Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Agenbite of inwit. Four years in Dublin, but never once for Bloomsday. Shameful. But Bloom’s spirit lives on, all pervasive. His footprint is everywhere, regally hosting the contemporary pedestrian: golden plaques have been sown into the pavement, immortalising the wanderings of the modern hero. Some of Leopold Bloom’s acolytes too, reincarnates: Gertys ten-a-penny, a Citizen for each pub, boisterous Buck Mulligans beastly alive. The city is a setting indelibly touched by the proceedings of June 16, 1904, fashioned by and fashioning them. Independence too, achieved in 1921, the same year as Ulysses’s completion. A mere coincidence? Not at all. Literature reigns supreme in the Republic: all hail King Joyce. His accession is the occasion for a unique commemoration of the pen.
A quintessential Irishness has perceptibly survived, captured by the master, although it is slowlybutsurely being devoured by the ferocious Celtic Tiger. To find Joyce’s Dublin requires patience, and a trained eye: some parts still evoke the memory of Bloom and consorts. Sandycove on spring mornings, reached by Dart no longer tram, by the Martello Tower of milkmaid fame, bathing in the coolclear scrotumtightening sea. Or idle midday pints, in scores of tattered premises — not Davy Byrne’s: expensive, overrun, immoral — licensed to dish out famed stout to famished crowds, eloquent pulses of the dark veined city. The Cyclops experience is most common, as the gift of the gab lives on, institutionalised as craic, flowing through an expanded Nighttown of Gargantuan proportions — drink has won the struggle, defeating religion, squeezing out the Fathers Conmee of days gone by, rendering the tortured Dedalus’s extinct. Sunday is a day of rest indeed, and Bloom a prophet.
At Trinity College, last bastion of ascendancy, Bloom is equally revered. In the home of the enemy, Joyceans pontificate to elites eager for knowledge, ready to emulate Ireland’s exile-in-chief. In the shadow of Burke and Beckett, Swift and Wilde, the modern epic is daily unravelled, digested, relived. In the streets outside, its tragic triviality is also repeated, slowly altered by the meandering passage of time.
A century on, Bloom’s footsteps still echo around the ageing metropolis, evermore faintly. Only once a year does Leopold return in full pomp, revived by swarms of loyal followers in a celebration of the banal. And then, perhaps, it is better to flee — the city loses its essence, a mockturtle mockery, buffoons and buffoonery hiding the enduring reality.
