Unkind Art and Coronations

 Dubliners was as impressive as I remebered it and easily defended its title as my facourite prose fiction book. I progressed to Richard Ellman's The Backgrounds of 'The Dead' in the MacMillan Casebook from the series that provided so much of my university essays. Surely I must have read Ellman 45 years ago but it all came as news to me about Joyce's sources. He had more in common with Eliot than I ever imagined, re-treading old literature to his owns devices, Ulysses notwithstanding.

We can at least credit Joyce with 'mutinous' but the rest of that snowy ending is based on a passage from The Iliad. The idea, and that of Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Joyce tells his brother, came from Anatole France. And George Moore's novel, Vain Fortune. All of which are filleted for what is useful to him in a story reflecting his jealousy at the thought that his wife, Nora, had been on intimate terms with other men.

I don't know how much those inter-textual references reduce The Dead for me. Already not by as much as they did a couple of days ago so maybe time is a great healer and Brewster Ghiselin's The Unity of 'Dubliners', which I must have depended on for what I handed in as my essay, does a fine job of explicating that theme. I'm not going to dig out my 1980 effort to see how far short of okay it is and be appalled by what qualified for a 2:1 then, never mind now.

But this morning that reading prompted an idea for a new essay beginning from Joyce and bringing in a number of other big favourites - mainly the usual suspects - and it seems I have a project, the old envelope quickly filled with notes towards a plan. I can't imagine it seeing print but that's not the point any more. Increasingly, the point of writing is to enjoy doing it, sometimes even the footnotes.

Simenon's The Late Monsieur Gallet, read in preparation for the new poemsby Sean O'Brien, was short, clear and nowhere near as noir as I had expected. I'm accustomed to not knowing what is going on as a regular Midsomer Murders watcher and so struggling to grasp who and what was real or fake concerned me less than it usually would. Mysteries are a mystery to me which is what they are supposed to be but sometimes it's still a bit of a mystery after it's all been explained.

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Yesterday's coronation might be the only such to take place in my lifetime so I thought I'd better watch. A few days ago a journalist on Times Radio said Charles was going to be 'coronated'. Good Grief, has it come to that.

I'm no royalist and was immediately less so on thepassing of Mrs. Queen but I'm no republican either. I'm at a loss as to why the crowds are so devoted to this soap opera family who so so fashionably dysfunctional but if having them means we don't get President Boris, Liz Truss, Thatcher or Blair them I'm negatively in favour of them and I need to know from Republicans how being open to Boris, or Trump, presidencies would be preferable.

In its favour, the coronation was colourful, spectacular and immacualtely rehearsed. The big star of the show, as it always will be, was Westminster Abbey. The 'splendour' is quite astonishing - the gold carriage, the uniforms, the legions of minor aristocracy and maybe, just maybe, there is some economic benefit to be had by putting on such a show if it brings in revenue for various businesses. Money needs to move around to create the impression of fiscal well-being although the cost of watching it on telly went up alarmingly as my Virgin Media bill shot up by a large % as it happened.

The absurdities kept on crowding in, though, to make any kind of satire well beyond the scope of Private Eye or HIGNFY.

These elderly men, still mostly men, of high office performed some recondite rituals, the most incredible of which even they had to do behind a screen because even they knew it was too silly- they anointed the king with holy oil !!!  

The king was presented with a specially made Bible and was told,

We present You with this Book, the most valuable thing that this World affords. Here is Wisdom; this is the Royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God.

 

There were fanfares and religious invocations throughout. If one or two might acknowledge some tradition, they became tiresome but it's not all about peace and the brotherhood of man because the armed forces played a prominent part in all the precision processioning, my MP, Penny Mordaunt, famous for supporting causes like those of Boris and Truss once her own had fizzled out, carried a sword around and Camilla's robe, we were told, was embroidered with things that reflected her and her husband's 'love of nature' that he takes a gun to to shoot out of the sky, or ensnares out of rivers or has hunted on horseback. That's how much he loves it.

So, no, not really. One can find more fault with it than is balanced out by any grandeur. It was very peculiar but there are many far worse countries one could live in or call one's own and it is much the lesser ofmany evils given that nobody lives in paradise and never has.

Which is almost some sort of summary of the literary essay that might come of taking Dubliners and dragging it off in a direction of my choosing. It won't get anything like the audience the coronation got, though. It might not get any audience at all.