Joyce's writing above all else recreates and explores urban experience. The cities in which he lived as a result have had an enduring fascination for scholars and lovers of his work. Trieste, his home from 1904 to 1915, has a special appeal because of its location both at the heart of Mitteleuropa and on the imagined frontier between the eastern and western worlds.
Richard Ellmann's compendious biography of Joyce, however, curiously underestimates the impact of Trieste on the writer. John McCourt's The Years of Bloom vigorously contests and corrects this view. In a scrupulously researched narrative, he builds up a vivid portrait of Trieste as a dynamic city which was an important and thriving centre of commerce and power in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a cosmopolitan metropolis, and a vital arena for political conflicts between socialism, imperialism, and competing nationalisms.
McCourt argues that Joyce's imagination was engaged by the visceral nature of cities and by their peoples and cultures, rather than by their architecture or natural setting. The lived experiences of Trieste are absorbed into his writings at a deep level and not just its externalities.
The multi-ethnic, polyglot nature of Triestine life with its composite population of Italians, Serbs, Croatians, Germans, and Slovenes provides a crucial stimulus for Joyce's linguistic experimentation and informs the multi-cultural dimensions of his fiction. The hybrid identity of Leopold and Molly Bloom has its origins in the mix of Mediterranean and Oriental influences he encountered there.
The Years of Bloom sheds new light on Joyce's works by revealing in painstaking detail their countless Triestine resonances. As well as indicating the extent to which Joyce drew on Triestine dialect and on its flourishing Jewish culture, McCourt also posits numerous other illuminating analogues that had hitherto remained hidden. The debates between Bloom and the Citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses, for example, echo arguments between Triestine socialists who, like Joyce's hero, believed in municipalismo and the possibility of various peoples living harmoniously together and Italian irredentists who supported the cause of a separatist nationalism. Although McCourt contends that Joyce's experience of the political wrangles at the heart of another empire lead to his increasing disengagement, he also holds that he sought to rethink his nationalism in a European context rather than simply escape from it. The fact that, as one footnote tantalisingly reveals, a spy was sent to infiltrate Joyce's English classes in Zurich by the Austrian secret services because he was suspected of pro-Italian propaganda indicates how much imperial politics continued to impinge on his life and work.
This study proposes, however, that Joyce was influenced first and foremost not by the political but by the cultural life of Trieste and by the crucial friendships he forged there with Italo Svevo, Francini Bruni, Nicolo Vidacovich, and Leone Dario De Tuoni among others. It draws a full picture of the rich cultural scene in Trieste and itemises what was on offer in its many theatres, cinemas, and opera houses during Joyce's years there. Joyce's abortive attempt to found a cinema in Dublin is shown to have been inspired by the popularity of the new medium in Trieste, which had 21 cinemas by 1909. Likewise, Triestine variety theatre and the vogue for transformists at its caffechantants are cited as sources for the surreal theatricality of the "Circe" chapter in Ulysses.
An engrossing section of this book uncovers the links between Joyce's writing and other Italian avant-garde movements, futurism and a group known as the Vociani. Joyce's fiction both echoes themes and stylistic traits of the futurists and questions them. The Cyclopean citizen is at once a homage to and parody of the aggressive masculinity favoured by the futurists. The dynamism and mechanised nature of life in Ulysses also enacts one of the favoured ideals of this movement, which believed in scientific progress and what Marinetti called "the wireless imagination".
McCourt also crucially argues that Joyce was forced to revise his frequently misogynist views of women through his interaction with Italian female friends and students. Although his ambivalence about female sexuality never disappears, his only text set in Trieste, Giacomo Joyce, a tale of desire and erotic infatuation, allows him to locate a positive female otherness.
The Years of Bloom is an engaging, readable, and meticulous study. By scrutinising unpublished material such as Stanislaus Joyce's Triestine Book of Days 1907-1909 and undertaking an elaborate survey of local sources such as newspapers and pamphlets, McCourt has added much to our sum of knowledge about Joyce.
More importantly, he has enriched our reading of Joyce's works. Even the most maverick comments in this absorbing book, such as the observation that Anna Livia's long hair is modelled on the ground-length hairstyle of Sissi, Empress of Austria, encourages us to expand the contexts in which we engage with Joyce's fiction.
Anne Fogarty lectures in the Department of English, University College Dublin. She is Director of the James Joyce Summer School which runs from July 9th-21st in Newman House, Dublin, details of which can be obtained from (01) 7068480