The genius of Joyce: June 08, 1998 issue of New Thinking

June 08, 1998 New Thinking:
The genius of Joyce

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June 08, 1998

The genius of Joyce

By Gerry McGovern

I used to love James Joyce. I used to hate James Joyce.

I loved him because he was an explosion. He was liked a can-opener. He pushed, he stretched and he explored. He took things to extremes, and he forced society to look at itself, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Of course, I also loved James Joyce because he was Irish, because he gave me pride and confidence. Even though he lived most of his life in exile, he wrote about nothing except Dublin. He was once asked if he missed Dublin. He replied that in many ways he had never left.

I began to hate James Joyce because he could be so difficult, so hard to penetrate. Reading him was often so much like hard work. And I hated him because of what he helped create: Joyceans. Not all Joyce fans, of course, but a considerable number really irked me.

I once observed a bunch of Joyceans walking down South Circular Road, Dublin, on Bloomsday. It struck me how utterly mechanical these people were; how they walked like robots and talked like robots. Two of them stopped and began to argue. One said that he was tired and wanted to take a short rest. The other sternly reminded his friend that they had planned this trip together three months ago and that they were supposed to be in Eccles Street by 12.15.

I’m back to loving Joyce. Back to realizing how influential he has been on my thinking. A key thing that struck me in a very fundamental way about his novel, Ulysses, was how much structure it borrowed.

It was based around Dublin. It was based around a period of a day. It was based around Homer’s Odyssey. There are many other structures it was based around that I cannot recall right now. (Each chapter was based around an organ in the body, as far as I remember.)

Joyce was a genius. Ulysses was a masterpiece. Yet the structure for his book was adapted from other sources. (Geniuses steal, beggars borrow.) It was like he had a house with eight rooms, and he let other people build the foundations and put up the walls.

Then Joyce went to work on the rooms, making them challenging and substantial, not having to worry, not having to work on the foundations and having the walls to frame his imagination. In the rooms – these limited spaces – he could expand the space and thinking of our time.

Of course, James Joyce, like all geniuses, worked extremely hard and had an absolute attention to detail. He honed his ideas and style over many, many years.

Today, there are so few foundations, so little that seems to have been honed and cared for over many years. The digital age and Internet is like a giant building site, where very little has been built and that which has been built has a very short life. The pressure to understand and survive today, means that we not alone find it difficult to get a perspective on tomorrow, but equally important, we have little time to learn from yesterday.

James Joyce created greatness with time, not against it.

Gerry McGovern

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The digital age and Internet is like a giant building site, where very little has been built and that which has been built has a very short life.