As early as December 1922, Joyce was writing to his aunt in Dublin to help him retrieve details about certain “curious types” that Joyce had known in his childhood - particulars that would make their way into his new novel. If the author is a type of cartographer and fiction is their map, what, then, are the landscapes corresponding to this novel-as-map? One obvious candidate is the terrain comprised of memories, dreams, and all those tatters and scraps of information from which the novel is assembled.

Photographer: Dara Mac Dónaill / THE IRISH TIMES

John Gormley, TD MInister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and Dominic Deeny, CEO Chartered Land, unveiling a plaque at Chartered Land's, Grand Canal Square office development to mark the achievement of a prestigious BREEAM 'Excellent' rating fore sustainable building, The unveiling took place in the atrium against a seven story wall of letters featuring 1,000 letters from Finnegans Wake.

The analogy of novel and map is not a perfect one and yet does not each author, like the cartographer, make decisions about scale, about resolution, about when to be punctilious, and when to pass over a landform in silence? A map, we are often reminded, is not the territory it maps. Hardly a practical stratagem since, when unfolded, the map blots out the sun. In Lewis Carroll’s final novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), a character, Mein Herr, describes the existence of a map drawn on the scale of a mile to the mile. Like a topographic map, most works of art perform an act of compression. I understand this sentiment and yet I am encouraging you to start in on this work straightaway, as I don’t believe you have a minute to waste. With 17 years to go before this epochal event, the goal of having the Wake read before then will hardly seem a pressing one. The Wake was not published in its entirety until 1939, 17 years later. One hundred years ago, freed from the labours of creating, editing and then guiding Ulysses through its arduous publication process, Joyce turned his thoughts towards the production of Finnegans Wake. By now, you’ll have re-shelved your well-grubbed copy of that novel and, having no doubt fully recovered from the exertions of the most recent Bloomsday, you may be feeling mildly bereft of the company of Joyce’s capacious though querulous mind.įortunately, this year marks another significant Joycean anniversary, and this, the other centenary event, presents an opportunity to re-engage with your favourite author, vexing though he may very well be. It won’t, I suppose, have escaped your notice that this past February marked the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses.

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