Books
Birthday in emerald
by Gordon McLauchlan
In which our travelling correspondent reports from Ireland to mark the centenary of that famous day described in James Joyce's baffling masterpiece <i>Ulysses</i>.
The Irish are in a kerfuffle over the forthcoming centenary of that famous day, June 16, 1904, when James Augustine Aloysius Joyce first walked out, as they say over there, with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. A man who wrote wondrously for the ear was surely not seduced by the euphony of her name, but they fell in love and she stuck to him over the years through many a scrape. They are in a kerfuffle not because the young couple went for a walk in the park that evening but because Joyce stamped the date indelibly in the minds of his countrymen with Ulysses – the great, rambling, complex novel that documents both the diurnal and nocturnal activities of Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom and Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, during that single Dublin day. This was by most of the millennial assessments four years ago, the greatest novel of the 20th century. The centenary of Bloomsday, as June 16 is now known around the world, has preoccupied Dublin since the beginning of the year. The tourism industry and the Joyce industry have been relishing their common aim – to pull interested punters from around the world. The ReJoyce Festival as it has been tagged is not passing with quiet dignity, but rather with that kind of frenzied partying the Irish are so good at. The festival opened in January when Minister of Arts, Sport and Tourism John O’Donoghue laid out the programme for the year and invited visitors from everywhere to join them. In February, a radio reading of Ulysses began with 20 45-minute, perplexing, soporific episodes running through to June. A Ulysses movie called Bloom by director Sean Walsh has been previewed, a James Joyce musical recital will be held, and the National Library of Ireland is exhibiting, among a large range of Joyceana, 19 of the writer’s draft notebooks acquired only two years ago.But the shindig really gets under way on Sunday June 13 when 10,000 locals and visitors will have a Ulyssean breakfast in O’Connell Street on the “inner organs of beasts and fowl”. Sausage-makers, Denny’s, mentioned in Ulysses, will sponsor the event. As well, the James Joyce Centre will host its traditional Guinness Bloomsday breakfast across town. Bloomsday has been celebrated for years in cities around the world, including Auckland. The centennial will be special here, too. Auckland City Libraries have arranged a traditional Irish breakfast of offal meat – low on fat but high in cholesterol – as well as a programme of celebrity readings at 10.00am, 2.00pm and 4.30pm, and a Joyce Lecture at 1.00pm by Professor Liberato Santoro, honorary research associate with the department of philosophy at the University of Auckland. Meanwhile, in Dublin during “Bloomsweek”, 1000 international Joycean scholars will attend a symposium, chomping on more than 400 submitted papers in one of the greatest literary post-mortems of all time. The scholars will doubtless publish and add to the hundreds of thousands of words written about Ulysses, more than on any other work except Hamlet. Joyce was prescient when he wrote of his novel: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring immortality.”.
These literary pathologists take the great novel very seriously indeed. A few weeks ago in Dublin, I said enthusiastically to a resident National Library scholar with a nose so high he would have picked up smells from the Liffey River at low tide: “I’ve got this theory about reading Ulysses. Start at part two, chapter four, when Bloom enters the picture and you can get straight into it. It’s clear that Joyce used the first part to score off his erstwhile friends-turned-enemies, like Oliver Gogarty.”
He stared at me and with the slightest lift of one eyebrow said, “I hope you don’t think you’re the first one to come up with that”, and turned to talk to someone he thought more worthy of his time.
Bloomsweek will end, according to the orgasmic publicity, with “an explosion of bizarre costumed creatures, street performers, and costumed actors [who] will enact scenes … [as] Lestrygonians. Synchronised to music, water fountains will rise to dramatic heights as the drama is unleashed with a breathtaking performance of the River Liffey herself as a series of texts and images relating to Ulysses fill the surface of the water and bounce up against the architecture of the Liffey quayside.”
(Lestrygonians? Giant cannibals from that other book about Ulysses, or Odysseus, the one by Homer.)
All this for a book that is probably the least-read bestseller in the history of literature. But ah! Undercurrents flow beneath this surface of joyful celebration. Dubliner and Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle has taken a swipe at Ulysses, saying it is overrated, needed a good editor and never “moved” anyone. The great satirist Flann O’Brien, novelist John Banville and other famous Irish writers have expressed exasperation over the years, claiming Joyce looms over them like a dark cloud shutting out their light.
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