I
opened the 14 August New York Times Magazine
to find a full-third of a page photo of Gerry Adams,
arms folded and scowling in black blazer and jeans,
and a brief interview on the right side from the
Bearded One with the paper's Deborah Solomon. His
characteristic soundbites follow: 'I have never
been a member of the IRA.' In response to whether
he's fired a gun: "No. But I have been blasted
by assassins.' He explains that 'Sinn Fein has its
own little security arrangement, but it's basically
friends and colleagues who drive us around. They're
unarmed.' Finally, asked 'So how would you protect
yourself in the case of an attack?', Adams remarks:
'I would run very fast.'
These entertaining ripostes aside, my concern remained,
as a teacher and explorer of literature, with his
closing answer to Solomon's last query: 'In addition
to your political activities, you are also a writer
of fiction, and I am wondering if you have any special
insight into the work of your fellow Irishman James
Joyce.' Adams replied: 'I have never completed his
"Ulysses." And I've never met anyone
who has, although I've met people who say they have.'
Why should this preoccupy me, in light of more immediate
media flurry about whether he stepped down from
an IRA Army Council (prior to the latest 'dump arms'
announcement), upon which he and two Martins supposedly
never sat to begin with? Well, this willfully ignorant
attitude, at the risk of sounding like a snob, irritates
me. Now, I have laboured through Joyce, with the
exception of Finnegans Wake, which I have
only floundered about in happily but admittedly
weakly, a toddler in a swimming pool who knows that
deeper depths sensibly elude him in his infancy.
Listen, following Adams, to the puerile blather
that Ulysses towers as a glacial outcrop
against which the reader can only squirm, as if
Sisyphus on his uphill stint, that in the Irish
Times pages accompanied their web features on
Bloomsday and its patron, bleated by many other
Irish men and women in the creative arts whom you've
supposed to have trekked through the weighty tome
at least once--if only to boast about it to such
as Gerry at an apolitical fund-raiser. It seems
it's a badge of honour to begrudge the appeal of
Joyce if you pose as a prole among Irish literati,
among whom Mr. Adams finds himself shelved, under
fiction. I recall asking an earnest young student
after an Irish Studies conference paper in which
she presented her take on Adams' autobiography Before
the Dawn why the hell Adams included a mid-volume
fade into a purportedly fictional tale of a sniper
who shoots a British soldier before resuming his
earnestly and fully disclosed non-fictional account
of his 'political activities'. She had no idea,
the question seeming never to have occurred to her
or any of the muddled audience, who all glared at
me.
I don't idolise Joyce; one of my best friends is
part of the academic 'Joyce industry' and I admit
after auditing her reading-group lectures I picked
up far less than a good beginner's guide like Anthony
Burgess' Rejoyce, Don Gifford's annotations,
or even Harry Blamires' page-by-page crib can give
all you daunted neophytes. If you can face Cage
Eleven, you can survive Joyce. Parts of his
texts will bore you and parts will not. He captures
life, after all. CD's from the 1982 RTE broadcast,
one by Jim Norton on Naxos, and another by Donal
Donnelly on Recorded Books, and BBC excerpts on
cassette all can delight and instruct you beyond
the page. It's not the Wake, after all! But
surely anybody claiming to be well-versed in Irish
culture should give Joyce enough patience to invest
a share of time and effort. The intellectual and
aesthetic workout will pay off with bigger brains
and furtive smiles; your own stream-of-consciousness
reveries will never be the same oul' dull routine.
Look, I am no expert in parsing Adams' ouevre, fictional
or factual. But when it comes to Joyce, I admit
that he presents notable roadblocks to keep a republican
advance from occupying the ideological terrain he
mapped out of 1904 Dublin. Yes, for readers of The
Blanket, as well as Mr Adams, hazards may loom.
Even non-finishers of Ulysses realise that
our sympathies are meant to be with non-violent
Bloom rather than his nemesis straight out of the
purple prosed uber-patriotic and ultra-xenophobic
pages of T.P. Moran's The Nation, the Cyclopean
Citizen--himself a caricature of Michael Cusack
the GAA founder. Out of all the critics on Joyce
I have read, none make a republican defence of his
works, and none, I propose, can be seriously proposed.
I wonder: where exactly did Gerry Adams bog down
in Ulysses' pages? A sneaking suspicion makes
me think it might have been at the 'Cyclops' chapter,
in which--in this sustained bravado passage--the
author demolishes the claims of nationalism and
erects instead those of tolerance. These constructions
alone would not have brought about even the incomplete
Republic of 1916, Joyce fully knows, but he remains
too honest a writer, too bitter a critic of the
anti-semitic, anti-protestant, and anti-British
prejudice which infected far too many nationalists,
and too brutal an Irishman, to accept the boasts
of Irish-Irelanders like Moran and the Citizen.
Republicans, attempting to take on the literary
inheritance of the past century, cannot make the
same claims to literary continuity that they may
parse from the votes for the Second Dail or against
the mandate of the GFA.
After all, look at the volumes issued by those out
in 1916, 1921, or thereabouts. Liam O' Flatherty,
Peadar O'Donnell, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Casey (see
UCD professor Chris Murray's superb new biography),
Darrell Figgis, Eimar O'Duffy, Francis Stuart, and
Sean O'Faolain--to name some still recognisable
nearly a century on--all cast a Yeatsian cold eye
on the enthusiasms that felled the poets Thomas
MacDonagh and Padraic Pearse. It was left, actually,
to the women--Maud Gonne, the Countess Markiewicz,
Dorothy Macardle, and Kathleen Clarke to carry on
in print--not fiction preferred by their male counterparts
(with the notably qualified exception of Ernie O'Malley)
so much as memoir, history, and propaganda for the
Cause. Male writers associated with the rebels seem
to have all surrendered their idealism along with
their arms by the end of the Civil War. A few stubborn
women, often widows or single, soldiered on, but
the majority of men who would dominate Irish literature
of the first half--at least--of the 20th century
shunted aside the sword after that first order to
dump arms. They bent their pens into plowshares
with which to--as Seamus Heaney would later agree--dig
a new furrow. Thus excavated, the worshipped Irish
soil seemed better suited to seeds for a better
Irish future than graves in which to mummify its
past patriots.
This is an choice that the earlier Adams, like most
republicans then and now, contested bitterly. Today,
those of us who believe in the Cause have also been
products of an educational system and our own self-confidence
to read from, and respect, the humanist legacy within
much of the mainstream current of Irish literature
and culture that rejects--as did Joyce's Gabriel
Conroy, Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom--the
shrill cries to revenge of Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Bloom rejects hate. How this contrasts with the
republican insistence to remember the Fenian graves
and avenge those who have fallen for our freedom
has not been, to my knowledge, fully addressed by
activists today. I myself am unsure about my own
loyalties as I age and return to a Joyce that in
my youth I dismissed as too bigoted against 'old'
Sinn Fein. As we all reconsider in what shape a
republicanism rooted in values of fragile peace
rather than armed rebellion will carry us into a
third century of a still-incomplete national project
in an era of multinationals and the erosion of nations,
what Joyce, so trendily seen now by critics as not
'post' but 'semi-colonial', can offer to assist
our mental and political quests may be a question
worth reconsideration.
I send this contribution to The Blanket in
the wish that such contrasts may be confronted by
others within the republican and wider communities.
If I met Gerry Adams, perhaps--judging from his
interview--be the first who would admit to him that,
yes, yes, yes, I have completed Ulysses and
continue to re-read it with increasing delight.
I'd add that the Cyclops chapter forces us all to
re-think, if not regret, the ties that all too often
have tangled the pull of freedom with the reins
of bigotry. That's a lesson that Joyce meant for
all of us to learn from the pages of Ulysses.
It's one that only can be appreciated if you take
the trouble to finish the damned work, and then
start all over again. I hope you, and Gerry, will
do so--to inherit Joyce's legacy.
