June 16th is the centenary of Bloomsday, which, thanks in part to Senator David Norris, is our only annual literary commemoration, aside from summer schools. James Joyce is not only Ireland's greatest prose writer, but a writer of world stature, alongside contemporaries Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, writes Martin Mansergh
Joyce was not always appreciated. Writers living abroad were regarded with suspicion in newly +independent Ireland. An Irish writer was required to be resident.
Joyce, like most creative writers full of contrasts and contradictions, refused to be pigeon-holed, or to submit to the tyranny of ideology.
As Stephen Dedalus told Davin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
No one could have been profoundly stirred by the fall of Parnell, or have compared British rule in Ireland with King Leopold's treatment of the native population in the Congo, as exposed by Casement, without being in his own way profoundly nationalist.
But his political opinions are not what matter in literary criticism, just as it is belittling, inexact, and largely irrelevant to their work to brand Yeats as fascist, Francis Stuart as crypto-Nazi, or Elizabeth Bowen as Churchillian.
Joyce illustrates the distinction between a national literature and a nationalist one. He told Arthur Power of Waterford: "If you are sufficiently national, you will be international."
In his own words, he sought "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race".
Whereas most famous writers that came out of Ireland had been Protestant, Joyce evinced the pride of a people poised to come into their own.
Even if he was a religious sceptic, Catholicism based on Aquinas exercised a profound influence on his writing.
A Portrait of the Artist was graphic about sadistic physical abuse in clerical-run schools, but ignored.
I have never understood the surprise at its belated rediscovery.
Joyce was not a devotee of Lady Gregory, who co-founded the Abbey Theatre, also celebrating its centenary. He must not have fallen into the category of those who used a toothbrush, to borrow from Colm Toibín's sharp characterisation of her.
Yet, as Roy Foster shows, Yeats did recognise in Joyce "the intensity of the great writer" and the immense importance of Ulysses. Yeats described it in 1923: "As voluminous as Johnson's dictionary and as foul as Rabelais."
Others wondered if Joyce's inspiration came from the fountain or the cistern. A challenging book, it was barred by customs officers till 1932, but never censored. Despite AE's line ("Are we going to be read? I feel we are"), it was never going to compete with modern equivalents of The Sweets of Sin.
Against a mock-Homeric canvas, Ulysses presents a cross-section of life in Dublin on June 16-17th, 1904. The anti-hero Leopold Bloom is an unassuming person with a quiet cunning, the classic homme moyen sensuel. He belongs to the small Jewish minority, in the year it is forced out of Limerick. When challenged, he affirms his nation as Ireland, because he was born here, a nation being "the same people living in the same place . . . or also living in different places"!
The Belfast Agreement formulation: "Irish or British, or both", is a bit Joycean, perhaps?
Bloom's background has a special 20th century resonance. Joyce in 1938, using Pádraic Colum's good offices, obtained a rare residence permit from the minister for justice for a relative of a Jewish friend in Trieste. Joyce's reaction to Munich in 1938 was an angry: "Give him Europe?"
This and other references come from the excellent and enjoyable The Joyce We Knew: Memoirs of Joyce, by Ulick O'Connor. He has over a lifetime provided engaging and accessible guides to the entire Irish literary revival.
Tribute must also be paid to the majestic surveys of Irish literature by Declan Kiberd.
Joyce and the Abbey put Dublin on the literary map. Joyce's passion and sometimes distaste for his native city, now much changed, was intense. His patriotism was local. He was little drawn to remote islands as the heart of the nation.
Homer's Iliad (adapted) is now on film with Troy, and the depiction of the Greek flotilla landing bears a remarkable resemblance to D-Day. Although Joyce ran Dublin's first cinema in 1909, Ulysses is too diffuse to lend itself satisfactorily to film. On the other hand, his short story "The Dead" from Dubliners was revived by a heart-warming and poignant film by John Huston.
Charles Haughey as Taoiseach, opening the International Financial Services Centre, exuberantly cited it as "the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future". His cultural adviser, Anthony Cronin, provided a link back to Joyce's successors in the 1940s and 1950s.
The ministerial speech for the opening of Luas will no doubt pick up "Alderman" Bloom's sentiments on running a tram line: "That's the music of the future."
While Joyce prized the English language of Shakespeare and King James's Bible, Ulysses was written in Trieste, Zürich and Paris between 1914 and 1921, and is steeped in European culture.
It is fitting that EU enlargement was celebrated in Dublin, and, one hopes, the new constitutional treaty will be agreed, under the Irish presidency, so close to the centenary setting of the modern Odyssey.
Joyce admired medieval rather than renaissance man. He preferred Goldsmith for his simple modesty to Swift ("he made a mess of two women's lives"). Joyce owed a great deal to the women in his life, his feisty wife Nora, but also his enthusiastic American publisher, Sylvia Beach. The debts writers owe their publishers are too infrequently acknowledged. Certainly in the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy, Joyce made an important contribution to the liberation of women in the 20th century.
On that note, I wish to join in warm tribute to Mary Holland, a courageous journalist of insight and integrity, whose coverage of the early years of the Troubles was truly pioneering and lent the Observer its authority.