“james Joyce Was An Artist. He Said So Himself.” | Flann O’brien’s “a Bash In The Tunnel” (or, “was Joyce Mad?” By Hamlet Prince Of Denmark)

“A Bash in the Tunnel”

by

Flann O’Brien

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 affirmation 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 thinkers-all Irish, all Catholic, some unlay—have 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 off very well under unfaultable teachers, both were very proud, both had a fall. But they differed 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, it’s 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 doesn’t 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 wouldn’t get killed as well? Wasn’t I standing beside him?’ Another blasphemy, perhaps-doubting the Almighty’s 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 man-—then a complete stranger-came, accompanied by his drink, and stood beside me: addressing me by name, he said he was surprised to see a man like myselt 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 didn’t 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 needn’t 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 ter-minus. 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 father’s job to load them from time to time with costly victuals eggs, 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 first is a chronic inability to ‘make up’ trains in advance, i.e., to estimate expected passenger traffic accurately. Week after week a long-distance train is scheduled to be five 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 peculiarity-not exclusively Irish-is 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.

Reflect 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 dawn-and 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 Liffey Junction. It is there for five 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 bastards!’ 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 unauthorized 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 cuffless, hairy wrist in proof.) ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I had a bash in the tunnel?’ He has not—for 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 Liffey 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 doesn’t last more than a day and a night. I know it’s night outside when it’s dark. If it’s bright, it’s day. Do you follow me?’ ‘I think I do.’ ‘Well, I was about on the third bottle when this other shunter crowd come along it was dark, about eight in the evening— and nothing would do them only bring me into the Liffey Tunnel under the Phoenix Park and park me there. As you know I never use a watch. If it’s bright, it’s day. If it’s dark, it’s 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 first and last time I ever had a bash in the tunnel.’