I seem to remember Joyce was the final straw in the uneasy alliance between the Rourke-style “avant-gardists” and the “Brutalists”, after Rourke asserted Joyce was a genius, and a Brutalist suggested that he was “shite”, or some such epithet.

Bloom’s urine-scented kidneys have a Proustian touch for me. Those offal-based breakfasts of my childhood… Tesco kidneys don’t smell of anything, not even kidney.

I’m sure McCarthy would relish the notion of “disciples”, and yes his pronouncements suggest he views his output as consisting primarily of sacred texts. Your equation of his symbolism with idealism also puts him in the same camp as the Romantics, surely? He’d love that.

I was thinking of Tom McCarthy actually, as part of a piece I wanted to write about symbolism – which I’ll probably never get around to writing because it’s a) interesting, and contains a few worthwhile thoughts (which excludes it from being part of this blog), and b) not quite formulated clearly (which obviously doesn’t exclude it from this blog at all). McCarthy’s use of symbolism seems very close to medieval symbolism (part of what, in the medieval world was called “realism” – though this “realism” appears to be what we call “idealism” (a sort of neo-Platonism), in which every aspect of the world is seen as a symbol of the divine). Novels as texts for your pseudo-religious philosophical outlook, to be pored over for years by your disciples.

I have enjoyed some of your other “war on originality” pieces more I must admit.