13th June 2015, Saturday.
‘When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.’ (James Joyce)
James Joyce was the focus of the evening on Saturday as literature lovers gathered inside the Centre to enjoy, rather ‘rejoyce’ in an evening of excerpt readings, screenings and coffee.
Few authors have in their lifetime achieved acknowledgment as geniuses and yet aroused so much discontent and reproach as James Joyce. To the Irishmen he remains obscene, very likely a lunatic. To the English, he is eccentric and often misunderstood. Be as that may, Ireland’s most beloved author has had a tryst with destiny that gave him peace and left everyone around him harried and confused. For such was the mad genius of James Joyce.
In the novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom was a humble vessel elected to bear and transmit the best qualities of the mind. And it is with exactly those qualities that the people of Ireland would celebrate this day, with great pomp and pride. As an added celebration, there was even a tip of the cap to another Irish literary great in this week, as Ireland revels in the 150th birth anniversary of the legendary poet W.B Yeats. The latest addition to this year’s Bloomsday celebration in Ireland will be the Bloomsday Express, a Joyce-themed train that will run from Dublin city to Sandycove on June 16th. While Joyceans in Pune couldn’t enjoy a train ride, Mr. Khare’s inputs about the mad genius of Joyce and why Ireland loved the author so much gave those present much to ponder about. A multimedia presentation ran in the background, as the author’s past and the concept of Bloomsday was explained. Following this, clippings from the movie Bloom (2003) were screened, with Mr. Khare narrating in between, in effect fusing the clips as a whole.
Why June 16? Of all the days in the year, you have to wonder why Joyce chose that exact date for Ulysses to take place. Well, it was on this day in 1904 when he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. It was in fact actually their second date as Nora had failed to show up on the first one and had left Joyce to stand outside the house of the father of Oscar Wilde!
Born into a family of artists, James Augustine Joyce grew up with more than ten siblings. His father was an amateur actor and his mother was a gifted pianist. An interesting fact about him: Joyce shares his birth year with another notable modernist writer, Virginia Woolf. Not only were both born in 1882, but they died in the same year too! Both wrote a landmark novel whose principal action takes place over just one day in mid-June. And they pioneered the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique associated with modernist writing. His writing is visibly characterized by experiments with language and symbolism. He truly had a way with both words and worlds. For once, upon hearing critics call Ulysses profane and vulgar, Joyce responded by saying, “If Ulysses is unfit to read, then life is unfit to live.”
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo.”
Talking in a sing-song manner, Keya and Hemant later read from Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. Some paragraphs invited a few chuckles from the audience, as Stephen Daedalus’ life was explored, drawing stark comparisons between him in Joyce’s first novel and in Ulysses. The evening concluded with a soulful composition- the only known composition by James Joyce- sung by an Irish Tenor, named ‘Bid Adieu to Girlish Days’. It was indeed a fitting tribute to the legendary author and his work in a tiny alcove of the city.
