Joyce and the Irish

Patrick Kavanagh's renown is almost wholly based on his poetry but below a short extract from a prose piece Football, football here being gaelic football, and here he writes of the local team's coach:

He was a great master of the cliché, but sometimes he broke into originality as when the time we were going for the county final he wouldn't let us touch a ball for a week previous as he wanted us to be 'ball hungry.'
Ball hungry as we may have been we lost the match.

How sterile is virtually everything else! To unfortunately yoke it to the at least semi-conceived seriousness which presumably will follow, to move from this 'Irishness' onto James Joyce, though with the reservation that anyone who wanders into the territory of wondering what it is to be Irish is no longer Irish but something else. Joyce takes this playfulness, this fertile, colourful relationship with language, and turns it into some artificial, intellectual monstrosity, and the reason largely being that he lived apart in Europe, perhaps necessarily on a pesonal level, and in a self-sustaining of his identity made a kind of colony out of this Irishness within his writing. And to take a quick look at a definition of colony:

A kind of isolated medium where strange and fantastic growths can come to fruition.

And though this artificiality is imbued with the native playfulness of language, like some bizarre fungal growths allowed grow within some isolated medium, the novelty of the resulting strangeness, the fetishisation of this native language, is revered by others, themselves rendered artificial by their growths within the fantastical strangeness of particularly Western European civilisation. And so to their distorted forms Joyce's distorted forms are a thrilling validation, a heady mix of the organic and artificial, but the organic or natural bent into intellectually obscene forms, the language ever more so ceasing to refer to anything but itself, an ultimately insane and narcissistic violation of the nature of language.