It’s Complicated: Me and James Joyce in the Age of Facebook
In which a contemporary Irish novelist spends Bloomsday (June 16) wondering how to describe his relationship with the legendary writer
When I was a kid, growing up in Nenagh, in county Tipperary, me and my best friend Kevin McGee wanted to be writers. (Even though we didn’t know you were supposed to say “my best friend and I.”) We’d write stuff in our Christian Brothers copy books, and read it out to our friends.
One day, when we were 15 or 16, Kevin read us a new story of his, that started:
‘’Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….’’
And everybody hated it and thought it was shit. Of course, he’d copied out the beginning of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I like to think that I was the only one who liked it and thought it had potential; but that could be my memory saving me from embarrassment.
My dad had a Bodley Head hardback copy of Ulysses, which he had bought in England in the 1960s, because you still couldn’t legally buyUlysses in Ireland then. It had the dirty bits helpfully marked in blue ink in the margins. (The temptation to write “Came in handy” at this point is very great. I will resist.) My dad also had a critical theory about Joyce. It was quite a short critical theory, so I will pass it on to you in full:
“That man is obsessed with shite.”
So, James Joyce was certainly an active force in the culture in Tipperary when I grew up.
I grew older, and went to university in Galway, to study English literature and philosophy. I began writing more seriously. And as a young Irish writer in university in the 1980s and 90s, Joyce was what you had instead of God. You might not believe in him; you might want to rebel against him; but he was floating there, above you, above criticism, transcending literature, like Yahweh.
Not just in the university. Something odd was happening in Ireland generally. People lost their faith in the bishops, and the Pope, and the Church, in those years, as scandal followed scandal. And people began to transfer their yearning for spiritual guidance to writers and literature instead. In the pubs of Dublin, where once you might have seen a collection box for the Missions in Africa — a collection box on a chain, we weren’t saints — you started to see posters of James Joyce. Then they put James Joyce’s face on the banknotes. And then they started putting bronze plaques on the pavements, and on the walls, to tell you where James Joyce’s characters in Ulysses had eaten their breakfast, or bought a bar of soap, or taken a piss. Walking around Dublin became an involuntary pilgrimage to all these holy sites. Bloomsday itself was like doing the Stations of the Cross, but with a big fry-up at the end of it.
To celebrate the centenary of the day on which Ulysses takes place, the City of Dublin (having eventually got the permission of the Joyce Estate) put quotes from the book in pink neon letters all over the buildings of Dublin, till the city resembled an Irish Studies department designed by the guys who built Vegas. His words floated in the air wherever you looked.
Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, were now the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Irish literature; they became secular saints. They had suffered in order to bring us spiritual truths. And, although they were wonderful writers, their looming shades were a bit oppressive if you were trying to write a book in modern Ireland. You had to navigate your way around their achievements without being capsized.
A character in my last novel hears about these writers for the first time, and tries to make sense of them in a way he can understand. I’ll quote those two pages because, although the passage takes a comic approach, it is also a serious description of their superhuman image in Irish culture.
The Novelist talked about Samuel Beckett for a minute. Then he talked about James Joyce for an hour. I couldn’t understand a word of it. Eventually I could endure no more.
“Stop, stop,” I said. He ground to a halt. I applied my mind to translating the Novelist’s speech into English.
“James Joyce,” I said. “Did he ever work as a journalist?”
The Novelist frowned. “Well, he did the odd bit of journalism, early on, yes. Incisive analysis of Ireland’s paralysis, from the traditional thousand miles away…”
Excellent. I’d thought as much.
A journalist.
Wore glasses.
Lived in exile, from a lost and distant world to which he could never return.
Yet of a sunny disposition.
And, deep inside — hidden from everyone — all-powerful.
Super-vision, with a thousand-mile range.
Able to stop the turning planet with his strong right hand, so that a single chosen day would last forever.
I translated James Joyce into Superman.
In my imagination the modest and bespectacled figure carefully removed his glasses, stepped out of a Parisian telephone box, and leaped the Eiffel Tower in a single bound.
So, James Joyce created a world in a book…
I imagined Superman labouring night and day to carve, from a planet, a book. Letters like cliffs girdled and regirdled it in a spiral, and God read it as it rotated into the sunlight, and vanished back into the night-dark.
OK. Now, Samuel… The Novelist started off again.
“Stall the ball there a minute,” I said. “I’m translating Samuel Beckett into English.”
The Novelist looked at me with a new respect.
OK. Samuel Beckett.
Younger than Superman.
More tortured.
Bit of family money, so he never had to work.
Looked on humanity with a certain despair.
Batman. Obviously.
This Literature lark wasn’t as hard as it looked at first sight.
“And who,” I said keenly, “is Spiderman?”
A certain amount of confusion ensued before I worked out he was Flann O’Brien.
“Did the rest of the globe not supply a few of these superheroes,” I said, “or is Literary Modernism a strictly Irish sport, like Hurling?”
“Well,” said the Novelist, “later on, William Faulkner attempted to do for his own part of the United States what Joyce had done for Dublin…”
So, this William Faulkner was a patriotic, but inferior, rip-off of Superman… Oh this was easy. Captain America.
“And were there any English modernists?” I said.
“Oh yes. All shit,” said the Novelist. “Except for Virginia Woolf.”
“Ah!” I said. “Wonder Woman!”
“Precisely.”
“And what did these superheroes do?”
“They fought,” said the Novelist.
“And what did they fight for?”
“Truth.”
“And what did they fight against?”
“Bought words,” said the Novelist. “Comforting lies. Mass-produced thoughts. They fought against the romantic novel, the formulaic thriller, and the Walt Disney Corporation.”
“And so they lost,” I said.
The Novelist shrugged, grimaced, and tipped the last of the sugarbowl into his coffee. “It is too early to say.” He sipped.
(From Jude in London.)
So yes, they were by now saintly superheroes of Irish literature; and Joyce was the most powerful of them all. You kind of had to do battle with him, to see how strong you were.
But when you tried to wrestle with him, quote him, play with him, you ran into a wall. The wall of the Joyce Estate.
The Joyce Estate is run by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson. Stephen clearly loved, and loves, his grandfather; he clearly believes he is protecting his grandfather’s legacy. But he is, clearly, wrong in this belief. I feel so strongly about this that I wrote a thunderer in the Times of London on the subject a couple of years ago, and I will repeat some of those points here.
Since he took control of the estate, in 1982, Stephen Joyce has fenced off his grandfather’s work from everyone else who loves it. He has said academics are like “rats and lice - they should be exterminated.” One Joyce scholar was told “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again.”
When scientists created a synthetic microbe three years ago, and inserted a passage from Joyce into its DNA:
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”
— Stephen Joyce sent them a cease and desist letter. You’ve got to be impressed by the zeal of a guy who would send a cease and desist letter to a bacterium. Even a microbe couldn’t quote a single line of Joyce. So you can imagine how difficult it was for human beings, and writers in particular, if you consider writers to be human beings.
Anything playful, anything popular, anything controversial, Stephen Joyce said no. You were allowed worship Joyce, but not question him, take the piss out him, play with him.
You couldn’t engage with Joyce in the way Joyce engaged with Homer. You couldn’t quote Joyce the way Joyce quoted so many others in his work, from plays to poems to political speeches, from novels to adverts to songs.
Stephen’s rejection of pop culture caused a huge amount of invisible cultural damage. No interesting popular artist of the past three decades was allowed a serious engagement with James Joyce’s work.
I’ll give you an example. The intelligent, talented, and very literary pop star Kate Bush, a huge Joyce fan, set part of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy to music in 1989. She offered to pay all the royalties for the song’s lyrics to the Joyce estate. But, for 22 years, the Joyce estate refused her permission to release it. They finally gave her permission two years ago (and took the money), possibly because Ulysses was about to come out of copyright, in 2012, and she could have done it for free twelve months later.
A generation of ordinary readers was lost to Joyce, because they were never led back to the books by pop songs, graphic novels, or films that played with his legacy.
There’s a great deal of irony in this. If you took out the bits that Joyce “stole” from other writers and artists, there would be little left. But, under today’s absurd copyright laws, such a mashup - a modern Ulysses - could not be published. Bear that in mind, the next time the Disney Corporation lobby for yet another extension to copyright, to protect Mickey Mouse from escaping into the public domain.
In fact, hang on a sec, I’m going to have a little rant about this. Stand back…
If estates are to earn revenue on work they didn’t create, for 70 years after the artist’s death, then they cannot also have a right to deny permissions to living artists. Posthumous control of copyright should be either lengthy and weak, or short and strong. Total control, for 70 years, is unjust, and culturally disastrous.
OK, done.
I like Joyce, sometimes love Joyce. His lines are quoted, played with, and transformed in my last novel. I rewrote the ending of The Dead, back when it was still illegal to play with Joyce, because I loved it, but I disagreed with it. (His vision of Ireland gets darker, bleaker, and closer to death, the further he gets from Dublin. My vision of Ireland would be entirely the reverse.) But I’ve never asked the Joyce Estate’s permission to engage with Joyce, and I never will. To “steal” from a great writer is an act of love, not a crime.
Culture is a choir of many voices, whose counterpoints, harmonies and dissonances create a single immense work that transcends space and time. And Joyce (who in life had a beautiful tenor voice), is one of the most important in that choir.
Over the next few years, all over the world, Joyce’s works are due to emerge, blinking, from the prisons of copyright law. Cheering crowds of writers, artists and musicians will welcome them. Joyce will clear his throat, and that great tenor voice will rejoin the choir.
So, yes, it’s been a complicated relationship. Me and my best friend, Kevin McGee, both became professional, full-time writers. I think we were the first two people from Nenagh to achieve that. And I think Joyce influenced that. His example said, you can come from Ireland and be, potentially, the best in the world at this strange business of putting the right words in the right order. Or, in the case of the very wonderful Finnegans Wake; the wrong words very deliberately in the wrong order.
If James Joyce was on Facebook today, would we be friends? Well, I don’t really like Facebook. And I like to maintain a little psychological distance between me and Jimmy J. But I think I would follow him on Twitter.
I doubt he would follow anybody.
(Julian Gough wrote the novels Juno & Juliet, Jude in Ireland, and Jude in London. He also wrote the narrative at the end of Minecraft. The internet being the internet, however, he is probably best known for stealing Will Self’s pig. His novella CRASH! How I Lost A Hundred Billion And Found True Love is published on July 7th, by DailyLit & Amazon, as a Kindle Single. He’s @juliangough on Twitter; if you liked this, go say hello.)
