Madam, - As the hype for the Bloomsday centenary approaches, one may expect many a revisionist swipe at the image of Joyce as he is typically venerated: as the best Irish writer never to scoop a Nobel.
Broadsides, both serious and tongue-in-cheek, have already been launched from many quarters, recently by an irritated Roddy Doyle, (Guardian, February 10th) a witty Kevin Myers (The Irish Times, February 11th) and a genial but dismissive Sam Stephenson (Sunday Independent, February 22nd). The rush is under way to emulate the brave, wise little boy who shouts out that the emperor has no clothes. But in truth, Ireland has been full of children proclaiming the Joyce industry's nudity for decades.
This is so because it is very important to Irish people to be perceived as being the ones "laughing at" and not the ones "being laughed at". Mocking laughter is how we may dissociate ourselves from the (mostly French and American) literati who have largely fuelled the Joyce Industry. Sure, aren't Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake only colossal leg-pulls? Isn't he only laughing at his readers? Isn't that the joke? And we, the unpretentious Irish, get it and "they" don't.
Certainly, the Joyce industry does need some deflation; but discussions of Joyce's "over-ratedness" by people who begin their complaint with, "Well I never managed to finish either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake but neither of them is worth the effort because Joyce was crazy/joking/a second-rate chancer, etc., etc." seem fatuous.
Yes Joyce is laughing. That laughter is born of insight into the incessant human demand for, to use Joyce's phrase, "wideawake language and goahead plot", both in fiction and life as though we were blinkered creatures with neither patience nor capacity for lateral thought. In Finnegan's Wake, a work of vast digressions which famously has no end, being a circle, Joyce actually slows down "goahead plot" to an infuriating standstill - infuriating, that is, until we see language unfold, see not only words but syllables shine as things-in-themselves, naked, unfamiliar. A collage of clichés, journalese, myths and languages and assorted junk swirls to form a portrait of the nuclear family and a history of mankind. In hundred-letter words it suddenly laughs at itself - how rich and full and pointless, like a dance. No goal, no plot, no linear "progress", just deeper layers. (To quote another famous "unreadable", Heidegger: "When philosophy attends to its essence it does not make forward strides at all.")
The modern world's obsession with "progress", with getting to the next stage as quickly as possible in neat, plot-like fashion, has produced a world of made-to-order, disposable literature. Today certain young Irish writers can sign a first novel for a fortune provided they meet the formula. An art that forgoes getting on with it, that slows to a halt plot-wise in order to play with the self-reflexivity of language (and consciousness), is attempting to show that the "colossal leg-pull" is really ordinary, unexamining, unplayful consciousness with its get-on-with-it plot. The Wake is the real child pointing out the naked emperor - and laughing heartily as it does so.
This June, as (mostly American) Joyceans flood the capital, we Irish will do as we always do: laugh at their misguided lack of irony and see ourselves as the wise, straight-talking undeluded child in the Hans Christian Anderson fable. But if we do not see that the Wake is laughing with the low rumble of thunder in the very syllables we use, we will miss the real joke altogether. - Yours, etc.,
COLM O'SHEA,
Kilnaglory,
Co Cork.