Joyce and a holiday

It was 1965. I was working in a mine in Canada. A young Quebecois student approached me and asked: "What do you think about James Joyce then?" I looked at him. "Who is James Joyce?" This was the first time I heard of him. This experience added to my hatred of the Churches and other forces in Ireland who had banned his writing and tried to keep all knowledge of him from us. I determined to make up for lost time.

A few months later I was working on a ship, and we docked in New Orleans. I went to the Library and asked for a book of Joyce. The only one they had was Finnegan's Wake. I thought I had concussion. Later I was to realize that Joyce would have been very interested and probably pleased to know that somebody on first reading this book of his would think they had concussion. I was responding in a reasonable fashion.

But to today and the holiday. My family are not working and will be giving each other presents. They are all still asleep. At times like these I always read a bit of Joyce. I would like to share a few snippets. I am sorry if this appears to be me indulging myself. Reading some Joyce takes me home again, takes me to Dublin, helps me stand against all that is repressive and ugly and lifeless, and reminds me how complicated and contradictory life is.

Wee Joyce some observations from other writers and:

Some fellow Irish poets; "the poet of his race."

Edna O'Brien about Joyces' stories: "In all the stories the women, despite being victims, attain a moral superiority."

O'Brien again: "Joyce always loved Homer's hero Odysseus, not for his warring prowess but for his cunning. ..... It was the human traits in Odysseus that he admired: a man who did not court bloodshed and who saw war as an outlet for the marketeers."

T.S. Eliot was threatened by the audacity of Joyce's work and wished for his own sake he had never read it. "How could anybody surpass that achievement."

It took twenty thousand hours of labor to write Ulysses. Not to mention all the illnesses.

O'Brien again. "If Ulysses was about about daytime, Finnegans Wake was a book of the night.....in it he was...... "laying siege to literature......" in it the old language would be put to sleep......What most of us do in sleep Joyce was attempting to do in his waking hours. It would isolate him completely -- 'his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff." What a genius!

Finnegans Wake is Ireland. As O'Brien writes: "If Ireland thought she had a defector in James Joyce, she was greatly mistaken. Her music, poetry and broken heaventalk" are all there."

The English critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote that Joyce was determined to write as "a lunatic for lunatics."

O'Brien writes: "What he was determined to do was to break the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness, to do in waking life what others do in sleep. Madness he knew to be the secret of genius. ...... He preferred the word exaltation which can merge into madness. All great men have that vein in them. The reasonable man, he insisted, achieves nothing."

Who have stood up better in the present day, the right wing repressive Church leaders who now stand exposed for all their centuries of repression and abuse, or the genius Joyce. Now recognized as the greatest writer of the last century.

Sean.