http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/james-joyce-you-cant-ignore-the-bastard
Joyce entered your life very differently in rural Ireland in the early
1980s. Back then, he still existed outside the official system. Too
difficult, too scandalous for school. It was still possible for
teenagers to read Joyce as an act of rebellion against teachers,
government, church. You read Joyce the way you listened to late punk, or
early rap.
Our generation formed bands, wrote songs and albums, not stories and
novels. The Irish heirs to the verbal exuberance of James Joyce are, by
and large, not the writers of literary fiction. They are the great,
exiled Irish lyricists; Morrissey; early, good Elvis Costello; Johnny
Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols and PiL; Shane MacGowan of the
Pogues (who spent his pre-London childhood on a farm outside Puckane,
only a few miles from our house). MacGowan’s “The Old Main Drag” and
“Fairytale of New York” are postmodern pop-stories worthy of Joyce;
brutal, clear-eyed portraits of hemales and shemales, destroying
themselves with drink in London and New York. “How Soon Is Now” and
“This Charming Man” by The Smiths ache with youth’s agonies as
exquisitely as Joyce’s story “Araby.” I’d say Joyce, as a man who wanted
to be a professional tenor himself, would be happy enough with that
legacy.
And language was the hero. That, I got from Joyce.
