 Ychydig am gweithio i chi'n dweud, a rwy'n gofio gyda'n strannu yng Nghymru, oedd a'r Ynchblad, oedd yng Nghymru yn gwybodaeth angylcheddau. Felly, rydych chi'n gweithio i chi i chi. Mae Byryddydd fel y dyfodd oedd yn fwybodaeth, o fe allan yn gweithio 100 yng nghymru ofeth o Laylau choice Ceylon. there's no better way to do with the Tour of Ireland's finest contemporary writers and end writers and Emma McBride. We're also delighted to welcome Dr Claire Hutton who will be hosting them this evening. The British Library has a small but very wonderful collection of Joyce materials. We're particularly indebted to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the patron of James Joyce who gave her archive, or possibly sold it, I'm not totally sure, to the British Library. a ddiddordebeth. Mae'r materioli a gweithio yn y gallu gwath y gallu gwlad y Llywodraeth Bryddiad o'r amddangos, ddim yn ymgyrchol o'r twfnod ar y gaelch yma, i'r pethau yma, i'r pethau'r adroddau i'r cyfrifiadau. O'r adroddau'n ei wneud o'r pethau, mae nhw'n gael i'r llawd o'r modd. Dr Clare Hutton gave a wonderful talk on Harry Shawweaver for us not so long ago and she delved into the collections and that will be available on the British Library player shortly. Clare is a reader in digital humanities and English at the University of Loughborough. She has recently curated the exhibition Women and the Making of Ulysses at the Harry Ransom Centre University of Texas and she's the author of Serial Encounters, Ulysses and the Little Review, an editor of the Irish book in English. We do have books by Anne and Eamor and of course James himself outside and the edition of Ulysses you find out there has got a fantastic new introduction by Anne. Later on you'll be able to buy books in fact, you'll have a copy of one of each of Anne and Eamors too. Those of you who are watching online can go to the books tab at the top of the screen and you can also purchase if you wish. Later on we'll be having questions in the normal way for you here, put your hand up and wait for the mic. Those of you who are watching online you are able to post questions in the form below your video window and we'll get to as many questions as we can later on. Finally I just wanted to mention that we are hosting a number of events related to Ireland. We're trying to reinvigorate the British Library's relationship with Ireland and institutions during the course of this year. In the autumn we are hosting a fantastic Irish Writers Weekend so please look out for that amongst other things. I'd like to now hand you over to Claire, to Eamor and to Anne and please enjoy the evening. Thank you very much indeed and I'd like to say welcome to the library. What an unusual event this actually is. Unusual to be live after two very long years. Unusual to actually have two major novelists here to talk about another novel 100 years on. There aren't many novels that we would talk about 100 years on if we think about it. It's a very sort of interesting thing that Ulysses is still casting this spell 100 years later. So let me introduce our novelists Anne Enright born in Dublin where she now lives and works. The author of seven novels including The Gathering which won the Booker Prize in 2007. And most recently Actress which came out just before lockdown February 2020. I remember seeing it on the best selling shelves just there. That was the last time I was in Dublin. And has also this year for the Centenary of Ulysses edited the vintage Ulysses which you're holding in your hand I can see. And also it's a lovely addition actually I've just had a look and my inner joy. I think it was Hans Walter Gabbler who edited it actually. Yes well I mean introduced here. I just gave it a little freshener at the top. No I did immediately see it was Gabbler's text. I didn't notice that. I'm not here as an academic but I did see that. And also Eamor. So astonishing book A Girl Is A Half Form Thing came out in 2013 with its own unique publishing history. Took nine years to get to publication. And won so many awards that year. The Goldsmith's Prize and also the Women's Prize for Fiction and also the Irish novel of the year. And since then we've had the lesser Bohemians and most recently Strange Hotel which also came out in February 2020. Also seems like a very long time ago now. So what are we going to talk about? The Legacy of Ulysses. Where do we begin? I thought a good place to begin would be to talk about first experiences of reading. When, where, why, how did you first encounter this book which continues to cast this spell? Over to you Anne. As I've been writing over and over in the last six months I bought my first copy of Ulysses when I was 14 in a bookshop in Kinsale when I was on a hosteling holiday. And so I read it in the hostel in Kinsale on the table. And then again in Cork after we cycled to Cork. And I still have that volume at home actually. So it was 1977 and it caused 470. You can still see the sticker at the back. I have no real idea of what I was doing when I bought Ulysses. It's a heavy book if you're cycling. Except I think I thought it would make me look interesting of course. I was out in the world and I thought it would be a great draw. But I read maybe the first three episodes before I got back home. And they were all kind of conniptions and lots of squawking from my mother who didn't want me to be reading Ulysses. Thought I should be reading Dubliners. My sister was dispatched to talk to my English teacher who said that no, it was too early, too early. But you know real teenage ding dong because it was my money. So it was agreed that it would be put up in the attic until I was 18. And so there was string and newspaper involved and it went up into the attic and I climbed up there when I was 18. And I read it while I was at college from all of it at that stage. But I didn't study it until last year, put it that way. I didn't study it at college. So many people encountered at university and it really... I just looked at it and thought that was enough for the time being. And I didn't want to go into all the stuff I didn't know. I wanted to experience it as directly as I could. And it was sort of my eyes on the page where all that interested me in those early encounters. Which is completely arrogant and very a lot of fun. I have to say I think resisting the temptation to study the book is quite sensible actually. Just looking at it. That strikes me as quite a... Yes, I mean you see some young people, it's a great book to read when you're young. But you want to grab the guide out of their hands and say just throw them in at the deep end and see if they can swim. Yeah, I think so. What about you, Emer? You had an intense encounter on this book with the train. Yeah, this is like my foundational writing story which is... I'm sure he'd be very pleased with that. But you know I was older, I was 25. Was that right? Yeah, so I was about 25 when I read it. And I was working as a temp. And I got this new temp job doing data entry at Deutsche Bank down on London Wall. And I needed the job because I had to pay the rent. But also it was going to kill me a bit to have to go and do data entry at Deutsche Bank. So I thought well what can I do to make it better? I'll read Ulysses. And I had it, I bought it when I was about 18, 19. And I had maybe started it but I hadn't really read it. And I bought it, this copy in fact. And I still have the original bookmark which is from a bookshop in Westport. And so I thought right, this is what I'll do. I'll read Ulysses that will make it all better, make Deutsche Bank recede. And so at the time I was living in Tottenham and I had to get the train in from Bruce Grove to Liverpool Street every day. And which is about 20 minutes. And so I got on and I started to read it. And it was a complete joy scene epiphany. And by the time I got off I just thought oh right. Everything that I have written up until this point is rubbish. And it's time to start again. If this can be done then this is the direction that I have to go in. Train underground or overground? It was overground. I don't want it to be emerging then. No, it's sadly not quite as cinematic as that. It's just more kind of stumbling through the crowds. That was my kind of beginning of Joyce. And then it was just reading it over that period where I would go and sit in Finsbury Circus which is now all built over and just kind of eat my curly cheese sandwich and read Ulyssys or read it on my lap while I was doing my data entry. And yeah, it did help actually. People have been telling me stories about, you know, I was at college. It was just after a breakup I was so sad I sat on I read Ulyssys. People tell me some origin story about the book which is about growing up or enlargement. But it's quite poignant sometimes. It's interesting that, you know, they set it as a thing that will shift something in their lives that they're going to do this now. And the moment of choice can be kind of slightly melancholic, which I like. Well, it's that thing. I think it connects that thing where people are so often just saying, oh, I've never read it. Oh, I couldn't read it. And so when people do read it, they're never sorry that they read it because they have to suffer through it. And so by the time they get to the end, the beginning of that journey is kind of a thing. Because it's just, I mean, it's so often me people just go, oh, I've never read it. I couldn't read it. I started it. It was terrible. Yeah, a lot of that. Yeah, I started it. But they did a survey on some Irish website and there were, you know, 5,000 people said, responded to it and 2 out of, maybe 1 out of, sorry, 3,000 said they'd read it and 2,000 said they hadn't finished it. So tick for not finishing it. It's quite good, you know. I mean, I strongly have the opinion that whether you've finished it or not is a matter of your own self-importance, really. It doesn't really matter if you've finished the book. Just read it. You know, I mean, who finishes Ulysses. And that even when you've finished it, it won't remain. It won't stop just because you've stopped. It will keep going behind your back. And then you go back to it. You'll find that you have to start it all over again somehow. Actually, that's not, I mean, yeah, I'm just making that up. But the idea of finishing it or not finishing it of it as something possessed and done and completed is not something that I value. Put it that way. I'm very happy for people to read in it or read it one way or the other. I like the modesty of these responses. I like the idea that you can read it for 20 minutes on the train. You know, I like that. That's an interesting one. I mean, just to kind of settle in for 20 minutes and give it a go. But I mean, if people say, how did you read Ulysses at 14? The other way to read Ulysses is one word at a time. Which is not as stupid an answer as it sounds. I like it. Kenner saying that the sentence is not the privileged sort of unit in choice. That a lot of the excitement is one word at a time. The sentences tend to fall apart under you. So that's not a bad way to proceed. One word at a time and sometimes one paragraph with one word. I mean, he's the genius of the one word paragraph. That's one of his kind of tricks. Which is an amazing thing to be able to have that confidence to write a one word. There's lots of tricks and confidence. You've got a big choice. Everyone also goes behind the book to think about what Joyce is trying to do to their head. I mean, there's a lot of sort of biological interest that he's slide through the text and say, this is very tricksy now. I'm not putting it up to you, but do you know what I mean? That who has the confidence to do that? I suppose he was supremely confident. I think it's also important to remember he wasn't writing in the light of James Joyce. He wasn't writing with the weight of, oh, this is what I have to do. This takes confidence in this, here I am. I think for everyone going after, there's the weight of, oh, but he had the confidence to write a one word paragraph. But for himself, it was all virgin. It was all his own. Yeah, it was whether it worked or not, I suppose. And he didn't know for a long time. I mean, I know he gave a lot of lather about it, but nobody, like no writer knows whether they have succeeded or not as they go along. Interesting. I think Joyce was very knowing about his own. I think he knew. No, I think there's a lot of bluster, and I think there's a lot of confidence. But I think there's also, there's so much writing that he's hiding all his fear inside. There's a lot of hiding, all right, to come and get me. Which is the other kind of, the reverse of what you're saying, that he's saying, I mean here, he's somewhere. So, yeah, putting it up to you. But I like that Nora's saying he's up all night writing, laughing to myself. Because that kind of, that pleasure is that, you know, the sense that he's having a good time is enough for me sometimes. Well, now, what about some readings to reflect on this, otherwise we might go around in circles here. Well, we will go around in circles, but why don't we just open the book and have a sense of, you know, you as readers. That would be nice. Who's going to go first? I think mine is at the earlier part of the book. You're a chapter one. Yeah, I'm a chapter one. So this is at the top of the Joyce Tower and the Martello Tower in San Degro, and it's Buck Mulligan. Shaving, looking out over the sea. He said quietly. Isn't the sea what algae calls it, a great, sweet mother? The snot green sea, the scrotum tightening sea, epi aneu pa, pontone, ah, deadless the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalata, thalata, she is our great, sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet, leaning on it. He looked down on the water and on the mail boat, clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown. Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly, his grey, searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. Someone killed her, Stephen said, gloomily. You couldn't have knelt down, dammit kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm a hyperbarian as much as you, but to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There's something sinister in you. He broke off and lathed again lightly. His father cheek a tolerant smile curled his lips. But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself, kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all. He shaved evenly and with care in silence, seriously. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, ffretted his heart. Silently in a dream, she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave cloths, giving off an odour of wax and rosewood wood. Her breath that had bent upon him mute reproachful a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuff edge, he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed, holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razor blade. Ah, poor dog's body, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few nose rags. How are the second-hand breeks? They fit well enough, Stephen answered. The well-fed voice. Yeah, so it's too famous to read. The wetted ashes and the rosewood and all the whole tank, it's too famous to read. It's not really, I mean, the well-fed voice and the poor dog's body. It's amazing the way he squashes those words together. Yes, that's not Gris, Crotum, Tytnang, all the rest of it. Yeah, that's great. But he makes Buck Mulligan, I love Joyce writing this extremely offensive book, makes Buck Mulligan the most offensive character in it. And Stephen is kind of pious and Jesuitical. You're fearful Jesuit, he's called, and disapproving and takes offence. Buck Mulligan sails around the place, you know, saying dreadful things. And it was just another Joyce's tricks. I'm not saying it. Even when they accuse each other of pissing on Singh's door, that was his contribution to the cause of literature, I think. Me, says Stephen, that was his contribution. Buck Mulligan takes the slack. It takes the blame. We can come back to the doorway, where? You know, the steps up to that door. You don't just idly come back from the pub and relieve yourself over the wall and hit the door. You have to go up a big set of granite steps where J.M. Singh was living with his elderly mother. And you have to do it. It's really like some doing it. This is obviously gating. This door is when you've visited. We'll come back to that. There's a stupid thing where Joyce was so drunk, he fell down and pissed himself outside a reading of Singh's work. And so he takes this really abject and horrible episode of his own life and turns it into Buck Mulligan on that. Amazing. Sorry, it's very hard to stick to the one subject here. We'll come back to glastool and doorways and the intimacy of living in Dublin with these kind of monumental textual presences. But maybe we can move to you for a reading. Would you like to? Yeah, I'm reading for a bit later on. I'm trying to remember why I chose this bit. I think it was kind of nosiness, the nosiness that he has about women that made me take it. But anyway, I'll read it and we'll see. Ah, devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance. Molly often told me, feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my foot. Oh, that way. Oh, that's exquisite. I feel it myself too. Good to rest once and away. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way. Turns milk, makes fiddle strings, snap. Something about withering plants I read in a garden. Besides, they say it the flower withers she wears. She's a flirt. All are, daresay, she felt I. When you feel like that, you often meet what you feel. Like me or what. Dress, they look at. Always know a fellow courting colours Well, cocks and lions do the same in stags. Same time, my prefer a tie undone or something trousers. Suppose I, when I was, no, gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kits in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner have me as I am than some poet chap with bare grease, plastery hair, lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentlemen in literary. Ought to attend to my appearance, my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still, you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men, Marion, beauty and the beast. Besides, I can't be so if Molly took off her hat to show her hair. Wide brim, both to hide her face, meeting someone might know her. Bend down her, carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair strong and wrth. Ten bob I got from Molly's comings when we were on the rocks in Hollow Street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice. She's worth 10, 15 more. A pound. What? I think so. All that for nothing. Bold hand, Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write an address on that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the day I went to Drimmies without a necktie, wrangled with Molly it was, put me off. No, I remember Richie Goulding. He's another. Wades on his mind. Funny, my watch stopped a half past four. Dust. Shark, liver oil I used to clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she... Oh, he did. Into her. She did. Done. Ah. Follow that. Inside the head of Leopold Bloom. I think that's the only reference of sex in the book, entire. I'm not going to challenge you on that. Sorry. Sorry, no. Piste offline, everybody. Stop, stop. There is. There is. I didn't mean it. So, I mean, it's just... We're into the question of, you know, Bloom and interior monologue and the stream of consciousness and the very distinctive styles of... I mean, what's interesting about Bloom and stream of consciousness is how it changes as the moods of the day progress, you know, the moods and moments so that you don't just get one type of narrative. It's many types. So, I suppose the question really would be, you know, the correlation between coming to terms with the book as a reader and committing to your own novel writing. That's quite a big question, isn't it? So, in other words, what has Ulysses enabled? Oh, well, for me. I mean, pretty much everything, I would say. I think... I think because I came to it with such ignorance that any reverence or understanding with no kind of university education or sense of approach... I'm really pulling the air rather than pointing, but... I think it gave me freedom that... I don't know, I suppose for a long time it was felt that he ruined it for everyone. But for me, because I came to it with ignorance, it was a release from all the kind of 19th-century stuff that I had been wading through before that. And I think to be allowed to give free reign to whatever came to your mind to follow in a way... Although it's such a constructed novel, there's also a sense constantly of instinct, of the brain darting here and there and following and finding images, finding words, finding styles and forms, which interested me less that. I don't know, I've gone off. But yeah, it was that boundlessness, I think, of possibility for the novel. That was something I had not encountered before. It's always stayed with me whenever I get stuck. So it's a sort of liberating force for your own aesthetic growth? Yeah, I think so of just being kind of unconcerned with anything other than your own whim. And I think that's a very important thing to not feel constrained by rules or forms or ways of doing or writing or behaving. For me that was Joyce allowed that. Maybe because I had come from this very particular kind of reading that was very sort of 19th-century and to just suddenly feel on the outside of that to be kind of pushed towards writing for the body that language had to be changed in order to capture, to be free to find a new language to describe the kind of experiences we have that grammatical language isn't quite so adequate to describe, to just find the gaps between words and try and create something that you can push into that that pulls the sense of that experience out. And that's a hard thing to do because the experiences are so subjective but when you see Joyce do it and even if you don't always agree, it gives you, I think, a bit of courage to have a go. It did for me. I suppose one of the things you're talking about is memory and the way that Joyce's prose remembers so many things and how he's so confident. Well, I love his kind of shameless obsessiveness. The endless hilarious lists of people's names and places or types of food that he twists and plays with and that kind of thing, which is you know that he's pulling all of these things into a place where he wants to keep them safe in the world and he's taking them out of the realm of memory where once he's gone, they will be gone. My feeling is that he puts them all in here so that he himself is preserved. And that's, you know, it's kind of shamelessly arrogant to think that I wouldn't be interested but also it's an obsessive thing to do which exists outside audience. And I quite like that, being to sort of give in to your own obsessions and then just let them go free in the world and see what comes back from them. Yeah, that's one of the phrases in the criticism. Is it young where someone says about Joyce, he has no concern with audiences? I think. Yeah, which is interesting. I think it's cold. Young also thought he was cold. Yeah. But I don't know. Joyce was very offended by young, wasn't he? And that was why it was such a big deal that he allowed him to treat Lucia. Yeah, he's not the only one who thought it was cold. But the temperature never bothered me. No, I don't think it's cold either. I don't agree. It's sort of body heat. It's like 30 years old. There are too many functions, there are too, you know, it's, there is no distance with Joyce. Yeah. Blood temperature, yeah. So can I just return back to this question to you? I mean, what about that correlation between reading and writing for you? To do you feel as though technique, style, theme? I don't think, I wasn't Joyce, I didn't suffer anxiety about Joyce's influence because I never claimed it as an influence. But it's, you know, when you've been reading, when you've been around a book most of your life, it's like you wouldn't claim Yeats as an influence, but I've been reading Yeats since I was eight, you know. So it's somehow part, so not quite of my DNA, but it's part of my epigenetics, I suppose. So it's somehow visceral, or it's in the way I am as an Irish writer. So I'm not going to kind of, and I, you know, I'm developing a theory that some writers are not as good as the Joyce of Dubliners, and then some writers are not as good as the Joyce of Portrait of the Artist, and some writers are not as, not in Eamor's case, not take Ulysses as their cue. And I think that I've found the stuff in Portrait in retrospect, the way the text kind of organised itself into different styles, in the Hellfire Sermon or in the stuff about romance and romantic fiction. And he does the same on a larger scale in Ulysses, so it allows you episode to episode for the language to become the style that it needs to be for that length of time. Until it almost becomes redundantly stylish, if you know what I mean, or redundant in its own. So that's pre-post, well, I don't know, I don't know enough about modernism to say that that's what modernism gives to you, is the ability to kind of find different idioms within a single story, which I like to do. I like my characters to think differently, but I like sometimes for them to think like different books, like they're in a different book already, which I did a bit in the green road and I'm doing it again now. And so, yeah, but that's not a very good answer. A lot of writers say, how can you write in the shadow of Joyce? And like Eamor, I say, he shone a great light. He made all things possible, so it's whatever you're having yourself. There it is. It's all there, so you can, you know, it's available. It made many things available. I think also it's an easier question for a novelist than it is for academics, because I think often academics, when they talk about influence, they want to see something very directly, a very direct link inside work. Whereas I think for novelists, an idea of influence is not a recreation or repetition. It's about something that opens a place inside you that allows you then to go on and do your own thing. And so I think there's two kind of conversations about influence. But also if you've read Ulysses and people sometimes say to me, you write a lot about the body, and you say, well, what else are you living in, right? If you're not living in a body, you write about, you know, garden sheds or something, but we're not all walking around as garden sheds, you know. And there are things that he does that when people don't do it, he says, well, how can you abandon that whole sort of part of the writing life? How can you not write about the body? How can you not allow language to do its thing? How can you keep it closed down like that, or one way or the other? I was really struck. I was looking at your introduction. I know you've written several pieces. This one where you talk about the freedom joist brought to the Irish tradition has been more useful to female writers than to male. I was welcomed as a gift by writers like Emer, like Edwin and Brian. And then the killer line in the essay when you just say, his innovative genius is more often declared a burden by men. That's sort of straight into this period. Yeah, well, it's all old father, old artificer stuff. And I'm really intrigued about how people go through the text and see the person behind the text and take the person behind the text on as if there was some mano a mano going on. That you have to beat Joyce by reading him, or not allow yourself to be beaten by Joyce, or possess whatever it is that he possesses. But what he's doing on the page is he's very energetically, he's messing with language. It's not about him, fun. Or it can't be about him because Emer says he hides, but he disappears behind it all. Or he becomes redundant and the book becomes its own thing. Yes, we shouldn't be so interested in the kind of self-projected by the writing. We should be just interested in the writing. But we should also not necessarily assume that the writer is projecting. I mean, that's kind of one of the problems with a lot of modern readings, that everything, and obviously love women get this more than male writers, that if you're writing a character who is a woman and you are a woman, then this character is somehow a projection of use. And then it's applying that logic to Joyce as well. But it rather wonderfully can't be not you. Yeah, but not necessarily the way people think. No, not the way people think. And the incredible richness that he could then, all the not-joices in the book, I mean Stephen and Bloom. It's so enlargent. I just wonder if we should get on to some more readings and maybe think about this sort of business of luxuriating in the language of the novel. I know you've got the dog, Tater's. And Tater's, will I? You mongrel. It's good reading. It's a good dog. He can do anything. He just shown off, he just does descriptive, he just does it. So this is Stephen on Sandy Manstrand, which is this amazing shallow beach in Dublin that goes on to the horizon when the tide is out. And then the sea comes right up to the wall as it chases Stephen off in the middle of this chapter towards the end of it. Cockle pickers. They waded a little way in the water and stooping, sized their bags and lifted them again, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelled running to them, reared up and poured them, dropped on all fours again, reared up with them at mute bearish fawning. Unheeded, he kept by them as they came towards the dryer sand, a rag of wolf's tongue red panting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked around it. Brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dogs, but drag on to fail. Dog skull, dog sniff. Eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dog's body. Here lies poor dog's body's body. Tatters out of that, your mongrel. The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hind leg pissed against it. He trotted forward and lifting again his hind leg pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hind paws then scattered the sand, four paws, dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing. A pard, a panther, got in the spouse's breach, vulturing the dead. It's fantastic. It's one out of many metamorphoses apparently in that chapter. The mole becomes another thing, another thing, another thing. And the language does what Emer's language does. It sort of nouns its verbs, its nouns and gerundifus everything. The bit that strikes me is the absolute kind of Dublinese of the way the dog is called. Tatters out of that your mongrel. It's a shock. Get out of that. I think Simon Daedalus doesn't get out of that later on in one go. Get out of that now. You can hear those voices. They talk about the streets and the places and the times and everything, but the absolute accuracy to the Dublin idiom, much of which remains the same, is astonishing. And it's so amazing that Joyce wrote that detail with such an absolute ear so precisely never having gone back after 1912. This 260,000 word novel is written in these circumstances of kind of chaotic upheaval. It shades into the parodic very quickly, which may have helped if you know what I mean. He's doing the voices. And then the voices themselves are quite parodic. There's quite a playfulness about the kind of speech that particularly the men in the book use. They're always largeing it. And they're always having the bounce. They're bantering. And so there's quite a performative thing to it, which you can see. It's a little bit like, you know, people never not doing Monty Python and the Holy Grail as they grow older. You can see that somebody would hold on to that kind of dramatic potential of that and have it in their head as a kind of constant thing. Don't you think it's also about his being away that allowed him to sink so far down into the memory of the Dublin that he has left behind? That in a way, had he been there, that kind of concentration would have been dispersed by everyday life, by actual interactions with people in the city on the current basis. And that actually having that space away, in that place. And the kind of the endless letters of, what is that chapter there and where we're in, was kind of, it's the memorial again. I think it's kind of the obsessive memorial, but it's the kind of luxury, he allows himself to luxuriate in a Dublin that he's already gone. Because he is, and he can do it because he's not being interfered with by contemporary Dublin. And it actually doesn't also quite exist. I mean he, even at the time, he got lots of little things wrong, even in his absolute need for accuracy. Some of the sources were quite corrupt and botched. So he gets things slightly wrong. So it's half made up at the same time. When you mentioned big male voices, but I think you've got a big female voice to read. Mrs Yelverton Barry. Oh, so yeah, I'm going to read a bit from Cersei. So God help us all, I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of a long bit, so. Good luck. From, yeah. So Mrs Yelverton Barry. In low corsaged opal boldress and elbow length ivory gloves, wearing a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliance, and Panachef Osprey in her hair. Arrest him, Constable! He wrote me an anonymous letter in Prentis backhand when my husband was in the north riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Love Birch. He said he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the theatre royal at a command performance of Latsigal. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made him proper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four on the following Thursday, done sync time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Coq, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays. Mrs Bellingham. In cap and seal Coney Mantle. Wrapped up in the... wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her broom and scans through the tortoise shell and breaks from inside her huge opossum muff. Also to me, yes. I believe it is the same objectionable person because he closed my carriage door outside thornly stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February 193 when even the grid of the waste pipe and ball stop in my bath's cistern were frozen. Subsequently, he enclosed a bloom of Edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant herloined from a forcing case of the model farm. Mrs Ylverton Barry, shame on him. A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward. The sluts and ragamuffins screaming. Stop thief, hurrah there, bluebeard. Three cheers for Ikeymo. Second watch produces handcuffs. Here are the darvies, Mrs Bellingham. He addressed me in several handwriting with fulsome complements as a venison ffurs an alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman, Palmer, while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham's scutch and garnished sable, a buck's head cooped or he lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit and eulogised glowingly on my other hidden treasures in priceless lace, which he said he could conjure up. He urged me, stating that he felt at his mission in life to urge me to defile the marriage bed to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity. The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Tullboys. In Amazon costume, hard hat, jack boots, coxbird, vermillion waistcoat, fawn musketeer, gontluts with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly. Also me, because he saw me on the polo grounds at the Phoenix Park, at the match all Ireland versus the rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, Sean, divinelys, I watched Captain Slugger Denahy of the Innisfilings win the final chukor on his Darling Cobb Centaur. This plebean Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes and obscene photographs such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards insulting to any lady, I have it still. It represents a partially nude seniorita, frail and lovely, his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature. Practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride him and write him, to give him a most vicious horse whipping. Mrs Bellingham, me too, Mrs Ylverton Barry, me too. Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up in proper letters received from Bloom. The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Tolbetts stamps her jingling spurs in sudden paroxysm of sudden fury. I will by God above me. I'll skirt that pigeon-livered curr as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive. What is not love? I'll flay him alive. Oh, yeah. That's great. Well, no. Where do we go? I was going to say, all in all, a very male book, which is one of the things that you have written, but moving from that towards the idea of maybe female characters and female characterisation, of which we've just heard. There were very much in Bloom's head, we have to say, those ladies. Yes, they were. They're Phantas Magoria, of some description. But it's all in Joyce's head, you know. So, when people want to talk about female characters, I sometimes push back and say, well, what about the men in this book? They're kind of weird, actually. You know, that's, you know, could Joyce write women? I mean, could he write men? Which you call Leopold Bloom. He's supposed to be a kind of every-man figure, but not every-man does what Bloom does. Every-man might think about doing what Bloom thinks about doing, but you know, there is a distance between fantasies, particularly in the Cersei, you know, urge and engagement, one might say, decorously. So, not all men are... Perhaps all men are potentially Bloom-like, or all men are potentially dead. I don't know, that's a large statement. It's a large statement about masculinity, and I'm not going to make it. But in the way that people endlessly used to... Well, not endlessly, but you'd be asked about Molly a lot, in a kind of knowing way. People might stand back a bit and see what you had to say. And what these are are kind of refracted images from Joyce's marvellous mind. They're not real. Although the amount of real people in it, we were just discussing this in the green room. The National Librarian, Lister, was rung up by the BBC late in his life. I believe you're a character in Ulysses, and he wrote back and said, Actually, I am not a character in Ulysses. I am myself. Surprise, surprise. That was a very good answer. But I'm just saying, there's nothing sort of standard about the book that you could say this tells us about... Apart from the idea that it opens possibilities for how we see either men or women. I suppose I think what's interesting about the women is that he's interested, at least, in the women that he writes about. But you don't get a lot in male writers now or then. No, it's an amazing generosity of interest. It's not just like they're not there to fulfil various roles. He's searching through them. Well, they're also there. Well, and that's the trouble of Joyce. It is all the things. But you feel like he's searching those characters all the time. They do not exist, pre-exist, and they're laid out. He goes through them, the lines he's trying to find them, find the things about them to understand what. And the questions that they're always asking themselves, you know that he's asking about them. And I think there's something very different about that feel. He doesn't. I don't think he particularly writes women well and whatever that is supposed to mean. I don't know, but I think he is really interested in the inner lives of women, and that is interesting. Well, he allows them to be desirous, which wasn't really common at the time. So, I know I have a special request, which is my favourite female character in this novel. I'm kind of out on my own at this. Well, maybe I'm not on my own in this. Maybe it's all about culture. Oh, I love her too. So, my favourite female character is Mrs Breen, who just, she's my grandmother really. So, I've asked... Where did your granny grow up? Oh, Clam Brassel Street. Oh, I'll bring down the accent a little bit. Did she? Yes. Did she? Yes. It's all gone now, Clam Brassel Street, really. Leopold Bloom is born on Clam Brassel Street, and he isn't real either, but I'm sure your granny was real. She was. Oh, Mr Bloom, how do you do? Oh, how do you do, Mrs Breen? No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for ages. In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily, meily has a position, a position down in Mullingar, you know. Go away, isn't that ground for her? Yes, in a photographer's there, getting on like a house on fire. How are all your charges? All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said. How many has she? No other in sight. You're in black, I see. You have no... No, Mr Bloom said. I've just come from a funeral. Going to crop up all day. Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead when and what did he die of? Turn up like a bad penny. Oh, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation. May as well got her sympathy. Dignum, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly, poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning. You're funerals tomorrow while you're coming through the ride. Sad Lucy, old friends. Mrs Breen's woman's eyes said melancholy. Now, that's quite enough about that. Just quietly. Husband. And your Lord and Master. Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them any hand. Oh, don't be talking, she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's in there now at his law books. Finding out the law of libel. He has me heart scalded. Wait till I show you. Hot muck, turtled vapour, and steam of new baked jam puffs. Roly-poly. Poured out from Harrison's. The heavy noon reek tickled the top of Mr Bloom's gullet. Want to make a good pastry? Butter, best flour, Demerara sugar. They taste it with a hot tea. Or is it from her? I'll put Arabs stood over the grating. Breathing in the fumes. Dead in the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is a penny dinner. Knife and fork, chain to the table. Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hot pin, ought to have a guard on those things. Stick it in a chap's eye and a tram. Rummaging, open, money. Please take one, devils if they lose the sixmans. Raised cane, husband barging. Where's the 10 shillings I gave you on Monday? Are you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled hanker chief, medicine bottle pastile. That was well. What is she? There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you know what he did last night? Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him. Wide in alarm, yet smiling. What, Mr Bloom asked? Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me. Woke me in the night. She said, dream he had a nightmare. Indigis. Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs. Hormys is green. She's great. But it's a moment of great sympathy in the book. It is just lovely. It's such a nice encounter and not a harp on about Dublin, but it really is very Dublin. Yeah, yeah. It's just some amazing stand-out lines, aren't they? I mean, he's a caution to rattlesnakes. I mean, that just bounces off the page, doesn't it? He has me heart scalded. He has me heart scalded. And he said the ace of spades is walking up the stairs. That's a great... Well, on that high note, I think we should open up to some questions. Not about the ace of spades perhaps, but have we got any questions? I'm roving Mike's wandering round. Oh, there we are. Yes. Gosh, I can see the audience now. Who's going to be brave? And ask questions. That's the one over here. Where is the Mike? Here it is. It's just coming behind you. I just wanted to pick up something that you said earlier on about Joyce not writing for himself, not following anyone. And it just made me think... He was trying to write the ultimate realist novel, wasn't he? And people were trying to do that before. I mean, Duda Rowan, mid 1700s, wrote something I think called... This is not a story. So the subject of trying to write realist literature was there. And I just wondered if you think... Joyce was obviously aware of the topic and people striving to try and write this and then running with it himself, or maybe it was just his idea. I mean, do you think that he was... He did quote an antecedent in a French novel whose name escapes me that there was a streaming consciousness novel in French that he had... Dujardin. But Claire is probably best fixed to answer that. I don't know. Dorothy Richardson was supposed to be the first person who wrote stream consciousness, wasn't he? I don't know. She's around the same time, and it's not as convincing. Dujardin is the one who, I think, does some stream of consciousness in French, and it's a little bit earlier. It's kind of a strange thing to want to do, put everything in a book. Yeah. This question about realism... I mean, realism is this huge 19th century genre, isn't it? In a sense, Joyce wants to write the realistic novel, but he also wants to take issue with the form of realism. That's part of what the second half of the novel. I'm not supposed to answer the question. Supposed to be you. I don't know. Have we got a question from our online audience? There's a question here about Dublin, and whether you see Dublin differently because of reading Ulysses. Does it play on your mind? Has it ever played on your mind when you experience the city? Yeah. I walk along by the joist terror quite often with my dog. And I pass Sandy Main Strand on my way here today to the airport, and whether the tide is in or the tide is out. I want to have a Bloomsday celebration where everyone closes their eyes and walks out on the strand, because that's what happens in the first bit of that chapter, in an octable modality of the visibility. Stephen closes his eyes and sees how far he can go. We used to do that drunk on bicycles when we were students. Close your eyes and see how far. So that would be my Bloomsday celebration. I'm going to walk out there. But there are standard landmarks, Finns Hotel, where Norbarlacle worked. The paintwork is still on there on Nassau Street. I don't think of it as often as I think of Oscar Wilde, who's around the corner. I mean, if you're asking. But yeah, quite a lot. But I lived in one of the houses that's mentioned in Ulysses in 13th St Kevin's Parade, which is mentioned in Calypso. It was a guy to whom money was owed for tea called Moses Herzog. In Tom's Gazette, it's actually an Isaac Herzog, if I have it all right. So there was a population in those streets. I lived there in 1985-86. I didn't know anything about it. I think I heard it later and it was kind of boring. I lived in the house in Ulysses. Who cares? But recently it struck me like with a jolt. I was living at a fictional house in an area of Dublin that has completely changed from your granny in Clam Brassel Street. There was a population of Lithuanian, a Jewish Lithuanian population that shifted to America and elsewhere when Ireland got too Catholic for them, among other reasons. I never knew that was there. There it is in Ulysses. It's there because Joyce is in Trieste. He wanted to open up the nationalist conversation. He wanted to make it less Catholic and homogenous. It's there because he went away and he researched it back in. I find that extremely valuable and affecting. To make Dublin more plural. To make it multiple. To light and variety. Yes, less homogenous. It's more like when I'm reading the book to this online person. It's always popping up like the Ovalists until recently. We're still populated by journalists in Aeolists. A lot of it is just right. It gets it right. Wow. Have we got any other questions from the audience? Gone quiet. There's one here and one up there. Sorry, just if we were stuck. I'm doing an abridgement very cautiously and nervously doing an abridgement of Ulysses which is a rather daring thing to do. Something that interests me is the difference between Joyce and Beckett in terms of the Catholic, which is my background, and the Protestant and Anglo-Irish background of Beckett. I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that, on the different sensibilities in terms of... Yes, sorry. Do you want to answer? I mean, I don't know. I suppose the two of them are yoked together by history, but I see them living in completely different houses all the time. I think that I find Beckett is just so scourged, despite not being Catholic, and everything is so mean and wonderful in its own way, but what I love is the total kind of sensual abandon and self-indulgence of Joyce. I suppose I always find it interesting to read about all the time they spent together drinking and being pissed and Beckett transcribing for Joyce and what could have possibly been going on in his head when he was having those experiences and what it was like for him later to share off that influence, having kind of wandered around under the weight of it and found his own kind of meaner, tighter, leaner self. Yeah, I don't know. I was going to say, I saw a Beckett, saw Happy Days in Irish on the Iron Islands a while ago, and I was listening to the Irish as well. I read afterwards there was a few other Irish translations of Beckett. I wondered what was lost or gained by a translation into the language that came before prefigured Beckett's use of English. Actually, I didn't want to say it, but the colonial experience was lost in that translation into Irish. Winnie in Happy Days was not part of an embattled and decaying ascendancy class. She was something much more pious and less affected. So all that kind of pretension was gone. All that sense of brittleness and loss was gone from the character. It was really interesting to see. So I think Beckett's Protestantism was key to his characterisations. I don't know. The rejection of English for writing in, I think is you just could never see Joyce ever being willing to do that. Yes, I don't know enough about them to be honest with you. No, I don't know that much either, but I'm here and someone's asked. No, but I think you do. I think you do know more than I. I think Joyce is so wedded to the richness of language, whereas Beckett and to the Irishness of his language, of his English, whereas Beckett goes to such lengths to get rid of the Irishness, to get free of hiberno kind of the pressure of that language, which has surrounded him, and you see it in the early, not very good writing. You can see why it's an aesthetic choice to set himself out in an empty space, whereas Joyce is always, like his feet are always on the ground, digging into the ground, growing into the ground and coming out of the ground, whereas Beckett tries to create a vacuum around himself and around his language. I can't even imagine Joyce attempting that. All the things that he attempts, he never does that. I was on the brink of a theory there, that Joyce is polyphonic and Beckett was a single note, but actually there's a lot of polyphony in Beckett as well. Yeah, there is, but there is the willful disjoint between what he comes out of and what he becomes, whereas Joyce drags Ireland with him everywhere he goes. It does actually come down to that thing to tell writing students that either you're going to write more, more, more, or less, less and less. There's only two kinds of writers. There's only two kinds, maximalists and minimalists, that if you sit at the desk long enough, you'll either have 500 pages or five. You start at the same 20. So they had perhaps a different kind of circumference. These are large questions. Yeah, they certainly are. Apparently verbatim, I think. Yeah, I think he upped it a bit. Yeah, I think he made them prettier. But he couldn't see them, of course, at the fall. Yeah, the Beckett text we kind of need, which I haven't read for about 30 years, is all that fall. That's got a fantastic joke about the Irish language, hasn't it? Beckett couldn't speak Irish. I know, but doesn't he say something? Nothing Joyce could either. No, no. I should have fucked them. Who were they at all? I mean, yes. There was another question in the middle here. Yeah, I'm sorry to point. I got the feeling that for the part of Ireland I'm from, which is not Dublin, that he'd be considered a bit of an Egypt. And that may reflect on why many people don't find it easy to keep going. And the reason for that is if you look at the collateral damage from, for example, I don't think he ever bought a drink with his own money. The Nora, the Lucia, the daughter, the son, all seem to suffer significant damage from being related to him. Even his grandson, I think, was a bit of an Egypt when it came to copyright and so on. So I wonder what either people think, would be like to be related to him? To be related to him. Wow. What would it be like to be related to James Joyce? Welty, these days. Yeah, that's not an easy one, is it? I don't think he was personally cruel. No, I mean, I think he was a very doting, loving father. I think he lived a very chaotic life because of his financial circumstances and because of his marital situation. And there were lots of reasons that his children had very chaotic upbringings and moving around. But by all accounts, he was very doting and particularly of his daughter and went to tremendous lengths to take care of her when she started to descend into very serious mental illness and was very broken by that experience of what happened to her and did everything that he could, including in list young who had insulted him to help her, which, as any writer will tell you, if someone insults your writing, that is a very hard thing to overcome to ask that person for help, and he did. So I think whatever went on with the grandson, there's plenty of people who live very happily off the labors of forebears and that is a whole other Egypt problem. Just his father wasn't any good either. So it started before Joyce's time. But I remember meeting one of the nephews and saying, oh, my granny worked with your auntie. And he said, oh, that was so-and-so. The look on his face was one of great difficulty. And he could manage the whole James Joyce's famous writer thing, but that whole family went through so much in terms of... And it's actually in Ulysses in terms of Simon Teddellus not feeding his children, basically. Leopold Bloom seized them on the street and Stephen is absolutely so angry with his father because of all of that. So I don't think Joyce was the monster. I think Simon was the monster. It was the creative monster. Except he wasn't really all that creative. He came out of a very chaotic life where they were constantly one step away from getting put out of space. Everybody was right around it the whole time. And all the mad stuff. So at least Joyce wrote a good book. At least he made something out of it because that's a story that a million people can tell in a million countries around the world for generations is the story of chaotic family life. But he made something. And those that came after him profited, although they didn't make anything. So, you know, I... And then, you know, the whole monster reputation of him personally, but the book had a monstrous reputation after it. That was also very difficult for everyone. That perhaps into the next generation that it brought in a lot of money, but it was the dirtiest book in the world, you know, blah, blah, blah. And Ireland only pretended to like it. Or only pretended. Nobody read it or talked about the... When nobody ever talks about the contents of your book in Ireland, do they? They just talk about how, you know, that it was in the shop. Or... It was well reviewed. Or, you know what I mean? They wouldn't say, fuck, page 63. What were you thinking? What were you thinking? There is a kind of a privacy about between the covers. And I think that Joyce started that, actually. That she wouldn't open the page. You'd get into it. Conversationally. Well, I think we've kept our audience some time. Are there any pressing questions coming in online that you've... Well, just one more, which was Joyce convinced of his own greatness. I mean, did he have assumed that we would have been talking about it 100 years later? Would that have been his natural assumption? There are so many writers who presume on their greatness. But he was the only one who was right. Just intersected, you know, with the thousand writers at the time who thought we'd be talking about it. He was right. The rest of them were wrong. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they all probably thought they would be. But he was, yeah. He got it right. I hope yours are. I've talked about it 100 years as well. Wow. He too. Well, I'm going to wrap this up. And I want to go back, not to Ulysses, but to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and to some of those amazing statements at the end of that novel where Stephen talks about, in a kind of pretentious and fairly various way about being a writer. A few phrases that come back. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall try to express myself as I am. And that is such a kind of, however you see it, it's such an interesting and resonant idea. And then in conversation with the Dean of Studies, they have this very vexed conversation about the English Dean of Studies, about language and cultural nationalism and what it means to be a male writer. And he says, you know, the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words, home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine, and so on. And then he says, my soul frets in the shadow of his language. And we've had the word frets. You know, pain that was not yet the pain of love fret at his human heart. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. Well, I'm delighted that neither of you are fretting in the shadow of Joyce's language, but actually luxuriating. And on that note, I want to thank both of you for being so generous and for reading. And I'm going to ask Eamor to read us out. I've just got a section from a girl that's a half-worn thing here. I'm just going to read from the very end. I'm the sea, the sea crimson sometimes like fire, and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees at the Alameda Gardens. Yes. And all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jesamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltas a girl where I was a flower of the mountain. Yes. When I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used, or shall I wear a red? Yes. And how he kissed me under the Moorish wall. And I thought, well, as well, him as another. And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes. And then he asked me, would I, yes, to say yes, my mountain flower. And first I put my arms around him, yes, and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume, yes. And his heart was going like mad, and yes, I said, yes, I will, yes.