”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” So begins June 16, 1904, the day on which James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses is set. One hundred years on Ireland is marking the anniversary with a five-month-long, 50-event festival.
ReJoyce Dublin 2004, which runs until August 31, features a packed timetable of exhibitions and events, including street theatre, music programmes, guided tours, radio broadcasts, academic workshops such as the 19th International James Joyce Symposium, a commemorative stamp and even a regatta. Most unusual of all is probably the ”Bloomsday Breakfast” to be hosted for 10 000 people in the capital’s O’Connell Street on June 16.
Sponsored by a well-known sausage manufacturer, the event commemorates the morning repast on the ”inner organs of beasts and fowls” enjoyed by the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom. Of course there will also be the by now traditional re-enactments where Joycean enthusiasts dressed in Edwardian costumes follow the route taken by Bloom in his perambulations around the capital on that historic day.
According to the festival’s national co-ordinator Laura Weldon, ”we were very conscious in developing the programme that there should be something for everyone in this unique celebration, and I believe we have achieved that”. It was all very different back in 1954 when Bloomsday was first marked in Dublin. That original commemoration was an unofficial, private affair, organized in secrecy and carried out without fanfare by a small group, including the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the writer Flann O’Brien, who retraced part of the book’s route in horse-drawn cabs.
However, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as the well-planned Joyce events of today. The procession moved slowly and not just because of the mode of transport — the party had a tendency to stop at every public house along the route to toast the book’s creator and simultaneously to follow progress in the Gold Cup at Ascot. Early in the day Kavanagh and O’Brien, both already the worse for wear from drink, almost came to blows on Sandymount Strand, the setting for one of the book’s chapters.
Still, even to celebrate the book in the conservative, Catholic Church-dominated Ireland of the 1950s was a highly symbolic and somewhat subversive act. Fifty years ago no Irish government was willing to embrace the legacy of one of the country’s most talented, if wayward, sons. In fact, besides achieving independence from Britain, relatively little had changed politically, socially or economically in Ireland in the half century since the 22-year-old Joyce left for Europe in 1904.
When ”Ulysses” was first published in 1922 after seven years of labour by its eccentric author, in Ireland the reaction to the book’s difficult stream-of-consciousness technique and frank treatment of sex and bodily functions was generally one of bafflement, shock and disgust. However, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland likes to consider itself cosmopolitan, cultured, and a keen supporter of the arts (and equally keen to cash in on a valuable literary legacy).
Now everyone acclaims Joyce a genius and Ulysses a masterpiece — especially those who have not read it. Today the book has been so readily embraced by official Ireland that the minister for arts, sport, and tourism, John O’Donoghue, can declare Joyce to be ”one of our greatest cultural ambassadors”.
It’s hard not to suspect that Joyce, who never felt he’d received the recognition he deserved from his compatriots, would have been amused by his journey from untouchable literary outcast to tourism cash cow.
Perhaps it is this cosy consensus that has prompted some present-day Irish literary rebels to thumb their nose at Joyce as well as the industry his work has spawned. Most notable among them was Dubliner Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of such books as The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Speaking at a Joyce birthday celebration in New York in February Doyle stunned his audience by suggesting that Ulysses was overrated, overlong and unmoving, and that Joyce could have done with a good editor. Shortly afterwards the outspoken Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers wrote that Joyce was an ”aberrant genius” who wrote an unreadable book which is ”one of the most unproductive cul-de-sacs in literary history”. Myers concluded: ”I just make this humble request: that no politician who hasn’t read Ulysses will this summer call it a work of genius. Is that too much to ask?”
For Minister O’Donoghue and the rest of his colleagues on the Joycean bandwagon, the answer appears to be yes. However, Joyce and the festival in his honour has an able and articulate defender in David Norris, a Joycean scholar at Dublin’s Trinity College and a member of the Irish senate. He puts the criticism of Joyce down to old-style Irish begrudgery, the sort of jealous attitude that drove the author into exile in the first place.
”A lot of people now try to make a reputation by attacking Joyce … These are people of medium talent who feel they can attack and challenge a global reputation. A lot of Irish writers of talent have felt threatened by Joyce. I think that’s part of it,” he said. Norris, who has been a flamboyant participant in Bloomsday events for many years, often playing the part of Molly Bloom’s suitor ”Blazes” Boylan in Georgian garb, also strongly defends the festival and the disparate array of events which seem to have little to do with the actual book. ”I make no apologies for the razzamatazz. Why should the [critics] be so snobbish? What’s wrong with people enjoying themselves?”, he asks.
Regardless of whether one views it as a sincere celebration of the most famous novel of the 20th century or as a cynical attempt to cash in, ReJoyce Dublin 2004 looks set to be a resounding success.
The tourism industry in particular is rubbing its hands in anticipation with the arts festival likely to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to the capital during its five months.
Joyce once boasted that Ulysses would keep academics busy for centuries — he might also have included arts festival organisers.