Kieran Healy

Introibo ad altare Dei

Today is the 99th Bloomsday. I bought Ulysses for myself on my 16th birthday, picking up the now much-despised Penguin ‘Corrected Text’ edition, edited by Hans Walter Gabler. (It’s still the only copy I have.) I bounced off of it two or three times before finally getting past Stephen’s monologue in Chapter 3 (the ‘Proteus’ episode). I go back to it pretty regularly, and read it again last year.

Joyce was in the news recently, in a poll of people’s least-favorite books (brought to my attention by Tim Dunlop). Joyce was narrowly outpolled by Tolkien as the least favorite author of the small group interviewed. Then again, one of those votes was cast by Neil Hamilton, correctly described in the feature as a “Disgraced former Conservative minister.” “I found it impenetrable,” he says of Ulysses, “and I got fed up with the style.” The style of which chapter, you Tory twit? To borrow from Anthony Burgess’ excellent introduction to Joyce: “Here is the hero of Ulysses seen in his primary, Nevil Shute, aspect, though the language of this inventory has, in sheer sound, in sheer organisation of consonsants and vowels, a distinction few popular novelists could reach:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Here he is seen in relation to one phase of past history:

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming. Of Israel’s folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand than him lone led till that house.

And here he is in one of his comic-mythic aspects:

And there came a voice out of heaven calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered him with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohue’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.

… The comedy of Joyce is an aspect of the heroic: it shows man in relation to the whole cosmos, and the whole cosmos appears in his work symbolized in the whole of language.”

While Joyce’s detractors may be Hamiltonian nincompoops, he is often even less well-served by his supporters. Worst of these, from my point of view, are the awful Oirish Joyceans (though Academic J(OY)ce/an[s] are often close behind). OJs are under no compulsion to have actually read anything by Joyce. They believe instead that their national origin gives them an ownership share in his genius. You see this at its generalized worst in the infamous poster of Ireland’s Writers, which International Law requires be displayed in every Irish pub in the world. A subclause forbids any mention that almost everyone shown on the poster was driven from, destroyed or despised by the country. (Those that weren’t generally didn’t like it and left of their own accord.) Only Russia has a similar relationship to its literary heritage. It’s no surprise that both nations are martyrs to drink.

Ouch – that last para is truly vicious. Well done.

Brian Keenan’s “An Evil Cradling” is a particularly bad example of what Kieran is talking about and is my vote for “Worst Book Ever”.

Cearly stung into action by derrida derider, dsquared here shows what “truly vicious” really means. No sympathy votes for you, Brian.

Oh come on it was a terrible book. Thinking about it, John McCarthy and Jill Morell’s book was also pretty bad, though in a more prosaic way.

I always dreamed of the day that Terry Waite landed the Glow-worm central heating endorsement …

“Hullo. I’m Terry Waite. After five years chained up in a basement in Beirut, there’s not much that I don’t know about radiators …”

I’ve never read it. Sounds like a good counterexample to the ‘great art comes from suffering’ school of thought, though.

Oh God I feel all guilty now. It’s absolutely loathsome of me to make fun of someone else’s unimaginably horrible experience, of course. But I remain firmly of the opinion, in the face of uniformly good reviews, that it was not a good book.

The poster’s only for starters. I’ve got a set of 6 “Famous Irish Writers” coasters that my mother brought me back from Ireland (or at least from Shannon Airport). Irish writers’ mugs for your mugs.

I’m on the list of people that never read Joyce, and frankly did an excellent job of avoiding anything of supposed literary significance.
I am now faced, in my partially framed young adulthood, with whether I should try reading Joyce. Is it too late to go back now, is it something that should seriously be thought of as over many people’s heads (including mine)? I’m a little cautious of anything that requires an entirely separate book (notes to…) for understanding the first book. What’s the best reason for dedicating serious time and energy to Joyce now?

Oirish Joyceans:

About ten years ago, I was in school at UCD and took a seminar on Ulysses from one Declan Kiberd, who is a prominent Irish Joycean (wrote the intro to the European Penguin Classics edition, for whatever that’s worth). I don’t know if he is one of the Oirish Joyceans of which you speak, but I gotta say, Kiberd’s deep knowledge of every aspect of that book was a revelation, and the experience of reading that book under his guidance was one I’ll not soon forget. I feel extremely fortunate to have approached the book for the first time with such a guide (and living in Dublin didn’t hurt.)

Your post got me thinking about rereading it, now…

Ditto McAnaspey.

Here in Galway they just had a little shindig reading bits from Ulysses in front of the house where Nora Barnacle was born in Bowling Green. Unfortunately it started to rain.

Thanks for a great post about a great book. Roll on Bloomsday 2004.

Ulysses contains my favorite sentence in the English language: “Mr. Leopold Blum ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” With relish! I don’t think you need a course to think it’s the greatest novel of the 20th Century, I didn’t have one. But, as with Dante, a course would be fantastic. I said pretty much this on Roadtosurfdom.
An English friend has a set of placemats of Irish country houses from me, which we use when I visit. Do all visitors to Ireland buy these?
“Introibo ad altare Dei.” My High School Latin says “altarem”, motion towards and all that.

I understand that the Keenan book (which I didn’t think was awful, but was over-rated), was ghost-written more or less in its entirety. He’s also “written” a novelization of the harpist Carolan’s life, which was remaindered almost immediately after publication. As for Oirish Joyceans, Therapy?’s classic thrashcore track, “James Joyce #$%!ed my sister” says it all.

“Only Russia has a similar relationship to its literary heritage”.

Huh? Which of the great Russian authors were ‘driven from, destroyed or despised by’ the country? And how many Russians haven’t at least read their Pushkin? Scanning my bookshelf, I find that sideswipe pretty hard to support.

Defense!

Solzhenitsyn comes to mind.

Of course you can drag out Solzhenitsyn. You might even want to mention Babel, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Zamyatin, and a whole constellation of Soviet-era writers. Throw in Nabokov, I don’t care. But unless you’re willing to ignore all of the major Russian writers of the Golden and Silver age, Kieran’s statement is still indefensible.

Solzhenitsyn went back, after all, as soon as the Soviet Union fell. And Russian mistreatment of its authors during the Soviet era never really extended past the official sphere. Note the huge boom in ‘forbidden’ authors any time censhorship was relaxed.

Given that Russians revere their literary heritage and are pretty well versed in it, I continue to find the original statement in the post shocking.

“But unless you’re willing to ignore all of the major Russian writers of the Golden and Silver age, Kieran’s statement is still indefensible.”
Well, I don’t think Pushkin enjoyed what Nicholas did to him. I don’t know how, say, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev or Dostoyevksy fared. Tolstoy did fine, I guess.

Oh the Gabler edition is perfectly fine. Anyone who nodded off waiting for the “forthcoming” Kidd edition is about due to wake up their Rip Van Winkle slumber of 20 years to find… that Gabler’s text is still the best available.

I actually found Keenan’s “An Evil Cradling” to be very moving.

Jesus, there were enough off-color jokes in the British comedy shows about him & John McCarthy, doesn’t the guy deserve a break?

On another note: the DUP in Keenan’s hometown (Ballymena? Belfast?) rejected a motion to give him freedom of the city/town because he used a Republic of Ireland passport. Fuckers.

Frank McGuiness’ play “Someone to watch over me” is a great dramatization based on the hostages in Lebanon, BTW.

Bloomsday

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