This year's Bloomsday celebrations are almost comic in their excess. But no other novel could have spawned such antics, writes Fritz Senn, a 'Ulysses' enthusiast who founded a James Joyce symposium in the same spirit.
Ulysses is so firmly established in the literary pantheon that one of the only ways to grab people's attention with it these days is to say something detrimental about the novel or all it has given rise to. There is also the novel's symbiotic relationship with Dublin, which was always likely to give rise to panem et circenses - the Romans' bread and circus acts - of the type that the annual Bloomsday celebrations have come to exemplify. It was also likely to give rise to organisations such as ours, which arranges the annual International James Joyce Symposium.
Attention grabbers might like to imagine that groups such as ours are shadowy entities that work behind the scenes, pulling strings and advancing careers. But it all started modestly.
The symposium has many origins, just as the Liffey has many sources; one of them goes back to another Joyce city, Zurich. In 1966, 25 years after his death, his remains and those of Nora, his wife, were brought together in a new grave for which an American sculptor, Milton Hebald, had designed a statue of an aloof Joyce sitting with book, walking stick and cigarette.
The site was inaugurated on (of course) Bloomsday, with members of the Joyce family, John Garvin and Donagh McDonagh from Dublin, local dignitaries and Joyce scholars, most notably Richard Ellmann. No use was made of the assembled expertise. A telegram to the James Joyce Museum, in Sandycove, was proposed, but I still have in my ear the indignant "I am damned if I will" of Giorgio Joyce, the writer's son. A year later he was a guest of honour at the first symposium.
Now the symposium is almost as old as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses: the first, though Dublin hardly noticed it, was in 1967 - and, in fact, the event was conceived the full 38 years ago. A young American scholar called Thomas Staley, founder of the James Joyce Quarterly, visited Zurich in the autumn of 1966. After the habitual Joyce tour, late at night, we realised that we would both be in Dublin the following June - a chance for a small impromptu conference. Warming to the idea, we soon named it Symposium.
Although inexperienced and apprehensive, we announced our plans, and sure enough about 80 people turned up expectantly for June 15th and 16th, 1967, mainly scholars, with quite a few translators and amateurs, like myself.
There were only two sessions, one of which was in University College Dublin's old base, on Earlsfort Terrace; of the five speakers the first took up far too much time (by no means, as it turned out in the future, an exception); others hardly touched Joyce. Most memorable was Margaret Solomon's inquiry in to the "phallic trees" of Finnegans Wake, a fine example of instant symbolism. She introduced a few terms that, according to a group of protesters who walked out, had never been heard in the venerable building.
Giorgio Joyce and his wife, Asta, were invited by Dublin authorities, Joyce's old friend Frank Budgen and his wife through a private donation. Budgen did most to make the two days worthwhile; he talked lucidly and without adoration about Joyce and never preened himself as someone once close to the master.
The reception was mixed. The press was caustic. "Shall we say the weather was hot and the going was heavy, and leave it at that?" was a mild comment. "Lecture upon lecture about commas and semicolons were delivered by men who otherwise seemed reasonably sensible" (not that any comma was ever mentioned). Quidnunc, in this newspaper, declared: "I've never met a bigger collection of phonies in my life."
We, naturally, liked what we did and decided to set up a recurrent affair for which a formal James Joyce foundation should provide a solid base. Trustees were assembled from the floor, some of whom were never heard of again. At that time we were just a few names on a letterhead, and it was only later that, thanks to the Joyce scholar Prof Morris Beja, statutes and a system of elections were introduced.
We have come a long way: in the old days we were simply naive enthusiasts. (Perhaps we still are, most of us.) Admittedly, the spirit of the symposium hovers over us, and we tend to speak in tongues, or rather quotes (though these days we may be more circumspect). And we now have become "delegates" (which may justify the prohibitive fees).
Anyway, the event gathered momentum. By 1969 more than 230 participants convened for an entire week, more than fitted in to Dublin Castle for a reception sponsored by Guinness. In 1971 we moved to Trieste, and the city actually seemed to appreciate us. The symposium became a routine, and it is now part of the cosmic order.
We skipped a year so we could fall in line with the anniversary of 1982, when Bloomsday appropriately fell on a Thursday and the James Joyce Centre was inaugurated in a Georgian ruin on North Great George's Street that has metamorphosed in to a major institution.
At 3 p.m. we translated an episode of Ulysses, the 10th, in to street walking. Joyce had, not necessarily by intention, devised a new way of reading - with one's feet, a novel way of experiencing words that are so precisely anchored in a concrete city.
Bloom does it in questionable but appropriately clumsy grammar: "His slow feet walked him riverward, reading."
The 19 sections of what we like to refer to as 'Wandering Rocks' were acted out by scholars or enthusiasts who positioned themselves at the proper time in their proper locations and moved on according to the script. The lord mayor played the viceroy of the old colonial days but had to move in a different direction because of something as un-Joycean as one-way streets. No piece of fiction before 1922 could have spawned such antics, so the elaborate staging simply magnified a feature of a book.
The party imitating Lenehan and McCoy on their walk from Crampton Court to the Metal Bridge should have sighted Bloom at Merchants Arch, but Bloom's impersonator had already left, possibly urged on by an impatient crowd. In this respect the experiment failed, as it did in another trifling detail. At that time Temple Bar, along the way, was derelict, with most shops gone, and the two characters did not even simulate Lenehan's popping in to "Lynam's to see Sceptre's starting price": there was no trace of any Lynam's. Just the sort of thing a pedantic Joyce buff would cavil at (remember the lectures about commas and semicolons).
But, within the mechanical cause and effect of Ulysses, if Lenehan had not gone in to the shop and bumped in to Bantam Lyons he would not have heard of the alleged tip that Bloom is thought to have given Lyons, and he would not have announced in Barney Kiernan's that Bloom had a bet on the winner of the Gold Cup. The plot of the novel might have taken another turn, and the book would have derailed. This civic perambulation was a foreshadowing of the comic excesses of this year's Bloomsday events.
On Bloomsday 1967 we took a coach trip to the Martello tower in Sandycove. Giorgio Joyce came along, admired the view and asked with his resonant voice: "Why are we here?" He was told, then asked the same thing when we ended up in Davy Byrnes. "Why are we here?" A good question that will resound again today.
The 19th International James Joyce Symposium runs until Saturday June 19th at the National College of Ireland, IFSC, Dublin 1. Day pass, €80
