Bloomsday 2007

(Bloomsday crowd at the James Joyce Centre)

DUBLIN: It’s not every day, nor is it for every book that one flies halfway across Europe to walk in the footsteps of a certain literary character – and no, I’m not referring in any way to Dan ‘didn’t-visit-The-Vatican-before-setting-my-novel-there-so-made-numerous-howlers-oops’ Brown.

So I’ve made it. Dublin on Bloomsday – June 16 – when literary types come from all over the world to experience the city through the words of one of its greatest writers, James Joyce. (For the uninitiated, the door-stopper work of fiction that is Ulysses (1922) is set entirely on a single day, June 16; Leopold Bloom being the main character, the date is celebrated in Dublin as ‘Bloomsday’.)

The whole shebang was Liam’s suggestion many months ago (i.e. I deny all responsibility), and though I initially balked at the expense, I eventually managed to find some cheap flights in light of it being, more than likely, a once in a lifetime sort of thing. (For ‘thing’, read ‘chance to get drunk on Guinness that hasn’t traveled while using the phrase ‘literary pilgrimage’ to justify the expense.’ Well, not quite, but there’s some truth there.).

After an Irish breakfast to sop up the sea of stout we consumed in Temple Bar, Liam and I made for the Joyce Centre, where we found a healthy crowd listening to a series of brief readings. Unfortunately, most of the readers were ambassadors, for whom reading publicly from Ulysses was clearly not a forte. Visiting the bathroom in the centre, we overhead snippets from the events that actually cost money, and could tell from the truly animated voices in those rooms that we’d missed a trick by not paying up. Still, we had our walking tour to look forward to.

(In the footsteps of Leopold Bloom... ps. a leprechaun made me buy the hat... but i dig it)

The tour itself – which followed the footsteps of Leopold Bloom in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter of Ulysses – was, along with our Trinity College jaunt (to follow), one of the two highlights of my Dublin experience (okay, three highlights if I include the Guinness). Our guide was extremely knowledgeable, but didn’t lord it over us, ie. he was in no way pretentious. He illuminated the text by reading sections of it at each stop along the way, and suggesting ways of understanding its countless resonances. I won’t go into detail here, frankly because it would be too difficult, and too lengthy – and I don’t have enough superlatives. Suffice to say that the one and a half hours of the tour were alone worth the trip to Dublin, that being there in the flesh was worth twenty lectures on the text, that the whole thing was unforgettable, and that in light of this, my appreciation for the scope of Joyce’s genius will never, ever flag.

(Yeatsbus)