This post has been reuploaded from The Michigan Daily with the permission of Katie Lynch.
Living in Ireland is teaching me how to walk slower. I’m in Dublin for an exchange semester, and sometimes the change of pace is all I can think about. In Ann Arbor, I’m a fast walker, always hurrying to class, the library and back home again, headphones on as I call my parents or listen to an audio recording of my next reading assignment. But here, I feel I am given permission to take my time and to move through the day without rushing.
Earlier this week, I went for a stroll along Sandymount Strand, a beach on the Irish Sea southeast of Dublin city center. It was well after sunset and the tide had gone way out, leaving behind rippled patterns in the sand and little pools of water that glistened under the nearby streetlights. I stayed close to the water line and stared out at the ocean, the warm city lights of Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire to my right and two red-and-white-striped smokestacks surrounded by gray factory buildings to my left. Cold wind stung my cheeks and whistled in my ears, but the water’s surface remained still. I walked as slowly as I could, indulging in the salty sea air and the way my footsteps sunk into the wet sand.
As I moved down the strand, I found myself thinking about James Joyce’s Dublin. The words “Sandymount Strand” have been ringing around in my head ever since I took a class on Joyce last year at the University of Michigan and read three of his most notable works: “Dubliners,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses.” Sandymount Strand is the setting of the “Nausicaa” chapter of “Ulysses,” a sentimental and uncomfortably erotic episode that takes place at twilight and culminates in Leopold Bloom (the book’s protagonist) falling asleep in the sand. It’s also where Joyce’s semi-self-inserted character Stephen Dedalus goes for a walk in “Proteus” and spends an agonizing chapter stuck in his own head. Ever since reading these books, I’ve been so eager to see the strand which seemed to be, according to Joyce, one of the best spots in Dublin for people-watching and self-revelation. I wondered, like Stephen said in “Ulysses,” “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?” It sort of felt like I was. The strand at twilight felt liminal, inviting me to continue walking further and more curiously along some of the scenic inspiration for Joyce’s writing.
Almost everything I knew about Dublin before arriving here in January came through the lens of Joyce’s writing, which was informed by the way the city looked in the early 20th century. Joyce isn’t the only reason why I wanted to come to Ireland, however. Ancestors on my dad’s side were Irish, and I’ve always been interested in the country’s traditions of resistance and literary splendor, not to mention proximity to the ocean and the lush, green countryside. But still, it is undeniable that just as much as Joyce’s writing was inspired by Dublin, the city itself has in turn been influenced by his work. He is everywhere — in statues and bookstore display cases and building names. Half of the postcards I’ve seen on metal racks are adorned with Joyce quotes in cursive or photos of him wearing his iconic round glasses and a crooked top hat.
It’s a bit of an odd thing to experience the real-life version of a place that I was first intimately introduced to in a literary and fictional capacity. For Joyce, having grown up in Dublin, it was almost the complete opposite — his fictional works, including the modernist masterpiece “Ulysses,” were reflective of the Ireland he already knew well. Joyce once famously said to a friend that in writing “Ulysses,” he wanted to “give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed.”
His attention to detail throughout the entire text is almost absurd in its specificity, especially given that Joyce had emigrated from Ireland long before writing “Ulysses” and relied on his own memory and extensive correspondence with friends and family in Dublin to confirm the accuracy of his references. In the “Lotus Eaters” chapter, for example, a misunderstanding between Leopold Bloom and Bantam Lyons leads Lyons to believe that Bloom is trying to give him a betting tip on a horse named Throwaway in the Ascot Gold Cup. Throwaway was actually a real horse who was considered an outsider but competed in the Ascot Gold Cup on June 16, 1904 (the single day on which all of “Ulysses” takes place), and won. Throwaway as a motif continues to resurface throughout the book, and to the reader serves as a reminder of how Joyce was able to extract profound meaning from the mundane and easily forgotten details of everyday life.
Now it has been more than 100 years since the book’s initial publication in 1922, and I doubt “Ulysses” would suffice as a template for reconstructing the modern city. Still, though, Joyce and “Ulysses” are enshrined all across Dublin. Beyond pandering to tourists who want nothing more than to own a bar of lemon soap from Sweny’s Pharmacy (made from the very same recipe that Leopold Bloom would’ve had!), it’s clear that Joyce’s writing means something to the Irish people. As I’ve been exploring Dublin for the past several weeks, I find my mind keeps returning to him and his writing; I cannot seem to sever Joyce from the place I now inhabit.
With all of this in mind, I decided to spend some time immersing myself in the Joycean landmarks of modern Dublin. After visiting Sandymount Strand, I signed up for a walking tour called the “Footsteps of Leopold Bloom” through the James Joyce Center. On a rainy Friday morning, I took the bus to Dublin’s Northside and made my way to the center. Inside, a small group of people was standing around a lit fireplace discussing how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. It was just me and Marged, a retired psychology professor vacationing from Alabama, who would be on the tour. After we’d warmed up enough, our tour guide Josh — an American who’s been living in Dublin for the past eight years after getting his doctoral degree at Trinity College — led us back outside into the rain.
In a path that Josh told us was meant to mirror the digestional tract, the tour followed Bloom’s trail through the “Lestrygonians” chapter — down O’Connell Street and across the River Liffey, past the Spire (a horrendous 400-foot-tall needle that eventually replaced Nelson’s Pillar after it was blown up by the Irish Republican Army in 1966), through Trinity College and eventually stopping in front of the National Library of Ireland. At each stop was a series of bronze placards with the silhouette of Leopold Bloom, “Ulysses” at the top and a quote from the book corresponding to the location. The placards were discreet enough that I realized I’d stepped over them several times before while walking down these streets, but as the tour progressed, we stopped in front of each of them for several moments to take in the scenery and listen to Josh tell us about what was happening in the book at those locations.
Toward the end of the tour, we approached 21 Duke Street, the site of one of the most iconic buildings featured in Ulysses: Davy Byrnes Pub. It’s just up the street from the Burton Restaurant (now the Burton Hotel), which Bloom initially entered looking for lunch but left disgusted by the scene he came across.
“Stink gripped his trembling breath : pungent meatjuice, slop of greens,” Joyce writes. “See the animals feed. Men, men, men.”
Leaving the Burton, Bloom walked to Davy Byrnes for, believe it or not, a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Now, both the Burton Hotel and Davy Byrne’s look fairly upscale, filled with plush leather booths and polished wooden tables. Peering inside their front windows, we noticed that the walls are lined with Joyce-related souvenirs — artistic renditions of Leopold Bloom, copies of “Ulysses” encased in glass, old photographs of Dublin. Davy Byrne’s even has a gorgonzola sandwich on their menu. “Ulysses” seems to be serving as an eternal source of marketing for each restaurant, and they’re definitely leaning into it, simultaneously profiting off of and celebrating the work of Joyce — “the James Joyce industry,” as Josh calls it. For reasons that I cannot quite pin down, this leaves me with a bit of an icky feeling. But even still, knowing the impact Joyce has had on the Irish cultural and literary landscape, I understand this desire to commemorate him, even if it often comes at a cost to the consumer.
After the tour, Marged and I walked a few more blocks to Sweny’s Pharmacy, which Bloom visits in “Lotus Eaters” to pick up a prescription for his wife, Molly, and buys a bar of lemon soap that he ends up carrying around with him for the rest of the day. It’s not a pharmacy anymore, but the inside has been preserved, and it now exists as a small museum. Behind the wooden counter is a mirrored wall lined with shelves and shelves of colorful glass bottles. Again, Joyce paraphernalia is everywhere. Marged and I chatted with the two volunteers working that day, and they happily recounted for us the Sweny’s moment in “Lotus Eaters.” We then signed the guestbook and I bought a few postcards before we parted ways, myself heading to the bus stop and Marged going for an Irish coffee at the pub across the street.
My final stop in this introductory tour of Joyce’s Dublin was the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove on the south end of Dublin Bay. The museum is inside of a granite Martello tower built in 1804 in anticipation of needing to defend the region against a Napoleonic invasion that never happened. While its history as a military structure is interesting enough, the tower’s real claim to fame is that a 22-year-old James Joyce once stayed there for six days with two other college students. Inside a small, circular room, the three of them lived, slept, drank and argued until Joyce left in the middle of the final night, walking more than seven miles back to Dublin City Center. “Telemachus,” the opening chapter of “Ulysses,” is set in this tower, with the characters “stately, plump” Buck Mulligan and Haines being based on the two students Joyce stayed with. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and the third roommate in the first chapters of “Ulysses,” is meant to resemble James Joyce himself.
In 1962, the structure was opened as a museum by Sylvia Beach, the original publisher of “Ulysses,” and that’s how it remains today: filled with a collection of Joyce-related writing, artwork and memorabilia. I walked up the narrow spiral staircase to the top, pausing on each floor to look through the different artifacts. In the room where Joyce would’ve stayed, the museum has set up a recreation of their living quarters. The table is covered with china, empty bottles of beer and open textbooks. A hammock is strung across the right-hand corner of the room.
The best part about this pocket of Joycean history, though, is not actually the museum itself but what lies along the coast in front of it. Slightly downhill from the tower’s door is the Forty Foot, a popular swimming hole framed by stone walls alongside sloping concrete paths and benches. On the morning of June 16, 1904, Buck Mulligan goes for a swim here while Haines and Stephen look on. Quoting English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Mulligan says in a rare moment of quiet sincerity, “Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it : a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.”
Dublin Bay, while unquestionably snotgreen, is far from maternalistic in its frigid caress. It was windy on the day I visited the Forty Foot and I watched enamored as the swirling tide, crashing over slippery black rocks, formed foamy white whirlpools in the muted green sea. Dark seaweed washed up onto the jagged shoreline and water spilled onto slabs of sidewalks along the seawall before cascading back down like miniature waterfalls. Seagulls, in groups of twos and threes, floated gently across the sky above. From the top of the tower, I held my breath as a man in black swim trunks slipped into the water, waves crashing forcefully against the stairs behind him. A few moments later he emerged, shivering but unscathed.
Though I’ve not lived here for a lifetime, I resonate deeply with Joyce’s sentiment of wanting to be able to immortalize a place in words. When I return to Michigan in a few months, I want to remember the small details of Dublin — like the way that wherever there is water, there always seems to be a set of concrete steps leading the people right to it, or the way so many dogs are walked off-leash yet remain dutifully and happily by their owner’s side. I want to remember the sound of the crosswalk signals and the springs in my dorm mattress and the inky sheen of the River Liffey at night.
But for me, I think, all of this makes sense. I’m a nostalgic person and completely smitten with Dublin and this entire country. Joyce, on the other hand, famously had a much more complicated relationship with Ireland. All of his writing contains references to a sense of paralysis the country seemed to facilitate, and his semi-autobiographical book “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in particular reflects his journey of becoming increasingly critical of the power of the Catholic Church. After 1912, Joyce never returned to Ireland. Thus, for Joyce to have spent the majority of his professional life writing about Dublin in such a thorough and obsessive way feels like even more of a feat.
I’m not sure if it makes it harder or easier to write about a place you don’t fully love, but I do believe these circumstances are part of the reason why Joyce is so often considered one of the greats. His work, reflecting on all the nuances of his love for and frustrations with Ireland, seems to represent the country in a way that is faithful not only to its splendor, but also to all the complexities of its history.
What makes “Ulysses” so stylistically distinct from any other book I’ve ever read is the ways Joyce intentionally pushes the limits of what language can do, combining elements of different genres, academic disciplines, symbols and theological and mythological references. There’s a chapter structured like a play, a chapter broken up by mock newspaper headlines, a chapter with minimal punctuation and a chapter composed entirely of questions and their answers. “Ulysses” contains everything — every thought, every step, every song stuck in a character’s head, every bowel movement, even. It’s a portrait of Dublin not at its best or most alluring, but at its most honest. And this, I think, lends itself to a more ethereal sort of beauty than your average romanticized depiction of a place ever could conjure.
As I made my plans to explore Dublin through Joyce’s eyes, I expected I would come to a natural conclusion about the beauty of reading a story in the place where it was set. And while I still feel there is truth to this sentiment (and I’ll continue to work through as much Irish literature as I can while I’m here), I found walking through the landmarks of Joyce’s literary canon to be a surreal experience, but not entirely magical in the ways I had anticipated. Standing outside of the old Evening Telegraph building, where the “Aeolus” chapter takes place, I found myself not overcome with a sense of connection to Leopold Bloom, but more so in reverence of how “Ulysses” paid tribute to Dublin, and how Dublin continues to pay tribute right back. It reminded me that the stories of Dublin that I had first experienced as fictional were built upon a foundation of something real. It challenged me once more to stop mythologizing this city and to see it as it really is, with the sublime and the everyday existing side by side.
This is exactly what Leopold Bloom spends the entirety of June 16, 1904 doing. At the end of “Ulysses,” we find out that Bloom doesn’t return to his home at 7 Eccles Street until about 2 a.m. on the following day. He’s had a full day, but he also knows that while he’s gone, his wife Molly is going to be having an affair. Bloom wanders around Dubin for so long because he’s dreading going home and facing the reality of what his marriage has become in the wake of life and loss. As he walks through the city, he sees it all: life and death, sex and violence, poverty and greed. Still, even faced with the reality of all that exists in the world, he accepts Dublin and his marriage and all that they encompass at face value. The final words of the book underline this exact sentiment, coming from Molly Bloom as she remembers the early days of her relationship and arrives at a full affirmation of the entirety of her life and her desire to love it in its fullness: “Yes I said yes I will Yes.”
