The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill

Next year I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve only just thought of it now, with your questions, but I’m not much of a thespian myself, or even a good reader. And as for my memory—I have to keep my home phone number in my billfold so I won’t forget it.”
    When it was apparent that Flood had nothing more to add,Sinclaire said, “Holderness. A research student. We don’t have a first name for him, but could he have had some difficulty with Mr. Coyle?”
    “David Allan George Holderness, you’ll mean. A brilliant chap altogether, but utterly lacking in tact, at least in regard to Kinch. And then they were so much like oil and water—Kinch, the Dub’. Working class. A positivist, let’s say, in regard to the world and his work. Yes, he possessed humor and was capable of trenchant sarcasm, the weight of which Holderness himself was sometimes made to feel, but Kinch’s great achievement was to have found a way around the aesthetic problem posed by Joyce and Beckett. By that I mean how important novels might still be written in the shadow of their achievements. Holderness was—rather, i s—pretty much what Kinch once called him, ‘A Beckett clone without Beckett’s depth, wit, or sympathy for the human condition.’”
    McGarr cleared his throat. He had waited long enough. “Professor Flood—you see in us two plain, poor policemen. Our leisure hours are spent in our garden or with our children. Once, when I was a young man living abroad and feeling…bereft of my culture, I picked up a copy of Ulysses. The dust jacket said it was Ireland’s greatest literary work by Ireland’s greatest writer. To be honest, I was mystified. It left me cold. As did—let me add— Waiting for Godot and End-game, when my wife dragged me to the theater.”
    Flood’s arms were again folded across his large chest, such that his bow tie appeared fixed to his darkly shadowed jowls. “Well—you’re not alone. I sometimes think myself lucky if ten percent of my students actually read Joyce and Beckett and not just the trots of their works. That it leaves most of them cold, I wouldn’t doubt. And it’s our own fault. Academics, I mean. As Kinch contended, those two are having the last laugh, and it’s at our expense. We’ve played theirgame, and in so doing, made entirely too much of them. Joyce once bragged that what he was writing would keep scholars busy for years, and here I am over a half century later making literally literary capital from that very prediction.
    “Think of him: an odd, acerbic man—half blind, irascible, and impecunious. He quarreled with his best friends and inevitably insulted casual acquaintances. He was a scathing critic, a devastating satirist, and possessed of such boundless egotism that he baldly stated even before he had published much that he was the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Of the Wake he bragged that it was the perfect book for the perfect reader, who could spend his entire life reading no other book and still never sound all its depths or understand all its resonances. The problem is, he was right. Finnegan’s Wake is a masterpiece, the ultimate novel of competence.
    “Beckett, who when Joyce’s eyesight was failing, took notes for and, it seems, from him, played a similarly intricate academic game on his reader. But although always the perfect gentleman personally, Beckett’s creation—the novel of incompetence —is nasty and cruel and, what’s worse, a dead end. A kind of literary black hole.
    “Shall I go on?” His eyes twinkled.
    “I’d like that,” said McGarr. “Especially the bit about the novel of…incompetence?”
    “Yes—interesting turn of phrase, what? Would you like the short explanation or the long?”
    “Well…” Sinclaire glanced at his watch.
    Flood nodded, folded his fingers together. “It begins with Joyce and the novel of competence. In spite of what I just said about him in a negative way—since we must smash old idols in order to raise