dedalus encounters standing at the edge of the waves
becomes an image of mystical ecstasy in the awakening of his new
consciousness of life in all its frailty and possibility. At this moment,
Stephen is redolent of Paul Ruttledge’s wild immersion in visionary
experience, the epiphany infused with the same spiritual excess that we
encounter in Where There Is Nothing. Stephen speaks of ‘the holy
silence of his ecstasy’ as he looks at the figure on the strand. She
appears to him as a ‘wild angel’, one who opens for him ‘in an instant of
ecstasy’ the doors leading on and on along all the pathways of ‘error
and glory’.61 The experience is expressed as the overflow of
consciousness itself: that transcendence by consciousness of its own
limits through which Hegel identifies the movement of spirit in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Jaurretche sees the passage as Joyce’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Improvised apparatus may be used, but it requires much more labor and is not as
satisfactory.
All milk should be sterilized or pasteurized before being used as a food for infants.
The following table shows an analysis of milks and infant foods helpful in the
selection of a food to supply deficiencies indicated by a chemical analysis of the infant.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MILKS AND INFANT FOODS (COMPILED)
(Percentage of Composition of the Dry Substance)
Borden’s Mellin’s Eskay’s
Borden’s Horlick’s Nestle’s
Mother’s Cow’s Condensed Food Food
COMPONENTS Malted Malted Food (Milk
Milk Milk Milk (Eagle (Milk (Milk
Milk Milk Substitute)
Brand) Modifier) Modifier)
Protein 14.00 27.00 15.10 13.83 10.10 12.40 12.10 6.82
Fat 31.00 31.00 9.20 7.90 12.10 4.15 0.25 3.58
Cane-Sugar None None None None 59.1 22.10 None None
Other Soluble
Carbohydrates
52.00[18] 36.00[18] 69.77[19] 66.56[19] 16.0[18] 35.00[19] 84.00[19] 56.78[20]
(Lactose,
Maltose, etc.)
Starch None None None None None 25.70 None 30.42
Ash (Mineral
2.00 5.00 3.46 3.42 2.4 1.62 3.78 1.00
Content)

The following table from Holt shows at a glance the comparative average
composition of human and cow’s milk:
HUMAN AND COW’S MILK COMPARED
Human Milk Cow’s Milk
Fat 4% 4%
Sugar 7% 4.5%
Proteins 1.5% 3.5%
Salts 0.2% 0.75%
Water 87.30% 87.25%
Total 100.00% 100.00%

Barley, rice, oatmeal, corn meal and soy-bean flour are

generally used. If the grains of the cereals are used, they must Gruels
be cooked from three to four hours.
As a rule, cereal gruels are made by cooking the flour and water for from fifteen to
twenty minutes. Two ounces to the quart is about as strong as plain gruels can be
made.
 Dextrinized gruels may be made as high as eight ounces to the quart. Four level
tablespoonfuls of the cereal flour weigh one ounce.
As the soy bean contains no starch, it does not thicken when cooking.
About 1 level tablespoonful to 3 ounces of soy-bean flour are used to the quart. One
or 2 tablespoonfuls of barley, oat, or wheat gruel may be added before cooking to
increase the nutritive value. One ounce of soy-bean flour, or 2 ounces of barley flour,
to 1 quart of water makes a very good standard gruel. It contains 2 per cent. protein,
0.6 per cent. fat, 5.1 per cent. carbohydrates, giving a food value of ten calories per
ounce, just one-half the value of milk. In certain forms of intestinal trouble in which
cow’s milk is not assimilated, this gruel is valuable used with condensed milk.
Malted gruels are made by adding 1 teaspoonful of good malt extract or diastase to
a cereal gruel after it has been cooled. It should be stirred in very thoroughly.

In artificial feeding “spitting” is usually an annoying symptom

Vomiting that does not indicate anything more serious than an overloaded
stomach. This condition is usually relieved by lengthening the
feeding intervals to four hours.
On the other hand, vomiting usually indicates something more serious in a bottle-fed
baby, especially if it is very persistent. It is usually a sign that cow’s milk, or the
preparation of it, is not agreeing with the infant. It also indicates a digestive
disturbance that should be treated only by the physician, who will probably change the
formula.
Occasional vomiting is sometimes due to too rich food and too frequent feeding.
Lengthening the feeding hours and decreasing the amount of fat in the mixture will
usually eliminate the trouble.

This is the most common of all of baby’s troubles. It is often

Colic due to too rapid feeding either from the breast or bottle, and
when there is a tendency to colic, the feeding should be slower.
The baby should not be fed while it is suffering from colic, even though it seems that
the drinking of warm milk relieves it temporarily. Hot water should be given every half-
hour or hour until relieved. If the baby seems cold, hot water slightly sweetened, and a
hot bath, should be given at once. A hot-water bottle may be placed near it as well.
In colic there is severe pain in the abdomen, which is swollen and hard. Sudden and
violent crying is usually a symptom of colic, which often ceases very suddenly after the
emission of gas from the mouth or bowels.
If the baby seems exhausted, the physician should be summoned at once, but these
suggestions may be helpful until the physician arrives.
 When colic is very frequent in a bottle-fed baby, the food should be modified.

The character of the stools depends primarily on the

composition of the food. They are varied according to the The Stools in
digestive powers of the infant, and according to the amount and Infancy
rapidity of absorption of the products of digestion. The amount of
absorption depends to a considerable extent on the rapidity with which the contents
pass through the intestinal tract.

The nature of the food, of course, influences the character of the stools. The
examination of the stools is of the greatest aid in determining whether or not any given
food element is properly digested and assimilated, and, in many diseased conditions,
in telling what element is at fault. This, however, can only be determined by analysis,
but a little information on this subject will be of value to the mother or nurse.
During the first few weeks or months of life, the breast-fed infant has three or four
stools daily. These are of about the consistency of thick pea soup and are golden
yellow. The number of stools gradually diminishes to two or three in the twenty-four
hours, and the consistency becomes more salve-like.
It is not uncommon for thriving breast-fed babies to have a large number of stools of
diminished consistency and of a brownish color; in such instances, the examination of
the breast milk will show that the proteins are high.
It is best not to pay too much attention to the stools if the baby is gaining in weight
and appears well. It is not unusual to find many soft fine curds and sometimes mucus
in the stools of healthy breast-fed babies.
It is not only unnecessary, but decidedly wrong to wean a baby simply because the
stools are abnormal, if it is doing well in other ways. The breast-fed infant will often go
weeks or months without a normal stool and yet thrive perfectly. On the other hand, if
a baby has such stools when it is taking cow’s milk it is a decided evidence of
malnutrition.
Infants that are thriving on cow’s milk have, as a general rule, fewer movements in
the twenty-four hours than do breast-fed babies and these movements are firmer in
consistency.

Constipation seems to be the chief difficulty in artificial feeding,

Constipation due usually to the poor absorption of fat, or the low percentage
necessary to prevent indigestion. If the constipation is not
severe, the substitution of oatmeal for barley water in the mixture will usually relieve
the trouble.
If the constipation is severe, causing occasional attacks of colic or straining at stool,
it is sometimes advisable to give a little higher percentage of fat in the mixture, but this
should be done very cautiously and usually on the advice of the physician.
If, however, this does not relieve the trouble, the best plan is to substitute one of the
dextrin-maltose mixtures for milk-sugar or cane-sugar. The malt itself is not especially
laxative but it prevents the excessive fermentation which usually occurs when the
bowels are very costive.

Two, three, or more green and loose evacuations, even though

they may contain whitish particles of undigested fat, are of no Diarrhea
great significance in the breast-fed infant, but should be regarded
as danger signals in bottle-fed babies.
Even a mild attack of diarrhea is usually a symptom of fat-dyspepsia which, if taken
in time, may usually be promptly checked.
A dose of castor-oil at the beginning of the attack may relieve any irritation that
might have caused the trouble.
It is best to omit all food for at least twenty-four hours. Plain water should be given
very freely and occasionally barley water, if the baby is hungry. After that it is best to
start with a mixture low in fat. Skimmed milk or boiled milk free from all fat, diluted with
cereal water, may be given at regular intervals.
Should slight diarrheal attacks continue, or should the stools be of a diarrheal
character, the wisest plan is to substitute a dextrin-maltose mixture for the sugar, as
malt decidedly favors fat absorption.
In almost every case of infantile diarrhea it is advisable to consult the physician,
especially if there is considerable restlessness and rise in temperature.
Diarrhea is more frequent in summer among bottle-fed babies, as the heat often
promotes the growth of germs in the milk. Therefore to sterilize or pasteurize milk
during the heated months is especially necessary.
A chill, due to insufficient clothing, will sometimes cause diarrhea. The abdomen,
arms, and legs should be kept warm by close-fitting garments of soft wool.

In treating anemia in infants, as in adults, the cause should be

Anemia removed by correcting any errors in diet and treating any other
physical deficiencies.
The cause of infantile anemia is an insufficient absorption of iron from the food.
 The amount of iron in both human milk and cow’s milk is small and is insufficient for
the needs of the growing infant. However, Nature has deposited enough iron in the
liver of the new-born infant to last until it can digest foods which contain iron in
sufficient amounts. The iron in human milk is apparently more easily retained than that
in the milk of animals.
The iron content of human milk is dependent on the general condition of the mother.
It is higher in healthy individuals and lower in those under par.
Anemia in infants is apt to become severe and often take on a pernicious form. A
prolonged intestinal disturbance often brings on anemia, and not infrequently anemia
is due to a deficiency of protein in the food.
The treatment consists largely of additions or changes in the diet, depending on the
age of the infant. Purées of vegetables that contain much iron, such as spinach and
carrots, and also fruit juices, are valuable and in proper proportions can be added to
the diet after the age of six months. It is best that the physician decide on the
advisability of this as it will depend on the general condition of the infant.

Rickets, a chronic impairment of nutrition, affects not only the

bones, but all of the tissues of the body, particularly the nervous Rickets
system. Artificial feeding is the chief cause of rickets on account
of the poor absorption of fats, and often because of protein starvation.
Prepared foods, on account of their large percentage of starch and their lack of
protein and butter-fat are frequently the cause of rickets.
In addition to its fuel value, milk-fat contains the elements which promote growth.
As previously stated, the infant requires a certain percentage of protein, fat, and
mineral for the blood and tissue building and the growth of the bones. In artificial
feeding, the preparations given are often deficient in these important elements.
Climate and poor hygienic surroundings sometimes cause rickets in breast-fed
babies, probably on account of the lowered vitality of the mother and the child and
consequently poor digestion and assimilation, but it is most frequently found in babies
improperly fed.
Dr. Winfield S. Hall says:
Fresh milk, appropriately modified and in proper amount, together with such other
food as is indicated for the age and weight, is the important point in the treatment of
rickets. Fresh air, day and night, sunshine and outdoor life, are only next in happiness.
Cod-liver oil, especially with the addition of phosphorus, is a very valuable addition to
the treatment.

Rickets is a chronic condition, while scurvy is an acute disease.

 This difficulty is considered as entirely due to improper feeding
Scurvy and therefore must be overcome by a change of diet. Recovery
is usually very rapid when the child is properly fed.
Pains and tenderness about the joints, particularly of the legs, are the usual
symptoms, causing the baby to cry when it is lifted or moved about. The gums
sometimes become swollen and bleed. In almost every case it is found that infants
suffering from scurvy have been on a continuous diet of prepared foods like malted
milk, condensed milk, or boiled milk which Dr. Hall terms “dead food,” presumably on
account of a lack of the life-giving proteins and butter-fat.
When boiled milk has been used, the change should be made to pasteurized milk or
raw milk if it can be secured clean and fresh. If prepared foods have been given, the
amount should be greatly decreased and replaced by a cow’s-milk preparation in
which a small percentage of the prepared food may be included, or, better still, omitted
entirely, if a cow’s-milk preparation including a good substantial gruel will agree.
In scurvy, orange juice or other fruit juices should be given, from 1 to 4 ounces a
day, according to the age. Orange juice is particularly valuable, 2 or 3 teaspoonfuls
being given before each feeding.
A lack of fresh air often aids in producing scurvy.

After the baby has reached the age of one year, we often feel
that it is not necessary to be so careful of its diet. However, the Feeding during the
number of deaths due to digestive disturbances caused by Second Year
improper feeding during the second year is significant.
After the child is a year old it should be given solid food very gradually to develop its
digestive functions as well as its teeth. A soft-boiled egg or a little beef juice may be
added to the diet. Until the appearance of the anterior molar teeth, however, the child’s
diet should be confined largely to milk. A thin slice of buttered bread or a little plain
rice or rice pudding, a soda cracker or bread crumbs in milk may be given. The year-
old child may also begin to drink cow’s milk. One or two glasses a day may be given,
until the child is at least 13 or 14 years old.
Good judgment should be used in feeding children, as habits and tastes are being
formed, and whether they are normal or abnormal will depend on the kind of food
given and when.
Four meals a day, at regular intervals, and nothing but water between these
intervals, is considered the best plan.
Dry toast, zwieback, and crackers may be gradually added to the diet, also well-
cooked cereals, like cream of wheat, rice, and oatmeal. The oatmeal should be
strained the first few months it is given. Very little sugar should be added to the
cereals, as children very quickly cultivate a desire for sweets, rejecting other more
nourishing foods, and too much sugar is apt to disturb the digestion. It is best during
the first few months that no sugar be added to cereals.
The amount of whole milk, or milk diluted with barley or oatmeal gruel, should be
limited to one quart when the other foods are given.
Beef juice (from one to two ounces), mutton broth, chicken broth, and cereal broths
may be given after the age of one year; not more than two ounces at first, gradually
increasing in a few months’ time to four ounces. This is best given at the beginning of
the noon feeding. These broths have little nutritive value, but usually stimulate the
appetite for other foods.
The child must build muscle, bone, and sinew, and more protein is required as soon
as he begins to walk. Milk, eggs, and cereals will furnish this. The heavier protein diet
is best given at eighteen months to two years, in eggs, cooked soft. An egg may be
given every other day, soft boiled for about two minutes, or coddled for four minutes.
At the age of two years an egg may be given every day. These soft-cooked eggs are
best when mixed with broken dry toast or broken whole wheat or Graham crackers,
because if dry food is served with them they will be better masticated, hence more
saliva be mixed with them.
The habit of thorough mastication should be cultivated at this period.
Oatmeal, thoroughly cooked, and shredded wheat, with cream and sugar, ripe fruit,
bread and butter, milk, soft-cooked eggs (poached or boiled), constitute a rational diet
at this age.
Bread is better broken in milk because the chewing movements mix the saliva with
the milk and smaller curds are formed as the milk enters the stomach.
Custard may after two years be added to the diet, also baked or mashed potato,
plain boiled macaroni, also a little butter on the potato, toast, or bread.
Also after the age of eighteen months, a small quantity of very lean meat, like
scraped or chopped beef or lamb, or finely minced chicken, may be given once a day.
Also well-cooked and mashed vegetables like peas, spinach, carrots, and
asparagus tips. For the first few months these should be strained.
Some fruit should also be given each day, orange juice, apple sauce, or the pulp of
stewed prunes; the latter especially is valuable when the bowels are inclined to be
constipated.
Tea, coffee, and cocoa are absolutely objectionable, and before the age of two
years no kind of candy should be given.
One of the most important things to teach the child, when it is taking foods other
than milk, is thorough mastication, not only to assist the proper growth of the teeth, but
to prevent the digestive disturbances that invariably occur from the bolting of food, and
children are especially liable to do this.
Dry toast and zwieback compel mastication and strengthen the gums. These should
be given in the hand, a piece at mealtime and occasionally between meals, if the child
seems hungry. The child will then gradually get into the habit of chewing other solid
foods when they are given.
If the child is hungry between meals, he should be fed at a regular period, midway
between breakfast and luncheon and between luncheon and the evening meal. The
food should be dry (toast or a dry cracker) to induce thorough and slow mastication.
Many object to “piecing” between meals, but if this piecing be done at hours as
regular as his meal hour, and the food be dry and well masticated, it will readily digest
and will not interfere with his meals. The growing child needs more frequent meals
than the adult. His stomach is not so large, he is active in outdoor exercise, and
eliminates waste freely. He also requires much heat and energy. The active child at
outdoor play uses almost as much energy as the laboring man.
Many mothers are in doubt as to whether the baby’s food should be salted. It is
necessary to add a very little salt to the food for the baby; broths should be seasoned
slightly and a pinch of salt added to potatoes and eggs. Cereals and vegetables are
cooked in water to which a little salt has been added.
Experienced observers of children and their ailments and diseases have said that
more babies are killed by overfeeding than by underfeeding. Especially in summer,
when the child’s condition reflects that of the mother, too much food will cause
indigestion, irritation of the stomach, and diarrhea.
Often the child is fretful because it is too warm or is thirsty. It will often be benefited
by giving it less food and more water. This fretful mind affects the child’s digestion just
as it affects the digestion of the mother.
If a healthy child refuses good, wholesome food because it wishes some other than
what is offered it, it is not hungry and doesn’t need the food.
The growing child craves sweets, but a child should not be given candy whenever it
wants it during the day. Candy or sugar is quickly converted into heat and is best
eaten immediately following a meal. Sugar may be spread on bread for the four
o’clock lunch or a little candy may be eaten at this time. Two or three pieces of candy
an inch square are sufficient.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] All lactose (milk-sugar).

[19] Mostly maltose (a hard, crystalline sugar formed by the action of malt on
starch).
[20] Mostly lactose.
 APPENDIX

MEASURES AND WEIGHTS

A few tables of measures may be helpful here because accurate

measurements are necessary to insure success in the preparation of
any article of food.
All dry ingredients, such as flour, meal, powdered sugar, etc.,
should be sifted before measuring.
The standard measuring cup contains one-half pint and is divided
into fourths and thirds.
To measure a cupful or spoonful of dry ingredients, fill the cup or
spoon and then level off with the back of a case-knife.
In measures of weight the gram is the unit.
A “heaping cupful” is a level cup with two tablespoonfuls added.
A “scant cupful” is a level cup with two tablespoonfuls taken out.
A “saltspoon” is one-fourth of a level teaspoon.
To measure butter, lard, and other solid foods, pack solidly in
spoon or cup and level with a knife.
TABLE OF MEASURES AND WEIGHTS[21]
4 saltspoons = 1 teaspoon, tsp.
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon, tbsp.
4 tablespoons = 1/4 cup or 1/2 gill.
16 tablespoons (dry ingredients) = 1 cup, c.
12 tablespoons (liquid) = 1 cup.
2 gills = 1 cup.
2 cups = 1 pint.
2 pints = 1 quart.
4 quarts = 1 gallon.
2 tablespoons butter = 1 ounce.
1 tablespoon melted butter = 1 ounce.
4 tablespoons flour = 1 ounce.
2 tablespoons granulated sugar = 1 ounce.
2 tablespoons liquid = 1 ounce.
2 tablespoons powdered lime = 1 ounce.
1 cup of stale bread crumbs = 2 ounces.
1 square Baker’s unsweetened chocolate = 1 ounce.
Juice of one lemon = (about) 3 tablespoons.
5 tablespoons liquid = 1 wineglassful.
4 cups of sifted flour = 1 pound.
2 cups of butter (packed solidly) = 1 pound.
2 cups of finely chopped meat (packed solidly) = 1 pound.
2 cups of granulated sugar = 1 pound.
22/5 cups of powdered sugar = 1 pound.
22/3 cups brown sugar = 1 pound.
22/3 cups oatmeal = 1 pound.
43/4 cups rolled oats = 1 pound.
9 or 10 eggs = 1 pound.
1 cup of rice = 1/2 pound.
APOTHECARIES’ WEIGHTS[22]
20 grains = 1 scruple, ℈
3 scruples = 1 drachm, ʒ
8 drachms (or 480 grains) = 1 ounce, ℥
12 ounces = 1 pound, lb.
APOTHECARIES’ MEASURES[22]
60 minims (M) = 1 fluid drachm, fʒ
8 fluid drachms = 1 fluid ounce, f℥
16 fluid ounces = 1 pint, o or pt.
2 pints = 1 quart, qt.
4 quarts = 1 gallon, gal.
APPROXIMATE MEASURES[23]
One teaspoonful equals about 1 fluid drachm.
One dessertspoonful equals about 2 fluid drachms.
One tablespoonful equals about 4 fluid drachms.
One wineglassful equals about 2 ounces.
One cup (one-half pint) equals about 8 ounces.
METRIC MEASURES OF WEIGHT[23]
In measures of weight the gram is the unit.
1 gram 1.0 gm.
1 decigram 0.1 gm.
1 centigram 0.01 gm.
1 milligram 0.001 gm.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Practical Dietetics, Alida Frances Pattee.

[22] Practical Dietetics, Alida Frances Pattee.
[23] Practical Dietetics, Alida Frances Pattee.
 INDEX

Absorption of food, 145

Achlorhydria, 258
Acne, 295
Adulteration of foods, 118
Age, 165
Diet in, 230
Affecting digestion, 165
Albumin, 10
Albumin water, 309
Albuminoids, 12, 56
Alcohol, 184
Alkalies, 45
Almond oil, 25
Anemia, 37, 245-250
Appetite, affecting digestion, 160, 161, 163, 164
Apples, 47, 49, 51
Apricots, 47
Arrowroot, 20
Asparagus, 43, 44
Asthma, 282
Athlete, diet for, 228

Baking soda, 136

Balanced diets, 232
Bananas, 48, 49-50
Barley, 74
Barley water, 310
Beans, 43, 82, 85-86
Beef, 53, 54
Beets, 39, 41
Beverages, 103-109
Bile, 144
Biliousness, 267
Biscuits, 68
Blackberries, 48
Blood, affecting digestion, 157
Bouillons, 57
Boy or girl, diet for, 226-228
Bread, 66
Bread and crackers, 61, 62
Graham bread
Rye bread
Wheat bread
Graham crackers
Oatmeal ”
Oyster ”
Soda ”
Breakfast foods, 72-80
Breathing, 3
Blight’s disease, 272
Brussels sprouts, 43
Business man, diet for, 224
Butter, 89
Buttermilk, 89, 101

Cabbage, 44
Caffein, 106
Calcium, 4, 6, 34, 36, 59
Calories, 127-129
Candy, 15-16
Carbohydrates, 13
Carbon, 4, 122
Carbon dioxid, 20
Carbonaceous foods, 4, 9, 10, 38-53
Carbonaceous foodstuffs, 13-25
Carbo-nitrogenous foods, 9, 61-102
Carrots, 39, 41
Casein, 90
Cassava, 20
Catarrh of intestines, 264
Catarrh of stomach, 253
Celery, 43, 44
Cells, formation of, 1, 2
Cellulose, 45
Cereal coffees, 80-81
Cereals, 61-80
Cheese, 89, 100
Cherries, 47
Chicken, 57
Chlorin, 4
Chocolate, 108
Chorea, 291
Circulation affecting digestion, 181
Citrates, 45
Citric acid, 45
Citrus fruits, 216
Clams, 55
Classification of foods, 38-102
Carbonaceous, 38-53
Fruits, 45
Green vegetables, 42
Roots and tubers, 38
Carbo-nitrogenous foods, 61-102
Cereals, 61
Legumes, 82
Milk, 89
Nitrogenous foods, 53-59
Eggs, 58
Meat, 53
Cocoa, 108
Cod-liver oil, 24
Coffee, 106-107
Condiments, 109-111
Capers
Catsup
Cinnamon
Ginger
Horseradish
Mustard
Pepper
Salt
 Spices
Tabasco sauce
Worcestershire sauce
Constipation, 96, 97, 262
Convalescent, feeding the, 302
Cooking, 185-199
Corn, 71
Cornstarch, 10
Cotton-seed oil, 24
Crabs, 55
Cranberries, 48
Cream, 89
Cucumbers, 43
Currants, 48, 52
Custards, 314, 315

Dates, 48
Diabetes, 279
Diet, in abnormal conditions, 242-304
In age, 230, 231
For athlete, 228
For boy or girl, 226-228
For business man, 224
For laboring man, 229-230
In sedentary occupation, 222-224
In traveling, 213
Mixed, versus vegetable, 210
Diets, 216-231
Digestion, 133-150
Intestinal, 143
 Salivary, 135
Stomach, 140
Dilatation of the stomach, 259
Diuretic foods, 126
Dysentery, 265
Dyspepsia, 250

Economy in food, 148

Eczema, 294
Effervescing waters, 109
Eggnog, 60, 308
Egg preparations, 308
Eggs, 58
Elimination, 2, 130-133
Energy, 2, 13, 120-129
Enteritis, 264
Epithelium, 136
Exercise, 2
Exercise and breathing affecting digestion, 171-174

Fatigue, 174
Fats, 13, 21-25, 58, 59
Almond oil
Butter
Cod-liver oil
Cotton-seed oil
Cream
Meat fat
Nut oils
Olive oils
Figs, 48
Fish, 54, 55, 58
Flaxseed tea, 276
Flour and meals, 62-65, 73, 74
Bran
Corn
Gluten
Graham
Nutri meal
Oatmeal
Wheat
Whole wheat
Food elements, 3, 8, 9
Foodstuffs, 8-10
Frequency of meals affecting digestion, 169
Fruits, 45-53
Bland, 47
Dates
Figs
Prunes
Raisins
Sweet, 47
Apples
Bananas
Blackberries
Blueberries
Grapes
Peaches
Pears
Plums
Raspberries
Fruit juices, 305
Fruit sugar (levulose), 14, 15
Gallstones, 269
Gastritis, 253
Gelatinoids, 12, 56
Glucose, 10, 15, 16, 40
Gluten, 5, 10
Glycerin, 22
Glycogen, 16, 21, 151
Gooseberries, 47
Gout, 277
Grapefruit, 46
Grape juice, 307
Grapes, 48, 50
Greens, 43
Gruels, 314, 317
Gum-chewing, 139

Ham, 54
Heat and energy, 3, 120-129
Hives, 293
Honey, 10, 15
Hydrochloric acid, 34, 35, 46, 140
Hydrogen, 4
Hyperchlorhydria, 257
Hypochlorhydria, 257

Ice-cream, 115
Improperly balanced diet, 221
Indigestion, 250
Mental effect on, 135
Nervous, 252
Infant feeding, 320-356
Influence of mind, 177-178
Insufficient diet, effect of, vii
Intestinal disorders, 262
Intestinal indigestion, 143
Intestines, work of, 141-148
Invalids, foods for, 305
Iron, 4, 37, 59
Itching, 295

Jellies, 313, 314

Junket, 102, 314

Kidneys, derangements of, 271

Affecting digestion, 155, 160
Kumyss, 98

Laboring man, diet for, 229-230

Lactose, 15
Leanness, 298
Legumes, 63, 82-87
Beans
Lentils
Peanuts
Peas
Lemonade, 60, 108, 306
Lemons, 46, 48