 Welcome back to the Shore Theatre for the latest exciting instalment in the Irish Writers weekend this Sunday afternoon. I will look after events programmes at the library, the festival is being presented in association with the International Festival for Literature in Galway, the Sporting Cultural Island, the Irish Embassy in London and the Doraar Collection hotels. So, y dyna'r seisio'n chifiddeli ar ddegwydau ar gweithio'r llai, gwymae, mae'r llai a'r llai yn gwneud y defnyddio i'r defnyddio'r llai o'r amser i gael James Joyce. Gweithio'r llai, gan ymweld i'r llai o'r eu lleol, mae'r llai'r lleol yn gwybod i'r llai o'r llan fyddion. A erbyn. Felly, mae'n ddiddorol, mae'r llai yn gweithio'r panol. Mae'n gweithio'r panol a'r llai yn hynod i miol Llefyrtyn, Allan hyn yw'r cyflym ac ysteadfyniad, yr ëIrsh Times, ëFanatial Timesí, ëGardiní a ndryf, a'r hyn yw'r ysgoliamhiedd yma cyflogwyddo. A'r anodd yma yn ymwiel yn ymdwiel y mae'r oedd yn gwaith ar y myrdd y gwaith o'r hyn o bau. Yn gyflwyno'r bought. Yn ddiddorol am y cyfeysi nhw,yddech chi'n bwyl ffwllt ac yn ymddych chi'n gwelwch yrthwynt yn gyfr doświadwyd, yma, y nesaf rhywun oedd yma. I'm delighted to be here today with our distinguished guests and Enright needs no introduction, having been honoured with a lifetime achievement award this week at the Irish Book Awards. She's the author of seven novels, as well as a Sunday Times bestselling memoir about parenting called Making Babies, as well as numerous short stories and of course all of her excellent pieces that you will have seen. She was the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction in 2015 and on top of her own amazing work which includes the Booker winning the Gathering, she is a big promoter of other Irish writers for which we're grateful. Nula O'Connor also won an Irish Book Award this week for the best short story of the year for this small giddy life. She is the author of Nora, which is an excellent historical fictionalized biography of Nora Barnacle, which I highly recommend you buy if you haven't, you'll be able to buy that after the session. She's published four other novels as well as collections of short fiction and poetry and was also the curator of Love Says Bloom at the Mali earlier this year. Paula Doon, who's being beamed in from the States, is also a national treasure. He teaches at Princeton and is the author of 14 full length collections of poetry, most recently Howdy Skelp in 2021, Frolick and Detour in 2019, and 1000 Things Worth Knowing, some of which we hope he'll share with us today. His poetry has been awarded the TS Eliot Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the TLS called him the most significant English language poet born since the Second World War. Perhaps he prefers the Irish Post's comparison to The Beatles, having edited Paul McCartney's books of lyrics. He's also along with his wife, Jean-Hanthe Corlitz, the author and adapter of The Dead for a Stage, so we'll be hearing more about that. Thank you to all of you for being here with us today. Before we get into the crux of the debate as to whether or not we've had too much choice, especially after this year, I do think it's important that we recognize why it is that we're still talking about this novel 100 years on, and you had written about how you discovered Ulysses at 14 and you compared it to mainlining drugs. I haven't ever mainlined drugs, so I want to make that clear here. But you know that title, Too Much Choice, people said it to him at the time that too muchness is part of his mode. So his brother said there was just too much of Ulysses, and then of course everyone thought there was too much of Finnegan's Wake. So everyone's been shouting too much for over a century now at choice, and maximizing is part of what he does. But yes, no, I bought my copy of Ulysses in Kinsale in the bookshop there in 1977 when I was 14, and I think I did it to attract young men. I thought that carrying a book around while hostileing would make me look interesting and mysterious. I find it repels young men. It has the opposite effect for me. Oh no, the only cosmetic surgery I need is a small frontal lobotomy, and that would bring them in. I realised later in life. About 14 years still hope. But at 14 I still thought this was the way forward, in the way that you'd stand in front of a painting in the gallery feeling that the next, anyway, it didn't really work. I did read, at least, not all the book at 14, but I read, I'd say three or four sections before I brought it back home. I had a big fight with my mother, which probably was incidentally about Ulysses, when she told me to put it away from when I was older to read it when I was older. When did you pop your Ulysses cherry? Well, I suppose it's one of those books that when you're interested in Irish writers, you're kind of always reading, and obviously the sensual joys of Penelope precedes the book, you know, like a big waving banner, and so I had read Penelope over and over and adored it before I read Ulysses from start to finish. And because I was having trouble getting past certain bits of it, I thought the best way to do this is to do it with a group. So I joined up to one of those groups where there's a facilitator, and there were 25 of us, some of whom have read the book in depth before, and we would meet once a week and discuss the book. And it was a brilliant way to do it because so many people in the group already had knowledge, so you weren't just reading the book, you were learning about the book, the culture of the book, the history of its publication. So that was a brilliant way into it for me. That's how I came to it as well. So you didn't read it in school then? No, I studied Irish in college, not English, so I didn't get to it yet. Paul, do you remember your first experience as a young person with Ulysses? Well, I've read it or tried to read it as a student. I did not read it as a teenager. I tried to read it, I think, as the most accurate description when I was at university, which was Queen's University, Belfast. And like many as a one, I think there was one particular phrase that stopped me in my tracks. It was, of course, Jeshel, which of course is an Irish word, a point at which it does fall under the rubric of Gaelic literature, never mind literature in English. Jeshel meaning going in a good direction, going in the direction of the sun, going clockwise, which is the first word of the oxen of the sun chapter. No, it was the sentence, an ineluctable modality of the visible. And that's a sentence with which I think many people stop and indeed funder. And when I taught it once, because I did have the hootspan, to teach it once, I actually encouraged my students when they came on that particular chapter to skip it, to go to the next one and just keep on going. Because I know that's horrendous, that's heretical perhaps, but it is a way, and then come back to it, and then come back to it. Because there is a sense of being overwhelmed by it, just to go back to the rubric of too much. There is a sense of being overwhelmed by it, which I think actually is very easily overcome. And it's nothing compared to Finnegan's Wake, the aforementioned, which I think is actually truly too much. Can I get a show of hands of how many people have read Finnegan's Wake? Oh wow, not bad. Impressive. So we all have to go home now. Yes, that's next year's project. I think it's hard to judge what reading Finnegan's Wake would mean, Julie. I mean, I describe myself as having read it, but what I mean by that is that I took a, I made my way from word to word through it. And that is a very particular experience, and I think to reread the same four words half an hour later would be a different experience. So I'm not sure if there is such a phenomenon actually, such a concept as having read Finnegan's Wake, but that's for another day perhaps. I used to read it before exams. I'd read a page maybe of Finnegan's Wake and feel enormously sort of clever. Wow. It's like spinach, Popeye spinach, you know, and you go in and you just write, you know, so in my finals in Trinity I'd go in and take just, I don't know, a few lines. I was going to say mainlining Finnegan's Wake. Yeah, it makes everything go pop on ffizz, you know. Synapses you didn't know you had start to kind of, it's very galvanizing, I think. Interesting. I'll have to try it. And I think, you know, Anne, you've said that Ulysses is clearly part of the epigenetics, or Joyce is part of the epigenetics of Irish writers. And I think it's true even outside of Ireland. Rifka Gaugin writes that she does not call herself a big Joyce fan, but still, every attention paid to the quotidian seems to link back to him as does every highly elusive and densely detailed creation, every lounging in the texture of language, every joke, every game, every difficulty, and every epiphany. Even the video game Minecraft has something Joyceian about it. So, for each of you, how would you say that Joyce has influenced you, kind of broadly speaking, in terms of the possibilities that he... Yeah, I think epigenetic is a good choice of word because it's almost like Joyce provided the environment, you know, that altered your progress. So, for me, it wasn't a head-to-head, mano-a-mano person-to-person encounter. I didn't meet the writer and tussle with the writer or love the writer or be a fan of the writer. It wasn't a dyadic experience. It was being in an environment. I'm not saying it very well, but it was, you know, when people confront Joyce, that doesn't mean anything to me. It's just you read them, you read the pages, you read the words, okay? So, I say that asking a writer what influence Joyce had is like asking a fish what they think about the water. It was just the place where you swam. And also, in the question of influence, there are influences that happen before awareness. I had no sense of myself as a future writer when I started reading in Joyce. And I read, studied portrait when I was 17 and still had no sense of myself that this is something I could take and use and be influenced by. So, it happened too early for me to be properly anything other than a kind of intervention rather than an influence. But yet you describe the process as sort of similar, I think you could call it strenuous dreaming. So, reading Joyce is like writing. You find some of the same. It is. You sink into some very strange state of flow when you're reading Joyce making sense and not making sense at the same time. And it can be very strenuous. And the other thing it reminds me of is deep into an argument when you're really getting close to something and it can be extremely tiring. That same dreamy fatigue sets in when I read particularly the third section, ineluctable modality of the visible, the Proteus section of Ulysses. It's very close to tiring dreaming. That's a great analogy. Nula, you had written a fictionalised biography before of Emily Dickinson. What was it about Nora's story that you felt needed retelling? Oh, well, I mean, there's Maddox's excellent biography and there's Pat Murphy's excellent film which brought us up just to their time in Trieste. But I had read Maddox when I was a teenager and loved it and then I moved to Galway in my mid-twenties. And every year I would go to the Bloomsday celebration at the Nora Barnacle house, which is actually our mother's house. A little tiny museum now, just a two room house. So I was very aware of her. I had adapted a cat and called her Nora Barnacle. She's this lovely, proud, fearsome cat. And I was writing these biographical fictions about Emily Dickinson, as you say, a woman called Belle Bilton. Other short stories about Elizabeth Bishop and Frida Kahlo and different people. And it's just like the swirl of things happens whereby you end up with a subject to go forward with. So I was studying Italian by night in NUI and, you know, I had adopted the cat and I was just thinking about, I had to write an essay actually about their time in Trieste. Well, about Joyce's friendship with Italo Svevo, the Italian writer. And all the time I was doing the research, all I could think about was what did Nora feel about all of this? How did she feel married to this man who adored her, was a genius, was also a drunk, was irresponsible but loving, was generous but nervy around people. What was it like to be married to him? And I suddenly had my next subject. So I wrote a short story first, which sometimes is the way things happen for me. I write something smaller and then realise I'm not finished with this. I'm going to go forward and was delighted to find I was writing a novel because that's the next two years sorted in a sense once you begin. I always say, oh shit, I'm writing a novel. There's an element of that too. Because you know you're climbing that mountain. Paul, your poetry has been described as very elusive and has some of those joisting qualities. Would you call him a direct influence or more like Anne, do you think that it was an opening of the spirit? Well, I agree with Anne about trying to describe his influence, being somewhat akin to a fish describing water. However, I suppose we do have to try to be circumspect as fish. What is it about him? The notion of there being too much, of course, has been raised. I think the great thing about him is despite his own impulse to go further and further. As we know, his manuscripts, his typescripts slash manuscripts are all about addition, a cruel, a creation, putting more stuff in. Most writers, or at least I suspect many writers, are about cutting back. Of course, his great follower, I suppose, Samuel Beckett, reacted against him in precisely that way of pairing everything back to the bone. Joyce's impulse is to add, but what's fascinating about that to me is that as he adds, and why he adds, and because he adds, he somehow becomes equal to our being here. And his capacity to render, it render seems a crude word, because one's not conscious of him rendering anything, his capacity to give us the world in a slightly altered way. I mean, it's a cliché, but I think it's a truism, but I think it's true. He gives us a world that's recognizable, but not quite a world that we are seeing as if for the first time. And so he has a marvelous capacity to rinse his own eye and our own. And I think that actually is something that many writers learned from. And in a strange way, one would expect those of us who are primarily interested in writing verses to look more to WB Yeats, say, in the Irish context. But I think on balance, while I do look to Yeats, I find myself looking even more to Joyce because when it comes to Yeats, I have a sense in my innocence or perhaps arrogance of how it's done. I actually have a pretty good sense of how Yeats did it from case to case. I find it much more difficult to figure out how Joyce did it, much more mysterious, much more illusive and much more interesting. Sorry, is it a particular thing that he did? Because he did so many different things, you know? So he could figure out Dubliners, but where you find the problem may be where your problem is. Well, you know, to figure out Dubliners would be, would in itself be a major achievement. I mean, one of the extraordinary things about Dubliners is that it seems for the most part, if we think of it as a single piece, which is not, there's shifts and tone and style in it, but it's somewhat consistent. I mean, as we were hearing earlier on, I had the privilege, the task of trying to render the dead as an immersive piece, a piece of immersive theatre. And one of the things that I discovered, if I didn't already know it, was just how, despite its apparent immediacy, it's huge complexity and how virtually every word in it resonates in a way actually that's perhaps not so obvious as it might be with Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses, but actually resonates too. So I think what I'm interested in is capacity to be available and to be doing more than one thing at a time. Now, there's no particular desirability in that, but it just happens to be something I'm interested in myself, and so I looked in for that, among other things. Thank you. Ann, you wrote earlier this year about Joyce's influence that it was liberating for women but a burden for men. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about that. Yeah, but that's just a kind of social observation over the years when I hear one or other writer say that it's hard to write in the shadow of Joyce, and I began to realise that they were usually men who are saying this. And also in response to questions about influence, as though, which seemed admonitory or slightly authoritarian, how dare you be influenced by somebody as great as, you know, that seemed to posit a kind of inheritance, and Ireland is terrible at doing that. Who's wearing the mantle is a big Irish question, you know. And I rather thought you could do what you liked with or despite Joyce. And then I realised after the fact that people like Edna O'Brien, Nula, many, Ewa McBride, really took their kind of courage from Joyce's work, not just because he talked about sex, but because of the way he worked language was so kind of profoundly anti-patriarchal, I think, in the early season in particular. And that, by liberating the sentence, by, you know, the libidinal rush of his, of Penelope, for example, the absence of punctuation or whatever, by going under the skin with Bloom and others, that was all facilitatory for women's fiction. For a while I said that Joyce was a woman, you know, he wrote domestic fiction in which nothing much happened, there were relationships and it was full of small details, just like women did. And he was interested in the insides of people's heads, even when it wasn't all that traumatic. So, yes, I mean, he has just been a force for great, you know, his presence has facilitated great work, I think, since then. It's interesting you say that about women's fiction because Virginia Woolf had said that as well, that women would have to kind of explode the narrative structure of the Victorian novel in order to write. Yeah, and it bases questions of what happens when you put a sentence together, what are you limiting, what are you putting together, what are you fixing there on the page? And by the way he unfixed everything and unloosed everything, it is very empowering for both the reader, I think, and subsequent writers. Sure, with much more of a focus on words rather than sentences. Yeah, he rocks a good sentence, but yes, yes, yes. And Nula, I know one of your inspirations was the letters, which you wrote about for the Paris review and quite interestingly, you know, of course we don't have Nora's side of the lewd letters, the filthy letters I think you called them. And his Joyce's side is still under copyright, so you had to use your imagination for what that would have been like. Do you think that there is no Joyce without Nora? Is she amused so much that he wouldn't have been able to write kind of the sex scenes that he did, for example, without her in his life? Yeah, and not so much even the mudes, even though he did pick her brains and her stories and used them in the work famously, but, you know, writers have to be facilitated and Nora was a great facilitator. She looked after his health and his home life in order that he could write. So she did used to drag him home from bistros at night or send other people out to drag him home so that he could write because he was teaching English by day a lot of the time and had the care of the family in that way. But if he didn't, if he drank to much, he didn't have time to write and she needed to make sure that he would have that time. To go back to the influence thing, Ann and I are both from Dublin and Joyce's language is our language. And that language hadn't changed or evolved much by the time it came around to us to write and be writers. But when you read someone like Joyce as a dub and you hear your own language on the page, it just seems very natural and a very normal thing to you. And the stories are very recognizable as well. Like it's astonishing really when you think about Donner's that he wrote these in his late teens, early twenties and how deep they are and how pinpoint accurate they are on the Irish psyche if there is such a thing. All the sorrow and the shame that he puts in those books. But that was because there were things he knew he was Joyce wrote a lot about really about poverty and money and class and all of that comes out in the stories. That's what all of those stories are about. They're about levels and levels. And I think only someone who has known genuine poverty and the shame of the father basically drinking away all of their money and moving them by night with bailiffs at the door. Doing these midnight flits where they had to take every little thing they owned and move as a family and how angry the Joyce children were with their father about this and all of that comes out in the work. So I think it was a very still to us. I was born in 1970, you know, still to us it was a very recognizable Dublin, I suppose. And it feels like you're reading about people that you know. And I think that can be useful like when I would read Brendan Behan as well. I found the same thing as a teenager. You know that here's my language. Here's my people. I know where I am with these people. And that's why, you know, the thing about influence being there, but yet not being there. It's just it's sort of a natural part of your reading. You know, you're just absorbing it in and realizing by that, I'm allowed right this stuff. I'm allowed right about anything, the body, the mind, whatever, you know, ordinary life. And do you think for the young writers kind of just coming coming up now, do you think it's still recognizable Dublin or have we moved too far away from the. No, I mean. Yeah, no, but the language is it they're like it's like an artifact in the book. It's like a found object. Some of those those sentences, you know, I mean, you can literally hear it as you walk around the streets or if you're dead, you know, move up in the bed says but Mulligan. I just getting into the sea at the 40 foot. And, you know, that's what Irish men say. They say it in the bar. They say it in traffic. Move up there in the bed. And I never noticed it until I was reading it. I thought, oh, yeah, God, that's exactly it. You just reclaimed these these sentences. Also that kind of mock heroic. The kind of feckier way of talking is sort of posturing that that the men particularly in Ulysses to that's still very current and accurate to a certain style, certain social style that we still. And he drew from his father was from Cork. He drew from him a lot. And he drew from Nora, who was from Galway. So he says this lovely amalgam of Irish phrases going through the thing that sound very natural to an Irish ear. It's funny when you read it with a group and some of the people are not Irish. They don't always get, you know, the phrases like that, like move up in the bed and stuff words to Irish people. They sound very natural and that's that's another beauty of reading Ulysses and Joyce in general that you sort of have an extra in as an Irish person. Because it's the language of your people in a sense. Sure. And Paul, yesterday we were talking about there was a panel on kind of contemporary Ireland and how much more diverse it is. And interestingly, Emily Pine was saying how, you know, in the past decade with gay rights, abortion rights, there's been kind of a flowering of, you know, progressive thought or just a recognition of what the population thought. Sitting as you are from the States having watched the, you know, terribly fast decline of same progressiveness. How do you kind of feel about, you know, you've been abroad from since 1987? What's your relationship to Dublin and the language of Dublin? Well, sorry, there's several things happening there. Let me see. Sorry. Okay, let's take Dublin. You know, and one of the things about Joyce's Dublin and the contemporary Dublin is that actually, in many ways, not much has changed, certainly around the city centre and that one can still steer through the city using Ulysses as a bidicur, as a guide. And, you know, and there are moments, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is looking up on from Nassau Street, is it, and seeing Wins Hotel. It's not Nassau Street. What is it? Fins Hotel on Nassau Street. Fins Hotel on Nassau Street. I always hesitate about Nassau, because I live at work in Princeton and we have our own Nassau named after his fellow Prince William. So actually, so, you know, and he was so, as you know, he was such a stickler for detail, for accuracy, writing to, was it one of his aunts? And Josephine. And Josephine about, you know, getting the details right as to whether or not an able-bodied man, quote unquote, would be able to leap over the railings and down into the area at Seven Eccles Strait or whatever it was. Well, I mean, for most of us, accuracy is a great thing, but at the end of the day, really, you know, who cares about that kind of detail? It's for that reason, among others, and, you know, the fidelity to the fabric of the streets, that the specificity of that, that he continues to give us a Dublin that's recognisable, in addition to which, of course, the continuing recognition of the characters. Who are there, and, you know, we do recognise ourselves in those characters. These are the changes in Ireland. Those have been huge, needless to say. The moment that I left in 1987 was, I think it would be fair to say, a somewhat benighted place. We were just coming out of, you know, the Carey Babies case, for example. The church still had, pardon my French, a stranglehold on the place. And that has changed so dramatically. And Ireland is now one of the most progressive countries in the world, and one of the most far-seeing countries in the world, and it's absolutely thrilling to see what has happened there. And so, and I think Joyce would be thrilled to see what has happened there in terms of diversity in every respect. I mean, I think that's what one of the things he was trying to do in Ulysses was to offer an Ireland that was a little unlikely actually in its diversity. In choosing the main character, Leopold Bloom, as his Irishman, and unlikely Irishman in some ways. But in any case, so, but I can see you're asking me to comment on the state of America. That was, I think, the third component of the question. That was Subpoint 18. OK. Now, I suppose what I meant was, because Joyce was writing about Dublin from a place of exile as well, and yet, you know, got it so right. And you've been gone for such an important chunk of Irish history. And I mean, I'm myself stunned. Can I make a small suggestion that Joyce wrote before Ireland closed down to the extent it did. He wrote it at a time of hopefulness and of, you know, when mixtures and varieties were still possible before it turned into a kind of Catholic state. OK. So, so. Well, yes, and yes, and no, sis Paul. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, he continued to, I mean, one of the nets by which he needed to fly was the Catholic Church. So he was, he had that sort of thought. And I would, I think that Joyce would be thrilled, as so many of us are, to see the Catholic Church on the run as it should properly be. In fact, they should be drummed out of the country. On the slow trot. At a fast pace. At a fast pace. At any case. Terrific. Thank you. That was a conversation stopper of my opponent. So to play devil's advocate, I think everybody on the stage here would agree that you cannot have too much Joyce, however, since it's our topic today and as we're kind of struggling towards the end of the centenary year. Martin Doyle, the Irish Times said to me, as much as he appreciates the influence, continuing influence of Joyce, he would forgo the opportunity to cover yet another Bloomsday in order to highlight a neglected writer such as Maeve Brennan. And you've written a lot about kind of neglected writers, including Maeve and your laureate writings. Do you think that that holds water by talking about Joyce? Is there some way? Well, there's a difference between the book and what we do with the book, you know? So I suffered Bloomsdays when I was younger and thought it was all a great nonsense. And I felt like a real slightly horrible mouse in Disneyland looking at the parade, Mickey Mouse being paraded down. I was like, I'm a writer. What you're doing here isn't, you know, is something much more plastic or whatever. But, I mean, as I grow older and I visit more places and I realise we celebrate something, my youthful contempt was really badly misplaced to look at everybody in their hats and their long dresses and their boaters and all the rest of it and think that they hadn't read the book, which is in fact not the case. I mean, everybody is very famously not able to finish, not finishing Ulysses is a great subject of conversation, but actually so many people really have finished Ulysses and many here have finished Finnegan's Wake. I mean, it can't be game said. It's a uniquely sort of great bit of our streetscape now. So I go and eat kidneys with the best of them. And I think it raises all boats, doesn't it? I mean, I think the reveling in Joyce actually, I like to think that helps everyone, including those of us who are still knocking around and that, you know, that something of that engagement with Joyce might one day, you know, carry over to a little engagement at least. With other writers, and I'm pretty sure it does. And so, I mean, a country in which there is such regard for at least that writer is a country with which I'm proud to be associated, I have to say. But also sometimes when I'm teaching younger people now in UCD, and there is a kind of impulse to close texts down. Okay. And I have to remind them that they are studying at the university that produced James Joyce, and that is not just a kind of asking them to up their game. It's also saying everything is allowed, and this space must be kept free and open, and to close it down in some way would be to do your own talent at a service, you know. I think as well that there is a greater conversation now about how books are made and how Ulysses was made with the aid of four very strong women. Well, five, Beech, Weaver, Anderson Heap and Nora. And that without those five women, Ulysses wouldn't exist, because they were the people who supported him, paid for his lifestyle and ultimately published his book at great risk. You know, a special edition weighing three and a half pounds, seven hundred and sixty pages, an absolutely bonkers project for Sylvia Beech to take on. But she liked Joyce so much as a person. She did take it on. Why did they blade? He's like him so much. I don't know. He was very sort of introverted and clammy handshake and sort of quiet, and maybe they just wanted to mother him. He definitely wanted Nora to mother him. He said it. He said I want to climb into your womb, you know. That's how much he needed and wanted her care. He was quite exploited of, wasn't he really as well? Oh, he was. He was an awful user, like. He had a certain type of personality, but I think we concentrate a lot on Joyce's, the negative aspects of Joyce, and I love to celebrate the good aspects of him too, you know, and also these five women who, without whom it was never going to exist. Thanks. And so you teach Ulysses still? No, that's my creative writing students. So I would dream of teaching Ulysses. Because we were talking in the green room about whether or not one can look at it with a contemporary gaze, and you were saying that you think it stands up to, you know, for example. Yeah, I mean, I really do. I have been reading it every five or 10 years. I had a gap there of maybe 20 years. I came back to it after 20 years to read it again in preparation for the centenary. And it just gives and gives. Ulysses just is an absolutely endlessly generous book. It gives you your city back fresh and new each time. It gives you the map again and again. And it is the kind of book that I read as a measure of my own growth, you know. So it's a kind of more relationship than a book for me at this stage. And what would you say has evolved in terms of your own reading of it? Was it more sympathetic? Actually, when I read it as a student, I didn't use guide books and all the rest of it, so I read it kind of properly this time. You know, looking it up and doing it properly. I didn't think Ulysses wanted me to read it properly before. But I thought. And I was very interested in the figures of the women and in the elements of fantasy in the Penelope section and elements of projection in the Karate McDowell section. But I was also, as Nula points out, this time around, I was really interested in the money. Because when you read as a young person, you don't think money matters, but later you see all the debts and the small debt, you know, and the figure of the father. The starving girls and everything and the money and the shame of that poverty is really striking. Paul, have you read it recently? Have you gone back to it? Do you go back to it regularly? Yes, I did actually. I read it a couple of years ago. I do go back to it regularly. I think we don't have to choose, of course, but I think it's probably my single favourite book. I mean, this has been touched on already, but all human life is there. Was it the news of the world that they used to say that about? One of those English newspapers, remember? Yes. Was it the news of the world? All human life is there. The audience says yes. It's a while ago. I don't even know if the news of the world exists anymore, but... Sorry, my hamster. So we've been celebrating the book for the centenary, but you guys write short stories, and of course you wrote the introduction to the anthology of Irish short stories. Paul, you have described the debt as, I think, the greatest short story ever written, and also everything is there. So in terms of a cruel, although it's a long short story, it's kind of novella-sized, it's still much shorter, of course, than Ulysses. What do you think do we still see in terms of his... What did he offer the short story? It's really hard for me to answer that, because when I, as Mule said, reading those stories, I read Eveline when I was in my teens, and to me it was... I thought it was a piece of contemporary fiction. I just hadn't... I just didn't put it back in the day. It was so like the lives of my aunts in Redbrick, Fibsborough, and now... I can't read the dead without crying. It's one of the only things that makes me cry every time, so I read the dead in order to have a little week. So that is beyond criticism, isn't it? That's a completely useless thing to say to an audience. It's just no good at all. Or I watch the film, the John Huston film of the dead of my mother, and those are all the actors, and she says they're all dead now. We watch, yes, and they know I'm nearly all dead. It's just beautiful, beautiful work. It's very modern, as you say. I can't even say. It's just too close to my heart, actually, clearly. How about you, Paul, having adapted it? First of all, I remember when I read Dubliners first, which again would have been probably at university, I think. I couldn't quite understand, because I really didn't have a sense of the history of the short story in English. And I couldn't quite understand why these stories seemed so groundbreaking, so revolutionary, so unlike anything else. Of course, he is drawing on other sources, but it's, and one has a sense that he might be influenced by Ipsen, Boposon, whoever. And it's still hard to figure out what is so revolutionary about them in their ordinariness, their seeming lack of concern for regard for plot, for example, though there's plenty going on. Stories in which, in many ways, not all that much happens. So there is something quite mysterious about them even now to me. I don't know if I can really answer that question that I had 50 years ago, which is kind of pathetic. Or magical. He was writing the dead in 1906, 1907 when they were living in Rome. He was working in a bank. I put a scene into my novel where he and Nora are quite hungry because they just had pasta for dinner that Christmas day. So the dead has one of the most beautiful food scenes in all of Irish literature, all of literature, never mind Irish literature. And so I have them hungry and deciding what the ants would have had on the table, the two sisters, the Morkans. And so they're thinking of all this lovely food. And it was such a joy to write because it is one of my favourite stories too. And just to draw on what I know of the story and make a sort of a believable scene about it. Fascinating. He wanted to write about Irish hospitality. He realised the book didn't contain a story about hospitality. And so this was it. Wow. So just before I take it to audience questions, in that introduction to the anthology of short stories, you mentioned the oral tradition. And you've also said that you don't have to read the whole thing, but if you want to enjoy it in bits that you recommend listening. Ah, yeah. And I still say that at every Joyce event, which this will be the last, I think. Because there's too much Joyce. But there is a click away is the 1982 RTE players recording. And if you get jammed up in Joyce, which you can, sometimes your brain seizes up and judders to a halt and you close the book, if you want a paced companion, then the audio is a wonderful way to go. And it's the 1982 RTE players. So listen as you read. And it actually takes, rinses out some of the thrill of not knowing what's happening because it grounds it that little bit more. He said, oh, OK. That's just going on the chamber pot. OK. And yes, it's not as alarming as we thought, you know, or whatever. It's not as, yeah. So so if you're interested in finding out what the actions are behind behind the work, then that's a very nice, pacy way of doing it. Beautiful. I listen to it for comfort. It's like a comfort listen. Wow. Because the actors love it. It means the theatricality. I mean, they loved reading it. And again, none of these actors had PhDs. It really shows you how in the grain of ordinary life the book is that an actor can seize on that kind of and make great play with it and be revelatory in their reading of it. So we think of it as somehow inaccessible because there's so much of it. But actually, if you take it gently as it goes, it does. It does what it's not. It's not formidable at all. And Paul, did you find the same with your actors? I did actually. And just to go back to that RTE production, which is extraordinary. You know, we're used to thinking that Finnegan's work might best, might most usefully be thought of as an oral or oral experience. But I do think the same is true of Ulysses and possibly possibly even the stories in Dubliners, including the dead. Because when it's on its feet, as they say, and when we'll actually, you know, seize a representation of the party, meal, speech at the meal, it does somehow. It is most itself, I think, somehow. Yeah, so the orality, the orality, the ear as much as the eye or perhaps even more. Excellent. Thank you. Are there any questions in the audience? We've got mics. There's one here. Hello. I think all four of you have talked about the familiarity, in some sense, of Ulysses in relation to Dublin. In other words, you can use it as an A to Z, you can recognise the phrase geology. Does that mean for us poor people who were not brought up in Dublin and lived the other side that we are actually missing more than your average Ari Shreeder might be? Or you've been given more. Yeah, possibly that too, but if you have the time to figure it out, I suppose. Well, that's probably nuance in it that might go past you, but I mean, there's a lot that might go past you in Ulysses. No, I wouldn't worry about it. We can figure out what move over in the bad or move up in the bad means. I mean, we go towards it. And also, I'm reminded of that poem by W. H. Alden. It's a series of poems called Shorts, and one of them has to do with a valley cheese, as he describes it. A cheese from some valley in France or Switzerland that is absolutely redolent of its terroir, as we say in Ireland nowadays. The specificity of its place, the move up in the badness office, it's precisely for the combination of water, grass, whatever, limestone that has gone through a cow or a sheep or whatever it is to make that cheese. That allows it to be prized beyond its valley. And the same, I think some version of that is true of Ulysses also. We may have some inside track along here and there, but the truth is that it's a little bit like David Lean's film of Ryan's daughter, where someone complained about the fact that Robert Mitcham was it, would never really sound like an Irishman or be accepted as an Irishman to which the feeling was well actually who cares. The Irish film going audience, however large it might be, is a tiny percentage of the worldwide film cinema going audience and nobody's going to care. And I think it is strange where this end is true of Ulysses and that's why it is prized, not only locally but right around the world, far from the valley in which it was made. What a wonderful analogy of the cheese. As an American I will speak to you. Sorry. No, go ahead, Paul. I'm sorry. Andrew, up to you. Well, I just think it's all of them's analogy. It's not my W-A-Jet. I just wanted to, as an American reading Ulysses, I can highly recommend being one of the annoying tourists that Anne was disdainful of in her view. Actually, it was the Irish I was disdainful of. I have been to Bloomsday and there is really something about walking the streets and seeing the Martella Tower and swimming in Sandy Cove. So I think if you can get there it's a really nice thing to do to kind of ground the book in the Tawach. Or just come to Dublin and take the train along Sandy Mount Strand and look out to the horizon there and you understand everything of their proteas. OK, more questions? Got one here in the front row? Sorry, no, we've got one here. Thank you. That was absolutely amazing. Thank you. I don't really want to stab anyone in the eye but I find Dublin kind of alien. I've read Joyce a number of times. My people to go to are Seamus Heaney and Paul because I'm from the north and I come from a very Catholic minority area of a Protestant county and we have sort of a different cultural heritage. And in my view Dublin is foreign. I like Joyce. I love Joyce. Get a passport. I'm going to have to to travel in Europe now. Yes, you're right. But it's just a point that I don't feel that kindred spirit with Joyce about Dublin, though I love Joyce's writing. And I've been to Dublin a number of times. It's just, it is another place. It is not somewhere that I am familiar with. It's really interesting this idea of familiarity because Joyce is full of people being over familiar. But also the book is something that one is invited to experience from the inside as it were. So what we're talking about externality and internality really matters in a way. Can you experience the book even if you're not from Dublin from the inside rather than as an external object? Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. So it's an invitation to be a Dubliner, is the book. And you're all very welcome, no matter where you're from. Yeah, and I think Ireland is a resolutely regional country. You know from village to village we look at the other side as foreigners. You know that kind of way. And we're proud of who we have locally. And it's wonderful that you're proud of Heaney and Joyce. We are too. We love them too. But you know Cork is proud of O'Flaherty and whoever. You know what I mean? And we have them all. Ulysses just looms so large I suppose. I do think that you can take it on as a project and fall in love with it. But it's not going to be for everybody either, you know. I think that is true but I think it is in danger. Eclipsing, yes. That's kind of Joyce's killing everything argument or overshadowing. And that's the argument that I heard from the male writers in particular that Joyce was a shadow. I think you just have to throw that off as an idea of Joyce taking anything or invading anything or you know. It just exists. It's like complaining about trees or something. But I think it's also like a tourism thing. He's used as a symbol of Irish literature and yet he's long dead etc. We should just all read what we want and love what we want. Cheers to that. And we do revere Heaney in Dublin as well I have to say you know. Of course, of course. He'll be on the bank note next. Is that one of the hilarious things about all this really isn't it that you know he barely did how often did he go back in one back a couple of times in this lifetime and I mean. Whatever the opposite of revered was that was Joyce in Dublin and so it is kind of it somewhat amusing and I'm obviously not the first person to comment on this to see the the reverence for him now. ond mae'n ffordd eich bydder cymdeithas i chi'n tronydd i mor hi'n pwyrwyr, gyda chi'n gynnig o'r ll mornings yma i ei wneud fel hynny. A os gallwch chi'n gwneud, oedd mai'r hyrcaied, oes byddo i gyrfa dnas o'r bobl, oedd yr oedd yn gwneud o'r bobl eich cymdeithio. Nid yw, ond yna, yn wych yn gallu yr hyn yn olog, ond mae'r bobl yn ymddir i'ch rhyfyrnodd. A yn yny'r rhyfyrnoddio. Yned. Well thank you so much for this fascinating conversation. We've been very proud of time. Thanks everybody for tuning in in person and online. It's been wonderful and hopefully Joyce will continue to roll on in the background whether we read him or not and I think we're all grateful for his contribution to Irish literature. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.