By Mallory Sweeney

I sat tight, as the cab careened and hugged the city’s north-side corners—gently and then with fervor—as I was whisked to the airport and one-step closer to home.  The driver turned in is seat to me and lilted, “Say goodbye to Anna Liffey,” then obligingly pulled next to the stone enclosure overlooking the beautiful gurgling muck.  I knew in a split second that I had to borrow his words.  Even though I had only been a resident for a short four months, I peered into the dark green water and whispered, “DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN.”
  -James Joyce, Ulysses

James Joyce was born on February 2nd, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, the location that would become the setting for nearly the entire body of his work and a home with which he would remain in deep conflict his entire life.  Educated by the Jesuits for the first half of his life, he eventually attended Belvedere College and finally University College on St. Steven’s green where he studied language and literature.  Joyce would explore everything from the manipulation of language in his highly acclaimed Finnegans Wake, to the sophisticated reconstruction of Homer’s Odyssey in his brilliant episodes of the frequently banned Ulysses.  Perhaps the proof of Joyce’s ongoing and curious conflict with Dublin is in the fact that once he left the city in 1904 after he was recalled there from Paris for his mother’s funeral, he only returned four times, the last visit being in 1912.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to study in Dublin during the spring of 2006.  Throughout my time there, I was privileged to not only study James Joyce’s works under the astute supervision of Irish professors (many of whom have devoted parts of their lives to Joyce studies) but also while being surrounded by an Irish culture and population which still resonates many of Joyce’s ideas and sentiments. 

One might question why Joyce chose Dublin for his eternal setting, even as he was writing abroad.  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, as well as parts of Dubliners, his famed short story collection, were both composed while he was living in Trieste and published with the help of Ezra Pound.  Much of Ulysses was written while Joyce and his family were living in Paris.  Yet Dublin is always there, always a presence, almost like a central character.  Dublin, as a city, has a live pulse, a current that runs through it just as the river Liffey runs and cuts the city in half.  The Irish, generally outgoing and colorful by nature, never fail to speak of the city with an intimate knowledge—a trait that is clear in many of Joyce’s characters.  Who can forget the boorish and aspiring Stephen Dedalus as his struggle spans two of Joyce’s novels, or the encroaching med-student Buck Mulligan (based on Oliver St. John Gogerty, whose famed pub and restaurant still stands in the city’s Temple Bar area) who is Stephen’s roommate and his burden in Ulysses.  And there is, not to be forgotten, the sensual and consummately written figure of Molly Bloom, said to be based on Joyce’s own wife Nora Barnacle.  The Irish are expressive by nature and say what they feel and by this “virtue” can express the widest range of emotions—sorrow in one moment and exuberant joy the next.  As Joyce best express the Irish spirit and experience in his story “A Little Cloud” in Dubliners:

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

Just as the people of Dublin and specifically his family are his inspiration, one can wander her streets and not help but wonder that the city herself was also the author’s muse.  Joyce’s Dublin is so alive because he took the liberty to explore it.  As Joyce himself said of Ulysses, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”  Any setting becomes vivid under a careful eye—and Joyce, like many great writers, loved and yet had a conflict with their homes.   Much of the home conflict can be seen in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where home and religion inevitably fail Stephen as places of comfort. 

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

But Dublin, even in Joyce’s physical abandonment of her, still remains the heartbeat in his work and visitors can still explore the sites and imagine the sounds of the Dublin Joyce immortalized.  Anyone from the Joycean scholar to the interested student can still walk “In the Footsteps of Leopold Bloom,” specifically on a wonderfully guided tour offered by The James Joyce Centre, and experience Bloom’s journey as he leaves his door at 7 Eccles St. (where the Georgian building still stands) and crosses Dublin initially in search of lunch on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce met his real-life companion and later wife, Nora Barnacle.  Of course the pilgrimage intersects some modern sites, but with your guide at hand Bloom’s journey can be explained as Joyce’s blending of the monotonous with the momentous and the political with the social as the pilgrim travels from the bustling Kenmare Street to Bloom’s quiet refuge of the National Museum.  

The Joyce Centre itself provides many rich offerings for the literary buff.  The beautiful 1700’s style building was once home to a colorful occupant and one of Joyce’s personal friends, Professor Denis J. Maginn, a dance teacher who changed his name to “Maginni” to sound more Italian, and whose studio Joyce frequently visited.  One can only wonder if the dancers or the Professor himself—an Irishman quick to alter his identity for his profession, inspired Joyce.  The Centre is stocked with the furniture, which filled Joyce’s Parisian apartment where he lived while composing Finnegans Wake.  It houses a traveling exhibit on Joyce’s international influence, and even has a café where the chef specifically prepares dishes mentioned throughout Joyce’s works. 

Even my younger brother (usually uninterested in anything of literary importance), who was fifteen at the time of his visit, was drawn to the parts of Dublin Joyce describes in his work, that are still in existence.  His sophomore English class was reading Dubliners and when I mentioned that the title setting of “The Boarding House” was still in existence and could be seen, he insisted we go.  We stood by the crumbling building recovering from a regular siblings spat, the Dublin rain setting the background, he apologized, remembering a quote he had just memorized for a test on the collection of stories.  To hear him utter Joyce’s words, even if he misquoted, from “The Dead,” was an absolute apology in a sublime setting.
 

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

And of course no trip would be complete without a visit to that singular spot on O’Connell Street’s peak, past the General Post Office and past Leopold Bloom’s exit from the coach containing the part visiting Paddy Dignam’s funeral.  Not far from the site of the Gersham Hotel, the setting for “The Dead” perches Dublin’s famed sculpture of James Joyce.  The bronze figure projects the picture of Joyce as people would want him immortalized; he wears his famous jaunty cap, cocked to the side and stares at us through his perfectly round glasses as they accentuate his quizzical look.  It is in this quizzical look that so many search for the answers as they snap their photographs.  But no answers are to be found—only hints given away, as Stephen himself will tell you:

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery. 

Much of the enigmatic nature of Joyce’s prose is what draws his reader back for a second, third, or even countless readings.  An acquaintance of mine swears that his father, a respected Dublin government official and former Trinity College professor, reads Ulysses every year and still does not completely grasp its magnitude.  It is truly Joyce’s ability to build a rapport with his readers based on the nuances and confusion that composes the human struggle.  Perhaps our conflicts are not as internally wrenching as those of Steven Dedalus or Leopold Bloom, but we will always be able to glean something, even if it is but a fragmentary shard of Joyce’s incredible manipulation of language, which we can cling to and understand in the context of our own lives.  Joyce may have felt an extreme conflict with Ireland and Dublin, but modern day readers and visitors are sure to appreciate and relish in the city’s rich offerings.  By strolling the streets, both paved and cobbled and taking in the sites, any literary tourist can begin to understand how Dublin crafted the mind of James Joyce and in the end, how James Joyce in turn, shaped Dublin.   

 

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