Unknown Arts
by William Walsh
Keyhole Press, 2012
142 pages / $9.99  Buy from Keyhole Press or Amazon

Unknown Arts by William Walsh (Keyhole Press, 2012) is a collection of critical appropriations sourced from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and more. A book about Joyce’s books, Unknown Arts can be read as analysis, distortion, homage, and/or a work of art all of its own. It is doubtless a contentious book that will likely add fuel to the ongoing and often fiery debates around contemporary criticism, the imprint of influence, and the nature of creativity. Controversial or not, the collection is a valuable artifact that allows rare access into what are for many the impenetrable works of a literary master.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the many texts in the collection appropriated from Ulysses (1922), titled “Sunny Jim 2”:

At just one hundred and forty-one pages, Unknown Arts is a relatively slim book, and yet attempts to condense and capture Joyce’s enormous and ambitious body of work—groundbreaking works written over decades and which forever altered the laws of literature. The unique and many challenges posed by Joyce’s work as source, especially in terms of language, structure, rhythm, and what to include and omit, seem insurmountable. An extraordinary undertaking, then, made all the more astonishing because Walsh’s mirror to Joyce’s unparalleled—and to some, inaccessible—oeuvre is most compelling, a collection that is at turns whimsy, absurdity, and the studied plumbing of Joyce’s works, and is always rhythmic and provocative.

Here’s an excerpt, a single sentence that runs for seven pages, appropriated from Finnegans Wake (1939) titled “Himself.”

Nonetheless, it is arguably disconcerting, disturbing even, to shrink and recapitulate a dead master’s greatest works. There’s an implied audacity and irreverence. We might say Walsh is imitator here and “glorying in the open shame” (to quote from Joyce’s erotic letters and not from Unknown Arts). Alternatively, we can also recognize how exhilarating it is that Walsh has dared to deconstruct, re-imagine, and make anew that which would be enshrined and made holy. Many will hail Walsh as an innovator who has created here something that, (again from Joyce’s erotic letters), is in the “spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored.” Perhaps only devotees of Joyce’s greatest works can truly appreciate Unknown Arts, but even a familiarity with the Irish master’s books hardly seems necessary to embrace this unapologetic collection.

Here’s a final full text retelling:

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Ethel Rohan is Irish and she’s got the freckles, blue-white skin, and tattoo to prove it. Check her out at ethelrohan.com.