City of the Dead

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023

For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam – everything from sodden mattresses and old furniture to bulging bags of trash. That whole area of the inner city was, and is, characterised by decay. But this building was particularly painful to behold because of its extraordinary cultural significance, and because of its significance to me personally, as a reader, a writer, and a Dubliner.

This building – 15 Usher’s Island – was once home to James Joyce’s grandaunts and is famous as the setting of one of the great works of twentieth-century literature, his short story ‘The Dead’. Almost every morning, as I looked at this house, I would feel a faint but complicated pang of pride and anger. Pride that this house was in my neighbourhood, and that I got to pass it every day just going about my business as a Dubliner; anger at having to witness it, over the course of those years, sink into further depths of grime and dereliction.

One morning as I was walking home from dropping my son at school, I saw a group of Italian women standing about on the narrow footpath a little way down from the house, looking bewildered, glancing alternately up the street and down at their phones. I was in a civic-minded mood and so I stopped and asked them whether by any chance they happened to be looking for the James Joyce house. This was not the first time I had provided such an ad-hoc service for Joyce-curious foreign tourists.

‘Yes,’ said one of them. ‘James Joyce.’

‘It’s actually this one over here,’ I said, and walked with them the twenty yards or so down the quay to the house.

One of them told me that this was where they had been looking for, and that they had been outside it right before I came along, but had concluded that it couldn’t possibly be the right address. I told them that unfortunately it was the right address. It was in pretty bad shape, no doubt, but this was none other than the famous ‘dark, gaunt house on Usher’s Island’ in which the Morkan sisters held their annual dance on the feast of the epiphany, which ‘for years and years had gone off in splendid style, as long as anyone could remember’.

They looked crestfallen, and confused, and borderline unwilling to believe that this could be it. We stood for a few moments, looking up at the house in mournful, bilingual silence. It was hard to imagine that door, with its layers of soot and filth, being opened by Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, to the dapper figure of Gabriel Conroy, scraping his galoshes on the mat. It was hard to imagine the glow of a party, the sound of laughter and music, coming from within. There was, I felt, something masochistic about my insistence on showing them this house. Some part of me wanted to feel shame at the state of the place, at my city’s abject failure to honour, or to even maintain, this literary monument. I told them that it had been unoccupied and falling into dilapidation for many years now, for as long as I myself had lived in the area. I told them that it was due to be turned into a tourist hostel; that there had been a high-profile campaign to convince the planning board to reverse the decision, to force the city to honour in some way the cultural importance of the building, but that it had failed. They said that it was sad, and I agreed, sadly, and I left them to go about their morning.

When I first moved to that neighbourhood, the house at 15 Usher’s Island was owned by an entrepreneur who had converted it into a kind of Joycean events venue, operating under the pleasingly weird name ‘James Joyce House of the Dead’. The name has always led me to imagine some sort of formally experimental Hammer horror film, starring Vincent Price as a sinister Irish necromancer who speaks in convoluted multilingual puns and dense literary allusions. According to its website, the house was available, in those days, for private functions, including wakes.

The idea of a Joyce-themed wake struck me as slightly mad. And yet the whole of Dublin can seem, in some fundamental sense, Joyce-themed – as though the author, after his death in Zurich in 1941, far from the city where he was born, had somehow slyly designated the whole place as a monument to his works.

Dublin can feel less like a place that Joyce wrote about than a place that is about his writing. The city of his fiction exists in ghostly superimposition over the actual city. Every street corner, every landmark, every fleetingly glimpsed stranger in a Macintosh, can seem haunted by some Joycean revenant. If you’re already thinking about Joyce to begin with, Dublin will continually provide you with reasons to continue doing so. He will not be escaped. He inheres in the city’s bones.

*

I moved to Dublin at eighteen, to study at Trinity, and have never left the place – the city, that is: the university I did manage to leave, eventually. And as long as I’ve lived here my experience of the city has been informed by the omnipresence of Joyce. I first read him as an undergraduate, Dubliners and A Portrait for a course on Irish writing and then a year-long course on Ulysses in the final year of my degree. (Finnegans Wake I have a couple of times tried my hand at, but am now mostly resigned to leave that to the pros.) In the years since then I’ve returned to the work intermittently, sometimes for things I have been working on myself and sometimes just because it has felt like time to go back to them. There have also been times, two or three years at a stretch, where I have not so much opened a book by Joyce. But even in those times I never really stopped reading him – because to live in Dublin, as a reader of Joyce, is to be constantly, and forcibly, reminded of the deep presence of this man and his words beneath and behind everything.

I work most days in the city centre. When I lived on Arbour Hill I would walk out my front door and round the corner where, in the opening sentence of ‘Cyclops’, the narrator recalls standing, ‘passing the time of day with old Troy of the DMP’ when ‘be damned but a bloody sweep came along and near drove his gear into my eye’.

My walk into the centre takes me up the quays, past the site of the Ormond Hotel, where the ‘Sirens’ episode is set: where Bloom averts his eyes from the suave spectacle of Blazes Boylan and attempts to avert his mind from the knowledge that Boylan is on his way to Eccles Street to have sex with Molly. I walk over O’Connell Bridge, formerly Carlisle Bridge, where Bloom stops to throw broken up Banbury cakes to the ‘hungry famished gulls’ and a balled-up prophecy into the Liffey. I pass various other minor sites of Joycean significance until I finally reach the National Library, where I work most days – and where I wrote these pages.

In a city whose every street corner can seem Joyce-haunted, the National Library is the place that feels perhaps most thoroughly possessed by his spirit. The place remains almost exactly as it was in June 1904; it hasn’t been knocked down and replaced by a hotel – at least not yet – but neither has it been turned into a monument to its own Joycean significance. (Even Sandymount Strand is no longer the place where Stephen imagines himself walking into eternity; it was since reclaimed from the Irish Sea and is now a public park and playground.)

But the National Library is essentially the same place, occupying the same role in the life of the city, as the place where Stephen stands around, in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, riffing with virtuosic impenetrability on Hamlet and paternity, and where Bloom consults a copy of the Kilkenny People. When you walk through the door into the main reading room, there’s a photograph on the wall, taken around the turn of the last century. Apart from the fact that the photo is in black and white, and everyone in it is wearing very heavy-looking suits and straw boaters, it could easily have been taken last week. People are looking towards the camera with mild irritation, in exactly the same way as people would look at you now with mild irritation if you walked in and took a photo of them sitting and reading at their desks. The chairs and desks are the same chairs and desks; the bookshelves are the same bookshelves. I glance at this photograph every so often, as I walk into the reading room, and think about the threads of continuity that bind this city, and my life in it, to the city that Joyce wrote about in Ulysses. When I walk out the front entrance of the library, I sometimes think of Stephen and Bloom passing each other without acknowledgement and experience a small ectoplasmic frisson, as though I have walked through a ghost.

In this sense, the National Library is a bit like the city as a whole – you are always passing among the swarming ghosts of Joyce’s fictions.

*

In a wonderful essay published in the American Scholar in 2004, to mark the one-hundred-year anniversary of Bloomsday, the American writer Sam Anderson attempted to get to grips with this complex interplay between Joyce’s imagined Dublin and his own actual experience of the place as a visitor. He writes about going for a walk with a friend along a beach, when the friend points out that this isn’t just any old beach – that it is, in fact, the literary holy ground of ‘Proteus’ and ‘Nausicaa’. At first, he writes, he is underwhelmed by the place – despite its grand cultural significance, it’s not much different to any other beach in any other country. He finds himself immersed not in the numinous presence of Joyce, but in a banal panorama of the everyday. Families with kids. Kitesurfers. Dogs running around on the sand chasing sticks. But then he has what he knowingly refers to as an epiphany: that ‘Sandymount strand was a fictional stage that just happened, secondarily, to be a real place’ and that it had ‘been infused with trivnificance, the paradoxical colonization of trivia by art: trivia significantly fictionalized for its very triviality, and hence no longer trivial’.

I feel that there must be something quite unique about this relationship, that there can’t be many cities that are presided over so thoroughly and so minutely by a single artist. There are many cities of broader and deeper cultural significance than Dublin. But you can go to New York and not have a single thought about Andy Warhol, or even Martin Scorsese. You can walk around London without thinking incessantly of Shakespeare or Johnson or Dickens or Woolf. You can visit Vienna without feeling as though you are inside some kind of hyperreal immersive monument to the work of Freud or Wittgenstein or Mozart. These cities are too large and multifarious to ever be truly consubstantial with a single artist, in the way that Dublin is with Joyce.

Dublin is a very small city, and Joyce is about as large a presence as it’s possible for an artist to be. As Stephen puts it to Bloom in ‘Eumaeus’: ‘you suspect that I may be important because I belong to
Ireland . . . But I suspect that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.’ The suggestion is funny less for its absurd arrogance than for how weirdly accurate it turned out to be.

When I think about this, I think about a fairly recent interlude – last year, in the depths of the pandemic lockdown – when my family and I came close to leaving Dublin. My wife and I had resolved, like so many city dwellers during that time, that our lives would be better – calmer, more spacious – if we relocated to the countryside. At one point we came very close to moving to Kilkenny, and went so far as to sign up our children to a school there. That didn’t pan out. A few months later we very nearly bought a house in Wicklow. That didn’t pan out either. But during that time I was mostly able to convince myself that I wouldn’t miss Dublin that much. The traffic; the dirt; the outrageous expense of the place; the remorseless destruction, over the last decade or so, of the city’s cultural vitality. Though I would miss my friends I reasoned that, basically no matter where you were in Ireland, you were never any more than three hours away from any other person in Ireland. But during that time in which I was acclimating myself to the idea of leaving the city I had lived in for twenty-four years, I began to read Ulysses again. It was a strange and moving experience to read the book at a time when Dublin was returning slowly and tentatively to life, after seeming so empty and bleak for so long – from a late Beckettian stasis towards a Joycean civic vitality and kinesis.

When I thought about leaving Dublin, there was a part of me that couldn’t help but think of the prospect as losing the city of Ulysses, of losing this relationship with the book itself. As I made my way through the book, I got into the habit, as I walked to and from work in the morning and the evenings, of supplementing my reading by listening to an audiobook version, the RTÉ radio adaptation from 1982. As I walked around with my headphones in, listening to the inner monologues of Joyce’s characters as they moved through the city, I kept crossing paths with friends and acquaintances, and having to pop out my headphones in order to talk to them, and we would shoot the breeze for a while, often about some mutual acquaintance. Afterwards I would always think how the ambulatory intimacy of the book was still the reality of Dublin; of how, one hundred years after its publication, Dublin was still the city of Ulysses.

People are always bumping into each other in the pages of the book, stopping for chats, avoiding each other, seeing people they know or half-know as they make their way through the city. On a couple of occasions, as I listened, I was almost literally walking in Bloom’s or Stephen’s footsteps, realising as I rounded a street corner that my actual body was occupying the very location that Bloom’s or Stephen’s imagined bodies occupied in the book as I listened to it. And such moments, rare and delightful as they were, deepened my sense of the consubstantiality of the book and the city, the sense that, in simply going about my business, I was also in some sense walking around a vast modernist masterpiece. I was, through no fault of my own, doing a Bloomsday re-enactment.

There’s something about the unlikeliness, the beautiful awkwardness, of Joyce as this city’s cultural patron saint that is a source of complicated delight to me – because Joyce’s entire career is predicated on the fact of his having left Dublin. It is, famously, impossible to separate the writer and his work from the self-mythologising claims of exile. His reasons for leaving Dublin may not have been as existentially heroic as he, and his fictional alter ego, made them out to be, but it’s hard to imagine him ever having created what he created while still living in the place. Joyce’s own absence from Dublin, in other words, is as indivisible an element of his work as the city’s presence is in the work itself.

It often strikes me as interesting that it is Ulysses, rather than Dubliners, that is so central to Dublin’s conception of itself as a cultural city. There are a lot of good reasons for this, of course: Ulysses is the great democratic twentieth-century masterpiece and the signal achievement of literary modernism, which, just as it elevates the quotidian events of a single day to the level of epic, elevates Dublin to the status of a Bloomian everycity. Its smallness does not preclude its containing infinity. ‘I always write about Dublin,’ Joyce explained, ‘because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’

*

Dubliners seems to be less about finding the universal in the particular than about the relentless and ruthless excavation of the particular itself. It is a devastating diagnosis of what ails the city – recognisably the work of a young writer who just had to get out of the place. The book makes Dublin seem like kind of an unmitigated hellhole in a way that Ulysses does not, at least, in part, because it was written by an older man at a greater distance.

The Dublin of Dubliners is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city. There is a particular airlessness to the trio of childhood stories that open the collection, a thick fug of corruption that seems to suffocate the spaces in the city the stories explore. ‘Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms,’ the narrator of ‘Araby’ tells us. On the opening page of the book, the narrator of ‘The Sisters’, recalling the paralysing stroke that killed a priest with whom he had a peculiarly close relationship as a boy, notes:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This looking is the morbid business of the book itself, which often seems less a diagnosis than an autopsy.

Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some better version of themselves in some better place. The stories are filled with vague conjurings of such better places – the Wild West in ‘An Encounter’; the hazily evoked Orient in ‘Araby’; Buenos Aires in ‘Eveline’; London and Paris in ‘A Little Cloud’ – but what seem like possibilities of escape always turn out to be passages to deeper entrapment. The boys in ‘An Encounter’ skip school for the day, only to wind up being accosted in a field by a ‘queer old josser’ who quizzes them about girlfriends before excusing himself momentarily, apparently to masturbate, and then returning to deliver an obsessional monologue on the pleasures of whipping young boys. In ‘Eveline’ a young woman, trapped in miserable domesticity with her alcoholic father, is given an opportunity to flee for Argentina with a suitor, but then becomes overwhelmed by the weight of her responsibility to her family, and by a desperate fear of drowning – in the ocean, in the uncertainty of the man’s intentions, in the unknown depths of freedom itself.

There is still poverty and entrapment and misery here, of course, as there are in so many places, though they may manifest themselves in different ways, and for different reasons. The city that Joyce portrays in Dubliners has both receded into the past and remained insistently visible; Dublin, like all cities, is a sort of palimpsest, in which the past is always and everywhere legible beneath the surface of the present. Joyce’s writing adds a further layer, which, for me and other readers, is just as real, and as plainly visible, as the historical past.

Ireland’s circumstances have changed radically, and predominantly for the better, since Joyce wrote Dubliners. It is, for one thing, no longer a colonial backwater. In some important ways, you can imagine Joyce feeling just about OK with the way his city has turned out – and not merely because of the bridges named after him, the statues, the annual municipal celebrations of his work. For a while there, during the years of the so-called Celtic Tiger boom – the years during which I moved here to go to university – Dublin was a city to which people returned, having emigrated in the economically depressed eighties and early nineties, and it was a city to which people came from abroad to make livings and lives. But then, in the post-2008 years of economic downturn, the place seemed to shrink in upon itself, to become again the small city, the irredeemably minor city, that it was in Joyce’s time. In those years, most of the friends I’d made in university wound up leaving, often because they couldn’t make a living here but, in some cases, because they just felt like getting out. The gravitational force exerted by London, in all its vastness and density, is as strong now as it ever was.

*

Almost all of Joyce’s major work was written in other European cities (in Trieste, in Rome, in Zurich, in Paris) and all of it was about the one he was from, because if you wanted to succeed you had to leave – especially if success meant writing about that place in a way it had not been written about before. Joyce’s preferred narrative, and the one that has become the official version, was the narrative of exile, the story of his flight from Dublin because it was too morally and intellectually restrictive an environment that he could not pursue his work under the combined pressures of nationalism and Catholicism which bore down so heavily on the heads of Irish artists. ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight,’ says Stephen Dedalus to a patriotic friend in A Portrait. ‘You speak to me of nationality, language and religion. I will try to fly by those nets.’ The name Dedalus might be the most significant thing about Joyce’s alter ego: the symbolism of self-creation and flight was central to his own personal mythology.This heroic narrative is compromised by certain more prosaic factors, as heroic narratives always are: the woman with whom he chose to spend his life would have been seen as beneath his social level and, had he stayed in Dublin, he would have been under severe pressure to find gainful employment to support his financially blighted family.

This question of Joyce’s omnipresent absence from the city, was raised in a quite lurid – but, I thought, pretty instructive – way a couple of years back, just before the pandemic. Towards the end of 2019, two Dublin City councillors proposed a motion to seek, on behalf of the city, the repatriation of Joyce’s remains in time for the centenary of Ulysses’s publication. ‘Exile was a key element in his writing,’ said one of the councillors – doing a pitch-perfect impression, I have to say, of an undergraduate who hasn’t done the reading and has started writing the essay the night before its due – ‘but for that exile to follow him into eternity? I don’t think that was part of the plan.’ There is, as far as I’m aware, no evidence that Joyce himself ever expressed a desire to be buried in the country of his birth, but the councillors appealed to an apparent effort by Nora, in the late 1940s, to have his remains returned to Dublin.

The honouring of Nora’s wishes – evidence for which, as Sam Slote pointed out in the Irish Times, is not all that compelling – was hardly the true motivation for digging up her husband’s earthly remains and sticking them on the next Ryanair flight out of Zurich. ‘I’m not going to be cynical about bones,’ the councillor continued, and then immediately went on to be quite cynical about bones: ‘I think it’s something Joycean lovers would appreciate. I don’t want to calculate something like this in shillings and pence, but I don’t think it would do any harm. I think it would do some good.’

The whole idea struck me at the time, and still does, as distastefully ironic. Ulysses always belonged more to the world – to the Europe in which it was written, and championed, and published – than it ever did to Dublin. Joyce could neither live nor work in the Ireland of his time – a suffocating theocracy that closed off every possibility of freedom: intellectual, sexual and existential. ‘Do you know what Ireland is?’ as Stephen famously puts it in A Portrait. ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.’ A century after the publication of Ulysses, this plan to repatriate its author’s bones felt particularly crass: capitalism – which has, since Joyce’s time, supplanted Catholicism as Ireland’s officially professed faith – had come to see the value of Joyce and his work, granting a position (whether he would have wanted it or not) in the pantheon of Irish brands, as the Arthur Guinness of literary modernism.

I have complicated feelings about this. In some ways I’m on board with Joyce’s status as a kind of cultural mascot for the city. I quite like that the face we see, all over the city, on banners announcing – or perhaps urging – Dublin’s return to normal business after the pandemic is that of Joyce. I quite like that in the café I often go to near the National Library they have a stylised image of Joyce on the door to the men’s toilet and one of Nora Barnacle on the women’s. (I can’t help but feel that they’ve missed an opportunity to do a gender-neutral toilet door with an image of Bloom in Circe as the ‘new womanly man’ – though perhaps the iconography there is a little abstruse and convoluted for a café customer who just wants a quick pee.) I like all that stuff. It’s a little kitschy, sure, but in a way that gestures towards Dublin’s sense of itself as a city whose contribution to the larger world has been overwhelmingly a literary one. And there is undoubtedly something satisfying about how this country, which for so long rejected this writer and his work and everything he stood for, has come to embrace him as a kind of icon of everything it now wants to say to the world about itself.

But it isn’t always easy to distinguish an icon from a logo. For a while there, during the Celtic Tiger era, the seats of Aer Lingus planes had sentences from Ulysses embroidered into them. My friend Paul Murray, whose novels Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void excavate the hollow core of Ireland’s new capitalist dispensation, once said to me, about this particular Celtic Tiger-era employment of Joyce as interior decor for commercial aviation: ‘You have to wonder what it meant, other than that you could sit there and fart into this great work of modernist literature while on your way to New York for a shopping trip.’ And yes, there’s no getting around the fact that Joyce himself might have quite relished the idea, but it’s hard not to see it as emblematic of a shallow and mercenary embrace of Joyce, in recent years, as a symbol of Irishness.

In a 2013 essay on Joyce and the Celtic Tiger, the critic Barry McCrea pointed out that Ireland’s wholesale adoption of Ulysses coincided with a sudden increase in wealth during the 1990s and into the 2000s. ‘It made a certain sense,’ as he put it, ‘the discovery of economic potential and its exploitation was matched with that of Ulysses as a native “asset” which might also be turned to profit. So it was one of the odder effects of the economic boom that Ulysses not only came in from the shadows but suddenly became almost Ireland’s emblematic national text, a chief cultural icon of Dublin, a symbol, like the Book of Kells, of Irishness itself.’ McCrea writes about the startling changes that took place in his own hometown of Sandycove during that time: once, he writes:

Every 16 June, there were hordes of scrawny, gap-toothed boys jumping off the rocks in their underpants into a scrotum-tightening sea awash with empty cider cans, condoms and used syringes, oblivious to the handful of eccentrics with boaters and canes conducting readings, throughout the Tiger years, lines of BMWs, Saabs and Mercedes clogged the narrow path up to the Martello Tower to watch local worthies in Edwardian dress sing ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’. Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous Joyceanism emerged in strict parallel.

Dublin’s relationship with Joyce is a contradictory one of veneration and exploitation. There is an obvious tension between the relic and the derelict: between the desire to repatriate Joyce’s bones so that they might draw tourist pilgrims to this sacred literary city and the willingness to let a place like 15 Usher’s Island fall for many years into increasing decrepitude before finally allowing it to be turned into a tourist hostel. To those who live in Dublin, I hardly need to explain the particular tenor of this last insult.

One of the grimmer side effects of Dublin’s particular recovery from the years of post-Celtic Tiger recession has been the relentless hollowing out of the city’s cultural life. For some years now, artist studios and cultural venues have been disappearing while hotels are being built at a dizzying rate. The city has become increasingly unaffordable, with the cost of living and, in particular, rent and property prices reaching absurdly inflated levels. Young people in general, and especially young people working in the arts and culture, are hanging on for dear life, spending higher and higher proportions of their dwindling incomes on increasingly precarious rental situations. The country’s supposed wealth is a kind of wilful delusion on the part of the people who run it. In terms of GDP per capita, the preferred metric of our centre-right government, we rank among the richest nations in the world, but everyone knows that the global tech and finance capital for which our economy has become a burnished pipeline has little real effect on the life of the country’s residents.

If Joyce had been born in Dublin not in 1882 but in 1982 or 1992, he likely would have still left, because it’s unlikely he would have been able to afford to rent here – not on the kind of advances he’d be getting from his publishers. (And I’m not going to even get into the whole question of whether Joyce would be published today – other than to make the obvious point that he didn’t have that easy a time of it in the 1910s and 1920s either.) One of the ideas that got floated in the lead-in to the Ulysses centenary was that of renaming Dublin Airport – which is, admittedly, an aggressively utilitarian name for the airport of Dublin – as James Joyce Airport. Jim O’Callaghan, the TD for Dublin Bay South who raised the prospect in the Dáil last February, put it as follows: ‘You travel around the world; you go to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; you go to John F Kennedy airport in New York. Why don’t we call Dublin Airport James Joyce International Airport? It would give a real indication of the appreciation and the value we place on a literary figure.’

As sceptical as I was of the proposal, I felt there was something weirdly appropriate about the idea of naming the airport after our great patron saint of exile. It would indeed give a real indication of the value we place on a literary figure, to ensure that the young people who are forced to pack up their talent and ambition and board flights to places where they can afford to live can do so in an airport bearing Joyce’s name. I’d like to offer a highly ambitious counterproposal: that we have two airports for Dublin, one called Riverdance International Airport, for tourists coming to the country, and another named James Joyce International Airport, for young Irish people forced to leave it.

I think all of this goes some way towards accounting for my strong reaction against the idea of repatriating Joyce’s bones. It wasn’t just the obvious mercenary crassness of the idea, but the fact that it was so deeply embedded in, and weirdly reflective of, this economic and cultural context. The idea was dropped not long after, because it became clear to the city councillors behind the proposal that there was little appetite for it and that it would meet with a lot of resistance – not least from Joyce’s grandson, the late Stephen Joyce. To return Joyce’s bones to the city of his birth, and of his creative life, would have been to miss the point of his omnipresent absence. Joyce’s bones do not need to be in Dublin, because Joyce is already, and always, in Dublin’s bones. His real legacy, for a Dubliner, and for a reader, is not just the work itself but the way in which that work lights the city up from within, investing its commonplace realities – its houses, its bars, its shouts in the street – with a glow of significance. Because to read Joyce, and to read Ulysses in particular, is to be made to see the city as he saw it, and as in many important ways it still is.

*

Before I parted ways with the group of Italian tourists outside 15 Usher’s Island earlier this year, they asked me whether there were any museums dedicated to Joyce in the city. I told them about the Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street, and about the Joyce Tower in Sandycove, and about MOLI, the museum of literature on Stephen’s Green. But I realise now what I should have told them. I should have told them that the entire city was a kind of museum of Joyce’s work. I should have told them to just walk around, and that they would find him everywhere, insistent and invisible, within or behind or beyond or above the place that created him and that he in turn created.

‘City of the Dead’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). Issue Four is available to purchase here. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.

Mark O’Connell is the author of Notes from an Apocalypse and To Be a Machine. He is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, publishes in June 2023.