Houses of Decay: Joyce, History, and J.G. Farrell’s Troubles

Abstract

In his study of Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, Neil Corcoran describes the range of possible responses to the ‘achievements of these un-ignorable’ writers: ‘imitation, admiration, dependency, modification, hesitation, anxiety, separation, subversion, rejection, reaction.’1For many Irish writers coming after Joyce, especially for those novelists writing out of an Irish context, the legacy of Joyce’s writings has been felt as much a burden as a source of inspiration. The need to clear some literary space of one’s own, under the shadow of a body of work that seemed to have staked a claim to the entire ground, has been met in various ways over the course of the last ninety years or so and has resulted in a wealth of different strategies, from those Irish writers coming more or less directly after Joyce, such as Flann O’Brien or Samuel Beckett (for whom, it might be said, the burden was actually the source of inspiration and who ended up casting quite a shadow of his own), to any number of Irish novelists right up to the present day. In 2004, Roddy Doyle, for instance, wearied by the media coverage of the long run-up to the Bloomsday centenary, launched a much publicized attack on Joyce and the Joyce industry which smacked more than a little of the anxiety which stems from being an Irish writer after Joyce: ‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’2