Peter Costello
36_02 - James Joyce entertaing with his guitar Ulysses in Limericks,
by Tom Matthews
(New Island Books, €9.95)
The caricatures of Tom Matthews have been a fixture of Irish and British publications for several decades. His talent is of a partial kind. With great economy of line he can deflate those overblown attitudes which are so common these if only in the over inflated and over heated media world.
His skill at what were once called cartoons is sharp indeed. He rivals in my mind at least many of the past masters of the art, such Mel Calman, Bill Tidy, Mark Boxer, and Matthew Pritchett. The style goes back to the late 1930s when Osbert Lancaster began his long reign on the bottom of the front page of the London Daily Express.
But these days magazines and papers seem to have little room even for the smallest of pocket cartoons preferring, as in the Guardian and the Irish Times, large over-blown political cartoons, rather than the social comment that is the real joy of cartoons (here a sad nod on the loss of Dublin Opinion).
This year Blooms Day, the annual efflorescence of street carnival in which everyone seems to descend on Graftonia in long Edwardian dresses and straw boaters.
This is not a criticism of Joyce himself, who merely wanted to entertain people; but of the rampant Joyce cult which becomes in its popular manifestations more foolish every year”
Odd how Dubliners prefer to be either Molly Bloom or Blazes Boylan. Why they avoid playing the part of the Irish Jew who is the real hero of the book would need a long explication.
Odder still, one cannot imagine a Proust day in Paris, a Mann day in Berlin, or even more unimaginable, a Bely Day in St Petersburg.
This little jeux d’esprit deflates the Joyce cult in a most entertaining way. This is not a criticism of Joyce himself, who merely wanted to entertain people; but of the rampant Joyce cult which becomes in its popular manifestations more foolish every year, and academically ever more esoteric.
Tom Matthews provides a triple distilled essence of Ulysses in a series of effective limericks. However, it was suggested at the launch of the book that the next step would be to render down Joyce’s masterpiece in eighteen haiku – an even more entertaining idea: less is more.
However, let us hope that his publishers will be generous enough to allow Tom Matthews an extended set of pages in another book to display his needle sharp satire on other denizens of the Dublin cultural fishbowl since Kavanagh and Clarke down to last weekend’s most recently acclaimed genius of the moment.