{"id":1103,"date":"2004-06-14T11:50:12","date_gmt":"2004-06-14T15:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1103"},"modified":"2015-05-14T09:48:08","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T13:48:08","slug":"banville-on-bloomsday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1103","title":{"rendered":"Banville on Bloomsday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Great piece in the New York Times <\/a>by John Banville (a favorite of my dad’s) – on James Joyce and Bloomsday.<\/p>\n

Jorge Luis Borges makes an unforgettable appearance as well.<\/p>\n

Banville writes:<\/p>\n

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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Need to track the quote down, because I just summed it up very badly.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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