Launch of Ray’s book gives much cause for rejoicing

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

When Oranmore man Ray Burke moved to London in the mid-1980s, after graduating from UCG with an Arts degree, he shared a house with a gang of people, among them an English woman who would go on to be arts editor of The Guardian.

Occasionally, she’d look at him in amazement and say, I can’t believe you’re a university graduate from Ireland and you’ve never read Ulysses – you’re a f***ing disgrace”.

Ray laughs at the memory. He hadn’t read James Joyce’s mould-breaking novel back then, but had read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During his years as an exile in London, where he achieved his dream of breaking into journalism, Ray delved into Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners.

For him, as so many others, “the standout story in that perfect collection was The Dead”. While it’s set in Dublin, The Dead “is much more about Galway than Dublin”, says Ray. That’s because it’s based on a doomed love affair between Nora Barnacle and a young Galwayman that occurred before Nora met Joyce in Dublin in July 1904, eloping to Zurich with him shortly afterwards.

The final lines of The Dead, about snow falling softly “upon all the living and the dead” make specific reference to the “lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried” in Galway – Rahoon, although Joyce used poetic licence to make it Oughterard.

Back in Ireland, working for The Irish Press, Ray read Ulysses, becoming even more fascinated by Joyce, Nora and the Galway influence.  She’s present in Ulysses, in the Dead, in Finnegans Wake and in his only play, Exiles.

Other Galway influences permeate Joyce’s writings too, despite him only visiting here twice – once in 1909 and the other in 1912 with Nora and their children. He went to the Races, cycled to Oughterard, sailed to the Aran Islands and visited Clifden.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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