I recently visited Dublin for the first time, and there found myself standing in front of the first ever printed volume of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on display in the Museum of Literature Ireland.
A beautiful blue cloth-bound book is encased in glass beneath Molly Bloom’s famous words, the last of the novel: ‘yes I will Yes’.
I was surprised at how moved I was to see this and other Ulysses-related fragments – some manuscript pages, other prints of the book, quotes and recordings, letters to and from Joyce.
But I should not have been surprised, for here in humble physical form was the book – form-exploding, anarchic, revered, banned, celebrated, reviled, feared and envied (including, protesting way too much, by Virginia Woolf) – that surely most embodies that mightiest quality of creative endeavour, that essential artistic spirit: disobedience.
Anne Enright here rivetingly describes this disobedience: the breathtaking refusal of Ulysses to explain itself; its linguistic acrobatics, Joyce’s ‘transgression and disruption’. And she says something which in itself is a celebration of disobedience – that ‘unreadability’ is not a problem.
More than any other book, Ulysses is about what happens in the reader’s head. The style obliges us to choose a meaning, it is designed to make us feel uncertain. This makes it a profoundly democratic work. Ulysses is a living, shifting, deeply humane text that is also very funny. It makes the world bigger.
About a third of those who attempt the book do not finish it, according to a Bloomsday poll on an Irish news website. I never considered this to be a problem. I am not sure you can ever finish Ulysses. I am certain it can never be fully understood. I think I knew this instinctively at 14; a time when I lived inside and not outside the words on the page, a time when many books were beyond my understanding, and that was just fine.
I’m writing these words now at Cove Park, an artists’ retreat in Scotland, and when I look up from my keyboard I see trees, mountains and the soft, pewter water of Loch Long. I haven’t spoken aloud in four days. Bliss.
I had intended, after the above paragraphs, to venture into a discussion about the reception of Ulysses on publication, and its influence on Western literature since. I also planned to mention some of the other rule-breaking Irish writers featured there at MOLI – Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien and Anne Enright, each brightly dissident in their own particular way.
But something in my plan evaded me, something began to drag in my spirit. Something resisted.
I made more coffee. I looked out of the window. I read more about Joyce, O’Brien, Enright, Wilde, Kevin Barry and other Irish literary wild-children. I began a paragraph about why Australia’s Alexis Wright, with her lawless, time-exploding, virtually impenetrable, funny and dark and disobedient books, might be the world’s contemporary James Joyce, and how I hope the Nobel Prize comes her way some day. Then I deleted it.
I ate another piece of toast. I emailed a couple of writing friends, setting out my plans for this essay, trying to create a kind of run-up.
I took photos of the Highland cows outside my peaceful cabin.
I left my peaceful cabin to take a drive around the peninsula, bought a few supplies at the little supermarket. I returned, washed dishes, drank more coffee, ate chocolate, read on my bed and – the ultimate avoidance method, of which my consciousness is so fond – fell into a short, very deep sleep in the middle of the day.
When I woke I was forced to realise the truth. This resistance (on which I’ve written before) was telling me something.
As so often happens, it was telling me that I didn’t want to abide by the nicely logical train of thought I had set out for myself. I was bored by it before I began, and it felt somehow like a lie. Literary biography/critique is not my thing. And despite my real respect and admiration for it I don’t know anything about Ulysses, having failed to finish it twice in my adult life, marvelling and thrilling at it nevertheless. What I actually want to talk about, no matter how much I bow down to them, is not James Joyce or Alexis Wright or Irish literature at all.
So I’m not going to, thereby perhaps enacting the point of this piece, which is that an artist finally can obey no-one and nothing but their own honest instincts – or what one writer friend calls her ‘inner command’.
The strange thing to me is how difficult this always is. How, even in drafting this piece about the value of disobedience – an argument commissioned by nobody, to be read by very few, a piece written almost entirely for myself – I must first waste an entire morning wrestling with my own tedious compulsion towards to a logical and established line of thinking, only finally abandoning it when I just Can’t. Make. Myself. Do. It.
What is this about, do you think? This dogged plodding down an already well-worn path before realising it’s a personal dead end? Why are we so passively obedient to what’s gone before, until we’re not?
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