No better man than Joyce to coin a phrase

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

You’d have to feel sorry for the bloke in the Central Bank who made a pig’s ear of the new commemorative €10 coin that misquoted James Joyce.

Because it’s not hard to misquote a man who uses the coma as sparingly as the Fianna Fail Government used the Bank Regulator.

And – let’s call a spade a spade here – Joyce may well be a genius but most of us haven’t the first notion what in the name of God he’s going on about.

So if we didn’t lose track of things because of a deliberate lack of punctuation, chances are we’d miss out on a line or two through the sudden onslaught of sleep.

The erroneous lines on the front on the coin are taken from the beginning of chapter three of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus walks alone along Sandymount Strand reflecting.

What Joyce actually wrote: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.”

However, on the Central Bank coin the surplus word ‘that’ is inserted into the second sentence.

Now without being overly pedantic about it, one could argue that the use of ‘that’ actually improved the sentence – but criticising Joyce in literary circles here is akin to making a wisecrack about Kim Jong Un’s haircut in North Korea.

Perhaps the Central Bank would be better occupied trying to get us a better deal on our debt than minting tributes for Joycean aficionados – but given our penniless state, they’ve clearly committed bigger crimes than this one over the past decade.

Wouldn’t it have been a much bigger mistake if our unfortunate designer had put €20 instead of €10 on the coin and we accidently ended up devaluing them by half with the stroke of a metaphorical pen?

The only complication there is that this €10 coin was already retailing for €46, which only goes to show that there’s a fool born every minute – lashing out nearly five times the face value for a coin you’ll never spend unless you accidently divvy it up to a barman when you’re drunk.

But if our Central Bank pen-pusher had put in an extra zero or two at the end of it, we could have bought these coins ourselves for a tenner and then sold them to the Germans for a hundred – or even a thousand – thus making the first serious dent in our national debt.

Remember too that the Germans had a great fondness for Joyce – even if it was William instead of James – but wouldn’t it be nice to have the last laugh (the last Haw Haw if you like) on our old paymasters?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.