Bloomsday on Broadway XXXV
In honor of our 35th edition of Bloomsday on Broadway, we invited Irish author and expert of all matters Dublin, Karl Whitney, to share some of his thoughts on Joyce’s masterwork.
The global reach of Bloomsday is a remarkable thing to someone who, like me, grew up in Joyce’s home city of Dublin. This year will see the 35th annual Bloomsday on Broadway at Symphony Space, which is but one of the many international celebrations set to take place on Bloomsday, June 16.
A few years ago, I stood in the dark basement of a pub in Paris and listened as a number of actors performed selected excerpts from Joyce’s work. I had never before heard his writing performed in this manner, and it illustrated something I had never really given much thought to before: the polyphonic, many-voiced quality of his work.
Joyce’s prodigious memory — his recall of the streets and buildings of his home town — is often remarked upon, but his ability to recreate the atmosphere of Dublin through the city’s voices is perhaps even more impressive. Joyce’s city is made up of voices echoing in urban space. Ulysses is a novel whose primary mode is monologue — often internal, occasionally external. Its dialogue is typically jousting, peevish, combative — barely hiding mutual contempt. But its monologues, when layered and mixed with the cacophony of the city, promise something more: an empathetic dialogue, an end to alienation. Through the city, the trajectories of Bloom and Dedalus eventually intersect and result in such lively dialogue.
Just over a year ago, while in Dublin, I called into Sweny’s pharmacy on Lincoln Place near Trinity College. Sweny’s famously appears in Ulysses when the character of Leopold Bloom visits the premises to purchase some lemon-scented soap. You can still buy similar soap in Sweny’s though it is no longer a licenced pharmacy. Instead, it deals in new and secondhand books and is more likely to treat you by prescribing specific excerpts from Joyce’s works for which it holds reading groups every day of the week. (In a range of languages including German and Italian.)
It would be easy to see Sweny’s as a mere curiosity, an exercise in preservation that has little to do with contemporary Dublin. Nevertheless, as I talked to P.J. Murphy, the curator of Sweny’s, who stood behind the counter wearing a colourful dicky bow and the kind of long white coat a chemist might have worn in 1904, I was told tales of the many activities held at the pharmacy and of the variety of people who came there to read from Joyce.
Later on, I met Deirdre Daly, a young woman who frequently walked past Sweny’s and saw listings for reading groups in its window. “I read Ulysses in college, but you can only get so far on your own. I used to see: Thursday reading group, 7pm Ulysses. So I went there one evening. It was so much fun; a welcoming atmosphere. We read aloud. It’s not an academic discussion: let’s laugh at the dirty jokes, let’s marvel at the beauty of the language without being reverential.”
Reading a book is typically an individual pursuit, but reading it aloud to an audience is inevitably a communal act — in the case of Ulysses the book is being returned to a social and often urban context, be this New York City or Dublin. When I hear Joyce’s work being read in public, the effect is uncanny. It feels like I’m always brought back to Dublin, if only for the span of a few minutes. The cadence of voices as well as some of the turns of phrase, are anchored to my youth. Joyce contains multitudes.
Karl Whitney is the author of Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin (Penguin). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the London Review of Books.
