Resting in peace – Frank McNally on James Joyce and a real-life and fictional Paddy Dignam

As Joyceans prepared to celebrate another Bloomsday this week, by poignant coincidence, a real-life Paddy Dignam was being laid to rest in Dublin.

According to his death notice on rip.ie, this Patrick (Paddy) Dignam died peacefully on Friday last, lovingly remembered by a large extended family in Ireland, the US, and Canada. His funeral was held in Sutton on Wednesday.

One of the central events in Joyce’s Ulysses is the funeral of a fictional Paddy Dignam, an event attended by many of the book’s main characters, including Leopold Bloom.

Like other important passages in the novel, this is re-enacted annually, usually in Glasnevin Cemetery, where the supposed original event took place.

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In recent years, a few Joyce enthusiasts have even extended the commemoration with a follow-up “Month’s Mind” in July.

Joyce’s Dignam is fictional in the sense that nobody of that name died Dublin on or around June 16th, 1904, when the book is set.

The model for his character was Matthew Kane (1865-1904), a law clerk and friend of the Joyce family, who drowned in Dublin Bay in July of that year, aged only 39 – the same age as the fictional Dignam – and whose Glasnevin gravestone acknowledges his literary connections.

But Joyce may also have had another, real Paddy Dignam in mind when choosing the character’s name: a man who was still alive at the time the novel was set, and would be for 12 years afterwards, and was an ancestor of the man who died this week.

Although Ulysses describes the events of a single day in Dublin, and is in most respects scrupulously faithful to period detail, it was written between 1914 and 1921, when the exiled Joyce was closely following the turbulent events at home through newspapers and letters.

Scholars believe he subtly foreshadowed some of those events in Ulysses. The choice of the name Paddy Dignam as the subject of the novel’s may have been one example.

As Joycean scholar Senan Molony has pointed out, the accidental victims of the 1916 Rising included a Patrick Dignam, a bread-van driver killed on the Friday of the fighting.

He was shot dead on Lower Ormond Quay, while trying to get to his workplace at Downes Bakery on North Earl Street, near where a statue of Joyce now stands.

That Dignam is listed in the 1901 census as a 36-year-old, meaning he would have been 39, like his fictional counterpart, in 1904.

His home was No 34 St Joseph’s Place, off Dorset Street, making him a near neighbour of the fictional Bloom, whose house at 7 Eccles Street (now demolished and the site of the Mater Private hospital) Joyce “borrowed” from a real-life friend.

Bloom passes St Joseph’s Place on his way to the butcher to buy the kidney he famously eats for breakfast in Ulysses, one of many incidental ways in which the 1916 victim may have been quietly retro-fitted into the book.

There are also many references to bread, bread-vans, and bakeries. Most may be there for other reasons but at least some – like the crumbs Bloom and his fellow mourners find on the seats of their funeral carriage – seem pointed.

Perhaps the most telling detail, however, is Joyce’s reference to the seven gravediggers who have prepared the fictional Dignam’s resting place, with the seventh “shouldering his blade like a weapon”.

That would seem to be a lot of diggers for a normal grave. Unless, as Molony suggests, it was a deliberate foreshadowing of the fate awaiting a real-life Paddy Dignam, during a great upheaval begun by seven signatories.

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Amid the sadness over the death of another Dignam – singer Christy – I was reminded of a funny incident at the Euro 2016 football championships, to which one of his anthemic songs unwittingly contributed.

That was a time of high tension in France, after a series of terrorist attacks. The hosts were understandably nervous. Security was tight at the stadiums and in the “fan zones”, where thousands watched games on large screens.

Before entering the fan zone in Paris, beside the Eiffel Tower, I was patted down and had my bags searched three times. But a weakness in the system was the unofficial supporter gatherings, especially the Irish ones, with several thousand fans assembling outside Irish bars to drink and sing into the early hours.

These was an easy target for attack, if anyone had been so minded. Happily, that didn’t happen.

In the meantime, one night in Pigalle, the huge crowds outside three Irish pubs on the Boulevard de Clichy were being monitored by a handful of police at either end of the street, with two parked patrol cars as the only other obstacles.

The police looked worried. The fans just drank and sang, and serenaded their minders at one point with a mass chorus of “How can I protect you in this crazy world?”