Ireland and James Joyce: A dysfunctional relationship

June 16, 2004|By Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter.

To mark the centennial of Bloomsday, there will be public readings world-wide from "Ulysses," the novel that made June 16 the most celebrated date on the literary calendar -- but none in Ireland, which is nicely fitting.

Dublin's streets are the setting for the book, greeted as a masterpiece and reviled as a gargantuan bore. Yet to write it, James Joyce felt obliged to leave his native land, with which he had a love-hate relationship.

"Ulysses" was quickly praised by British and American critics and writers. The poet T.S. Eliot compared Joyce's achievement with "the importance of a scientific discovery."

But the Dublin Review panned "Ulysses" for uniting "the spiritually offensive and the physically unclean." When Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, a representative of the British government spoke at the funeral, but the Irish consul was conspicuously a no-show.

The snub poisoned relations between the Joyce family and his homeland ever since.

"It began with that and festered through the years," said Laura Weldon, national coordinator of the six-month-long ReJoyce Dublin 2004 Bloomsday Centenary Festival. Humans, she added, are infinitely capable of making emotional mountains out of seeming molehills, and those hurt feelings have lasted to this day.

For its part, Ireland has tried to patch up the feud, especially since the centennial of Joyce's birth in 1982 was marked by a major scholarly conference. Through the '80s, the Catholic Church began to lose its veto power over Irish society, and Joyce was added to high school reading lists, noted David Butler, education director of the James Joyce Center, Dublin.

"It became evident that Joyce wasn't a dirty writer or anti-Catholic, and we recognized the scale of his importance to Irish culture," Butler said. "But there still are problems with the estate."

Accordingly, the Dublin festival's organizers knew it was futile to even ask permission for a performance of "Ulysses" from his grandson, Stephen Joyce, who lives in Paris, holds the European copyright and is fiercely protective of his grandfather's position in literature's pantheon. But the situation with literary rights is more murky in the United States. So there will be Bloomsday readings from "Ulysses" in Chicago, including the Red Lion Pub, and New York, with a cast of Broadway performers including the distinguished Irish-born actress Fionnula Flanagan.

Considering the hurdles the book presents to even undaunted readers, its celebrity is remarkable.

It took 735 pages (more in later editions) to follow ordinary Dublin residents through the course of an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The central character is a Jewish advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, hence the name by which Joyce partisans annually celebrate their beloved author. As they freely -- nay, enthusiastically -- acknowledge, his style requires readers swim upstream.

"Ulysses" is told via the characters' thoughts, which, like those of all humans, don't succeed one another in logical fashion. Snatches of memory have head-on collisions with fragments of current experience, jerking the narrative back and forth in time, from one sentence to the next. The characters no less than readers sometimes aren't sure who's who or what's up.

"I was happier then," Bloom reflects. "Or was that I? Or am I now I?"


Even Gertude Stein, the pioneer of literary obscurity, pronounced Joyce "incomprehensible." Edmund Wilson, the reigning American critic of Joyce's day and otherwise a booster of the book, doubted "anyone will defend parts of `Ulysses' against the charge of extreme dullness."

Yet Wilson's present-day successor, Harold Bloom, can't get enough of the novel. He considers Joyce's writing the greatest achievement in 20th Century English literature.

"I first read `Ulysses' when I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science. I reread it twice a year," said Bloom, author of "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages."

"Like a mythical Kansas," he said, "it is, on one level, an almost documentary re-creation of the city of Dublin, its streets, its library, its whorehouses."

Weldon, who is American born, said that on coming to Dublin she repeatedly went through a shock of recognition. "I'd look up to see a sign, `Holles Street' or the maternity hospital," she recalled. "And I'd say to myself, `Why, they're in `Ulysses' too."

Those correspondences aren't accidental. When Joyce went into self-imposed exile, he took with him vivid memories of the smallest details of Dublin's physical appearance. He kept them sharply honed, noted the American avant-garde composer Otto Luening, who once recalled Joyce talking about Dublin.

"As Joyce described a street, he began with the kinds of cobblestones," Luening said. "He made the vivid sounds of horses' hooves, and the sounds of footsteps on the cobblestones."

Sound is, indeed, the key to understanding what Joyce was up to, Harold Bloom said.