Joyce’s Ulysses under fire in centenary year

By elevating him to the status of literary God, Joyce’s fans are doing other Irish writers a disservice and creating a ‘‘Joyce industry’’ which has more to do with tourism than literature, they say.

Roddy Doyle, author of best-seller Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the screenplay for The Commitments, opened the literary Pandora’s box last week with a scathing attack on Ulysses and its followers. ‘‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’’ Doyle told a gathering in New York. ‘‘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.’’

‘‘If you’re a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce,’’ he said. Doyle’s comments struck a chord.

Journalist Sean Moncrieff, writing in The Irish Examiner, said Ulysses would never see the light of day if it were written now. ‘‘What happens in Ulysses? Well, not much. Bloom has breakfast. Goes to a funeral. Wanders around Dublin a bit. Stephen Dedalus does the same. Gets pissed (drunk) and makes a fool of himself. Send that plot outline to any modern publisher and see how far you get.’’ —(Reuters)