IN THE EYES OF AN EXILE
The action of James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses took place on June 16 1904. This week Dubliners celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday.
“I have put all of the great talkers of Dublin into my book”, James Joyce told Vanity Fair in 1922, “they – and the things that they forgot.” This weekend ten thousand Dubliners, many in Edwardian dress, will gather in O’Connell Street for “a traditional Guinness Bloomsday breakfast” where, in homage to Joyce’s great hero Leopold Bloom, they will dine on grilled kidney, ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls’, washed down with the 'foaming ebon ale'. There will be Joyce look-alike contests, and even an Irish wake complete with story telling and traditional music for Paddy Dignam, whose funeral is recounted in Ulysses.
Dubliners have much to celebrate. In his depiction of “the dailiest day possible”, Joyce revolutionised the novel and memorialised Edwardian Dublin’s popular culture. With his fusion of narrative and internal monologue, he drilled deep into the city’s psyche, revealing the richness of the ordinary and making explicit the secret mental processes of his characters. Ulysses is not merely a triumph of the creative imagination, but is also a great sociological achievement, the prototype for the ‘global village’, in which everything is connected to everything else.
Nowadays official Ireland is proud to claim Joyce for one of its own. Politicians, whether they have read it or not, hail Ulysses as a work of genius. Fragments from the text are woven into the upholstery of Aer Lingus’s passenger seats. Bloomsday has become a national feast almost on the scale of Saint Patrick’s Day, but the celebrations are tinged with ambiguity. John McCourt, the director of the James Joyce School in Trieste, where Joyce began to write Ulysses, warns against an indecent appropriation of the author, in a “Hail Glorious Saint James" spirit. “We should not lose sight of the fact that Ireland is making amends to Joyce very late in the day.” he told the Irish Times.
While ‘Ulysses’ was Joyce’s love letter to Dublin, the city’s initial hostility to its publication hurt him deeply. The Dublin Review castigated Joyce, who, it said, “splutters hopelessly under the flood of his own vomit.” Despite the infamous literary censorship of the 1920s however, Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland. There was no need. There were very few copies and they would in any case have been seized by Customs. As for the Irish Jesuits, it was almost forty years before they felt able to acknowledge their most famous former student. When he died, the rector of Belvedere College was advised against an obituary in the school annual, although there are oblique references to James in a long, complimentary tribute in the 1941 edition to his brother Charlie, who died shortly after him.
Joyce was an outsider. Unlike such contemporaries as WB Yeats, he saw little to attract him in the Irish literary revival and nothing at all in the Gaelic revival. He was just as scornful of Britain. He wrote Ulysses from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, never returning to Dublin, which he called “the centre of paralysis”. He nonetheless spent seven years reimagining it just as it was - street-by-street and hour-by-hour - on Thursday, June 16, 1904, coincidentally (or not) the day on which he met his future wife Nora.
Based on the mythic outline of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce’s hero, the Jew Leopold Bloom, was cast as the universal modern citizen and Dublin itself no longer an Edwardian backwater but the archetypal metropolis of western civilisation. Bloom had to be Jewish, because – in Joyce’s words – ‘only a foreigner would do’. In a provincial British city at the time only a figure such as Bloom plausibly offered the required exoticism. Aware of his own race’s persecution, he is a national anti-hero. Provoked to a pub discussion of Irish nationalism, he retorts: “It’s no use. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of what’s really life.”
They were brave sentiments for their day. Leopold Bloom was an internal exile mirroring Joyce’s self-imposed exile. And this is why there is something unsettling about the ‘taming’ of Joyce and his sentimental adoption in today’s Ireland as ‘one of our own’.
Even now, Irish society struggles to tolerate its dissident voices. A secular intolerance has replaced that once associated with traditional Catholicism. Ireland likes to think of itself as a cosmopolitan, open society. With Catholicism and the Gaelic revival in ebb tide, it risks becoming little more than a regional British culture. It remains averse to inconvenient outsiders’ voices and to those of its own exiles, not to mention those of today’s refugees.
However closed a society Ireland was for much of the twentieth century, Catholicism offered a crucial window on the world and a counter to the long cultural shadow of Britain. According to the sociologist Liam Ryan, in such a suffocatingly closed society there was an intoxicating challenge for young men in going off to ‘convert China’. Joyce’s social class were the backbone of the Irish missionary effort. Indeed his own elder sister, Poppy, spent her life as a Mercy sister in New Zealand.
Joyce’s Jesuit education enhanced his sense of alternative possibilities. According to Fergus O’Donoghue SJ, editor of the Irish Jesuit review Studies, Joyce’s education was unusually cosmopolitan by the standards of the time. Several of the priests who taught him were foreigners, while even his Irish Jesuit teachers had been educated abroad. “They were unconsciously cosmopolitan and, knowing them, Joyce may have come to accept life abroad as a necessary condition for making himself cosmopolitan.”
Joyce’s mind was landscaped by the Jesuits. However he railed at Catholicism, he held to the intellectual categories in which his former faith was organised, acknowledging that his resilience in adversity might have owed something to the 'the influence of A.M.D.G.’ His Jesuit schooling taught him more than resilience: it enhanced his power of empathy, of imagining the outside and living there. Bloomsday this year is celebrated – rather appropriately - in Refugee Week. For the Irish author Joseph O’Connor, Joyce’s hero’s resonance is undimmed by the years. “Bloom stands for us all. In our own age when we speak of economic migrants, asylum speakers and refugees, we might remember that the greatest Dubliner in the history of Irish fiction is himself the child of an immigrant family.”
This article first appeared in The Tablet, 12 June 2004
The action of James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses took place on June 16 1904. This week Dubliners celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday.
“I have put all of the great talkers of Dublin into my book”, James Joyce told Vanity Fair in 1922, “they – and the things that they forgot.” This weekend ten thousand Dubliners, many in Edwardian dress, will gather in O’Connell Street for “a traditional Guinness Bloomsday breakfast” where, in homage to Joyce’s great hero Leopold Bloom, they will dine on grilled kidney, ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls’, washed down with the 'foaming ebon ale'. There will be Joyce look-alike contests, and even an Irish wake complete with story telling and traditional music for Paddy Dignam, whose funeral is recounted in Ulysses.
Dubliners have much to celebrate. In his depiction of “the dailiest day possible”, Joyce revolutionised the novel and memorialised Edwardian Dublin’s popular culture. With his fusion of narrative and internal monologue, he drilled deep into the city’s psyche, revealing the richness of the ordinary and making explicit the secret mental processes of his characters. Ulysses is not merely a triumph of the creative imagination, but is also a great sociological achievement, the prototype for the ‘global village’, in which everything is connected to everything else.
Nowadays official Ireland is proud to claim Joyce for one of its own. Politicians, whether they have read it or not, hail Ulysses as a work of genius. Fragments from the text are woven into the upholstery of Aer Lingus’s passenger seats. Bloomsday has become a national feast almost on the scale of Saint Patrick’s Day, but the celebrations are tinged with ambiguity. John McCourt, the director of the James Joyce School in Trieste, where Joyce began to write Ulysses, warns against an indecent appropriation of the author, in a “Hail Glorious Saint James" spirit. “We should not lose sight of the fact that Ireland is making amends to Joyce very late in the day.” he told the Irish Times.
While ‘Ulysses’ was Joyce’s love letter to Dublin, the city’s initial hostility to its publication hurt him deeply. The Dublin Review castigated Joyce, who, it said, “splutters hopelessly under the flood of his own vomit.” Despite the infamous literary censorship of the 1920s however, Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland. There was no need. There were very few copies and they would in any case have been seized by Customs. As for the Irish Jesuits, it was almost forty years before they felt able to acknowledge their most famous former student. When he died, the rector of Belvedere College was advised against an obituary in the school annual, although there are oblique references to James in a long, complimentary tribute in the 1941 edition to his brother Charlie, who died shortly after him.
Joyce was an outsider. Unlike such contemporaries as WB Yeats, he saw little to attract him in the Irish literary revival and nothing at all in the Gaelic revival. He was just as scornful of Britain. He wrote Ulysses from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, never returning to Dublin, which he called “the centre of paralysis”. He nonetheless spent seven years reimagining it just as it was - street-by-street and hour-by-hour - on Thursday, June 16, 1904, coincidentally (or not) the day on which he met his future wife Nora.
Based on the mythic outline of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce’s hero, the Jew Leopold Bloom, was cast as the universal modern citizen and Dublin itself no longer an Edwardian backwater but the archetypal metropolis of western civilisation. Bloom had to be Jewish, because – in Joyce’s words – ‘only a foreigner would do’. In a provincial British city at the time only a figure such as Bloom plausibly offered the required exoticism. Aware of his own race’s persecution, he is a national anti-hero. Provoked to a pub discussion of Irish nationalism, he retorts: “It’s no use. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of what’s really life.”
They were brave sentiments for their day. Leopold Bloom was an internal exile mirroring Joyce’s self-imposed exile. And this is why there is something unsettling about the ‘taming’ of Joyce and his sentimental adoption in today’s Ireland as ‘one of our own’.
Even now, Irish society struggles to tolerate its dissident voices. A secular intolerance has replaced that once associated with traditional Catholicism. Ireland likes to think of itself as a cosmopolitan, open society. With Catholicism and the Gaelic revival in ebb tide, it risks becoming little more than a regional British culture. It remains averse to inconvenient outsiders’ voices and to those of its own exiles, not to mention those of today’s refugees.
However closed a society Ireland was for much of the twentieth century, Catholicism offered a crucial window on the world and a counter to the long cultural shadow of Britain. According to the sociologist Liam Ryan, in such a suffocatingly closed society there was an intoxicating challenge for young men in going off to ‘convert China’. Joyce’s social class were the backbone of the Irish missionary effort. Indeed his own elder sister, Poppy, spent her life as a Mercy sister in New Zealand.
Joyce’s Jesuit education enhanced his sense of alternative possibilities. According to Fergus O’Donoghue SJ, editor of the Irish Jesuit review Studies, Joyce’s education was unusually cosmopolitan by the standards of the time. Several of the priests who taught him were foreigners, while even his Irish Jesuit teachers had been educated abroad. “They were unconsciously cosmopolitan and, knowing them, Joyce may have come to accept life abroad as a necessary condition for making himself cosmopolitan.”
Joyce’s mind was landscaped by the Jesuits. However he railed at Catholicism, he held to the intellectual categories in which his former faith was organised, acknowledging that his resilience in adversity might have owed something to the 'the influence of A.M.D.G.’ His Jesuit schooling taught him more than resilience: it enhanced his power of empathy, of imagining the outside and living there. Bloomsday this year is celebrated – rather appropriately - in Refugee Week. For the Irish author Joseph O’Connor, Joyce’s hero’s resonance is undimmed by the years. “Bloom stands for us all. In our own age when we speak of economic migrants, asylum speakers and refugees, we might remember that the greatest Dubliner in the history of Irish fiction is himself the child of an immigrant family.”
This article first appeared in The Tablet, 12 June 2004
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