Now I will make my own legend and stick to it.
Letter from James Joyce to Lady Gregory, 1904
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual, but – what is Dublin? Has it made up its mind? Yet if the Thames, as is well known, is Old Father, then Dublin’s river is as famous a woman, is Anna Liffey, with her broad curves gracious as those of a fin de siècle bum. On 16 June, the name of the bridge at Chapelizod was officially changed to the Anna Livia Bridge, thus putting the unequivocal sex of Mother Liffey squarely on the map at last, even if in tribute to Dublin’s most protean if least-grateful son, who irreverently changed ‘Liffey’ to ‘Livia’ after a Triestine housewife.
‘. . . riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . . ‘Invitation to the swell and ebb of sleeping and waking, to the world inside the book, which is the world, which is the river, which is the book. And so on. But Finnegans Wake is postgraduate stuff, still; as it turns out, Ulysses is for everybody.
Dubliners wished one another: ‘A Happy Bloomsday.’ Florists cashed in on a pardonable pun: ‘Buy a bloom for Bloomsday,’ and many, Anthony Burgess for one, sported Blazes Boylan buttonholes. Some said it should have been a national holiday. The entire inner city was en fête and, no, it did not rain. Thus Dublin ingeniously secularised and took back unto itself the first authentic post-modernist literary festival, a day devoted to the celebration of the fictional texts of James Joyce, in which the author took a back seat to his inventions.
For though 1982 is his centenary year, Joyce was not born nor did he die on 16 June, but chose to moor Ulysses to this point in time and place because, on that day, in 1904, Nora Barnacle consented to walk out with him. You could say that, on that day, Joyce’s real life began for his greatest novels make of the role of Husband the peak and summit of masculine aspiration. Joyce was one of nature’s husbands, incomplete until he found his wife, and none the less so because he did not marry her for a decade or two after; a husband, still, in his unconsummated dreams of cuckoldry.
On Bloomsday, though, it was not Bloom’s imaginary and antlered head that graced the postage stamps, but the Brancusi drawing of Joyce’s own, the gaunt, bespectacled, subtly odd, familiar face of the legend. But I prefer that infinitely moving photograph of young Joyce, every inch a Jim, taken when he was 22 in that very blessed 1904 itself, hands in his pockets, almost a Boy’s Own Paperly heroic stance. Such an undeniably handsome face you see why Nora fell, and his eyes not yet dimmed nor hidden away behind glasses. ‘Asked what he was thinking when C. P. Curran photographed him, Joyce replied: “I was wondering would he lend me five shillings”.’1
Note Joyce’s syntax, here. His English, as he well knew, had been moulded by another tongue, by one not even his mother tongue since her monoglot English, too, had been moulded by the language long lost within it. (The name of Dublin, Baile Atha Cliath, in Irish so dignified and remotely foreign, turns, when Anglicised, into the almost comically accessible Ballyattaclee: the English knew how to make the languages of the ethnic minorities of the British Isles ridiculous.)
This questing young man is already determined on earth-shattering fame: ‘Now I will make my legend and stick to it.’ He stares at us with almost a Jack London look of purpose. He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
‘Aren’t there words enough for you in English?’ the Bliznakoff sisters asked Joyce. ‘Yes . . . ,’ he replied. ‘But they aren’t the right ones.’
However many there were, there would never be the right ones, since Joyce spoke a language that had been translated into English and must always have suffered a teasing feeling that most of the meaning had been lost in the process. Somewhere, perhaps in the European languages, lurked that unimaginably rich original.
What is more, we carry our history on our tongues and the history of the British Empire came to exercise a curious kind of brake upon our expression in the English language, as it became less and less the instrument of feeling and more and more that of propaganda. Something even odder has happened since Joyce’s day, in these last years, when English, in the great world, has become synonymous with the language spoken in America, which, though it uses the same words, is an entirely other communications system. Indeed, American threatens to leave us entirely stranded, now, on a linguistic beach of history with English turning into a quaint dialect, another Old World survival, like Castillian Spanish, stiff outmoded, unapposite.
And what shall we do then? Why, we shall be thrust back on Joyce, who never took English seriously and so he could continue, as we will do.
However, the world-wide provenance of English, its ubiquitous if fading functionability, the reason why there were enough words in it, even if they had to be kicked around a bit and shown their place, is inseparable from the history of the British Empire, when English needed to be in a lot of different places at the same time. Happy for Shakespeare he did not speak Serbo-Croat and his Queen embarked on a policy of expansion. If you speak a language nobody understands, you can babble away as much as you like and nobody will hear you. Even had he wished to use it, the grand but archaic language of Ireland would not have suited a man who wished to straddle the world.
In Ulysses, only an Englishman is fluent in Irish. ‘I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself,’ mutters a crone addressed in her native speech.
On the other hand, the Celtic revivalists were theoretically correct. The only way to get us off their backs was to ensure we could not understand what they were saying. But unfortunately, we needed to hear them and, by the turn of the century, Ireland was already committed to that tongue of the wicked stepmother – fortunately for us. And this is the tongue that Joyce systematically deformed, excavated, imploded, you might say; he made sufficient space within that appropriated language to accommodate the next phase of history.
He sheared away the phoney rhetoric that had been accreting over the centuries. In Ulysses, he transformed English into something intimate, domestic, demotic, a language fit not for heroes but for husbands, then did it over again, stripped it of its linguistic elements, in fact, and put it together in a polyglot babble that, perhaps, begins to approximate something like a symphonic Euro-language, in which English is no more than a dominant theme. He disestablished English.
Although American academia was especially prominent among the massed scholarship arriving in Dublin for Bloomsday Week and the VIII International James Joyce Symposium in order to get their heads down over a susurrating mass of learned papers, this question of the disestablishment of English is, of course, not an American problem. The American language had something exponential built into it from the start, although the chances are that American will harden its arteries somewhat if the United States dons the mantle of world leadership with too much enthusiasm. All the same, there is nothing culturally troubling about Joyce for Americans. There is for me. Troubling and consoling.
I do believe that, had Joyce opted for a career as a singer, as Nora wished, I, for one, as a writer in post-imperialist Britain, would not even have had the possibility of a language, for Joyce it was who showed how one could tell the story of whatever it is that is going to happen next. Not that he would have cared. Whatever it was he thought he was up to, it certainly wasn’t making it easier for the British to explain their past and their future to themselves. He wasn’t doing it for our sakes, he made that clear.
Nevertheless, he carved out a once-and-future language, restoring both the simplicity it had lost and imparting a complexity. The language of the heart and the imagination and the daily round and the dream had been systematically deformed by a couple of centuries of use as the rhetorical top-dressing of crude power. Joyce Irished, he Europeanised, he decolonialised English: he tailored it to fit this century, he drove a giant wedge between English Literature and literature in the English language and, in doing so, he made me (forgive this personal note) free. Free not to do as he did, but free to treat the Word not as if it were holy but in the knowledge that it is always profane. He is in himself the antithesis of the Great Tradition. You could also say, he detached fiction from one particular ideological base, and his work has still not yet begun to bear its true fruit. The centenarian still seems avant-garde.
‘The value of the book is its new style,’ he said of Ulysses to a friend in Paris.
And another thing . . . Poet of the upper-working and lower-middle classes as he was – that is, of the artistically most despised and rejected, poet of those exiled from poetry – he never succumbed to the delusion that people who do not say complicated things do not have complicated thoughts. Hence, the stream-of-consciousness technique, to bring that inner life into the open. It’s simple. Just as, when you hear Joyce read aloud in the rhythms of Irish, it, too, all falls into place.
That is what Radio Telefis Eirann did, for Bloomsday. RTE broadcast Ulysses, read aloud, from early morning on 16 June till the next day. All over the city, transistors fed it to the air. RTE propose to sell cassettes of this mammoth and inspired occasion for the sum of £1,000 each, which would have gladdened Joyce’s heart of a balked entrepreneur. (He set up the first cinema in Dublin, the Volta, in 1909, with Triestine money. It failed. RTE’s project, with a market of American universities, will probably succeed.)
‘History is a trap from which I am trying to escape,’ said Stephen Daedalus. The Bloomsday of 1982 takes place in the capital city of the Republic of Ireland. It is a country which Bloom Joyce, the wandering Irishman, would find amazing. A state reception was held for him in Dublin Castle, and this reception turned out to be the very kind of riotous party Joyce adored. American Express offered the city the Bloomsday present of Joyce’s head in bronze; the President himself, Dr Patrick Hillery, unveiled it. (Nobody thought to gratify Joyce’s gleeful and malicious ghost by slipping say, an item of ladies’ underwear under the veil and, indeed, it would have marred the dignity of the occasion.) Bloomsday was celebrated with such stylish and imaginative joyousness it seemed a pity the old boy missed it.
But the old city is pulling itself down. Freed at last from that ‘hemiplegia of the will’ which Joyce diagnosed as his country’s most significant malady in a letter to his brother in 1903, Dublin, all bustle, thrust, traffic-jams, and businessmen concluding suave deals, is no longer the city I remember from even twenty years ago, which, then, pickled in the sour brine of poverty, was sufficiently like the city of the book to make you blink.
Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.
The squares, the terraces, the grand parades, going, going, deserted, weed-grown, the city of the Raj, waiting for the demolition men, gone. The city seethes with gossip, rumour, and speculation about the activities of property speculators. Up go the mirror-clad slabs of office-blocks; Ireland has at last followed Joyce into Europe.
Everything has changed. If 16 June was Bloomsday, 26 June was Gay Pride Day. In the personal column of the magazine, In Dublin, the ‘Legion of Mary’ finds itself at hazard of alphabetical listing, nudging against ‘Lesbian Line’. Decorating each street corner, exquisitely spiked and studded Irish punks have, overnight, discovered Style. The city, the country, whose inhabitants once seemed to leap with one bound from babyhood to middle age now seethes with the youngest population in Europe who have a look in their eyes that suggests they will not be easily satisfied. One doubts both the old sow’s appetite for this farrow and her ability to digest it.
But nobody lives at 7, Eccles Street, anymore. The house where the imaginary Blooms never lived is now a tumbledown shell. Its door graces the Bailey Bar, in Duke Street. Before this abandoned house, however, at three in the afternoon of Bloomsday, a facsimile of Molly Bloom disposed herself upon a makeshift bed while Blazes Boylan made his way towards her and her husband pottered pooterishly round the town. Because this is what Dublin did for Bloomsday: it peopled the streets of the city with the beings of the book: the Word made Flesh, in fact.
For one hour, just one hour, up they all popped, in costume, large as life, and even ‘William Humble, Earl of Dudley, and Lady Dudley, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Hesseltine’ riding out from the viceregal lodge in a cavalcade of carriages and antique horseless carriages. And exquisite children in pinafores and sunbonnets and ladies in tight bloomers on tricycles and blind men and one-legged sailors and look it up in your Bodley Head edition, the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode in Ulysses (pages 280, 328), this slice of teeming 1904 Dublin life rendered as street theatre, like a marvellous hallucination. Nothing could have been more perfect, as the city adopted Bloomsday and revisited its own vanishing past with a tourist’s eager curiosity and the devotion of a trustee.
These are, perhaps, the last few years when Joyce’s fictional blueprints of Dublin will correspond at all to the real outlines of the city. Dublin appears, the final tribute, to be ‘fixing’ the city of the book as perfect fiction by tidying away the real thing so that Joyce’s Dublin can gloriously survive as its own monument, the book which is the city, the metaphysical city of the word, while whatever it is that happens next gets on with it.
Jorge Luis Borges at the Bloomsday banquet, proposing the toast to Joyce and Ireland (‘since for me they are inseparable’), opined that, one day, ‘as with all great books’, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake would become books for children. One day, one fine day, one universal Bloomsday, when, perhaps, the metaphysics depart from the book and it becomes life, again.
(1982)