Oh, all I was going to say was....well, have you ever thought what it must be like to be James Joyce? Living as a poor Catholic in a country that is occupied by wealthy Protestants from an island next door? We live 100 years later now, and Protestant and Catholic are mostly just All Theists to the intellectual class, or to people who read Joyce. Yet imagine being Joyce. Imagine you hear that a Bureaucrat who works for the British Government shuffling papers to keep the Irish in their place---and if you're a Bureaucrat working for the British Civil Service in Dublin Castle, chances are you're a Protestant---has just published his first novel. And you're James Joyce and you read it and you see that this novel is full of clichés about the Wild Untamed Irish Natives of the West Coast of Ireland, and is just badly-written horseshit from beginning to end.
And you ask around to find out about the author of this book and you find out he is a Bureaucrat whose only previous published work is a manual for British Bureaucrats called "The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland". And suddenly he thinks he can write a novel....
And so you (James Joyce) pick up the Bureaucrat's novel, because it is set in the Wilds of Western Ireland, and it's entitled "The Snake's Pass" even though any fecking Irish Catholic knows there are no snakes in Ireland, St Patrick chased them out, so this Bureaucrat is clearly a complete incompetent.
And you read the book and you realize the heroine is named "Norah Joyce". Because she is. (Although James Joyce hadn't met Nora Barnacle yet when this badly-written novel was published.)
And then seven years later the Bureaucrat becomes world-famous for publishing a novel you probably have heard of, although it's not much better written than The Snake's Pass. It's called Dracula.
What would James Joyce do?
Well, I'll tell you one thing. There's only one reference to Bram Stoker or Dracula in all of Finnegans Wake. (And you can trust me on this, I've read the whole damn thing, so you wouldn't have to.) Page 145 in the Viking edition:
"Let's root out Brimstoker and give him the thrall of our lives. It's Dracula's nightout"
And yet....Finnegans Wake is about a man who comes back from the dead. Tim Finnegan is undead, you might say. So is Dracula.
But do you think there's any chance that James Joyce HAD read The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker the way I described it, and saw the cliché Irish stereotype heroine written by a Protestant Bureaucrat Servant of the Brutish Vempire named Norah Joyce, and thought of that when Nora Barnacle gave him a handjob on Bloomsday?
It's possible. Although nobody in the thriving Joyce industry has ever mentioned it.
Bram's brother Thornley Stoker even pops up as a character in Ulysses. So who knows?
But there, I've given you a reason to take an interest in Finnegans Wake. It might be (as Gogarty suggested) the most colossal leg-pull in literary history. Or it might just be the Catholic's response to the Protestant Dracula. After all, Dracula literally drinks blood. Which--if you believe as Catholics do in the doctrine of Transubstantiation--is exactly why Protestants are afraid of Catholics in the first place.
Yet I've never seen any of this mentioned in Joyce criticism, because Joyce critics are mostly interested in holding on to their teaching jobs rather than trying to think: What would it be like to be James Joyce?