Madam, - In answer to Eileen Battersby's article in last Saturday's Weekend Review, Ulysses deserves to be ranked as the best Irish novel because it is one of the most enabling texts ever written. Contemporary Irish writers who suggest that it has had a disabling effect on the domestic novel should bear in mind the degree to which it enabled both Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. Beckett's "literature of exhaustion" takes the penultimate "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses to its logical conclusion, while the hilarious juxtaposition of Gaelic epic with Dublin slang in the "Cyclops" episode is the foundation of O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.
Far more than Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner, these two compatriots of Joyce were keenly aware of his comedy, Beckett developing its black, scatological side and O'Brien revelling in its baroque, idiomatic humour. Latin American, European and Commonwealth authors continue to mine the rich veins of Ulysses. If contemporary Irish novelists appear formally timid by comparison, they should blame themselves rather than the so-called shadow of Joyce. - Yours, etc.,
Dr DAVID BUTLER, Education Officer, James Joyce Centre, North Great George's Street, Dublin 1.
Madam, - Gasp! Shock, horror! Eileen Battersby has dared, in reviewing your recent poll of Ireland's greatest novels, to say that Ulysses is "monolithically overrated"! Joycean anoraks are bound to get steamed up about that. As one who is trying to earn his Joyce spotter's badge, I hope you'll let me make a few points.
Of course Ms Battersby is entitled to her opinion. But I am staggered that she considers Ulysses to be fuelled by cynicism and mean-mindedness. The book's main concern is how and whether its protagonists can restore themselves to psychological health. The illness that afflicts them, and particularly the hero, Leopold Bloom, is grief, and the novel treats that subject tenderly and eloquently.
The villain of the piece, Buck Mulligan, is chiefly guilty of cynicism - Mulligan mocks everything around him, including the grief of his "friend" Stephen Dedalus - and Joyce clearly loathes the trait. Ulysses, in this sense, is the least cynical of novels.
Ms Battersby also observes that the reputation of Ulysses owes more to academic critics than to readers. There is some truth in this, but I've heard this said so often that I fear it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ulysses is very much worth reading, even if it is difficult in some parts and dull in others (funnily, the difficult parts are never dull). It contains probably the best-drawn characters in any novel. If the general public hears only complaints about Ulysses - its impenetrability, its snug relationship with literary theory - it may soon go wholly unread.
Twelve years ago I saw the late Gus Martin spend a long afternoon reading tracts of Ulysses to his graduate students - and much to their chagrin. But I suspect that back then he glimpsed the possible death of the book, even as the Joyce industry grew, and he wanted to make certain that the students on his watch heard the words.
Ms Battersby would surely agree that they remain worth hearing. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID HANDY, Trimleston Avenue, Booterstown, Co Dublin.