Great piece in the New York Times by John Banville (a favorite of my dad’s) – on James Joyce and Bloomsday.
Jorge Luis Borges makes an unforgettable appearance as well.
Banville writes:
One must beware setting up Joyce as a founding father of the Irish tourist industry. Our minister for the arts, tourism and sport bids us ”rejoyce” this June 16, the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, but in Dublin, as elsewhere, ”Ulysses” remains one of the most talked about and least read works of world literature. There is nothing wrong with a party — a breakfast of bacon, sausage, black and white pudding and that quintessential Irish dish, hash browns, will be served to a crowd of 10,000 rejoycers on O’Connell Street — but Roddy Doyle’s public outburst against ”Ulysses” earlier this year was probably less a literary judgment than an instance of the exasperation many of us feel at the pervasiveness and bathos of the Joyce myth.
There’s a quote I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that said that Shakespeare has almost turned the entire English language into something that is “radioactive”. He so dominates and so controls the entire era from which he sprung – and his use of language was so groundbreaking – that it is impossible for anything else to grow in that atmosphere. There may have been other good writers in Shakespeare’s time, but Shakespeare is the Chernobyl of the literary landscape. If you argue with this point, then you are in denial. You may dislike Shakespeare, but if you think that writers can free themselves from his shadow while working in that tradition, you’re not dealing with reality.
Need to track the quote down, because I just summed it up very badly.
Seamus Heaney has said that Joyce has done the same thing for Irish literature. Every Irish writer has to contend with the ghost of that giant … like it or not. You may hate it, you may despise the legacy, and wish that he wasn’t so omnipresent … but too bad. He’s there, and you have to deal with it.
Great piece by Banville. He discusses his own history with the book – when it was impossible to even get in Ireland. The rest of the world read it (or DIDN’T read it) long before the Irish people did.
Hi Sheila,
It sounds like that quotation might have come from Harold Bloom, or at any rate someone who was influenced by Bloom’s ideas about the anxiety of influence.
IMHO, Irish writers, with the massive exception of Samuel Beckett, haven’t come to terms with Joyce at all. His true heirs have come from elsewhere (Burgess, Pynchon, Borges, Steve Katz, Sukenik, to some extent Nabokov).
I certainly agree that anyone who writes fiction who doesn’t consciously feel Joyce’s shadow is in denial. Personally, I’m scared to death of him anytime that I try to write fiction.
Bryan – Nope – it’s not Bloom. I just remembered where I read it – but I don’t have the book on me. Michael Schmidt’s sweeping survey “Lives of the Poets”. Do you know it?
I’m scared of Joyce too, when I write.
I need to do some sort of ritual to stop him from looking over my shoulder. :)
However: I am a firm believer in tradition, too – and that acknowledging that you are standing “on the shoulders of giants” – as opposed to inventing something new – can be invigorating and exciting.
Amateur writers (or I guess I should say – mediocre writers, bad writers) think they are doing something new. Maybe because they haven’t read enough, or something. So they are filled with excitement that what they are doing has never been done before.
Oh, I have to differ with that last bit. I doubt that anything great can be accomplished in the arts except by someone who “think[s] [he’s] doing something new,” who believes “that what [he’s] doing has never been done before.”
I think that any writer worth his salt knows that he writes within a long tradition.
Maybe we don’t disagree. I’m sure Shakespeare felt both that he was working within a long tradition and that he was creating something new. They aren’t incompatible, are they?
Well, yes. But even if you are reacting AGAINST a tradition you find restricting (which is the case with Joyce) – you are still within that tradition.
There is nothing new under the sun – and the writers who THINK that what they are doing is creating something new and wild – are probably not very well read. That’s all I’m saying.
It’s like the chick-lit crazy taking over the damn literary landscape right now. Everyone thinks this is something new, regardless of the terrible quality of those books. Meanwhile – Jane Austen covered the same ground and MUCH BETTER a century and a half ago. You’re better off just reading Jane Austen, in my opinion.
But then again, I’m a snob.
Oops – meant to write chick-lit CRAZE, not chick-lit CRAZY, although there is something quite a propos about that slip
And I think that your point is correct. Shakespeare borrowed HEAVILY. He made up none of his plots – they were all well-known stories, which had already been told. He owes a huge debt to Chaucer, Dante, blah blah blah. It was what he did with the language that was unprecedented and so extraordinary.
Whew, relief. Didn’t want a dustup with Red.
Dustup?? Nah. Discussion is good. Dustups are no good.