(k) Short story as obscenely unfiltered literary criticism:
On the Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry, a man called Rob — who may be Doyle, but probably isn’t, but possibly is, either way he’s the narrator, although he barely says anything himself — this man called Rob listens to his friend John-Paul Finnegan as Finnegan sets forth his theory of Irish literature, or more accurate to say his theory of what the Irish people, those who’ve stayed in Ireland at least, think of literature. Which is not a lot, reckons Finnegan, and spends pretty much the entire story bewailing this sorry state of affairs to friend Rob, and at one point to most of the rest of the ferry’s understandably terrified passengers, in a long, repetitive, looping, and utterly foul-mouthed rant. Finnegan uses Ulysses as his case in point, also coincidentally the name of the ferry on which the pair are embarked for home, and look, you could probably make a game attempt to divide Doyle’s story up into Joycean-Homeric chapters if you thought that would be fun, but, again, as previously mentioned, it consists mostly of Finnegan ranting to Rob and saying fuck a lot, so maybe not. The thing is, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious even as it’s pitch-perfect bleak and sad about the realities of even attempting literature, never mind failing at it, and it’s spot-on about Joyce and his legacy even as Finnegan is furiously wrong-headed about the whole damned thing, and I think of all the current crop of genius Irish writers it’s Rob Doyle who is the true heir of Flann O’Brien, and so there.
Collected in This is the Ritual, Bloomsbury/The Lilliput Press, 2016. Available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 