AT 933 pages in its paperback edition, James Joyce’s Ulysses is a frighteningly long, deep and daunting novel, more read about than read. It’s far less effort to don period dress and hoist a few stouts at a semi-literary festival in the book’s honour.
But the world is full of people who take the quintessential Dublin novel very seriously indeed, and most of them seemed to be in the Irish capital yesterday to celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday. Joyce set his urban odyssey on June 16, 1904, the day when he first went out with Nora Barnacle, with whom he was to spend the rest of his life.
Ireland has never been slow at mining its heritage for profit, and Bloomsday is the biggest show in town this year after St Patrick’s Day. Dubliners may not have read the book but they know full well its financial potential.
“There’s a lot o’ them Joyceans in town today,” one busy taxi driver said. “I tried reading it once, but there’s no plot; it’s just a day in the life of some guy.”
Out at the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where the novel begins and where Joyce briefly lived, Barry McGovern, a local actor, declaimed passages of the dense and sometimes impenetrable prose from the tower to a crowd of hundreds below, many kitted out in bowlers, boaters, blazers and wasp-waisted Edwardian dresses.
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At the James Joyce Centre, occupying a fine Georgian house off O’Connell Street, Mary McAleese, the Irish President, breakfasted like Leopold Bloom on the inner organs of beasts and fowls — eggs, bacon, black pudding and kidneys. The crowd outside was served similar but less authentic fare from a mobile catering van. Joyce never mentioned that Bloom ate his breakfast in a baguette.
As Mrs McAleese emerged from breakfast and a token listen to the all-day readings, she, being a consummate politician, kissed a baby who turned out to be Christina Coulter-Riley, the author’s great-great-grandniece and his newest descendant, aged nine months. With the family group was a hapless woman who married the author’s grand-nephew and is now Mrs Joyce Joyce.
Any gathering of the earnest inevitably includes a significant proportion of Americans from obscure Midwest universities. But a much more unlikely group sat outside the centre sipping mid-morning Guinness in the hot sun. The 14-strong reading circle from Trondheim had spent three years preparing for its visit to Dublin, reading Ulysses in Norwegian. Clearly Ibsen is far too flippant for them.
“We don’t study Ulysses at school in Norway,” Tone Lowe, 41, said. “It would kill all interest in Joyce. We read it as adults, but we don’t necessarily like it. I like Molly’s soliloquy at the end (62 pages devoid of any punctuation) but I think the rest of the book appeals more to men.”
It makes you wonder how the Norwegian translator coped with Joycean sentences, which bring even the English reader to a juddering halt of incomprehension. And what is the Chinese — for there are two such translations — for: “Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.”
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It’s much easier to take a Joyce walking tour, for few novels are so inextricably rooted in a location. But time has torn gaping holes in Bloom’s itinerary. His house at 7 Eccles Street was shamefully bulldozed in 1982.
Nor can you re-enact the Parable of the Plums, in which two old crones spit stones from the top of the Nelson Pillar; the IRA skilfully blew up the monument to England’s naval hero nearly 40 years ago.
Nor dare you replicate Stephen Dedalus entering the bar of the Ormond Hotel, ordering a whiskey and lighting his pipe. Dublin now equals New York in its draconian anti-smoking laws, a measure that would have caused Joyce, the breaker of boundaries, utter apoplexy. Up at the National Library of Ireland, where Dedalus propounded his theory of Hamlet with the help of three stiff whiskies, a new exhibition shows Joyce’s original manuscript, handwritten in a succession of school copybooks.
John O’Donoghue, the Irish Arts Minister, said on opening the exhibition: “Some people argue that Ulysses is not an easy book to read. This makes it clear that it was not an easy book to write, either.”
More than 800 earnest Joyceans are attending a week-long academic symposium in Dublin to hear some 430 papers on topics as diverse as the difficulties of translating Ulysses into Asian languages and the significance of excrement in Joyce’s work.
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Anne Fogarty, organiser of the symposium and a lecturer in English at University College, Dublin, cleared up one popular misconception. “Joyce was never formally banned in Ireland; he was just never actively imported.” Of course; to have Ulysses put formally on the censorship list, some sanctimonious prodnose would have had to read all the filthy bits.
Ulysses, Ms Fogarty believes, is a thoroughly modern work, despite being published in 1922. “It sums up all the contradictions of the modern period. Leopold and Molly Bloom are Irish Hungarian Jews, foreigners and misfits. Bloom is trying to find out how his inner self copes with reality; he’s a modern hero, because he’s so ordinary,” she said.
So hoist a glass to Leopold and have one of his Gorgonzola sandwiches with burgundy at Davy Byrne’s bar — on special offer at 10.45am yesterday. It’s so much more fun than wading through Molly’s 62-page stream of consciousness in Norwegian.
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