Tinteán

A Feature by Steve Carey

White, straight, male… and dead. Yesterday’s literary roosters are today’s feather dusters, and it’s led me to wonder whether time is up for authors such as James Joyce.

Has the notion of The Classics, The Great Books, The Western Canon, ever seemed quite so excruciatingly old-fashioned, so colonial, so white, so dead, so… cringe? The very concept suggests a uniform series of important, fat, dull, leather-bound dusty volumes sitting dumb, forlorn in the rear stacks of a dark library, unvisited except by the very occasional self-important, fat, dull, leathery, dusty old straight white man. Will the last visitor turn out the light?

Before darkness falls, let us ease from the shelf the collected works of one author, James Joyce, and make him a representative of all the white straight dead males, accused of all the various privileges those attributes bestow, not least in being those who award and receive canonisation.

To quote his biographer, Richard Ellmann, Ulysses is the ‘most difficult of entertaining novels and the most entertaining of difficult novels,’ and as a result of his reputation for difficulty, many have missed out on the entertainment. In the first half of the 21^st century it seems appropriate to wonder just how many more readers will ever now brave the challenge. Is Joyce’s time up, barely a century since the publication of Ulysses? In that tumultuous but brief period of history, his reputation has fluctuated wildly, from that of obscene guttersnipe whose books were too filthy to be given house room, to genius ranked alongside Homer, Shakespeare and Dante. Perhaps, like the fireworks in the twilight of Bloomsday, Joyce too has shot ‘up like a rocket, down like a stick.’ If that’s the case, he makes a pretty good representative of most of the authors on that unfashionable shelf.

I’d like to make the case against this pessimistic assessment, but first I shall suggest reasons for its plausibility.

Joyce’s reputation is a stool – Joyceans, make your own joke at this point – that stands on three legs, each of which has been sawn away. The first is this very much on-the-nose notion of a Western canon, what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and said.’ This smacks too much for modern tastes of élitism and prescription, and has the more fundamental fault that admission to the canon has been a closed shop, tightly controlled by the very type of author for whom admission has been almost exclusively reserved: old, white, straight, ableist, upper- and middle class, and above all male. Contra Groucho Marx, they would only join a club that would have members just like themselves (and Jews such as Marx were unlikely to make the grade, not being gentlemen and all). There’s a good chap, they murmur, pointing in a mirror.

The most articulate defence of ‘The Western Canon’ is by one Bloom – not Leopold, Joyce’s modest hero, but Harold, in his 1995 book of the same name. It doesn’t help that of his 70 twentieth century Great British and Irish authors, just seven are women: there are as many Johns, Jonathans and, to stretch a point only very slightly, Seans as there are women.

In the 30 years since it’s become much more obvious that such a selection smuggles in and therefore foregrounds and entrenches many values and assumptions: sexism, ableism, classism, colonialism – enough ‘isms’ for any Marxist (Karl, not Groucho) to sink her teeth into.

The second leg of the Joycean tripod is the rise and fall of English Literature in the universities as a discipline. It is no coincidence that Joyce’s reputation rose with the methods of English literature professors: elucidation, annotation, biographical investigation and interpretation, the anxiety of influence. Indeed, the discipline itself arose more or less alongside Joyce’s own career, and you could say of Joyce’s books what Terry Eagleton says of the study of English: ‘In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English [or Joyce] was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else.’

Now the disciplines not only of English literature but of the humanities as a whole have collapsed, their ends hastened by Marxist challenges to the assumptions that underpinned them of authorial intention, of hierarchy, of literariness itself, and of course all the ‘isms.’

The real killer blow – a capitalist one, ironic in the light of that Marxist challenge – has been the (re)invention of the university as a fee-for-service product, where now the student is the consumer and the customer is always right. Now it’s the professor who needs the good grades, in the form of positive end-of-semester feedback. Tenureship is out, indentured casual labour is in. Now politicians want money spent on education to go ever further and not just be, but be shown to be, well spent, which drags studies towards the vocational. To throw Eagleton’s words back at him, it’s once again become desperately unclear why English is worth studying at all. And if – if – you’re going to read books, when as a student working to pay fees are you going to find time to do so? And why should the student saddling herself with a lifetime of debt for this education have to read stuff that gives her the ick? Trigger warnings teach students that they are delicate and easily shocked, and that being shocked is A Bad Thing and The Wrong Answer. Perhaps it would be a better idea all round, less of a bother, to choose shorter, less challenging texts, written by people who sound and look more like the students themselves? There’s a good read, they might say, pointing in the mirror.

So out goes the pile of books a yard thick and the requirement to wolf them all down in a semester: nowadays it’s a brave or foolish prof who expects her students to tackle something like Ulysses, which requires hours students don’t have of concentration they don’t have. 

The third and final leg of our imaginary Joycean stool is the social value of reading. Like many, I picked up Ulysses because, as Mallory put it, it was there. I felt that if I could succeed in scaling the south face of Molly Bloom, then I had conquered the Everest of literature. Go the extra mile, as someone said: it’s less crowded there. But Everest is a boast precisely because it’s hard, and takes dedication. (I used to love reading. I worked in my father’s greengrocery and more than once he found me in a shop full of customers, bent over the pages of newspaper in which we used to wrap the produce, transfixed by whatever words had caught my eye.) Now, who cares if you’ve read that old dead white male stuff? Big deal.

So that’s it then? Time, gentlemen, please? Is there no hope for Sunny Jim and his ilk?

Well, it’s up to others to make the case for the ilk, but as for Joyce himself, I shall mount a defence.

For one thing, not just Ulysses, but the whole of Joyce’s ouevre is a million miles away from the tweedy, English, polite, straight, God-fearing tradition. Indeed, Joyce appears to have gone very far out of his way to systematically challenge every single one of the values and virtues of the polite canon. His form is anarchic comedy, not dignified tragedy, and his subjects include sexuality, gender, the body, what’s permitted, the political and religious status quo and those whom it suits, empire, nationalism… all the isms. Above I quoted from Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, and the first line of his biography bears repeating: we are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries. What could be more up to the minute in 2025 than a Jewish advertising salesman? Ironically, Bloom’s exclusion as a Jew extends even to his very Jewishness: Bloom is what one might term ‘Jew-ish,’ having also been baptised three times and not having the requisite Jewish mother required for full acceptance as a ‘real’ Jew. Identity, certainty are blurred and melt. Joyce’s choice of a Jew for protagonist contrasts sharply with the jarring complacent racism in Joyce’s contemporary TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.

The canon is perhaps more robust and resilient than we give it credit for: it responds well to being pushed. Joyce’s project is to ask, Socratically, what we think we know about what is fit to be read, to be thought, to be said, why those boundaries exist, and even what it means to ‘read.’ In titling his book after Homer, Joyce is inviting us to plug in the end of literature to its beginning and switch on the current. You may have ‘read’ Ulysses and not (yet) read the Odyssey, but if so you haven’t read the same book I’ve ‘read,’ and in turn what you know and what you bring make it a different book than I’ve ‘read.’

Straight and dead he may be, but Joyce was from the race of the colonised, not the coloniser; of the oppressed class; not of ‘English’ literature, any more than Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Heaney. (And with his terrible eye problems, he could justifiably beat the charge of ableism, too.) When you stand atop the Martello Tower, the setting for the first episode of Ulysses, and look out as Stephen Dedalus does across the water, though they’re too far away to be seen, you are looking in the direction of colonised Wales, then coloniser England and then continental Europe and the source of the Western tradition, canonical and otherwise. 

As the ‘English literature’ department was being established, Joyce’s work was banned for more than a decade, published only in continental Europe. Indeed, the British continued to regard Joyce with suspicion, if not outright hostility. They didn’t stop at banning his book: in 1925 the British Home Office ordered police to spy on a young Cambridge academic who planned to teach Ulysses to impressionable and vulnerable undergraduates. That young Cambridge academic was, in fact, pillar-to-be of the English literature department FR Leavis, and he was ahead of his time, learning to be Joyce’s contemporary – so much so that into the 1930s the BBC was still prohibiting a radio programme from even referring to Joyce’s novel.

Far from being a silent, dusty bookshelf, the canon is a raucous forum in the centre of the city, full of raised voices and strong opinions. And as with the birth of western democracy, so too with the canon: reform is absolutely necessary and new voices, new perspectives and new values can only improve the quality of the debate. But in this regard, as in so many others, Joyce was always ahead of the curve, with a deeply informed interest in queerness, disability, equity, what constitutes ‘perversion’ and what are the limits of the human experience. ‘If my book is not fit to read,’ he said, ‘life is not fit to live.’ And to a young man who approached him, eager to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, he withdrew, observing, ‘No, it did many other things besides.’

As for reading: rumours of its death are, as Twain said of his own, exaggerated. Fiction is performing well, stronger than non-fiction, and in particular science fiction, fantasy, romance, crime and thrillers are all growing in popularity. One big driver is the social media platform TikTok’s community BookTok, which is mostly consumed by younger and in this case users who don’t identify as male. You may protest that all these genres are, if you like, diametrically opposed to the canon. But then, the university was traditionally a male domain, making men the guardians of the tradition. Now, women are performing far better than men academically, and have a bigger say than ever on the reading lists. 

And as for a lack of interest in Joyce, the evidence suggests otherwise. There are Finnegans Wake and Ulysses reading circles around the globe, and Bloomsday in Melbourne recently attracted 60 first timers to our introduction to Ulysses. Let me conclude by making an observation about Ulysses that might apply, more or less, to any book you’d want to include in the canon, however reformed.

Ulysses and any classic is a book that changes every time you read it – or rather, reread it, I should say. When I was a teenager I experienced Ulysses as a book about a sulky young man, Stephen Dedalus. When I was 40 I discovered a book about a middle-aged father, Leopold Bloom. Now I find it a book about us – about you, about me, about every single one of us. About what it is to be a human, endowed with embodied cognition and conscious of the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. When Leopold Bloom heads out into the back garden and occupies the toilet, Joyce is not merely observing that this is a universal human experience, one we so rarely encounter in our books and plays and movies, even today. (It is said that when Stephen Dedalus picks his nose in the third episode of Ulysses, he’s the first fictional character ever to do so. Can this be true?) Further, Joyce is also saying something about us and our uniquely self-aware consciousness of our own bodies, and of our own minds as part of those bodies. His use of stream of consciousness is no mere technical innovation, but instead a new, bold attempt to convey a sense of what it is like to be inside a head and to look out on the world. 

We read the classics not to judge but to understand, and sometimes the ick is the point. If you read the Iliad as the story of Achilles, a manchild ‘sulking in his tent,’ then you’ve not read the Iliad at all. In his world view, not ours, Achilles is wrestling with a terrifying dilemma: you can have glory, fame, reputation, and thus immortality; or you can have a long life. Your honour is worth more than your life, and without it, life is not worth living. When Agamemnon slights his honour, Achilles has nothing left to fight for, to live for or to die for.

If you read the Iliad and Paris turning Helen of Sparta into Helen of Troy as a love story then you’ve not read the Iliad at all. It’s a story of a triple whammy, a trifecta of the very worst sins a man can commit: to lay claim upon and to accept another’s hospitality and, having done so, betray it by stealing his wife and his goods. The roles of host and of guest are utterly, utterly sacred, ordained by Zeus himself, and to dishonour them is to shake the earth’s foundations.

Those are not our values, but that’s not the point, or rather that is the point. It takes an effort of empathy to understand them, and empathy is in short supply right now. We need to penetrate the looking glass, into other worlds, other sensibilities, not gaze at our own reflection. In doing so we see ourselves anew.

That’s how mere books become classics. They reward re-reading, and in fact challenge the very verb ‘to read.’ The question, ‘Have you read Ulysses?’ makes no sense. You can only ask, ‘How’s the rereading of Ulysses going?’ 

A classic is part of a babble of conversation, centuries and indeed millennia-long, between all the books that touch us in this way. In one of David Lodge’s campus novels from the 1980s, there’s a postgraduate writing on the influence not of Shakespeare on TS Eliot, but of Eliot on Shakespeare. That student could equally well construct their PhD on the influence of Joyce on Homer. Read the episode of Ulysses in which Bloom gazes with lust upon Gerty MacDowell and you find a new perspective on Nausicaa encountering a near-naked Odysseus. Listen carefully and you can hear a dialogue between two books, the first – well, the second, after the Iliad – in our Western tradition and the other one on which the ink is barely dry. In the dark the library may be empty, but the pages still turn and the dialogue continues, interrogating our humanity.

This piece is an expanded version of a talk the author gave at The Wild Geese in October 2024 as part of the Celtic Club’s monthly Celtic Conversations.

Steve Carey is Treasurer of Bloomsday in Melbourne, a society dedicated to presenting theatrical and other interpretations of the work of James Joyce.