BLOOMSDAY . . . THEN AND NOW

By sheer coincidence (“What other sort is there?” pseudonymous Irish novelist Flann O’Brien once mused from behind another of his pseudonyms—Myles na Gopaleen), my Bloomsday in Dublin ended with my reading the opening chapter of Ulysses and Us, scholar and critic Declan Kiberd’s newish guidebook for reading James Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (Joyce’s phrase—not mine or Kiberd’s . . . or O’Brien’s) Ulysses. I picked up Kiberd’s book while playing my part, I suppose, in what he describes as a cultish ritual commemorating the place-specific ramblings around Dublin of the fictional Leopold Bloom on the 16th of June, 1904. “Every year,” Kiberd writes, “hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book—Stephen with his cane, Leopold with his bowler hat, Molly in her petticoats, Blazes Boylan under a straw boater—as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. They re-enact scenes in Eccles Street, Ormond Quay, and Sandycove’s Martello Tower.”

So, what role did I take on? Well, I guess that like every other person is Dublin who did not “dress the part” (and I actually saw only a handful who did), I unwittingly played the part of a random character from the densely-populated “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses . . . which Joyce’s friend and early commentator Frank Budgen, explaining how Joyce wrote the episode “with a map of Dublin before him” and “calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city,” has described as “peculiarly the episode of Dublin.” (I must now briefly put on my robes of academe and add my own explanation in the form of a lecture-like digression. In describing in several “schemas” that he shared with friends a correspondence between his “Groups of Citizens” and the Symplegades, Joyce apparently conflates two mythological phenomena, the Wandering Rocks and the Clashing Rocks. Strictly speaking, the Symplegades were the Clashing Rocks located at the mouth of the Bosporous, in this case obviously the two banks of the Liffey metamorphosed into metaphors for church and state, forces that tend to converge on the individual. The ordinary citizens of Dublin who fill this episode seem to represent much more suggestively the phenomenon of the Wandering Rocks, like the Symplegades found not in Joyce’s obvious Homeric analogue to Ulysses but in Appolonius’ Argonautica. End of digression.) In others words, like the vast majority of the denizens of Dublin on June 16th, 2010, I simply went about my business as if today were just another day in the life of the city. (Allow me to put my robes back on for one more moment: in Joyce’s Voices, senior Joyce scholar Hugh Kenner observes that none of Joyce’s characters are aware of the Joycean roles they are playing, or else they wrongly think of themselves in other roles; I don’t have Kenner's book at hand, but one example that I recall him citing is that in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus thinks of himself not as Telemachus but as that other equally famous literary “dispossessed son,” Hamlet. So . . . was I or was I not one of the “wandering rocks”? Hmmm.)

That second parenthetical aside notwithstanding . . . my unselfsconscious “wanderings” included picking up a few books—the aforementioned Ulysses and Us plus Colm Toibín’s newest novel Brooklyn (which I was reminded of when I brushed shoulders with Toibín first thing the morning previous—though by the time I realized who that familiar face was, he had disappeared, so I didn’t get a chance to say hi to him) plus John McGahern’s book of essays, Love of the World, plus Before the House Burns, the hot-off-the-press first novel by Boston-based Clare-born poet and fiction writer Mary O’Donoghue, whom I will be meeting for a cup of coffee tomorrow.

I also went to the National Library and took care of a little bit of research and to the National Gallery where I spent time mesmerized by the paintings of Jack B. Yeats. Both of those places are visited by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—and the former is also the setting for the entire “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, in which Stephen Dedalus holds forth on Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the benefit of a motley gathering of librarians, poets and scholars. (One more academic aside: in his heavily illustrated Ulysses guidebook, James Joyce’s Odyssey, Frank Delaney includes not only photos from Joyce’s time, the turn of the twentieth century, but also more recent shots. The one he chooses for the interior of the National Library was shot in 1978—I know that for a fact because that’s me standing Stephen Dedalus-like at the ticket desk. No kidding!)

By mid-afternoon I had been mostly on my feet for hours, so first I sat down for a cuppa java and then changed venues for a coupla pints with old friend Fionán O’Connell, whose wonderful photographs are at the center of the research project I’m “officially” working on while I'm in Dublin. We met at Nealon’s, a fine old bar on Capel Street just north of the River Liffey.

The next stop on my “rocky wanderings” was a very fine restaurant called The Church, where I met my dear old friend Joan—we go back to 1978, and every time we see each other (not often enough) we just pick up our conversation exactly where we left off. She just happened to be in Dublin for meetings—part of the serendipity that seems to be shaping my visit to Dublin. We had a great meal and a great chat, then she caught the train back to Limerick.

But my wanderings were not over! Leaving The Church, I decided to walk all the way back to my hotel—a long way, as it turns out. Then almost as soon as I got back, my friend Rob Savage (see previous post) called to see about heading back into the City Centre, to O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row, to meet yet another Irish Studies colleague, Joseph Lennon (recently of Manhattan College, soon-to-be of Villanova University) and a friend of his.

On our way back the hotel, Rob and I decided to stop for one more nip, at O’Brien’s on Sussex Street, which seems like the leading candidate to be our “local” during our stay at the Burlington. I think that James Joyce would approve.

“Bloomsday” was first observed in 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the day immortalized in fiction by James Joyce, by Flann O’Brien and fellow writers John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Anthony Cronin, and another friend Tom Joyce. Declan Kiberd wonders if the current “celebration of Bloomsday may in fact be a lament for a lost city, for an earlier time when Dublin was still felt to be civic, knowable, viable.” Well, without any sort of play-acting on my part, I found it to be all that—and much more—on the 16th of June in 2010.