I'm not sure which I dislike more: Ulysses or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from Ulysses, but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts, to read it (never mind Finnegan['\]s bloody Wake and that precious bloody missing apostrophe).
On the other hand, we are probably agreed on the Joyce estate: ungenerous, litigious, humourless and sour, a sleepless Cerberus guarding a literary bone that should long since have been public property.
It is a grisly reaffirmation of the power of the legal profession that all the main events in this year's "Rejoyce Dublin 2004" are going have to be vetted by lawyers. As it is, no readings from the Joyce canon will be permitted at the festival - for which, however, I can only express deep gratitude to the Joyce estate. Indeed, part of me wishes that, given its permanently churlish condition, the estate would copyright the names James and Joyce, Bloom and Stephen, and so on, thereby putting a kibosh on the pretentious shenanigans of the Joyce industry once and for all.
The truth is that there was nothing wrong with Ulysses which a good editor couldn't have put write - or is it rite? (We can all do this sort of thing, but we don't get called geniuses for it.) It is about 400,000 words long, which is probably about 250,000 words too many. It is full of spelling mistakes and typos, and they'll have to be tidied up. The main role in the novel will go to the great Jack Myers (the grand-uncle) who in the original version had a shamefully tiny part.
There's a great deal of meaningless rambling about Dublin, and that will have to go. The Molly Bloom soliloquy, which is (apparently: I've never read it) all about her masturbating, lasts over 40 pages and takes up about 20,000 words. The final chapter will thus be condensed to: Then Molly had a massive Allied Irish. The End.
Actually, I blame the first World War. Ulysses and it began the same year. The novel finished three years after the war did, and was often far more terrible. The Somme and Ypres meant that all the good editors and critics were dead, blind or barking, and the few remaining didn't have the nerve to tell Joyce that there was nothing clever or funny about spelling the aphetic of the future tense of the first person singular Ill. It's just a silly affectation for which a good editor would have twisted his nose and given him a boot up the backside.
Joyce was an aberrant genius who should have been given 350 pages of lined foolscap and told to write a novel of 25 chapters, with a beginning, middle and end. Spelling must be perfect, and no punctuation errors. Multilingual puns allowable, provided they're not obvious, and absolutely no showing off.
But that didn't happen because of Kaiser Bill, and as a result we got one of the most unproductive cul-de-sacs in literary history, down which other potentially great writers have been drawn. Unable to escape the force-field of stream-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo, they too sat down and wrote gibberish, which was reviewed by other residents of the cul-de-sac, and given prizes by yet other residents. Thus the Booker was born.
But non-residents of the cul-de-sac don't read these books because they can't. They are unreadable in the sense that usually the word "read" is not just about our brain clinically deciphering hieroglyphs on a page, but involves capturing the heart and the mind and the body of the reader.
I'm not saying Ulysses does this for absolutely nobody. I'm perfectly sure it captivates some people, as does collecting train-numbers for others. But both pastimes are very much minority tastes. The vast majority of literate people cannot read Ulysses as they read Pride and Prejudice - that is, with simple pleasure. Yes, people can indeed plough their way from stately plump buck mulligan through to yes i said yes i will yes, but with the joyless concentration of an Eircom sub-editor proof-reading a telephone directory.
It's one of the defining features of storytelling since the first yarns were spun beside the Neolithic fire that the audience doesn't have to work to understand. The effort comes from the bard. To be sure, to attend with more application will probably mean more pleasure: but the primary medium, the tale itself, must be agreeable. It shouldn't be like pushing sand uphill.
Yet certain personality types are drawn to sand-pushing. We call these people "Joyceans". These eccentrics think that Ulysses can be translated into Chinese, Aztec and Arapahoe - and indeed it can, much in the same way that Calcutta's telephone exchange can, with comparable success, be installed in the USAF's Stategic Air Command's command and control centre in Nebraska.
There's nothing wrong with such eccentrics, and it's perfectly splendid that the capital will have a three-month party on the centenary of the first Bloomsday. But the truth is that few of the revellers will have read any Ulysses at all; some will have read only parts of it, and only with a great effort, before abandoning it; and just a tiny minority, the equivalent of the Hassidic Jewish population of Greenland, will have devoured it all with undiluted pleasure.
I just make this humble request: that no politician who hasn't read Ulysses will this summer call it a work of genius. Is that too much to ask?