With a precision of emotion that comes from a scarred memory, James Joyce describes the stifling surroundings that stunt the literary growth of his autobiographical protagonist in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” At one point Joyce writes of Stephen: “His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin.”
Joyce himself escaped “the dull phenomenon of Dublin” by living most of his nearly 59 years as an exile in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. He never returned to Ireland after 1912 (when he was 30), even though all his major works–“Dubliners” (1914), “Portrait of the Artist” (1916), “Ulysses” (1922) and “Finnegans Wake” (1939)–are set in Dublin and examine every facet of Irish life.
Joyce was not alone in leaving his native, green grounds to pursue the literary muse. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw before him as well as Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien later found life abroad more conducive to developing their writing. Beckett, who, like Shaw, won a Nobel Prize for literature, spoke not only for himself when he complained about Dublin’s “oppressive Catholic atmosphere” as a principal stricture on freedom of expression and rendering warts-and-all reality.
But times change. Especially in recent years, as Ireland has become more secular, prosperous and artistically accepting, there’s been a concerted effort to celebrate the talents of writers who left home and gained international recognition. In Dublin, it’s impossible to wander very far without discovering a statue, plaque or entire building honoring the achievements of a literary expatriate.
This attitude that all is forgiven is also reflected in Dublin’s numerous bookstores, where volumes by Joyce, Wilde, Shaw and Beckett occupy as much shelf space as that devoted to noted contemporary Irish poets and novelists, such as Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Eavan Boland, Seamus Deane and John Banville–not to mention Maeve Binchy.
Most remarkable (and unavoidable), Dublin’s homage to Joyce is anything but a “dull phenomenon.” His bust in St. Stephen’s Green looks pensively toward Newman House of University College Dublin, where he studied. A life-size statue, complete with hat, glasses and walking stick, stands just off O’Connell Street in the city’s busiest downtown area, attracting a constant stream of onlookers and picture-takers.
Not far from the statue is the James Joyce Centre, a stately Georgian house that organizes exhibits, lectures, reading groups and other activities about Joyce and his work. Since opening in 1996, the Centre has made the celebration of Bloomsday–June 16, 1904, the day “Ulysses” takes place–a week-long festival of dramatic readings, tours, talks and social occasions. The centenary of Bloomsday in 2004 promises to be almost as active as Joyce’s imagination, with planning already afoot.
Just outside Dublin in Sandycove, the James Joyce Tower is not only a museum with manuscripts, first editions and the writer’s memorabilia. It is also the defense tower built by the British in 1804 where Joyce briefly lived and set the vivid opening scene of “Ulysses.” From its gun platform on top, he could survey all of Dublin, the city he physically left yet kept returning to in his mind and work.
Although some of Joyce’s relatives remember being told in the 1940s and 1950s not to reveal their kinship with the author because (among other things) his religious irreverence and open treatment of sex angered many Irish, it’s now possible to trace the scene changes of “Ulysses” by following 14 brass pavement markers placed around the city. At 52 Clanbrassil Street in what used to be Dublin’s Jewish quarter, one even finds a wall plaque to honor the fictional birthplace of Joyce’s fictional character Leopold Bloom–“Citizen, Husband, Father, Wanderer, Reincarnation of Ulysses.”
Much of the transformation of Dublin into a citywide literary theme park has taken place since 1990. In that time, besides the Joycean jubilance that extends to T-shirts, mugs and usual tourist merchandise, the house where George Bernard Shaw was born and spent the first decade of his 94-year life has been carefully restored and opened to the public. Three years ago, a reclining statue of a dandified Oscar Wilde was dedicated at Merrion Square. The lifelike, full-color rendering of the increasingly popular dramatist, poet and novelist looks out on pillars that reproduce some of his epigrams as well as the home across the street where his savage wit came into the world.
Yet honoring individual authors who became exiles is just one dimension to celebrating literary life in Ireland’s capital city. The Dublin Writers Museum, which opened in 1991, provides context and background for understanding why myriad forms of composition have flourished in this one locale since Jonathan Swift set his satiric pen to paper in the 18th Century. Drawing some 50,000 visitors a year, the museum helps explain why a “reverence for words” has been an Irish trait for hundreds of years.
Ironically, as one informational panel at the museum points out, many of the writers most revered in Dublin “practiced their art in a language not indigenous to this country.” Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and their successors put their own stamps of originality on the English language, doing little or nothing with native Irish.
“It has been claimed that the greatest weapon the English ever gave to the Irish was their own language,” a museum sign wryly notes, adding that “the language of the invader fueled the literature of the subversive” until the 1921 independence from Great Britain (for all but six northern counties) and the creation of the Irish Free State.
That literature, of course, was often composed by exiles abroad. But their work (in another ironic twist), along with the fiction, poetry and plays by those who never left what Shaw referred to as “John Bull’s Other Island,” greatly contributed to a distinct national identity. Appropriately, critic Declan Kiberd calls his illuminating study of Irish literature (from Wilde to the present) “Inventing Ireland.”
W.B. Yeats, the first of four Dublin natives or residents to win the Nobel Prize for literature in the 20th Century, once remarked, “If you want to know Ireland, body and soul, you must read its poems and stories.” Dublin’s celebration of writers doesn’t only take someone closer to the “body and soul” of Ireland but also to enduring literary art.
