James Joyce’s Ulysses was introduced to the world on December 7th, 1921 at a small launch event at La Maison des Amis des Livres, a Paris bookshop. The previous day, the Irish delegation in London signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which would lead to Independence and to Civil War. In the space of those two days, as the scholar and critic Joe Cleary has remarked, modern Ireland’s future, literary and political, was being shaped in two of Europe’s great capitals.
A century later, only one of these events – not the establishment of the Free State and certainly not the Civil War, but the publication of Joyce’s great novel – is marked with an annual national celebration that includes political speeches, global marketing campaigns, tourist promotions and street parties where the leisured urban bourgeoisie dress up for historical reenactments. This week’s centennial Bloomsday, observed on the day of Leopold Bloom’s epic stroll around Dublin, was perhaps as close as the country will come to a moment of national commemorative unity this year.
Even though the Civil War has faded with the passing of the generations that remembered it, and its legacy has all but washed through the political system, that violent conflict offers few narrative comforts. The Free State Constitution was quickly undermined, and for many people, not least in Northern Ireland, 1922 is recalled only as a year of suffering and pain. Just about the only thing that united the generation that lived through it was disenchantment at the subsequent failure of the new State to live up to its founding ideals.
Joyce, long rejected in the country of his birth, offers an escape from that contested history and emphasises an alternative, parallel telling of the Irish story that accords more neatly with the modern State’s idea of itself as a cosmopolitan, secular, outward-facing place. Joyce, like Ulysses, is Irish and European at the same time. Bloom, like modern Ireland, is at ease with hyphenated identities. Bloom might as well be describing one of the key concepts behind the Belfast Agreement when he says “A nation is the same people living in the same place”, before quickly adding: “Or also living in different places.”
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And yet it’s hard not to see the irony in the commodification of Joyce by the State’s marketing machine. The Department of Foreign Affairs, which was famously concerned in 1941 to know if he had died a Catholic, now deploys Joyce as one of the chief weapons in its soft power armoury. The State has named a warship after him. Meanwhile, the city that Ulysses brought to the world is today a place where cultural spaces are closing, the built heritage is under threat and an adequate home is beyond the reach of most artists. The epic ambition of Joyce’s novel finds few echoes in the political culture that is so keen to celebrate it.