Ineluctable cock-up

'A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery,' wrote James Joyce, modestly. He might have added that if you're looking for an epic balls-up, bankers are a corresponding portal.

The unattractive object below is one of 10,000 commemorative coins minted (in Germany) for the Central Bank of Ireland and released yesterday. It depicts a trepanned, cyclopean, pointy-chinned Joyce and, in the kind of lettering usually seen on the covers of chick lit paperbacks, the first two sentences from Chapter 3 of Ulysses: 

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things that I am here to read.

© Royal Bank of Ireland

The launch, held in University College Dublin (Joyce's alma mater), was hastily followed by a red-faced press release, part of which reads:

The Central Bank acknowledges that the text on the Joyce coin does not correspond to the precise text as it appears in Ulysses (an additional word “that” has been added to the second sentence). While the error is regretted, it should be noted that the coin is an artistic representation of the author and text and not intended as a literal representation.

You'll admire the gormless evasive wriggle implicit in the use of the passive voice 'the error is regretted' and 'it should be noted'. I'm keen to learn, perhaps from the chump who wrote that balls, how a misquotation can be flourished as an 'artistic interpretation' as opposed to 'a literal representation' (by which I suppose is meant 'an accurate transcription of the original text'). They want it both ways, these bankers - to have the prestige-by-association of Joyce, a notoriously 'difficult' writer that otherwise literate people are unashamed to admit never reading, as though this were evidence of their own robust common sense, and (at the same time) arrogantly to assert that he is grist to their aesthetic mill, subordinate to the sanctioned 'interpretation' of a boorish commercial concern.

The coin's designer, who is probably having a bad week, is called Mary Gregoriy (and that is how she spells her name, which is mildly annoying).

The passage from which the two sentences have been artistically interpreted renders the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus as he walks alone along Sandymount Strand, his mind calmly racing. What in Erin's name it has to do with coinage is anyone's guess:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.

Let's agree that it's an odd choice of text. Joyce's writings offer plenty of quotable money-related zingers so one wonders who settled on this one, and how. No blame can be possibly attached to the artist. who clearly can't have chosen the original quotation because, as she admits on her blog (http://marygregoriysculptor.blogspot.co.uk):

                  'I have not really read a book for such a long time - too busy at the mo.' 

So perhaps a committee of Irish plutocrats with literary leanings met over lunch, or several lunches, to wrangle learnedly over a shortlist submitted by a cohort of respected Joyce scholars and high-minded numismatists. Or their spouses, at some convivial book club? Their children? Mates in the pub with blindfold and pin? Having settled, perhaps arbitrarily, on the sentences for Gregoriy to render in her squiggly 'hair writing' did nobody check, and then sign off, the final version? Wasn't there a preliminary drawing? Did no memos circulate? No emails between artist and client and mint? If some official responsible for signing it off did sign it off - shouldn't they get a symbolic bollocking? (I'm a firm believer in blame culture, especially in the financial sector.)

Nobody, however, is likely to care enough to apportion or accept blame, and I expect everybody at the bank is privately congratulating themselves over the enormous amount of coverage the error is likely to receive and, in a misguided access of optimism, the boom in sales of the coin under advisement. But they are wrong - who in their right mind and with the slightest interest in Joyce would want to own this pisspoor and preposterous ten euro coin costing, quite incredibly, forty-six euros? You'd have to be a banker. The total issue has been valued by the Irish Central Bank at €4,600,000, although the face value is fixed at €50,000. There's an artistic interpretation for you. Purchases are limited to three per customer, so get there early and form an orderly queue.

If the modernist intellectuals at Central Bank need an alternative Ulysses quotation for a replacement coin they could do worse than choose what is among the most beautiful sentences ever written. It describes the sky over Dublin on the night of 16th June 1904 as seen by Leopold Bloom, in the back garden of his house at 7 Eccles Street:

                             The heaventree of stars hung with humid night blue fruit.

Even an Irish banker couldn't make a hash of that.