I’m standing in the garden of the Museum of Literature Ireland near an old ash tree where James Joyce once stood for a photograph. It marked his graduation from University College Dublin in 1902, when he was 20.
Joyce now looms like a colossus over literature. His novel “Ulysses” topped most scholars’ lists as the best of the 20th century.
In the photo where he stood on this spot, though, he does not look like an artist who will reshape culture. A slender, bespectacled young man, he stares quizzically forward, as if he were just trying to find a way out.
He does not appear—yet anyway—to be the writer who would strive “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” as he proclaimed in his first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
Some of his demeanor of detached confusion could be attributed to his notoriously poor eyesight. He was nearly blind for almost the last half of his 59 years. In pictures, his eyeglasses seem as thick and opaque as the bottom of a fully formed glacier.
But it also may have sprung from his ambivalence about his native land. Joyce lived the majority of his adult life away from Ireland, returning rarely to the earth where he was born.
Yet Ireland—particularly Dublin—obsessed him. In his writing, he never left the city. All his major works—the exquisite short story collection “Dubliners,” “Portrait,” “Ulysses” and the daunting “Finnegan’s Wake”—were set here.
He even wrote of “Ulysses” that one of his goals for that book was to so perfectly depict his hometown that, should Ireland’s largest city be erased from existence, it could be recreated just by consulting the pages of his novel.
Standing where Joyce once stood, I try to imagine what both enthralled and appalled the young artist in the making.
Dublin has changed in the more than 120 years since Joyce left it with his love and life partner, Nora Barnacle, in December 1904. The population of the city proper is twice what it was in 1900 and the population of the metropolitan area is five times what it was at the dawn of the 20th century.
The atmosphere of cloying, clogging repression the young Joyce found strangling has cleared. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote.
And the country’s connection to the European Union has enabled it to thrive, transforming Dublin from an impoverished minor city into a plush metropolis. The hovels Joyce knew and shuddered over have been replaced by posh stores, upscale hotels and renovated condos.
I’m curious, standing where he once stood, to know what his penetrating, if half-blind, gaze would have made of this transformed Dublin.
Doubtless, he would have seen things worth noting.
Joyce’s gift was finding the poetry in the ordinary. He understood how easily everyday experience could be allegorical.
In “Ulysses,” he depicts a man’s meanderings around Dublin as a parallel to Odysseus’s struggles to get home in Homer’s great epic. The comparison is often read as soft-edged mockery, but there is sympathy in it, too.
Joyce saw heroism in survival—in enduring the everyday indignities that life piles on everyone.
That sympathy radiates throughout what I consider his best piece of writing, the stunningly beautiful short story “The Dead.” It details a holiday party in which a detached, full-of-himself husband learns about an early, deceased love of his wife’s.
The revelation rocks the husband, undercutting his self-regard but also increasing his awareness of life’s complexity and the complicated inner lives of others. The story closes with one of the most gorgeous sentences ever written, a sentence that casts winter weather as a symbol of an all-embracing affirmation of life, death and rebirth:
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
No snow falls as I stand beside the tree where James Joyce once stood in the city he both loved and hated.
Outside the garden, though, I can hear the sounds of people on the street, moving, some swiftly, some slowly, through the everyday epic that is ordinary life.
