Joyce on their minds....

James Joyce seems to crop up a lot in despatches recently. Just today, in the email/letters page, he is used to browbeat the CEO of Qantas, who is assumed to be family. He is not as far as I'm aware. However, what I want to draw attention to is the slur of  James Joyce's 'impenetrability' which the mainstream media loves to apply to Joyce, especially around Bloomsday. It's not the fault of  Mr. Langsam (of Flemington - great address on 1 November and Melbourne Cup Day) that he thinks this, because he has simply internalised unquestioningly the unrelenting and insidious diet of mainstream press utterances about Joyce. The subtext is 'you'll never be able to read him. Why bother? Too hard. Too show-off-y. A wank.' Lots of people, including literary academics, have not read Joyce because of such self-serving mystification of him, engaged in, I hate to admit it, by academics, and fuelled by a press that loves to treat Bloomsday as a kind of literary St. Pat's Day, and similarly booze-fuelled.

 It's balderdash. Nonsense. Legions of readers, Bloomsdayers, and you don't have to be an egg-head to be one of those, find Joyce engaging, funny, wise, not to say radical, subversive, revolutionary.  Those of us who do get off on Joyce know it's a slow read, one for the bedside table, and one that's never done because the pleasures of Joyce come slowly. The characters unfold slowly.The experiments get more convoluted, but gradually, while he primes you up for the outrageous and teaches you how to read him as you go. The ideas he playfully tosses around, teases and turns upside down, inside out, in the end begin to mess with your brain, and life is never the same after Ulysses. So has it been for several generations of writers and thinkers. My splendid Aunt El taught me to keep it by the bed and dip in. It's advice I've transmitted to generations of students of Joyce. A book for our times, for the secular age,a touchstone for thinking about what it is to be human.

Two other contexts cropped up for Joyce this week. In re-reading Flann O'Brien for a Conference on 11 November (at University of New South Wales), to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, there was Jim Joyce, large as life and incognito,  pulling Guinness in a pub in Skerries,  reports of his death having been 'greatly exaggerated'. Joyce is in flight from his admirers, claims that he did not write Ulysses (subject to literary identity fraud), and seems to be quite unaware of even the existence of Finnegans Wake. Flann resurrected him  to deal with his own writing demons, I suspect. Escape as he might try, Joyce is everywhere in Flann's differently outrageous corpus, and being written back to, in a spirit of adolescent rebellion. Flann seems to me to need to contradistinguish himself from Joyce, to turn his back resolutely on Europe,  to struggle with a church he loves and hates, and with the loss of the Irish language.  What amused me most is that he even has Joyce return to Ireland to take the road he chose not to take - to become a Jesuit. How life in the c20 and beyond would have been different had that happened. Generations of thinkers and revolutionaries would have had to find another touchstone. He would not have become the rallying point that he became for thinkers about systems and how they are made and how they can be dismantled.

The other context was so very different. A seminar at the Carmelite Centre in Middle Park on Famous Seamus Heaney, given by Philip Harvey and Peter Gebhart. Again, Joyce stalked the room. Philip's comments on 'Station Island' took me back to that longish poem. Seamus is famously generous, and his is less a struggle with a Literary Father than a loving tribute to Joyce as inspiring the forging of a vocation, that of writer. Curiously, the locale for this renewal of a sense of mission is St. Patrick's Purgatory, Lough Derg, the centuries-old penitential pilgrimage site in Co. Donegal, north-west Ireland. What Heaney remembers is not the overblown ending of Portrait, but a subtler moment from Ch.5:

                           there is a moment in Stephen's diary
                           for April the thirteenth, a revelation

                           set among my stars - that one entry
                           has been a sort of password in my ears,
                           the collect of a new epiphany,

                          the feast of the Holy Tundish.' 'Who cares,'
                          he jeered, 'any more? The English language
                          belongs to us....

                        ...
                        That subject people stuff is cod's game,
                        infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.

                        ....it's time to swim
                        out on your own and fill the element
                        with signatures on your own frequency,
                        echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements

                        elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'

Joyce's hydrophobic Stephen is here imaginatively changed, changed utterly. But it's not a terrible beauty. It's one that shows Heaney's debt to Joyce's imagining the world in all its particularity, earthedness and instability, its retreat from Certainty.  Someone who doesn't find Joyce impenetrable, but rather empowering.