I MAY in the past have made claims to be a kind of Joyce populariser, in that I have celebrated his humanity rather than his ingenuity in all the available media, but I have never considered myself to be a Joyce scholar. Joyce scholarship has become so much an intramural discipline since the days when I began to read him that there is very little a mere scribbling outsider can contribute to it. I can only take a kind of gloomy pride in one qualification only – that of being so old that I have known Joyce’s work longer than most reputable scholars. Indeed, I lived my adolescence contemporaneously with the composition of a book called Work in Progress and achieved legal maturity before its publication as Finnegans Wake. My reading of the earlier work is hard to separate from a period of growing up not dissimilar from that recorded in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I was nurtured in a city closer to Dublin than to London – Manchester – and in a culture more Irish than English. My family was Catholic, had begun as indigenously Catholic, and, in a Protestant land, had sustained its faith by Irish marriages under the aegis of an Irish priesthood. Until the Emancipation Act of 1829, English and Irish Catholics had been debarred from higher education, and intelligence and initiative were unable to find an outlet in any of the professions save one. This was the field of popular entertainment, in which my family worked. The musical background of Joyce was of a kind familiar to a Manchester Catholic. Opera meant the touring Carl Rosa company rather than Covent Garden. The songs sung around the family piano were Moore’s Irish Melodies and arias from The Bohemian Girl and Martha. Finnegans Wake is, among other things, a compendium of the songs that Joyce’s family sang or heard at the music hall.

Joyce did not always remember the family songs with the right exactness. Buck Mulligan sings: ‘Won’t we have a merry time / Drinking whiskey, beer and wine / On Coronation Day.’ This is wrong. My stepmother put it right. It should be ‘We’ll be merry / Drinking whiskey, wine and sherry / All be merry / On Coronation Day.’ When a copy of Ulysses eventually got into the family house, my musical father was puzzled at the transcription of the song about little Harry Hughes, supposedly sung by the tenor Stephen Dedalus. He pointed out that it was wrongly placed in the bass stave and that the lowest note was A, impossible to a tenor. I have had ever since to justify these solecisms by suggesting that Stephen temporarily takes over Bloom’s baritone voice, that the song is sung by Stoom or Blephen, or conceivably perhaps both.

Joyce made his primary appeal to me as a failed professional musician who had taken to literature as a pis-aller. This remains my own situation. The structure of Ulysses still seems to me to be closer to that of a symphony than to a work of literature, just as the typical Joyce declarative sentence seems to be composed on a melodic principle. The impact that Joyce made on me as a young man was partially musical. The absence of a strong visual element in me and him could not be attributed to weak sight. After all, the near-blindness of Aldous Huxley didn’t militate against an encyclopaedic knowledge of pictorial art. It seems that one is born with a partiality to one sense rather than another. Joyce as an auditory man was not permitted to be a visualiser as well. Moreover, it is somehow typical of the kind of Northern Catholic education I shared with Joyce that training in the visual arts should be neglected. The eye is an inlet of sin. The only pictures in A Portrait of the Artist are pornographic ones, stuffed up the bedroom chimney. There is fine comic irony in Joyce’s title. The portrait is, so to speak, an audiograph. The pictorial implication suggests a totally false trail.

I first read A Portrait of the Artist when, at the age of fourteen, I was beginning to lose my faith. The book had been suggested to me by my Liverpool Irish history master, who had lost his own faith some years before but was too prudent to assist me with the loss of mine. Whether it was his intention or not, Father Arnell’s sermon on hell drove me back shivering to the arms of the Church, beating my breast. I maintain that no non-Catholic can meet that novel with the right response. Or perhaps there is a deeper irony in Joyce’s method than scholars have been willing to descry. Stephen Dedalus sets out at great and eloquent length the principles on which proper art should be conceived. The artist must avoid equally the temptations of the didactic and the pornographic. And yet that massive section of A Portrait of the Artist which deals with eternal damnation is thoroughly didactic in both the Joycean and traditional senses – it arouses loathing and it teaches a heavy lesson. One has to be innately agnostic to take it as art. I have read no other book which so aroused fear that I had to burn my copy.

The head of one of Oxford’s colleges, noticing the first volume of my memoirs, which inevitably paints a Catholic upbringing, said that it was inferior to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. There is a confusion of genres here. The content has been remembered but the form forgotten. And yet that content is so memorable that the non-scholarly reader tends to ignore those elements that make A Portrait a work of art and not merely a selection of juvenile reminiscences. What makes this book a novel is what makes a poem a poem – or should I specify a symbolist poem? There is a cunning manipulation of images of earth and air, and ascent up from the mud – and, for that matter, the subterranean fire – to a creative empyrean, the slow sprouting of wings. Old father, old artificer – the improbable name Dedalus is justified, and a conflation which can make sense only to a Catholic is adumbrated. For if Dedalus is the father, the son must be Icarus, whose waxen wings melt, who falls as Lucifer fell. In other words, non serviam.

As I have said, I am not a Joyce scholar, but a working writer aware of market forces: in other words, I write for a living in a way that Joyce never did. I call myself a novelist who is forced to write other things on the side: the situation is more Fitzgeraldian than Joycean. I’ve produced, to date, thirty novels, which is considered too many, but no writer can write too much if his living depends on it. I was led to the writing of fiction by an admiration for Joyce and a sense of community of temperament, sensibility, taste, faith, and the need for exile. I suppose the only two writers who have meant much to me, Shakespeare apart, have been Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Trying to write verse in my youth, I followed Hopkins; trying to write prose, I followed Joyce. It was following Joyce that warred against turning myself into a novelist. Ulysses, as one of the five greatest novels of the century, ought strictly to be a novelist’s model, but, as we all recognise nowadays, it represents the end of an artistic impulse, a fulfilment rather than a new beginning.

Of course, in my youth Ulysses possessed an extraneous glamour in that it was a book one read about rather than read. It was banned everywhere, it seemed, except in France and Nazi Germany. My history master imported from Berlin the two-volume paperback Odyssey Press edition of the book into Manchester. This he gave to me. It was, I think, as good an edition as one could find in those days. I would have it still if the Luftwaffe hadn’t bombed Manchester in 1940 and 1941. Previously we had known Ulysses in baffling extracts meant to show, and castigate, the unacceptable avant-gardism – chiefly in books like Collins’s The Doctor Looks at Literature. Since three instalments of Work in Progress were available, and delightfully baffling, my generation expected Ulysses to be of the same substance. It was hard to reconcile the imputation of obscenity with unintelligibility, but we knew that the puritanical could always find the scabrous if they looked carefully enough. To read Ulysses was naturally thrilling, since it was an illegal act, but it was also disappointing. It was not sufficiently like Anna Livia Plurabelle. On the other hand, it was not sufficiently like an orthodox novel. It had added something to the European fictional tradition, but it had also taken something away.

The opening chapter works well, but only as a kind of etiolated version of the Edwardian novel. The brazen bells of religion keep chiming, and we do not know why until we realise that the presiding discipline is religion. We wonder why the progress of a narrative should be oiled or clogged by an exterior symbol. More worrying is the fact that we can see so little. Compare it with a passage from a genuine Edwardian novel:

And so on. We would accept nowadays that that is not the way to write narrative. We do not welcome the omniscient observer, we deplore the faisandé phrasing, but we worry that the Joycean technique cannot accommodate such a description of red mullet. The passage, by the way, comes from Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival, a novel praised by Henry James. Admittedly in his dotage. It must be said that that tradition still holds: the majority of novels published these days are closer to Carnival than to Ulysses. For that matter, such a continuation of techniques which, somewhat debased in Compton Mackenzie, are brilliantly deployed by both James and Conrad, is integral to the writing of fiction. The tyro will find in Ulysses various useful technical devices – the interior monologue, the extreme descriptive compression, above all the avid ear for realistic dialogue (compare, or rather contrast, Thomas Hardy) – but he will not learn how to write a novel.

Joyce’s aim was to eliminate from fiction those elements which fiction can hardly do without. He called the sensational the journalistic, he deplored the element of coincidence which drives the Dickensian plot. But he displayed both these elements in the ‘Nighttown’ episode of Ulysses, where they are justified by hallucination and magic. The fact is that a novel can be defined as a fictional composition in which a particular double swathe of time is engaged – time in which something sensational happens. Without a major event of a kind rarely encountered in ordinary life, without a measure of coincidence, a novel is hardly possible. Ulysses contradicts totally these conditions; therefore it is not a novel. Or, if it is a novel, it is a novel that maintains its movement by means extraneous to the novel. We know what these means are – the means of symbolism, which is more proper to poetry than to prose fiction.

Examine Ulysses in terms of the traditional novel, and you will find that it fulfils some of the desiderata once the Odyssey gets started. Bloom unwittingly gives a tip for the winner of the Ascot Gold Cup, receives a letter from Martha Clifford, contemplates masturbating over it in the bath, sees Stephen three times, arranges to see Mrs Purefoy in the lying-in hospital. These minor incidents lead to a pogrom, an oblique and onanistic revenge on the Citizen who arranges it, a meeting with Stephen of a more intimate nature than previously, and the possibility of a further meeting. In other words, one event breeds another, as in the traditional fictional programme, but the major outcome of the narrative will take place at some other time. We are justified in expecting the real story to begin on June 17, 1904. There is a wilful evasion of all the properties we expect from a traditional narrative, and when Joyce is faced with a situation all too traditional his evasion becomes manic. I refer to the meeting between Stephen and Bloom in Horne’s hospital, when the entire action is obscured by the most thoroughgoing symbolism we have so far met.

If we want a story, we shall find it somewhere else: in Homer. Joyce’s own narrative alludes to him, however, only in the most facetious manner. Certain stage props of the Odyssey appear, but they merely decorate the action. Bloom’s ‘knockmedown’ cigar, one of the ‘prime stinkers’ of Barney Kiernan’s pub, does not put out the eye of the Cyclops. The moly which protects Bloom in the house of Circe is probably three things implausibly combined: the potato in his pocket against rheumatism, the Molly always in his mind, the pale flower of his ejaculation on Sandymount shore. If the Oxen of the Sun are blasphemed against, it is in the most jocular way imaginable, and there is no blasting of the blasphemers. ‘Loud on left Thor thundered, in anger awful the hammerhurler’ – it’s a minor response from the God of fertility. Nobody is struck by lightning.

Why is the Homeric matrix there at all? The usual response is: to relate quotidian urban banality to myth, thus elevating the one while abasing the other; to turn Bloom into a classical hero. The truth is that the template of the Odyssey, and the symbolism which is engendered, is there for two reasons. If much of the movement is relegated to interior monologue, that monologue must be given a shape to prevent it from deliquescing into mere inconsequent vapour. Not only the Homeric parallel, but the other symbols that spring out of it, control the direction of the flow. But the main purpose served by the parallel is the shunting of action, which includes emotional impulses, points of self-discovery, even resolutions of the narrative, to an invisible siding. If we have to assume that Bloom has conquered the suitors, it is only because we know that Odysseus has done it on his behalf.

I’m aware, naturally, that Joyce’s triumph is to make a compelling narration out of drab ordinariness, and that this had never been done before (except possibly in Gissing’s novel, The New Grub Street). But, from the angle of the genuine working novelist, which Joyce was not, it’s clear that most of the problems of the novel have been grossly evaded. Ulysses was, from one angle, all too easy to write. To confine the action of the book to a single day in a single town meant a limitation of the action which would have shocked Fielding or Dickens.

A novel is not a novel unless it admits the possibility of the change consequent on some kind of emotional impact. There is, in the classical novel, a kind of watershed: things flow one way and, after a variety of climaxes, they flow another. The major difficulty of the novelist is to present the moment of change without making it too blatant: the reader sees change, but it not quite sure where it began. This is in conformity with human life as we know it. The difficulties which Joyce set himself are purely of a superficial technical order, some of them embarrassingly ludic.

I would like to say something about my own early career as a sub-Joycean novelist. You may take me as an example of a writer made so desperate by Joyce’s achievement in Ulysses that I delayed entering the field. Clearly, Ulysses raised and solved new fictional problems which had no general application: what Joyce discovered he discovered for himself only. To write novels after Ulysses meant ignoring everything in that work except a new attention to dialogue and récit. If Joyce taught nothing else he certainly taught a rigorous attention to language – an aspect of the traditional British novel which is generally despised. Hugh Walpole told Henry James that it was character that counted; one could forgive slipshod prose and improbable dialogue as well as careless construction if – as in Dostoevsky – the personages strode off the page and lived. James wrote a long letter to Walpole lamenting this attitude. Joyce never said anything about style; he merely disclosed to Frank Budgen that he had spent a day worrying over the order of words in a sentence. After Joyce, a novelist had to learn a new fastidiousness in handling his verbal material.

Prepared to learn, I embarked on my first novel in my late thirties. The title was A Vision of Battlements – a reference to one of the symptoms of migraine as well as the locale, which was Gibraltar. The fact that I had spent three years as a soldier in Gibraltar, while Joyce had never visited the Rock, granted me the courage of a certain superiority. For Gibraltar is necessary to Joyce’s symbolic scheme in Ulysses, being a place of caves proper for the nymph Calypso. Joyce had learned all he could about it from books, and his particular knowledge of Gibraltarian families like the Opissos impressed other Gibraltarians when I read parts of his novel aloud to them. Indeed, one of the extant Opissos complained of Molly’s attitude to his grandmother. But Joyce committed a desperate error in his portrayal of Molly Bloom as a daughter of the Rock garrison. We cannot believe in a Major Brian Tweedy who married a Spaniard and begot a girl whose speech is low Irish. Molly’s first language has to be Andalusian Spanish, but her approach to Spanish in the book is that of someone who has tackled it through Hugo’s Spanish primer. As a young lady on the Rock she would have either spoken a near-patrician English – if her father was really a major, which I doubt (a sergeant-major seems more likely) – or the Gibraltarian patois, unidiomatic and full of Iberian vowels. Joyce’s realism falls down badly here. Despising him, I felt better able to tell the truth about life in wartime Gibraltar.

If Joyce could take his classical template from Homer, I could take mine from Virgil. I followed the Aeneid closely. I called my hero Richard Ennis (‘Ennis’ being fairly close to Aeneas). As a new Aeneas, he is committed to the building of a Utopian postwar community blazoned by the British Army’s Bureau of Current Affairs. This is as fanciful as anything in Joyce. He is a sergeant in the Army Vocational Corps, concerned with teaching conscript soldiers civilian trades. The AVC flash on his uniform enables him, in the opening lines of the novel, to tell the ignorant that it means Arma Virumque Cano. The story follows Virgil in making Ennis conduct an affair with a Gibraltarian widow, sees her marry a rich Gibraltarian named Barasi (an anagram of Virgil’s Iarbas) and then fall in love with a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service named Lavinia (another Virgilian name). He meets the Sybil in the form of an Army schoolmistress who tells fortunes with the Tarot pack. He visits hell in the shape of a corrupt and broken-down La Línea over the border. All this was considerable fun, but it did not solve the main narrative problem. The characters had to function under non-Virgilian steam. When the novel was eventually published, no reader noticed the framework taken from the Aeneid.

The second novel I attempted took its mythic structure from Wagner’s Ring. In calling the book The Worm and the Ring I was spelling out its provenance. The theme was the lack of ambitions in a Midlands grammar school, with the headmaster named Woolton for Wotan, the chemistry master Lodge for Loge, Freia the goddess of beauty as Miss Fry, a Latin teacher. The gods and heroes were the teaching staff, the dwarfs the pupils. All this was established on the Joycean example, but the temptation to follow Joyce in other ways was irresistible. The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is both deplorable and admirable. Every author wants to have written it. When I sent my Siegfried, the German master, to Paris to bed the hockey mistress, I presented their liaison as a history of French prose in reverse. After an evening in the bistro in the style of the Oath of Strasbourg, they couple in a hotel de passe in Silver Latin. All this went too far. Blame Joyce.

You see the situation in which a post-Joycean novelist finds himself. He cannot write Ulysses, and he is forced to pretend that Ulysses does not exist. He feels ashamed at having to revert to a more orthodox tradition. He has to do this anyway in order to earn a living. That Joyce produced a work sui generis, touching the traditional novel only in the superb rendering of ordinary life, is confirmed by the fact that he ceased to be a novelist after its publication. Finnegans Wake is not usually considered to be a novel, or, if it is, only in a Pickwickian sense. But it joins Ulysses in possessing recognisable characters. The hero in particular is one of the most massive in all fiction despite the fact that he is invisible and so much of his inner life is hidden. The eccentricity of the technique of the book which contains him is justified as a series of obstacles which he is powerful or cunning enough to overcome. A hero who can survive the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is genuinely heroic.

If in Ulysses Joyce clothed Bloom in fantastic garments which the reader tries to strip off, in Finnegans Wake he hides Earwicker from us by a device which is so simple as to be shameful. It is a trickery of paranomasia which anyone can learn. It is termed oneiric, a language of dreams, but it is better thought of as contrapuntal. We are back to music. The ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses has, by the unmusical, been taken as a triumphant conflation of the sister arts. In fact, and I believe this to have been Joyce’s intention, it demonstrates that the two arts have little to say to each other. Finnegans Wake at least attempts to fulfil that dream of all novelists who envy the capacity of music to say more than one thing at the same time. The initials HCE warn us that something musical is to be attempted. H is the German for B natural, by the way, and Tristan and Isolde ends in the key of H major. BC and AD are played as a theme that transcends time, and the FACE of the cad in the park has a GBD pipe stuck in it.

Joyce’s method can best be clarified in the form of a series of mad examination questions. For example: ‘If one is drunk the whole year round, what would be the names of the months?’ Answer: ‘Ginyouvery, Pubyoumerry, Parch, Grapeswill, Tray, Sawdust, Siptumbler, Actsober, Novitner, Decentbeer.’ Again: ‘If Charles Dickens is a cook as well as a novelist what works may he be said to have written?’ Answer: ‘Charred Limes, Grate Expectorations, the Cold, Curried Sausagy Shop, Our Muttonial Fried, Halibut Twist, Pick Weak Peppers, and Snackelius Knucklebone’. If Shakespeare were a cat? He wrote The Tompist. If he were a jobbing printer? He wrote Pamphlet, Prints of Penmark. If he were an American? He would have written All’s Swell that End? Swell. There’s no limit to punning, if, like Joyce, we draw on foreign languages. If Joyce does that sort of thing better than I do, it’s because he has had more practice.

The astonishing thing however about the dream that is Finnegans Wake is the solidity of the basic cast of actors. Mr Porter, if that is his offstage name, has to play Earwicker and also Finnegan, as well as a host of guilty personages, some of whom stutter. But he is easy to recognise under the disguises. In respect of this solidity, Joyce shows himself to be more traditional a novelist than D.H. Lawrence. To Lawrence human identity is not important. One has to excavate deeply beneath it to discover a divine or animal substance, actually both, recognisably living through its commitment to life. The surface of clothes, regularly discarded, or cigarettes, discussion of Pelléas et Mélisande, holds the characters to life as we know it, but surface is not, as it is in Joyce, an aspect of identity. Curiously, we have a better idea of the outward appearance of Earwicker than of Bloom. We see Kevin and Jerry and Izzy and Ann. More than that, we’re aware of the nature of the daily life that is transformed into universal dream.

Joyce was no Freudian, and the dream was not presented as a mass of data for the clarification of a neurosis. But from this data one can reconstruct the plot of an orthodox novel. This plot is driven by guilt – the guilt of sexual incapacity in the marital sphere, compensated by spurts of unlawful desire in the filial. ‘Incest’ is too terrible a word even for a dream to utter, and the three inner notes of the theme – C E S (or E flat) are reordered to make ‘insect’. Although Earwicker, or Porter is of Scandinavian Protestant origin, this is a very Irish Catholic story. Much of the poignancy of the narrative, if we may call it that, lies in the dreamer’s attempt to sublimate his fleshly cravings into the impulses of universal history. Out of an unlawful erection a lawful one may be made. Balbus is building a wall, and we know why he balbutiates. Lust is cleansed into the founding of a city.

I know that these aspects of Finnegans Wake do not appeal to scholars in the way that the pains of more particular exegesis do. Much critical labour has been expended on dragging the book away from the fictional zone I’m sure it inhabits. If it is not fiction, what is it? And if it is fiction, it exhibits the same evasions which disfigure, or glorify, Ulysses or The Blue Book of Eccles. For there is no resolution of the narrative except through myth. It’s interesting to note that genuine though frustrated admirers of Joyce regard the two great books as quarries from which can be excavated the materials of true fiction. We’ve seen at least two dramatisations of Ulysses. A film was made of Finnegans Wake. Some twenty years ago I made a television adaptation called A Night at the Bristol Tavern. This began in full evening light, with the pub at its Saturday busiest with the twelve Sullivani on their settle, the four evangelists round their table, gigantic Earwicker behind the bar, the children running in and out, Earwicker’s fond but tortured eyes on his daughter, the Slav-featured Ann dragging the children off to bed, Sackerson, or whatever his name is, washing the glasses. With the closing of the pub and Earwicker’s retirement to bed, the calendar on the wall showing February 1132, the branches of the Eggdrizzle tree tapping at the window, the true story began but the television producers lost interest. Joyce’s dream story is too spatial to be good narrative.

It would seem that one part of me is looking for the wrong things in Joyce. I blame my career as a novelist, a career which Joyce never had. César Franck wrote one symphony, and this does not make him a symphonist. In the works of Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford we find a strenuous engagement with a genre, the raising of fresh problems with each new novel, evidence of commitment to a form and not merely a single vagrant example of it. And yet Joyce’s single novel – if we ignore the mixed fictional-autobiographical-historical-mythical formula which is Finnegans Wake – towers above the work of all his contemporaries and successors. Was it ever possible to regard it as the forerunner of a whole new mode of art? Apparently not, for Joyce has no followers. In that sense, he is nobody’s master. Joyce Cary, a fellow Irishman, used his technique of interior monologue in the Gulley Jimson novels, but he merely sounds like a feeble imitator. Samuel Beckett had to free himself from Joyce’s influence by turning to another language and cultivating the vacuum instead of the plethora. Flann O’Brien was stifled by Ulysses and had to end up by diminishing Joyce into a Dalkey bar curate who wrote pamphlets for the Catholic Truth Society. Speaking for myself because I happen to be here, and not because I consider myself worthy of that august company, when I start a new novel in order to earn my bread the horrible example of Ulysses glooms from the shelf.

Ulysses belongs to an experimental period in all the arts, and we have to wonder why experiment, the urge to make it new, was necessary at all. Was it not better done as others used, to follow the plain omniscient time-bound narrative method of Fielding, Smollett, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray? This is the way things have turned out in the post-Joyce epoch. The novelists who make money have never doubted that the plain story-telling technique good enough for the Victorians is good enough for them – though they have profited from Joyce’s candour in the bedroom, if not in the privy.

The fact seems to be that experimentation in the novel, with rare exceptions, is directed towards destroying the form. The great general public, in its undoubted wisdom, wants the straight arrow of uncomplicated narrative without the fuss of psychological penetration, the bending of time, the mythic component. Fiction is, like suntan oil and the scuba suit, an appurtenance of a holiday. Some years ago I remember watching on television a discussion between the late J.B. Priestley and the late Lord Boothby. Boothby, a greatly admired statesman, said: ‘There are only three novelists worth bothering about: Jack here, Monty Mackenzie and Willy Maugham. All the rest are bloody awful.’ This is pretty much the attitude of the British politician, to say nothing of the Royal Family. The general public accepts that the novel is for a pleasant read, not for a deeper engagement with life. It may be wrong, but we ought perhaps to feel uneasy that works like Ulysses are the province of scholars and that a ring of fire – that sometimes, mercifully, is extinguished – is made to surround them.

If we had a regular international conference to examine aspects of the James Bond novels, there’s no doubt that great subtleties of symbolism could be made to emerge. To be less facetious – but am I really being facetious? – closer scholarly attention to Ford Madox Ford, without doubt the greatest British novelist of the century, would be more profitable in terms of the genre itself. But the fascination of James Joyce lies in the manner in which he exceeds the bounds set by his chosen form. He seems closer to Dante or Rabelais or Blake, even Shakespeare, than to Ford or Conrad.

I noted at the beginning that my own attraction to Joyce had more to do with temperament, auditory endowment, and above all race and religion than with the fictional revolution that he represents. Race, I think, is important in a way that does not apply to the half-German Ford or the wholly Polish Conrad. The alleged madness of the Irish is not just a matter of affectionate jokes. In his Back to Methuselah Shaw prophesies a time when the Irish and Jewish races will be wiped out in an ultimate holocaust and the rest of the world will commit suicide through boredom. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are mad works in the sense that the Irish are mad. The madness fascinates. It is a spasmodic madness, not a steady state. Only Sir Hamilton Harty, saved by his residence in England, was able to compose an Irish symphony. Irish operas are pure music-hall. Except for George Moore, who was really a Frenchman, the Irish novel does not really exist. Joyce was an admirable writer of short stories who planned Ulysses as a brief narrative about the day of a certain Mr Hunter. In the story ‘Grace’, the ascent from inferno to paradiso is parodied; Homer was to receive a much swifter comic treatment in the story which eventually swelled considerably. Ulysses remains a short story of great length. But length is less an inherent attribute than an applied one. If the later chapters of Ulysses had been as brief as the earlier ones, the total work should be easily pocketable. The comic expansion is mad, and it is Irish madness.

When I say more boldly what I’ve already implied, that Joyce is a Catholic writer, I mean it less in the narrow sectarian sense (if the Catholic church can be diminished to a sect) than in the wider sense of a civilisation, a massive culture from which the Reformation wantonly separated itself. The novel is usually considered to be a Protestant form, despite its beginning and its fulfilment in Cervantes. Certainly, the English novel, from Richardson to E.M. Forster and beyond, celebrates the Protestant virtues of individuality, pragmatism and middle-class morality. Joyce can, and does, parody this tradition, but he is far closer to the Catholic Middle Ages than to the revolutionary epoch of Protestant mercantilism. He attempted to drown his Irishry in Europe, producing finally an international language that can be called Eurish, but the mere fact of his being an Irish Catholic, impervious however to the siren songs of Irish nationalism, automatically made him a European. He attempted a very early revolt against the Southern Europe that produced Dante by acclaiming Ibsen as his master and by learning Ibsen’s own Dano-Norwegian. In Finnegans Wake the Master Builder or Bygmester relates directly to Ibsen, but Southern Europe gave him both Bruno and Vico – heretics admittedly – and the philosophies of both grant him a structure.

When Joyce was told that too much of his last great work was trivial, he demurred, saying that some of it was quadrivial too. The education that the three children of Earwicker receive is safely medieval, though it ends with a kind of Freudian revelation. The deeper medievalism of Joyce lies in devices like arithmology, to say nothing of sacramentalism, which makes us seem to be eating the bread of narrative while in fact ingesting the flesh and blood of a deeper reality. But I would merely assert that this lapsed Catholic, a heretic inimical even to baptism, had genuinely exchanged one priesthood for another and had turned his back on a logical absurdity not in order to embrace an illogical one. If you don’t become a Protestant you have to remain a Catholic.

W.H. Auden said of the novelist that his task was ‘to be dirty with the dirty’ and, finally, ‘to suffer dully the wrongs of man’. It was the dullness and not the dirt that Joyce objected to. ‘Novel’, unfortunately, has only two rhymes: ‘grovel’ and ‘hovel’. Joyce raised the form above these associations to its destruction and to its glory – and we, his admirers, followers, have, like the saintly hero of the blessed Thomas Eliot, to mourn and rejoice at the same time.

 

Previously unpublished. A version of this piece was given as a speech at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, in 1990.