"THE GUARDIAN", febrero de 2004.

"Overlong, overrated and unmoving: Roddy Doyle's verdict on James Joyce's Ulysses" 

By ANGELIQUE CHRISAFIS

February 10, 2004

It is constantly voted the greatest novel of the last century and perhaps also the most likely to be abandoned after a few pages. Now Ireland's best-known modern writer has put literary Dublin in a tizz by confessing that he too can't be bothered with James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses.

Roddy Doyle, the Booker prize winner and the bard of raucous Dublin demotic, chose a Joyce birthday celebration to slam the epic story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom as overrated, overlong and unmoving.

"Ulysses could have done with a good editor," Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.

"You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it."

"I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time," he added. Dubliners was Joyce's best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.

Worse still, he claimed that Joyce was not even the best Irish writer. That accolade belonged to Jennifer Johnston, the relatively little-known author of The Captains and the Kings.

The timing of Doyle's outburst could hardly have been worse, with the centenary of Bloomsday, the date on which Ulysses is set, looming.

The Irish government - still guilty about the way Joyce was treated in his home town - are helping to pay for six months of celebrations culminating in a "Bloom's breakfast", when 10,000 people will sit down on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, and stuff themselves with fried offal and mutton kidneys washed down with Guinness.

The feast is being sponsored by Dennys sausages, whose bangers Joyce plugged in the novel. Not to be outdone, Guinness is sponsoring another breakfast across town.

"They'll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next," said Doyle, author of The Commitments and The Van, about what he witheringly described as the "Joyce industry".

He went further, taking a swipe at David Norris, the Irish senator and Joycean scholar, who is almost single-handedly responsible for rehabilitating Joyce in once disapproving Irish eyes.

Doyle said the Bloomsday celebrations should be put on hold for five years, to "save us the trouble of having to shoot him or deport him or something."

Mr Norris hit back by calling Doyle "foolish" and hinted he was only a "moderate talent". He said: "A lot of people now try to make a reputation by attacking Joyce ... These are people of medium talent who feel they can attack and challenge a global reputation. A lot of Irish writers of talent have felt threatened by Joyce. I think that's part of it." 

Begrudgery was nothing new to Joyce. He fled the city, where his books were effectively banned until the 1960s, because of the viciousness of its barstool critics. He famously wrote in 1909: "How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness, I long to be out of it."

But what makes Doyle sick is the way Irish writers are always compared to Joyce. "If you're a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce. The whole idea that he owns language as it is spoken in Dublin is a nonsense. He didn't invent the Dublin accent. It's as if you're encroaching on his area or it's a given that he's on your shoulder. It gets on my nerves," the Sunday Tribune in Dublin reported him saying.

Flann O'Brien, the great Irish novelist and satirist, suffered from the same problem. "I declare to god, if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob," he once said.

Dublin, despite Joyce's view on it, has been quick to cash in on his legend. At least 30,000 visitors flock to the James Joyce centre each year. The Dublin tourist board says Joyce's impact on revenue is immeasurable. Rejoyce 2004, the six-month arts festival that will commemorate Bloomsday will draw hundreds of thousands for a Joyce symposium, exhibitions and a light and music "spectacular" along the river Liffey. A new film version of Ulysses has also been made.

James Joyce reading groups in the city are oversubscribed, despite the fact that one group took seven and a half years to get through Finnegans Wake. These groups are particularly popular with retired "ordinary Dubliners" , who say they didn't have time for the almost 1,000-page novel before drawing their pension.

"I make no apologies for the razzamatazz," said Mr Norris, who himself performs a Joyce one-man show. "Why should the [detractors] be so snobbish? What's wrong with people enjoying themselves? Joyce has become a massive icon. We are a rather subversive people, we like undermining statues and showing they have feet of clay."

Helen Monaghan, director of the James Joyce centre, said attacks on Joyce were nothing new. "Ulysses is an easy target, it has a difficult reputation which we are trying to dispel."

What would Joyce would make of the current rumblings against him? "He would love it," said Mr Norris. "He would do his best to stir it up as hard as he could, make sure he was the centre of attention, then he would find some method of extracting money out of it." 

"How to read this book"

February 11, 2004

By JOHN MULLAN

Roddy Doyle has declared that James Joyce's Ulysses, acclaimed as one of the greatest novels ever, is overrated and needs 'a good edit'. Yes, it is a challenge, says John Mullan, but it's worth it

Roddy Doyle has had it up to here with everyone's reverence for James Joyce's Ulysses. Will there be many sighs of sympathy with this would-be debunker of the Great Irish Novel? As schoolchildren are not made to read the thing, perhaps there are no great reserves of resentment. Doyle suggests that it is fellow Irish novelists like himself on whom Ulysses weighs heaviest: "You write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce." And then there is the Joyce industry, a tourist business for a country from which the author exiled himself and in which, for decades, his magnum opus was banned.

The tone of Doyle's outburst - at a Joyce birthday celebration in New York, no less - suggests exasperation, as if he were finally saying what for long he has patriotically repressed. Ulysses is overrated and "could have done with a good editor". Does he have a point? Any Joyce lover will scorn the idea that it could have done with cuts. Of course it is long: inclusiveness is its principle. It takes you to a funeral and a brothel and even (for Joyce loved journalism) a newspaper office. It lets you taste Leopold Bloom's break fast and accompanies him to the lavatory.

Ulysses is huge, but you can sip at it. There is plenty that needs no academic explanation, as particular and exact as each passing sensation. "From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush." This is a book full of smells. And odd sounds. "Mrkgnao!" goes Bloom's cat. "Pwfungg!" sounds an expiring gas jet. Any page has the quiddity - the this-ness - of one day in Dublin in 1904, brought to life in Paris almost two decades later.

But Doyle's irritation is not groundless. The truth is also that Ulysses is not accessible like most novels - its pleasures only come eventually and after you have worked at it. The narrative tricks of interior monologue and stream of consciousness that were weird and baffling in the 1920s are no longer so daunting. Joyce's innovations have passed down to many a Booker prize contender. Yet his allusiveness and erudition, his digressions into learned jokes and literary parodies, are still daunting.

Joyce wrote a book designed to send you off to the library or the mug's guide. "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring immortality," he said. This sounds like a joke against academic commentators, but it is also true. Ulysses offers us the enjoyment of erudition and half-concealed design. Unravelling its "enigmas and puzzles", with the help of notes and guides and reference books, is part of the pleasure of reading it.

Perhaps there are those - knowledgeable about Irish history and the topography of Dublin, versed in the rituals of Catholicism and the details of Dante's Divine Comedy, and carrying the narrative structure of Homer's Odyssey in their heads - who need no help. The rest of us guiltlessly reach for something like Harry Blamires's Bloomsday Book (itself now canonical) to guide us into Ulysses.

Great literature does not have to be difficult (Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby), but there is a kind of difficult book where the obscurity has been willed by the writer. Oddly, several of these belong to that movement of which Joyce was a part: modernism. As well as Joyce there was TS Eliot, whose densely allusive poem The Waste Land prompted such perplexity that the poet felt prompted to provide his own notes. Several of these, presenting slabs of untranslated Latin or medieval Italian, made the poem even more taxing. And these are falling off a log compared to Ezra Pound, whose Cantos is simply unintelligible without a scholarly guidebook.

The usual line is that these writers were literary revolutionaries who had to be hard in order to wrench fiction and poetry away from complacent patterns. Yet, from Spenser's The Faerie Queene onwards, there is also a long tradition of writing that intends to send you off to look things up. It is true that Milton probably expected his readers to have the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis in their heads, but Paradise Lost carries a load of learning that is strange by the standards of its own day as well as ours. Theology and etymology and mythology combine in single lines. Luckily, we have the notes in Alisdair Fowler's Longman's edition of the poem (one of the great scholarly books of modern times) to send us down the side-routes of Milton's imagination.

For Milton, like Joyce, was a writer who imagined that we might enjoy chasing meaning through other books. There are other masterworks that cannot just be picked up and read. One of the most wonderful and darkly witty works in the language is Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, a mock-epic that is baffling to the first-time reader without guidance, yet brilliant once you find out all that it is parodying. It is easy to assume that we cannot cope with learned literature because we are culturally impoverished - not fit to read these things. But Joyce did not imagine, any more than his illustrious predecessors, that he would have readers who knew everything they needed. He just imagined readers who might want to find out.

This sounds perhaps like an intellectual game, and sometimes it is. Doyle implies that it is only this, a clever book, all breathing human passion far above. When he dismisses Ulysses, it is ultimately by a standard that any reader of his own fiction might expect. He cannot believe, he says, that even those who claim to admire Joyce's masterwork "were really moved by it". So lovers of the novel would also have to get him to notice something else: how Ulysses brings to life the melancholy and affection of Leopold and Molly Bloom's almost failed marriage. As moving as it is brilliant.  

"Ireland's Shakespeare"

February 10, 2004

By JOHN SUTHERLAND.  

John Sutherland responds to Roddy Doyle's criticism of James Joyce's Ulysses

"Ulysses could have done with a good editor". A neat put-down, Mr Doyle, but less memorable than that of Mrs Joyce, the author's (very cut-him-down-to-size) wife: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?"

Dirty it was. Most readers of Ulysses (and it's not quite as gruelling or off-putting as Roddy Doyle suggests) rush with mounting excitement through the final, unpunctuated Penelope section (what, one wonders, would a good editor have done?), as Molly Bloom drifts into slumber, the events of her life swirling around her like snowflakes.

Her stream of semi-consciousness rises to that sleepily orgasmic "yes". But what did Joyce 'mean'? What, in his (dirty) genius way, was he getting at? He explained his intentions to a friend, Frank Budgen (who may not have been much enlightened):

"Penelope is the 'clue' to the book. The first sentence contains 2,500 words. There are eight sentences in the episode. It begins and ends with the female word yes. It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes."

Well, yes. I suppose. Thank you, Jim. I see it all perfectly now. Bottom.

Joyce (like Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and the other giants of modernism) will always provoke hostile response, because his writing is so demanding. We resent him for the same reason we resent any hard job of work.

"Writing in English", Joyce once said, "is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives." Reading Joyce's English will sometimes seem even crueller torture.

No writer places a heavier load of readerly responsibility on us as readers. With that supreme, deistic arrogance, which only the supreme artist dares assume, Joyce ordained that those who wished to understand his writing should devote the whole of their lives to mastering Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. With the second of those a lifetime might not, of course, suffice.

If Joyce were a fake, or a dud, a burden would be lifted from us. But, of course, he isn't a fake, or a dud. Did we doubt his genius, the word (and lifelong discipleship) of Ireland's second greatest prose writer, Samuel Beckett, would suffice. Joyce, not to mince words, is Ireland's Shakespeare, its Goethe, its Racine, its Tolstoy.

Were one to say "Ulysses is a masterpiece" it would win the banality of the month competition (runner-up: "Hamlet is a great play"). Why, then, does Doyle's denunciation generate headlines, attention, and public controversy? And what credence should one give to the author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha when he rubbishes the author of Ulysses? On the great Joyce anniversary in 2141 chances are it will be Roddy Doyle Who, Who, Who? Didn't he write some potboiler half a century ago?

There is however, something to be said for the Doyle diatribe. Great authors take up a great deal of space - and there's not much space to go round. It's been estimated that the average, literate, Briton reads some 800 to 1,000 "worthwhile" books in a 70-year lifetime (multiply by five, if you thinking of the Jeffrey Archer and forget "worthwhile"). For a single-honours English undergraduate degree, diligent students will diligently study some 50 works of literature. And feel eminently well read as the ceremonial mortar-board descends on their heads.

What this means is that cultural room is at a premium. A lot of it is taken up by dead literature. Shakespeare, immovably, occupies a big part of the disposable area (and, every now and then, iconoclastic writers have a go at him). Evict Joyce, and there will be more room for living literature to breathe, move and have its chance. That would not, necessarily, be a bad thing.

Doyle is, I think, in one sense right. Joyce has become a cult and too much intellectual and cultural energy is expended on him. Any time a writer spawns an "industry" (as did Shakespeare, Dickens, and, recently, Virginia Woolf) we should be suspicious and reach for our literary hedge clippers. Nor is it the case (as Matthew Arnold put it) that some authors are "for all time". The Victorians revered Tennyson. We don't - at least, not to the same reverential degree.

That's not to say that we are right and our great-grandparents wrong, or vice versa. Simply that times change, and criteria of literary greatness change with them. Who is to say that, in a century or so, Joyce (and possibly even Shakespeare) won't have joined the author of The Idylls of the King on literature's back burner? Unlikely, but not inconceivable.

For the moment, we can enjoy Joyce. Not least because we are living in a golden age of annotated editions. Oxford World's Classics offer (at near giveaway prices ) editions with tactfully explanatory notes of most of the Joycean oeuvre (Finnegans Wake is, and always will be, something else; annotating that tome would be like counting the grains of sand on the beach). Ulysses need no longer frighten us. Try it yourself: the OWC edition (notes by Jeri Johnson) will only put you back £6.39. Nor, to be honest, will it take you a lifetime: a solid weekend will do it. A fun weekend, too.

· John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London

"Genius or fallen idol?"

February 10, 2004

Interviews by Sam Jones

Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University

"I've read Ulysses many times. It's odd that it should have become so revered a text when Joyce himself was such an iconoclast. Joyce once said he had the mind of a grocer, but while it's highly ordinary, highly populist and full of vernacular, it's also very esoteric. Is it too much of a sacred text? Well, Stephen says in the book: 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' And some people in Ireland say Ulysses is a nightmare from which they are trying to awake."

Christopher Cook, artistic director of the Cheltenham Literary Festival

"I'm afraid to say I've only read it one-and-a-half times. I got through it with fewer difficulties than I thought and it wasn't as tough as I'd feared. It's one of those books you buy as an undergraduate and which seems to sit unread on your shelf for years. The problem with Joyce, as with so many great writers, is that it's very hard to separate him from his reputation."

Anne Enright, novelist

"I think some of its sequences are brilliant and moving, but a lot of people would be happy if there was a marker in the book to show where Molly's monologue begins. I wasn't allowed to read it when I was young. I asked my mother why, only to be told it was too 'scatological'. I began reading it on the sly at too young an age but still enjoyed it. The only problem with the book is the Bloomsday tradition. Living in Dublin as a writer when Bloomsday comes around makes you feel like a real mouse in Disneyland."

Justin Cartwright, novelist

"I think it's a work of genius. I've read it once but I look at it again whenever a new commentary comes out. I've read Finnegans Wake and Dubliners, but Ulysses really is a supreme work of English. It shows an amazing understanding and use of language, but there's more to it than that. Writing is about story as well as style and Ulysses has both. It impresses linguistically and it moves emotionally. The fact that it's still decried now shows what an impact it must have had when it came out."

Fintan O'Toole, critic

"It's a great relief to see someone finally have a go at the book. Joyce shouldn't be treated as an icon and for too long the book has been held so in awe that people are afraid to read it. That said, I've read it twice and I find it very moving. The relationship between Leopold and Molly Bloom really is one of the great love stories. It's also very funny.Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the book is its treatment one of the big problems of the 20th century - anti-semitism."

Roy Foster, Carroll professor of Irish history, Oxford University

"I'm a great admirer of Roddy Doyle's, but Ulysses was a true trailblazer. It couldn't have had the impact it did if it hadn't been written the way it was and at the length it was. The whole point of a great work is that it should be uncompromising, but Ulysses still seems engaging as a work of literature and genius. It remains my desert island book."

Craig Raine, poet and tutor in English at New College Oxford

"I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear. I think it is one of the greatest books ever written."