A Bash in the Tunnel

Flann OBrien
In this astonishing commentary on James Joyce, Flann OBrien reveals what it was that stately
plump Buck Mulligan saw in the cracked looking glass of Irish art.
James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself. His was a case of Ars gratia Artist. He declared that he
would pursue his artistic mission even if the penalty was as long as eternity itself. This seems to be an
afrmation of belief in Hell, therefore of belief in Heaven and God.
A better title of this piece might be: Was Joyce Mad? by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Yet there is a reason for
the present title.
Some thinkersall Irish, all Catholic, some unlayhave confessed to discerning a resemblance between
Joyce and Satan. True, resemblances there are. Both had other names, the one Stephen Dedalus, the other
Lucifer; the latter name, meaning Maker of Light, was to attract later the ironical gloss Prince of Darkness!
Both started of very well under unfaultable teachers, both were very proud, both had a fall. But they difered
on one big, critical issue. Satan never denied the existence of the Almighty; indeed he acknowledged it by
challenging merely His primacy. Joyce said there was no God, proving this by uttering various blasphemies
and obscenities and not being instantly struck dead.
A man once said to me that he hated blasphemy, but on purely rational grounds. If there is no God, he said,
the thing is stupid and unnecessary. If there is, its dangerous.
Anatole France says this better. He relates how, one morning, a notorious agnostic called on a friend who
was a devout Catholic. The devout Catholic was drunk and began to pour forth appalling blasphemies. Pale
and shocked, the agnostic rushed from the house. Later, a third party challenged him on this incident.
You have been saying for years that there is no God. Why then should you be so frightened at somebody
else insulting this God who doesnt exist?
I still say there is no God. But that fellow thinks there is. Suppose a thunderbolt was sent down to strike him
dead. How did I know I wouldnt get killed as well? Wasnt I standing beside him?
Another blasphemy, perhapsdoubting the Almightys aim. Yet it is still true that all true blasphemers must
be believers.
What is the position of the artist in Ireland?
Just after the editors had asked me to try to assemble material for this issue of Envoy, I went into the Scotch
House in Dublin to drink a bottle of stout and do some solitary thinking. Before any considerable thought had
formed itself, a manthen a complete strangercame, accompanied by his drink, and stood beside me:
addressing me by name, he said he was surprised to see a man like myself drinking in a pub.
My pub radar screen showed up the word TOUCHER. I was instantly on my guard.
And where do you think I should drink? I asked. Pay fancy prices in a hotel?
Ah, no, he said, I didnt mean that. But any time I feel like a good bash myself, I have it in the cars. What
will you have?
I said I would have a large one, knowing that his mysterious reply would entail lengthy elucidation.
I neednt tell you that that crowd is a crowd of bastards, was his prefatory exegesis.
Then he told me all. At one time his father had a pub and grocery business, situated near a large Dublin
railway terminus. Every year the railway company invited tenders for the provisioning of its dining cars, and
every year the father got the contract. (The narrator said he thought this was due to the territorial proximity of
the house, with diminished handling and cartage charges.)
The dining cars (hereinafter known as the cars) were customarily parked in remote sidings. It was the
fathers job to load them from time to time with costly victualseggs, rashers, cold turkey and whiskey.
These cars, bulging in their lonely sidings, with such fabulous fare, had special locks. The father had the key,
and nobody else in the world had authority to open the doors until the car was part of a train. But my
informant had made it his business, he told me, to have a key, too.
At that time, he told me, I had a bash once a week in the cars.
One must here record two peculiarities of Irish railway practice. The frst is a chronic inability to make up
trains in advance, i.e., to estimate expected passenger trafc accurately. Week after week a long-distance
train is scheduled to be fve passenger coaches and a car. Perpetually, an extra 150 passengers arrive on
the departure platform unexpectedly. This means that the car must be detached, a passenger coach
substituted, and the train dispatched foodless and drinkless on its way.
The second peculiaritynot exclusively Irishis the inability of personnel in charge of shunting engines to
leave coaches, parked in far sidings, alone. At all costs they must be shifted.
That was the situation as my friend in the Scotch House described it. The loaded dining cars never went
anywhere, in the long-distance sense. He approved of that. But they were subject to endless enshuntment.
That, he said, was a bloody scandal and a waste of the taxpayers money.
When the urge for a bash came upon him his routine was simple. Using his secret key, he secretly got into a
parked and laden car very early in the morning, penetrated to the pantry, grabbed a jug of water, a glass and
a bottle of whiskey and, with this assortment of material and utensil, locked himself in the lavatory.
Refect on that locking. So far as the whole world was concerned, the car was utterly empty. It was locked
with special, unprecedented locks. Yet this man locked himself securely within those locks.
Came the dawnand the shunters. They espied, as doth the greyhound the hare, the lonely dining car,
mute, immobile, deserted. So they couple it up and drag it to another siding at Lifey Junction. It is there for
fve hours but it is discovered (by that crowd of bastards, i.e. other shunters) and towed over to the yards
behind Westland Row Station.
Many hours later it is shunted on to the tail of the Wexford Express but later angrily detached owing to the
unexpected arrival of extra passengers.
And are you sitting in the lavatory drinking whiskey all the time? I asked.
Certainly I am, he answered. What the hell do you think lavatories in trains is for? And with the knees of me
trousers wet with me own whiskey from the jerks of them shunter bastards!
His resentment was enormous. Be it noted that the whiskey was not in fact his own whiskey, that he was that
oddity, an unauthorised person.
How long does a bash in the cars last? I asked him.
Ah, that depends on a lot of things, he said. As you know, I never carry a watch. (Exhibits cufess, hairy
wrist in proof.) Did I ever tell you about the time I had a bash in the tunnel?
He has notfor the good reason that I had never met him before.
I seen meself, he said, once upon a time on a three-day bash. The bastards took me out of Lifey Junction
down to Hazelhatch. Another crowd shifted me into Harcourt Street yards. I was having a good bash at this
time, but I always try to see, for the good of me health, that a bash doesnt last more than a day and a night. I
know its night outside when its dark. If its bright, its day. Do you follow me?
I think I do.
Well, I was about on the third bottle when this other shunter crowd come alongit was dark, about eight in
the eveningand nothing would do them only bring me into the Lifey Tunnel under the Phoenix Park and
park me there. As you know I never use a watch. If its bright, its day. If its dark, its night. Here was meself
parked in the tunnel, opening bottle after bottle in the dark, thinking the night was a very long one, stuck
there, in the tunnel. I was three-quarters way into the jigs when they pulled me out of the tunnel into
Kingsbridge. I was in bed for a week. Did you ever in your life hear of a greater crowd of bastards?
Never,
That was the frst and last time I ever had a bash in the tunnel.
Funny? But surely there you have the Irish artist? Sitting fully dressed, innerly locked in the toilet of a locked
coach where he has no right to be, resentfully drinking somebody elses whiskey, being whisked hither and
thither by anonymous shunters, keeping fastidiously the while on the outer face of his door the simple word,
ENGAGED?
I think the image fts Joyce: but particularly in his manifestation of a most Irish characteristicthe
transgressors resentment with the nongressor.
A friend of mine found himself next door at dinner to a well-known savant who appears inUlysses. (He shall
be nameless, for he still lives.) My friend, making dutiful conversation, made mention of Joyce. The savant
said that Ireland was under a deep obligation to the author of Joyces Irish Names of Places. My friend
lengthily explained that his reference had been to a diferent Joyce. The savant did not quite understand, but
ultimately confessed that he had heard certain rumours about the other man. It seemed that he had written
some dirty books, published in Paris.
But you are a character in one of them, my friend incautiously remarked.
The next two hours, to the neglect of wine and cigars, were occupied with a heated statement by the savant
that he was by no means a character in fction, he was a man, furthermore he was alive and he had
published books of his own.
How can I be a character in fction, he demanded, if I am here talking to you?
That incident may be funny, too, but its curiosity is this: Joyce spent a lifetime establishing himself as a
character in fction. Joyce created, in narcissus fascination, the ageless Stephen. Beginning with importing
real characters into his books, he achieves the magnifcent inversion of making them legendary and fctional.
It is quite preposterous. Thousands of people believe that there once lived a man named Sherlock Holmes.
Joyce went further than Satan in rebellion.
Two characters who confess themselves based on Aquinas: Joyce and Maritain.
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce appears to favour the Vico theory of inevitable human and recurring evolution
theocracy: aristocracy: democracy: chaos.
A.E. referred to the chaos of Joyces mind.
That was wrong, for Joyces mind was indeed very orderly. In composition he used coloured pencils to keep
himself right. All his works, not excluding Finnegans Wake, have a rigid classic pattern. His personal moral
and family behaviours were impossible. He seems to have deserved equally with George Moore the sneer
about the latterhe never kissed, but told.
What was really abnormal about Joyce? At Clongowes he had his dose of Jesuit casuistry. Why did he
substitute his home-made chaosistry?
It seems to me that Joyce emerges, through curtains of salacity and blasphemy, as a truly fear-shaken Irish
Catholic, rebelling not so much against the Church but against its near-schism Irish eccentricities, its
pretence that there is only one Commandment, the vulgarity of its edifces, the shallowness and stupidity of
many of its ministers. His revolt, noble in itself, carried him away. He could not see the tree for the woods. But
I think he meant well. We all do, anyway.
What is Finnegans Wake? A treatise on the incommunicable night-mind? Or merely an example of silence,
and punning?
I doubt whether the contents of this issue will get many of us any forrarder.
A certain commentator seeks to establish that Joyce was at heart an Irish dawn-bursting romantic, an
admirer of de Valera, and one who dearly wished to be recalled to Dublin as an aging man to be crowned
with a D.Litt. from the National and priest-haunted University. This is at least possible, if only because it
explains the preposterous esthetic afectations of his youth, which included the necessity for being rude to
his dying mother. The theme here is that a heart of gold was beating under the artifcial waistcoat. Amen.
The number of people invited to contribute to this issue has necessarily been limited. Yet it is curious that
none makes mention of Joyces superber quality: his capacity for humour. Humour, the handmaid of sorrow
and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyces works. He uses the thing, in the same way as Shakespeare does
but less formally, to attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they will be in
hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the
heritage of the Irish Catholic. True humour needs this background urgency: Rabelais is funny, but his stuf
cloys. His stuf lacks tragedy.
Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his ambiguity (his polyguity, perhaps?), his
leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his technical skill, his attraction for Americans. His works are a garden in which
some of us may play. This issue of Envoyclaims to be merely a small bit of that garden.
But at the end, Joyce will still be in his tunnel, unabashed.