Pride in Joyce abloom

Some 10,000 people will gather today on one of this historic city’s main thoroughfares -- long, wide, expansive O’Connell Street -- and sit down to a breakfast that includes a dish of kidneys to be washed down with Guinness.

It may seem a strange way to observe a centenary of the city’s greatest writer, but the iconoclastic James Joyce, now universally regarded as one of the world’s greatest and most innovative novelists, might well have approved.

This particular party isn’t for the centenary of Joyce’s birth or death; rather, it marks the day, June 16, 1904, on which all the action of “Ulysses,” his most famous novel, takes place.

Published in 1922, “Ulysses” is a loosely imaginative rewrite of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” transposed to early 20th century Dublin; this complex, funny and often raunchy story traces the progress around the city of its everyman hero and Jewish barroom philosopher, Leopold Bloom.

Here, June 16 is known as “Bloomsday” and is marked with annual festivities. But this 100th anniversary will easily surpass them all.

“Bloomsday celebrations have tended to attract enthusiasts and academics,” says Laura Weldon, national coordinator of the ReJoyce Dublin 2004 festival. “So to some extent, it’s preaching to the converted. Our remit has been to broaden its appeal.”

That shouldn’t be difficult. Joyce exerts a huge influence on the Irish imagination. In “Ulysses” and his other works, his prose captured precisely the rhythms and cadences of the nation’s speech, notably the Dublin accent. There is intense, almost patriotic pride in him here, even among people who find his work austere and inaccessible. So much so as to incite something of a backlash.

This dichotomy has emerged in some of the off-stage dramas leading to Bloomsday. Bestselling Irish author Roddy Doyle recently launched an attack on Joyce’s work and influence, while Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, an energetic litigator, was until last week seen as a potential threat to one of the festival’s major exhibitions. Its organizers have plowed ahead regardless.

The festival was the brainchild of Ireland’s arts, sport and tourism minister, John O’Donoghue. “It was his notion that the centenary should be shared by more people,” Weldon says. Hence, the feeding of the 10,000 on Dublin’s bustling O’Connell Street. It will be converted into a turn-of-the-century marketplace, with vendors in period costume, street musicians, barbers offering wet shaves and barber-shop quartets.

“It will be everything you’d find in Dublin in 1904, taking people back to another era,” says Weldon, 38, an Ohio native and book dealer by profession, who has lived in the city just 16 months and landed her job after a consultancy stint for the National Library of Ireland.

Visitors are urged to dress up and compete as look-alikes of “Ulysses” characters: Bloom; his amorous wife, Molly; her lover, Blazes Boylan; or Stephen Dedalus, the serious-minded young poet (and Joyce surrogate). But because June 16 falls on a Wednesday, and it would be inconceivable to add to Dublin’s daily traffic gridlock by closing down a major street like O’Connell, the breakfast will take place today.

It is just one event in the ReJoyce festival, which began in April and continues to the end of August. It includes “Ulysses” walking tours and bus tours, exhibitions of Joyce-inspired art and films, poetry evenings, lectures and symposiums. Visitors are making pilgrimages to Dublin landmarks like the James Joyce Centre and Davy Byrnes pub in Duke Street, a rest stop on Leopold Bloom’s urban journey (he referred to it as “a moral pub”) and a favorite haunt of Joyce himself.

In a remarkable installation called “Elijah Walks,” a 40-foot-high likeness of Joyce, projected in light after nightfall, will be seen “strolling” along the quay of the Liffey, the river that flows through the city.

It is also now certain that Ireland’s National Library will host the exhibition “James Joyce and Ulysses,” displaying more than 500 pages of the author’s manuscripts. On June 2, Irish lawmakers felt obliged to rush through emergency legislation preventing Stephen Joyce from suing the government and the library over possible copyright infringement. Stephen Joyce, now in his 70s and living in France, is the author’s only living descendant and has previously targeted publishing houses and Internet websites over copyright issues.

Weldon concedes ReJoyce walks a fine line in aiming for a wide cross-section of people without descending into crass commercialism: “We’ve been extremely conscious of the literary integrity that must be maintained. So all these events have a legitimate purpose regardless of the fun and amusement factor. There’s an educational underpinning, and people walk away with something valuable. There’s no merchandising like tea towels or key chains. This is not about making a few extra pennies for everybody.”

For years, Joyce, who died in 1941, was something of a pariah in much of Ireland because of the sexual candor of his writing, and he still ignites strong feelings here, in part because of his towering literary reputation. It is based primarily on four works, each of them increasingly formidable: “Dubliners” (1914), an atmospheric collection of short stories about the city; the strongly autobiographical “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916); “Ulysses,” which runs close to 1,000 pages in paperback, including 250 pages of explanatory notes; and the ambitious, densely allusive “Finnegan’s Wake” (1939).

Guardians of his legacy are fiercely protective.

Sen. David Norris, one of the country’s leading Joyce advocates, warns that the festival offers “all kind of opportunities for begrudgery. There’s a rather snotty literary group here that looks down its nose at what they see as the vulgarization of Bloomsday. They disdain the silliness, dressing up and fun. But I think Joyce might have appreciated the fun and might have loved the idea of being a national totem.”

Doyle, who wrote “The Commitments” and “The Van,” ignited a different controversy in February. Speaking at a New York literary gathering -- ironically, to celebrate Joyce’s birthday -- and alluding to the difficulty and length of “Ulysses” and the reverence in which it is held, he declared the novel was overrated and needed “a good editor.”

Doyle also regretted the shadow Joyce casts on all Irish novelists following in his wake: “You write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce.”

“I understand how hard it is for [Irish] writers starting out,” Norris says. “Flann O’Brien was another, a tremendous supporter of Joyce. But he was endlessly compared to him and finally said: ‘If I hear that word “Joyce” one more time, I shall surely froth at the gob.’ He’s like a mushroom cloud over young writers. They feel the only way to deal with him is to trash him.” Norris added that Doyle had contacted him to stress that his comments had been blown out of proportion.

Demystifying ‘Ulysses’

But Weldon viewed the Doyle outburst as an opportunity: “If it had been appropriate to send him a thank-you note, I would have,” she says. “He effectively raised an issue that was always going to come out. We’ve taken the sting out of this festival by saying, ‘You know what? We know a lot of people buy [“Ulysses”], they get to Page 3 and they quit. There’s no criticism for that. We accept it’s not the newspaper.’ But if people give themselves a chance to understand how the book works and what’s going on, they’ll have a much easier time.”

She added that an aim of ReJoyce was to demystify “Ulysses” by urging people to listen to it on audiotape or make it a reading group selection.

With various publishers selling the title throughout the world, it’s all but impossible to gauge how many copies of “Ulysses” have been sold, though estimates run into the several millions. Penguin UK reports sales of 800,000 copies in Britain alone since the company first published its paperback edition in 1969.

Joyce’s importance to writing is even foremost at Davy Byrnes pub, where in Bloomsday season they serve the meal ordered by Bloom in “Ulysses”: a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. “The most famous light literary lunch ever,” as the pub’s landlord, Redmond Doran, describes it.

Doran and Davy Byrnes have also sponsored a writing competition; the winner of the best short story will win a prize of 20,000 euros (about $24,500), with runner-up prizes of 1,000 euros (about $1,200) and weeklong places at a residential writers’ workshop.

“We felt we wanted to do something to repay that mention of the pub by Joyce in ‘Ulysses,’ ” Doran says. “Hopefully, some other young Irish writer will emerge and become famous through this.”

The James Joyce Centre devises programs and Joyce-related walks and creates educational packs for teachers and children studying the author.

“So much of his work is constructed around a strong sense of place,” says the center’s director, Helen Monaghan. “All of his works are inspired by this city. So it’s easy, even 100 years later, to see the city Joyce knew.

“There’s a good number of businesses still in existence that he mentions: Davy Byrnes, butcher shops, small stores. The city’s structure hasn’t changed that much. Its society has changed a great deal, thankfully.”

She refers to a factor that makes all these celebrations a tad ironic: Joyce’s reputation over the years in Irish polite society. “Ulysses” was originally banned in Britain and the U.S., having been deemed pornographic; while never banned in Ireland, it was effectively suppressed. (The book was finally published in America in 1934 and in Britain two years later.)

Joyce’s own attitude toward his native city was ambivalent. He drew on it heavily as a source for his writing but found it stifling.

He left it at 22, returning only three times, and living the rest of his life in voluntary exile in Zurich, Trieste, Paris and Rome with his partner and eventual wife, Nora Barnacle -- a young woman with whom he had first gone out walking on, yes, June 16, 1904.

But Dublin is now a very different city. In the last 15 years especially, Dublin has reinvented itself as a sleek, modern European city that has benefited from grants from the European Union. It established itself early as a major European hub in the technology sector, and now is a youthful, bustling, prosperous place of sidewalk cafes and smart new hotels.

Another major social upheaval here in recent years has been the relaxation of the grip of the Catholic Church; it is a much more secular society than Joyce would have recognized.

Disapproval of the writer in Dublin was widespread for some 40 years. “Back in the 1960s, liking Joyce was neither profitable nor popular,” Norris recalls. “He was controversial. Even in the 1970s I came across a magazine that attacked him as ‘a brothel-frequenting misfit who spies on his friends.’ Joyce was seen as an apostate, a spewer-out of filth, a renegade Catholic who had betrayed his country.”

Monaghan believes the tide of opinion began turning in 1982, the centenary of Joyce’s birth: “That marked the first official recognition by the state of his worldwide reputation.” Yet not until the 1990s were any of Joyce’s works finally included in the curriculum for Irish high schools.

The Bloomsday centenary, then, seems a peculiarly Irish kind of event, fraught with contradictions. Its benevolent, joyous surface masks conflicting agendas, a battle between high art and populism, and a residue of ambivalence toward the literary hero being honored.

Still, everyone connected to the festival feels bullish about it.

“The popularization of Joyce means people are introduced to ‘Ulysses,’ ” Norris says. “Even those people who just want to dress up for the look-alike competitions have to nibble at the novel to see how to dress, and what props to take.

“And once they start reading Joyce, it’s such an insidious thing. It’s more addictive than crack cocaine.”