BLOOMSDAY 2004: Fifteen Joycean luminaries give their views on how the centenary should be celebrated.
Anne Fogarty
Director, James Joyce Summer School and a member of both Bloomsday committees.
The centenary of Bloomsday is a very important anniversary, but an odd one. You don't get very many dates like it celebrated in the literary calendar - the anniversary of a fictional text. For the centenary so far, there is the 19th annual Symposium of the International James Joyce Foundation coming to Dublin next year, where it will be hosted at Dublin Castle over a week. The symposium will encourage people to reassess the Joyce industry and Joyce criticism. There will also be an emphasis on more innovative approaches to Joyce, moves to digital media, such as the Digital Ulysses which it is hoped will be launched by Bloomsday 2004; it will be like an Annotated Joyce except on CD-Rom. For example, if you read the text and come upon a song, you click on the song and hear it. We also need a counter-Joyce space in which to think about Joyce critically. Dublin Writers' Festival, which always takes place in the same week as Bloomsday and looks at Irish writing in a larger, worldwide and European context, provides such a space to rethink the Joycean legacy in literature.
Robert Nicholson
Curator,
Martello Tower Joyce Museum
Our tower will be 200 years old next year, and by a curious coincidence the order to build was dated June 16th, 1804. What would make it a very special Bloomsday from our point of view would be the donation of a major Joycean item. I feel Bloomsday has gotten so out of hand, treated as a garden party; the spirit of Joyce, the fact that the city he described was a rather shabby place where people went around in small crowds, is lost. We need a return to the fundamentals. This does seem a very undemocratic notion, but what is desirable is cultivating a more informed notion of Joyce.
It's on Bloomsday that many people's main idea of him is based and it is the best opportunity to tell people what Joyce is about. Just don't let the messenger bikes get in the way.
It's very important to set Joyce in his time. I am hoping, at the Dublin Writers' Museum, to curate an exhibition of what other writers were up to at the time, all those writers mentioned in Ulysses - and those omitted, to see what he was reacting to. You have to revive some of the outrage, otherwise you lose the point.
Michael Nugent
Campaigner for the preservation of Joycean landmarks
Something that I realised while we were campaigning to save the house at Millbourne Avenue in Drumcondra was that people see Joyce more as a character, a Dublin character, than as the novelist who changed the face of literature. But Joyce was also challenging the establishment. It would be interesting if people connected with Joyce were to highlight some challenging work by contemporary world writers, even to focus, perhaps in an exhibition , on writing which is banned or considered subversive.
Certainly one appropriate way to mark Bloomsday would be to see the house at 2 Millbourne Avenue, Drumcondra, which features in A Portrait of the Artist, re-built as ordered, it having been demolished without permission.
Michael Donnelly
Chair, Dublin City Development
Board
Joyce was very conscious of the city and its local authority, and he made many references to the Lord Mayor in Ulysses, not exclusively favourable ones, either, so I think that we at the City Council should be at the forefront of organising Bloomsday 2004. We are hoping to name the new bridge over the Liffey the James Joyce Bridge, and for next year I would like to see the whole Joycean aspect of Dublin re-infused into the city, in a real way, not a gimmicky or touristy way. This is where it all started from, after all.
Dubliners and Ulysses are eminently accessible and hilarious in places. You could hear a lot of Dubliners today talking, even thinking, the way his characters go on.
I would like to see the City Council taking the initiative to contact interested parties and experts alike, in Dublin - property owners, Joyceans, people with stories to tell - and decide how to go about maximising the contributions we have. Maybe a book or a CD-Rom.
There's a limit to the number of plaques you can put up and I'd like to see something a bit more fundamental, something to raise consciousness of Joyce and what he has done for the city, so that what he saw in Dublin, we could also see; possibly even a programme to enrich adult literacy, to make all books more accessible. That alone would be some Joycean legacy.
Helen Monaghan
Administrator, James Joyce Centre, and member of both Bloomsday committees
We've been making plans for Bloomsday 2004 for over two years now. Bloomsday used to be something purely for tourists or academics. Over the past five years we have been trying to change that by taking it to the streets, to the city, where it belongs, having readings on the DART during rush hour, or in Temple Bar on Saturdays. Thankfully, this is working; last year on the morning of Bloomsday, we had 700 people in North Great Georges St, enjoying readings, performances, and music, and most of them were Dubliners. Our committee is looking at proposals from various interested parties, like European, American, and Australian theatre and street theatre groups, who want to perform for the centenary. I'd like to see as many free events as possible; we are lobbying for more official support as to how this could become feasible.
I'd envisage a use of the new public spaces in the city; currently we are working on something for the new GPO plaza for Bloomsday 2004. It's not necessary to have another statue of Joyce, but there will be the possibility of some public art, both temporary and permanent, inspired by Joyce.
It would be nice also to see the old theatre on Pearse Street, where Joyce sang in 1904 with John McCormack, looked after; it is falling into itself. I'd like to see it brought back to life, but not necessarily turned into a museum.
Too much will be happening to fit it all into one day. In the months running up to Bloomsday we hope to run a series of events, ourselves and in conjunction with public libraries, looking at the city over a century: How Joyce saw it, how it is now, and what has changed since his time.
Terence Killeen
Writer and
Joycean Scholar
While there will be the Symposium and related events, we hope to make it a festival lasting a week or possibly longer, with the power to draw many kinds of people and to spread beyond Dublin. I'd like to see presentations, lectures in different places around Ireland, dramatisations, street theatre, that kind of thing, and also concerts based on Joyce's strong musical connection. There is a possibility that Bloomsday itself might not even have any academic events, but that it would be a whole day of street theatre events. One idea would be some kind of re-enactment of the Nighttown episode of Ulysses on the night of Bloomsday, possibly in the Iveagh Gardens, in the open air.
It would be good also to see by 2004 access for scholars to the National Library's Joyce manuscripts which have up to now been kept under wraps.
Fritz Senn
Director, Zurich James Joyce Foundation
I'm in two minds when it comes to Bloomsday. It will be a mixed bag and we all have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, there is clearly a commercial aspect: Everyone has to get something out of it. On the other hand if something considered as elitist as Joyce becomes so popular then that's not such a bad thing. What has changed since I first brought the Joyce Symposium to Dublin in 1967 is that there is a real enthusiasm for Ulysses from many readers. But it's not missionary work; we don't set out to convert people. It's good to see, though, that people do still read and sacrifice their time to read.
Joyce would probably make some caustic remark about all the fuss and be flattered at the same time. After all, there is little more that an author can ask than that people pay attention to what they do. And which other author generates this - a celebration of a day in his book?
Gerald Davis
Artist, and annual Leopold Bloom impersonator
Bloomsday is not a bank holiday, nothing officially is designated, but the people have taken it on in their own way and made it a day of craic. I like the way the Dublin people just take their Joyce for granted.
Next year should really be a bit like Dublin 1991, the City of Culture year, and should be a continuous thing.
I'd remember too the 1982 celebrations for the centenary of Joyce's birth, when intellectual events and craic were combined for a very big happening in Dublin. Bloomsday takes care of itself very well at the moment and I would not like to see it overly taken over by "professionals". But maybe one practical option would be for the St Patrick's Day Festival people and the Joyce people to work together to come up with a year of festivities for Dublin. It's the enthusiasm of Dublin that makes it.
Dermot Lacey
Lord Mayor
Dublin
I am like a huge proportion of the population in that I have tried, and will try again, to read Ulysses. I think it is very important that more Dubliners get a greater understanding of the variety of Joyce's work. Joyce had an extensive knowledge of Dublin and I would love to see it recaptured by present-day Dubliners; I'm not sure that people know the city anymore, have a sense of being from there anymore. Maybe Dublin has got too big. I'd like to see events that also promote that and that address the issue of newcomers to the city, of people coming to live here from elsewhere as Joyce lived elsewhere.
Joyce was bitter about Dublin and I hope that people who leave now see it as a place to come back to rather than to be thought about in splendid isolation.
Morris Beja
Former President of International James Joyce Foundation, Ohio
This is obviously the big one, it will be the biggest celebration of Bloomsday ever. I'm helping to co-ordinate the academic programme. I hope that, to start with, Bloomsday will encourage people to go back to, or to go for the first time, to Ulysses and Joyce's other writings. Because I'm an educator, the first thing to come to my mind as a suggestion for a more enduring marker of Bloomsday 2004 is the idea of scholarships but perhaps for secondary school rather than third-level students, awards that would encourage people to read and to write.
Because Ireland used to give very generous awards of this kind. Joyce himself received some before he went to university. On one occasion he got, I think, as much as his father earned in a year, which was a major thing for someone from a poor family. And something similar for young people today would be good to see.
Brendan O'Donoghue
Director, National Library and chair of the Minister's Bloomsday committee
At the National Library our basic objective will be a major exhibition of our Joyce materials, including the large collection we acquired last year, a collection of 19 previously unknown items, never seen by Joyce scholars, including eight separate episodes from Ulysses in draft form, some of the drafts earlier than any previously known drafts. We also have our manuscript of the "Circe" episode which we bought at auction in December 2000, and our manuscript of the Portrait, as well as first and all subsequent editions of Ulysses. We hope to use our materials imaginatively to make an exhibition centring around June 1904: photographs of street scenes, of characters from the time, and newspapers. We hope to bring the material together to tell the story of Joyce and the Dublin he knew .
Tommy Smith
Proprietor of the popular Bloomsday watering hole, Grogan's Pub
I would like to see it be a memorable day, even perhaps a holiday. People should highlight the accessible parts of the novel; it is very accessible, because it is a tour of Dublin. It's important to tell people not just to talk about the book, but to get hold of it and read it. Ulysses doesn't lend itself so well to a carnival as did the work of Myles na Gopaleen, perhaps, but you can strike a balance. The important thing is to keep it a literary event and yet highlight what Joyce did for Dublin and for Ireland.
We always have people's paintings on the walls in Grogan's, and what I'd like to do for Bloomsday next year would be to hold an exhibition of work with a Joycean theme.
David Norris
Senator, Joycean Scholar and member of both committees
My particular - and admittedly somewhat selfish - wish for Bloomsday 2004 would be an initiative to make the James Joyce Centre safe for all time through statutory funding. The centre and library attract a huge number of visitors and take in €80,000 annually. But this is not enough to properly staff the place and keep it open to the public. Government help has been sporadic and this year, in the run-up to the centenary, it was finally withdrawn, along with the wonderful FÁS support. Wouldn't it be nice to see the centre as significant, rather than have it limping from year to year? And another worthy programme would be to at least stabilise the house at 15 Usher's Island, where the great story 'The Dead' is set.
Also it is important that the Government puts muscle not just behind the showbiz side of Bloomsday. The Symposium, coming to Dublin for a week, should get a general and generous welcome.
At least one or two of Joyce's stories should be put on the official education syllabus. Other countries, after all, have them on theirs.
Michael Groden
Director,
Digital Ulysses project
The hypermedia project, some of which we hope to have ready for Bloomsday 2004, subject to agreements with the Joyce Estate, is an attempt to use the resources of the computer to enhance the reading experience of Ulysses.
For example we can provide links to photographs of buildings or other visual details and recordings of songs and other music and of literary works when the characters think of them as words read aloud. This kind of presentation, we feel, is especially useful for Ulysses because so much of it tends towards multimedia (even though, of course, it remains very much a work in print) but also because so much of the context isn't available to readers now. This is especially true for 1904 Dublin, and a hypermedia presentation can go along way towards recreating that.
John McCourt
Director,
James Joyce School, Trieste
So few people have actually read the book that it is important, on the Bloomsday centenary, to find ways to lead more people back to Joyce. The centenary organisers must be careful to strike a balance between keeping sponsors happy by creating tourist friendly events and not turning Irish readers off Joyce forever. There must be a serious academic heart to what is being done.
I would hope also that at least one English or Anglo-Irish Department in Ireland might find the resources to employ a full-time Joyce Scholar. While it is great that University College Dublin has an annual Joyce Summer School, it is a great pity that it does not have a major Staff Scholar paid principally to do work on Joyce. And now that the National Library has acquired such a wonderful hoard of Joyce materials, it must be given the resources to properly catalogue them and make them available. Generous scholarships, perhaps, could be made available for scholars from all over the world to come and consult them.
And it's important that Bloomsday won't become the occasion for a nationalistic celebration of Joyce in a "Hail Glorious Saint James" mode. We should not lose sight of the fact that Ireland is making amends to Joyce very late in the day, and that Joyce is a great European as well as a great Irish writer; the greatest Irish European. It would be wonderful if his European vision could be in some way reassessed and seen as being deeply prophetic for the kind of choices Ireland has made in its past 30 years and which parallel those Joyce himself made.