World View: The writer and painter Arthur Power met James Joyce in Paris for the first time on the evening he was celebrating Sylvia Beach's decision to publish Ulysses, writes Paul Gillespie
Power said he wanted to write like the 18th-century French satirists. Joyce said: "You'll never do it, never - you are an Irishman - you must write what is in your blood and not what is in your head".
Power said he was tired of nationality. He wanted to become international - all great writers were international. To which Joyce replied: "Yes - but they were national first - if you are sufficiently national you will be international."
Joyce's universalism is grounded in his obsession with Ireland and Dublin. These are not polar opposites, counterposing the cosmopolitan and the national/local in his view; rather do they mutually constitute and inter-penetrate each other.
This dialectical approach applies also to his political ideas, particularly his treatment of nationalism, empire and Europe. They remain relevant in a Europe which is reconfiguring itself anew, after the end of the Cold War, which itself arose from the collapse of the settlements reached after the first World War, when Ireland became independent just when Joyce's masterpiece was published in 1922.
This became more clear when travelling recently in Croatia and Austria.
One hundred years ago James Joyce and Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to take up a job teaching English at the Berlitz school. It was not to materialise until the following year; so the pair went to Pola, now Pula in Croatia, for five months - a period currently commemorated in an exhibition mounted by the Croatian embassy in the Masonic hall in Molesworth Street, Dublin.
Joyce was 22 then and was not to leave Trieste for Paris finally until 1920 at the age of 38, having spent the war in Zurich.
As John McCourt says in his splendid study, The Years of Bloom (Lilliput Press, 2000), Joyce was profoundly influenced and inspired by the "rich cosmopolitan texture of turn-of-the-century Trieste". It was the principal port of access to the Adriatic for the Austro-Hungarian empire, contained an extraordinary mix of peoples, languages, religions and cultures from all over Europe, was in the mainstream of contemporary artistic, musical and theatrical life - and the site of an intense irredentist nationalism by Italians determined to subvert that empire by reclaiming the city.
As Joyce wrote later: "I cannot begin to give you the flavour of the old Austrian Empire. It was a ramshackle affair but it was charming, gay and I experienced more kindnesses in Trieste than ever before or since in my life. Times past cannot return but I wish they were back." In 1919 he found the city utterly changed after its capture by Italy during the war, its cultural hybridity destroyed with its role in the collapsed empire.
But living there in the years 1904-14 he wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and significant sections of Ulysses. The city influenced his work - and not least the Blooms. Leopold, as McCourt puts it, was "a Jew with Hungarian roots \ does not fit into provincial Dublin, while Molly is as much a Mediterranean Jewess as she is Irish".
Most of Joyce's political journalism and essays were written while he was in Trieste. He explained to readers of Italian newspapers how Fenianism, Home Rule and Griffith's Sinn Féin developed as part of Irish nationalism, and to university audiences how Ireland's cultural history is intimately bound up with Europe rather than solely with Britain.
He made the point, directed against narrow Italian (and Irish) notions of nationality, that "to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible and to deny the name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modern movement".
In seeking to place Irish political developments within a European context, Joyce worked out his ideas on how nationalism and internationalism are connected. He did not see the former as backward and the latter as modern, a facile assumption made by many contemporary critics. Nor should his presumed pluralist multiculturalism be counterposed to his fascination with the particular and local.
Rather is the one expressed in the other. He is just as critical of Bloom's pacifism, the Citizen's xenophobia and British imperialism in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses devoted to the subject.
Now that Slovenia has joined the European Union and negotiations on Croatia's bid to do so are expected to be opened at next week's European Council, Trieste is rediscovering its hinterland and neighbouring peoples, as boundaries between them and Italy become more porous and open. They are reliving some of the mixtures found in the Austro-Hungarian empire, despite the passage of time during which nationalism, fascism, communism and the Cold War scattered and destroyed its minorities.
On the lovely Croatian island of Vis last month a journalist involved with alternative tourism spoke of the way in which it could become a bridge to Italians and other peoples rather than a wall against them, as it used to be against NATO during the Yugoslav period. It is a metaphor, perhaps, for wider regional integration. Slovenians are the most numerous tourists in Croatia and Austria is the source of 30 per cent of foreign investment.
Speaking at a European forum on new regional partnerships at the Benedictine Gottweig Abbey in Krems, Austria, last weekend the Croatian Foreign Minister, Mr Miomir Zuzul, spoke of how EU enlargement is bringing a new stability to the region. Only under a European umbrella in which the Balkan states aspire to join the EU is it possible to take steps that can link their nationalisms to peace, prosperity and democracy, not to war and separation. Joyce would surely approve.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie