Joyce and Colors

31:4 Book Reviews JOYCE AND COLORS J. CoIm O'Sullivan, Joyce's Use of Colors: 'Finnegans Wake' and the Earlier WorL·. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987. $39.95 I came to Joyce's Use of Colors skeptical, wondering if it is even possible (let alone worthwhile) to claim that there are "colors" in Finnegans Wake in the same sense that there are "colors" in the fiction of Stephen Crane. I left the book dazzled, a little like the way one leaves the Wake itself. O'Sullivan is from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a remote and puzzling place. The weather there is as uncertain as a baby's bottom, but when it lifts you can stand at the Conor Pass and take in both the Tralee Bay and Dingle Town in one panoramic sweep. Or from Slea Head, you can contemplate the great Blasket Island, where Peig Sayers lived and wrote the wild and simple way of Gaelic fishing people, and Flann O'Brien's Sitric O'Sanassa, weary of the futile hunt for spuds, took up life among the seals. Dingle probably has more archeological sites per square mile than anywhere else outside the Boyne valley just above Drogheda. The corbelled stones of the Galleras Oratory, without benefit of mortar, keep its tiny interior as dry as they did 800 years ago. The church at Kilmalkadur sports Om stones (carvings in a pre-Celtic language) and early sundials. The ring forts (there are forty of them, no two really alike) stand undisturbed in farmer's fields. The people (who speak Irish predominantly, this is the Gaeltacht) certainly give ring forts a wide berth, and the farmers ask tourists to shut the gate when they leave and take their plastic lunch bags along with them, as the cows will eat them and choke. Anybody who grew up on the Dingle has at least once been scared witless at night passing an old "faery ring." Places of imagination, there is nothing whatsoever Disney-like about them. There are two main areas of settlement on the peninsula, the northern half, people who look on Tralee bay, and the southern half, people who look across Dingle Bay to the Ivearna peninsula. They don't much like each other. It's nothing serious, and they won't need a formal "agreement." Finally, nobody from the Dingle is particularly fond of the color green—there's just too bloody much of it. What with the scatterings and layerings of four-thousand years of history, the persistence of the Irish language, the catankerousness of the people, the badness of the roads, and the general misery of the weather, the Dingle is an ideal training ground for a Wake scholar. O'Sullivan has put his education to good use. First, he knows how to resist any compulsion to try to get the big picture. It is not his duty to establish an allegorical consistency for the colors in Finnegans Wake. It follows that his best observations are local, as with the 505 31:4 Book Reviews perception that Joyce associated green and black with blindness and disease, that his choices in his own clothing were color-coordinated with the snuffstained vestments of Father Flynn in "The Sisters," that Joyce deliberately played the role of L'Aveugle. When green isn't signalling authorial melancholy in the Wake, it is either serving the larger theme of pathology, or Irish political jingoism, or (of course) both, as in the phrase that provides O'Sullivan with a chapter title: "The Grianblachk Sun of Gan Greyne Eireann." After a tour of the more manageable works, O'Sullivan launches into the Wake and remains largely in the sectors of it where critics have gone before: Mutt and Jute, Mick Nick, and the Maggies, Buckley and the Russian General, ALP's river section, Justius and Mercius, the Mookse and the Gripes, the children's homework . Along with his acknowledgment that his findings will be largely local, O'Sullivan has the intellectual patience not to try to resist the Wake's nature as a "collideorscape" or HCE's position as a "chameleon." As a UMI production, O'Sullivan's book...