by Annalisa Mastronardi
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Annalisa Mastronardi speaks to contemporary Irish women writers about the legacy of the novel: how it has impacted on their work and changed their perception of literature’s possibilities.
A shortened version of this piece was first published by The Irish Independent.
“Will you, for Chrissake, stop asking fellas if they’ve read James Joyce’s Dubliners? They’re not interested. They’re out for the night. Eat and drink all you can and leave James Joyce to blow his own trumpet,” Baba rants to her friend, Caithleen, in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960). [1] Of course, Caithleen’s obsession with Joyce was a reflection of O’Brien’s own enthusiasm for him. First introduced to his work through reading T.S. Eliot’s Introducing James Joyce, it was a discovery that convinced her to become a writer. She also published a pamphlet about the relationship between Joyce and Nora Barnacle, James and Nora: Portrait of Joyce’s Marriage (1981) and a short biography of the author, James Joyce (1999). Before Edna O’Brien, Kate O’Brien praised and critiqued Joyce in many of her unpublished writings, defining him as a ‘lonely genius’. Land of Spices (1941), as Aintzane Mentxaka points out, “can be seen as a response to Joyce’s first novel, an attempt to provide a ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman’”. [2] From Julia O’Faolain to Eavan Boland and Eimear McBride, many Irish women writers have expressed their love for Joyce’s work over the years. “Joyce really set my universe on its end. Reading Ulysses changed everything I thought about language, and everything I understood about what a book could do,” McBride claimed in her 2014 article ‘My hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce’ [3]. In her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), the fragmented flow of thoughts and narrated actions of an Irish teenager, addressing in the second person her terminally-ill older brother, bears clear echoes of Joyce’s masterpiece. Anne Enright has stated, “it’s male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they’re all ‘in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step in his shoes?’” [4]. Additionally, according to Gerardine Meaney, “it appears to be Irish women writers in the twenty-first century who have the most robust relationship with Joyce’s work” [5]. With all this in mind, it is worth asking why, one hundred years after its publication, Ulysses continues to have such an impact on Irish women’s writing. Why does this book resonate so much with Irish women writers? How important is Joyce’s legacy in contemporary Irish fiction? Here is how some Irish women writers responded to reading Ulysses.
Anne Enright
I first read into Ulysses at 14, when my idea of literature had no limitations. The process of narrowing that sense of possibility down has been a long and painful one.
Eilís Ní Dhuibhne
All contemporary writers have been influenced by Joyce, whether they have read him or not and whether they know it or not. The first thing to say is that we all use stream of consciousness as a matter of course thanks to Joyce and some of the early modernists, just as we are aware of the importance of point of view thanks to Henry James.
In addition to this primary lesson, Ulysses confirmed for me that keen observation of detail is one of the primary skills of a good writer. Keep your eyes, ears, nose and the other senses alert and pay attention to what is all around you! Also, that literary imagination means imaginative and innovative use of words and form, as much as or probably more than fantasy and inventiveness regarding plot. Perhaps it gave me a heightened sense of my home, Dublin, as an iconic place, a city of the imagination whose every stone was interesting and worth writing about (sometimes I think my sense of Dublin as a place of immense importance to the world was excessive, when I was young, thanks to Joyce. But one grows out of that.)
But really I have always found that great works of literature are inspiring and nurturing to me as a writer, in ways which I can’t analyse.
Lisa McInerney
The problem with Ulysses is that its reputation precedes it and is laden with hyperbolic caution. Ulysses is our ‘great Irish novel’, and we know about it as soon as we begin to learn anything about the canon. We learn very early on that it’s a challenging read, that it’s really only for scholars, or that this person or that person has never been able to make head nor tail of it, so despite the fact that it’s part of the fabric of Irish literature, there’s no guarantee an emerging writer will have read it or even thought themselves capable of reading it. So it was with me; it took me a long time to get around to Ulysses, and when I did, I discovered (to my surprise) that it’s fun. It’s beautifully tricky and shifty; it doesn’t so much flow as it comes in and out of focus; it’s modern, dirty, and very funny.
Specifically, the way that Joyce writes in Hiberno-English definitely changed my perception of literature’s possibilities. It made me aware that Irish literary tradition typifies the same playfulness with language that occurs in our vernacular, and that if this is what our writers and scholars value, then I also had license to experiment, to use the patterns and slang of dialect, to dip in and out of Gaeilge if the work called for it, to treat Irishness both seriously and with healthy irreverence, to be unapologetically Irish. And it taught me as well that there aren’t many rules that can’t be broken, if the writer is canny enough.
Nuala O’Connor
So much literature grew out of Ulysses, that literature’s possibilities had been very thoroughly explored before I committed fully to writing some twenty-four years ago. So, I came to writing as an already influenced being. What I admire in Ulysses, however, is its upfrontness, the way Joyce unabashedly portrays every twinge, tweak, and leak of the human body, and the way he captures the nonsensical rigmarole the human mind engages in, as we go about our ordinary days. I love too the sense of Ulysses being a series of linked stories, with tender Leopold Bloom as the connective filament. For me, what Ulysses ultimately does for a writer is open them to the possibilities of experiment in fiction, to the fact that rules don’t really exist – in art, it is literally OK to do anything, and it is perfectly fine to be funny while doing it. And to be humane, and flexible, and deep. Ulysses is the ultimate throw-everything-at-it novel and it works brilliantly and, maybe, it’s worth every writer’s time to give that a try.
June Caldwell
The truth is: I never read Ulysses! I did dip in and out, read bits over time, and my ex professor on the MA in Creative Writing I did in Belfast urged us to ‘spend a summer immersed in Ulysses, do nothing else’…I just didn’t have the interest to do it, it seemed like an awful chore. Joyce wasn’t on our school curriculum growing up at any stage though I did read Dubliners at university when studying English and I thought it was superb. When I was writing Room Little Darker, I thought of Dubliners, the realism of the time it was set in, and wanted to do a modern ‘same’, but never considered myself good enough to stand up to Joyce! I think the reason why critics or book reviewers have sometimes (lazily perhaps) compared some of my writing to his, is because Joyce wrote with his ‘ear’: he wrote by hoovering up the words he heard on the street, conversations on street corners, brawls at market stalls, ordinary working class men and women loudly going about their day, conducting their business on the street. He wrote for the ‘common man’. He would be very amused (I think) to realise that he has ended up in the corridors of universities being analysed, when really he was writing kitchen sink drama, pantomime, he was holding up a mirror to those streets and telling the people ‘this is what you sound like, this is how you go on’, while at the same time doing something highly literary. I wrote a lot of my stories by ‘stealing’ conversations from the street. I was working in Dublin city centre at the time and it was (and is) a rough place, and a lot of distress, and so it comes across in the slang language of the streets, and that’s why some people might call some of my writing Joycean. But to be honest reviewers and critics tend to say that about any writer who uses slang or parochial language. I’ve seen it said now about so many writers who are writing about working class situations or scenarios, and it makes me laugh. None of us are Joyce. He was unique. But who knows how many Lady Joyces were around at that time with the same ability to capture voices and chaos out on the street, but who never had a chance to shine?
Catherine Kirwan
Here’s the timeline.
I work as a solicitor. Words come with the job. And, like many lawyers, and for many years, and probably forever, I had thought about writing, and I had wanted to write, but I was afraid to, and I couldn’t see that anything I wrote would be worth anyone’s time, including my own.
So I wrote nothing.
Then, in 2013, between the Feast of the Epiphany and Bloomsday, I read Ulysses. I thought it was brilliant, impossibly so. I thought that there was nothing more to be written about anything because Joyce had got there first and had written it better than anyone else could. And yet, in September 2014, I found myself writing, and finishing, a short story, and a few more of them; and, in November 2014, starting a crime novel, Darkest Truth, published in 2019; and later, writing a second, Cruel Deeds, published in February 2022.
Now here’s the question. Did reading Ulysses change my perception of literature’s possibilities by making it possible for me? This is what I think. I think that there are many reasons why I, finally, in my forties, felt able to start writing. I think that most of those reasons have nothing to do with reading Ulysses. But I also think that, by writing (seemingly) everything in every conceivable literary style about human history and myth and endeavour, by recording and expressing every emotion and sense and fleeting thought and bodily function, by having the last word on all of it, Joyce freed me. To get over myself. To accept that I had been right all along, that nothing I might write was worth anyone’s time, including my own. And, in accepting that, to just get on with it.
So I wrote.
Oona Frawley
As an undergraduate in Colorado, I pleaded to be allowed to take a graduate course on Ulysses: an entire term on the novel. It sounds strange, but I loved how difficult I found Ulysses that first time through. Each Tuesday evening felt like walking into a tiny, dark entrance way and then having someone throw a switch to reveal a cavernous space with strange paths leading away from it. I had always read for language and feeling, but this was something completely new to me: for the first time I saw how much the reader could be required to bring to a text. In that sense, Ulysses changed me as a reader: like so many who engage with Joyce, I became obsessed with annotating it, writing my responses into the margins and gratefully turning to sources that could help me to puzzle things out. Myself and the other students emerged into the dark on those winter nights and stood while snow streamed down – and what I remember is our amazement that one text could contain so much, take so many forms. As much as I still love Ulysses, though, and for all of the time that I put into studying Joyce as both a reader and as an academic, Joyce has not had a particular influence on my own writing. My admiration for Ulysses is intellectual, and I’ve continued to experience it as an intellectual exercise, even if a deeply pleasurable one: it seems to exist in my mind in a very different compartment from the space of my own creative work.
Mary Costello
It blew the world of literature and writing wide open for me and made me realize anything is possible. Not just in terms of language, style, structure or subject matter, but in terms of psychology and time. In Ulysses the interior self is depicted in tandem with the exterior self. Virginia Woolf wanted literature to record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall. Whether it is Bloom or Stephen or Molly, their thoughts and mind fragments are caught in all their naked honesty as they fall, i.e. in a non-linear fashion (even though the words used to convey them must appear on the line of the page in a linear way). The actual real time or clock-time that passes during these thoughts and fragments is miniscule – often mere seconds. Somehow Joyce manages to capture the atoms of time, the quantum nature of time, the teaming vastness of a moment.
Claire Kilroy
You can write an epic novel in which nothing much happens. You can write about anything. Anything. The interior life is everything.
Being a writer means being a failure. Stephen feels himself to be a failure throughout, but when he wanders off into the night at the end of the book, the reader knows he will become the guy who changed world literature.
Mary Morrissy
I first attempted reading Ulysses in the early 90s when I was living in Italy and trying to write my first novel. As I sank into the richness of the world of the novel – familiar in so many ways; this was my city, after all, and I was nostalgic for it being away from home – I also fell into a slough of despond. My own measly, ill-formed attempt at a novel seemed so impoverished in comparison. Like Wilde’s wallpaper, one of us had to go. I knew if I kept on reading Joyce I’d never finish my novel because I’d be paralysed by literary envy and my own unworthiness. So I deferred on Ulysses then. But you could say it taught me, in a back-handed way, to realise my own possibilities within literature, meagre and all as they might be.
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Annalisa Mastronardi is from Rome. She received an undergraduate degree in Languages and Foreign Cultures from Roma Tre University in 2016 and completed her M.A in Literatures and Intercultural Translation in 2018. In 2019, she moved to Dublin where she is pursuing a PhD on James Joyce’s legacy in contemporary Irish women’s writing in DCU. She has previously written for Headstuff, Writing.ie, Hook Magazine and The Bookish Explorer.
[1] Edna O’Brien, The Country Girl Trilogy (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 150.
[2] A.L. Mentxaka, Kate O’Brien and the Fiction of Identity: Sex, Art and Politics in Mary Lavelle and Other Writings (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2011), p. 106.
[3] Eimear McBride, “My hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce,” The Guardian, June 6, 2014.
[4] David Mehegan, “For this writer, identity is subject to change,” The Boston Globe, February 27, 2008.
[5] Gerardine Meaney, “Joyce in Contemporary Irish Culture and Criticism,”. Voices on Joyce, eds. Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke (University College Dublin Press, 2015), p.275.
Contemporary Irish Literature 