ABSTRACT
Once upon a time there was a storyteller par excellence. His name was James Joyce and he wrote compelling stories about Ireland that displayed great virtuosity and imagination. Yet in his own words, he was a ‘cut and paste man’, who gathered raw material from life, myth, legend and ancient tale. In his day, the popular press condemned Joyce under the vague generalisation that his work is ‘something to do with drinking, a kind of verbalized vomit’ (McHugh 1981:108), and helped propagate the boundless rumours that he was, as O’Brien writes, ‘a misanthrope, a cocaine addict, “cavalier servante” of duchesses, a Bolshevik propagandist, a spy for Austria during the war…(who) swam in the Seine each morning, surrounded himself with mirrors, wore black gloves in bed’ (1999:126). Nevertheless, he is still regarded as one of the finest writers there has ever been, second only to Shakespeare. Alongside Picasso in painting and Schoenberg in music he stands among the avant-garde elite of the twentieth century. In the reflective list-making frenzy that the turn of the century and the new millennium has precipitated, he has been hailed the ‘Irishman of the Century’ (McDonald 1999) and the Modern Library’s top 100 Books of the Century has placed Ulysses at the top of the pile while A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man comes in at number three. The date 16 June, christened Bloomsday, is celebrated by Joyceans the world over and a thriving academic industry is devoted to interpreting his literary oeuvre. This chapter will pay tribute to Joyce for like many of the artists mentioned in this book he had an instinctive understanding that marketing and art are kindred forms, and that the art of marketing is art and the art of art is marketing.
