Reprinted from Roots and Branches.
James Joyce once said that he was “more interested in the street names of Dublin than in the riddle of the universe.” Indeed, he commented to his friend, the artist Frank Budgen, as he was laboring on his epic novel Ulysses in Zurich, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Joyce picked a great city to base Ulysses in as Dublin is a city that has a complex and often perplexing presence in almost all of his works. Methinks that Ulysses makes more sense if you are truly familiar with the streets and buildings of Dublin than if you are completely unfamiliar with the city. (If you’re askin’ if I actually managed to read Ulysses in its entirety, bloody hell no. Joyce’s shorter works are fine, but his long stuff bores me to tears.)
Joyce’s Dublin: A Walking Guide to Ulysses is a slim volume that replicates the rambling walk that Leopold Bloom took during the passage of a single day. Ulysses takes place on the single day and evening of June 16, 1904, which commemorates the writer’s first walk about Dublin with Nora Barnacle, who would become his life companion. Over the last 20 years the date has been celebrated as Bloomsday in honor of Leopold Bloom. Bloom, a Jewish advert salesman, rambles about the city, sometimes crossing paths with Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who is Joyce’s literary alter ego.
Like Ulysses, this book is divided into eighteen chapters with extensive notes explaining the location and importance of each place Leopold visited. The very best time to explore Dublin through James Joyce’s life and fiction is on a Bloomsday or the week leading up to it, an enlarged celebration often called Bloomstime. The impetuous Irish weather is disposed to grant reasonably fair weather in late spring. Bloomstime has many scheduled literary events, and the streets are filled with actors, buskers, and mimes giving extemporaneous performances. Thus this book becomes your best guide to fully enjoying Bloomstime and the festival of literary madness that accompanies it. This is not a dry academic book that will bore you, but a rather lively book designed for travelers who want to see Dublin for themselves and follow in the footsteps of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and the other local characters wandering ’bout this city.
The James Joyce Broadsheet said of Joyce’s Dublin: A Walking Guide to Ulysses that it was “…the sort of book which every amateur Joycean visitor to Dublin has been looking for…” and I have to agree. It’s well-illustrated, concisely written, and does a bloody good job of contrasting the 1904 Dublin portrayed in Ulysses with the city of the early 1990s. Take some cash so you may whet your whistle at the bars you’ll find en route while tracing the routes followed by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom; wear sturdy shoes; carry a bumbershoot; and put this book in your pocket. Do so and you too can have a jolly good time in Dublin.
(St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
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