Happy Birthyear

By Paul Gray

Dublin jumps for Joyce

In Dublin's fair city, a new plaque adorns a dingy, red brick house at 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street. It identifies the birthplace of someone who never lived and who, as long as there are readers, will never die: "Here in Joyce's imagination was born in May, 1866, Leopold Bloom--citizen, husband, father, wanderer, reincarnation of Ulysses." The Irish capital has changed in other small ways. A bronze bust of James Joyce stands in St. Stephen's Green, a small park near the city's center. The Chapelizod Bridge across the greenish River Liffey has been rechristened the Anna Livia Bridge, named after Anna Livia Plurabelle, the female force that flows through Finnegans Wake. Little by little, the city that Joyce so painstakingly preserved in his fiction is reshaping itself into his images.

The impetus for all this activity is the centennial of Joyce's birth, on Feb. 2, 1882. This year also marks the 78th anniversary of Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, the day commemorated in Ulysses and a sacred date on the calendar of all Joyceans. Some 550 scholars assembled then for the eighth international James Joyce symposium. The President of Ireland, Patrick Hillery, and the mayor of Dublin, Alexis Fitzgerald, were on hand for official ceremonies; scores of people in turn-of-the-century costumes took to the streets to act out scenes from the novel. One who declined an invitation to join in the fun was Joyce's grandson Stephen, who sent his regrets from Paris. Wherever his grandparents are, he said, "I know they will be smiling, even grinning broadly with malice and pleasure at the festivities."

Indeed, they might be. Joyce liked praise, and it is now coming to him and his work from some unexpected quarters. Red-bearded Patrick O'Rourke stands by the Liffey, leaning on his bicycle. "I left school at twelve," he says. "Now I'm trying to read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. From my point of view, it's a case of trying to educate myself. Just reading Joyce has helped me to appreciate the simple things of life. He changed my life long before the centenary."

There is cause for a small drop of Joycean malice as well. Dublin's embrace of its prodigal son is both tardy and tentative. The money for the bronze bust did not come from the Irish government but from American Express, to provide an additional lure to the swarms of foreign tourists who annually pay homage to the master. Many Irish natives remain unimpressed. Jerry Davis, a local artist who played the role of Bloom on Bloomsday, says of Joyce: "He was an impudent whacker. I don't really want to be identified with him." Symphorosa Daybell, a student at Trinity College with a name that could have appeared in Finnegans Wake, calls his work "bloody rubbish. It's just dressing the whole thing up. I tried reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but couldn't make head or tail of it." A denizen of one of Dublin's ubiquitous pubs shrugs at the mention of Joyce's name: "Jaysus, I can't even back a horse, never mind read his books."

Such comments would have made Joyce feel right at home. He guessed early that most of his fellow Dubliners would neither understand what he hoped to say nor accept quietly his growing rebelliousness toward Roman Catholicism. The defiant young man cultivated enemies, pinned them in his memory, then ran off to the Continent in 1904 with a chambermaid named Nora Barnacle. He spent the rest of his life--in Rome, Trieste, Zurich and Paris--writing only of Dublin. He gave the city back its lilting, musical language; he composed and settled scores. For its part, Dublin seemed content to ignore Joyce until its citizens heard that they appeared by name, or thinly disguised, in a scandalous book called Ulysses. Judging by their outrage, most of them might have preferred a niche in Dante's Inferno.

Time has evidently softened hard feelings, but not entirely, and that is just as well. A nondisputatious Dublin, an Ireland without its witty insults, would have nothing in common with Joyce's work. His imagination soared, always launched from a ground that remains much the same. Those readers who make their first pilgrimage to Dublin this summer and fall will find the place eerily familiar. Thanks to Joyce, they have walked those streets and heard those voices, that captivating urban hubbub, before. They will cross the Anna Livia Bridge and stand before the new landmarks. The centennial will end, and the most enduring monuments will remain Joyce's books. --By Paul Gray.

Reported by Mary Cronin/Dublin

With reporting by Mary Cronin/Dublin

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.