A Joycean Parade of Cyclists

 Today is, of course, St. Patrick’s Day.

Since I am not Irish (at least, not to my knowledge!), I will not tell you whether or how to celebrate this day.  I will say, however, that so much of what we’ll see today is what I’ll call Celtic Kitsch. (Confession:  I was in college before I knew that the “C” at the beginning of “Celtic” is pronounced like a “k.”  Until then, I’d been pronouncing the word as “sell-tick,” like the basketball team in Boston.) The truth is, few can agree on what is “authentically” Irish. Although schools teach the Gaelic language, nearly everyone speaks (beautifully) the language of their colonizers.  And, apart from Roman Catholicism with a strong monastic tradition—which the young are largely abandoning—we actually know little about pre-Anglo Irish culture and history.

James Joyce understood as much.  Although all of his writing is set in his native country—which he lived away from for most of his adult life—he is not part of a “Celtic revival.” Instead, he used Ireland—Dublin, mainly—as a lens through which he could explore how people move through life, and how it moves through them—and, perhaps most important, our minds re-assemble it all, whether in images or language—or simply deal live with it as the chaos it is.  

Some have said that Joyce’s works—specifically Dubliners and Ulysses—are therefore to literature what Picasso’s Cubist paintings are to art.  Others have called him the first “cinematic” writer.  I agree with both, and would add that his narrative style is like a bicycle ride:  Whenever I take a ride, even one I’ve done hundreds of times, I see not only people and things I haven’t seen before, but a building, a city block, a tree or a seashore from an angle or in a different kind of light (or darkness) from what I saw on that same ride on a different day.

Martina Devlin, Darina Gallagher and Donna Cooney seem to understand as much.  On Sunday, they participated in a Dublin St. Patrick’s Day parade that includes a procession of 100 cyclists dressed in Ulysses-themed Edwardian clothes. They took spectators on a journey through places in the book.

Martina Devlin, Darina Gallagher and Donna Cooney (Photo by Norma Burke)

Cooney, the artistic director of the Dublin Cycling Campaign (now there’s a job I wouldn’t mind having!) said this year’s bicycle procession and St.Patrick’s Day parade are particularly special because February was the 100-year anniversary of Ulysses’ publication.  But the essence of the event might have been best summed up by Devlin, a writer whose speech included an excerpt from the novel and began with this:  “One of the landmark days in my life was when I learned how to ride a bike.”

“I felt as if I were on the road to somewhere.”

As were the cyclists and marchers in the Dublin parade, 100 years after Ulysses came into the world.

What It's Really About

We've all seen the "On This Day In History" columns.  I like to look at them:  Sometimes I learn about people and events I never knew before.

For example, I didn't know that on this date in 1903, Ford Motor Company was incorporated, and in 1961, ballet star Rudolf Nureyev defected from his native Soviet Union.

I have long known, however, that quite possibly the most-commemorated events of this date never actually happened.  Yet they will be remembered long after most of the others are forgotten.

I am not talking about the fact that, one year ofter Henry Ford's motor company came to be, one of the most famous writers in history got married.  And he married the most unlikely of people:  someone who had no interest in literature and, when asked by a journalist what she thought of Andre Gide--on the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, no less--said, "When you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you tend to forget the little guys."

The literary spouse in question is Nora Joyce.  And, of course, she was defending the reputation of her beloved Jimmy.

And he wrote a book containing the people and events that are being commemorated today--far more than the founding of FoMoCo or the defection of a ballet dancer.  The events happened on this date in 1904 and, like the people involved in them, were creations of the man who set them down on paper.

Now, you all know no one ever called him "Jimmy".  (At least, I don't think anyone did!)  James Joyce wrote a book that did exactly what he said it would:  It's kept generations of professors, critics and scholars busy arguing over what it's "about".

The truth is (drumroll), his Ulysses is the Seinfeld of modern literature:  It's not about anything at all. At least, not really.  Sure, there are parallels between his characters and those of Greek mythology.  But the stories about the gods and demigods, like all tales embedded in systems of belief, are explicit attempts to explain the meaning and purpose of, if not life itself, then the world around us.  

I can find no such attempt in Joyce's book. When I say that, I don't mean it as a condemnation:  One could (and I have) argued that some of the great works of literature--including no less than Shakespeare's Hamlet-- really aren't "about" anything, except perhaps the foibles of the characters themselves.  

Now, of course, even with all of my erudition (ha!), you shouldn't take only my word.  I am even willing to consider (though not without a fight) that I could be wrong.  You see, the esteemed author of the "Cycling In The South Bay"--whose credentials are impeccable--claims that Ulysses is really a book about bicycling.

On what is this claim based?  CITSB's author offers the following evidence--13 mentions of bicycle or bicycling in the 782-page tome:

1. “They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle. Young woman.”
2. “His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a listening woman at his side.”
3. “Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.”
4. “As per usual somebody’s nose was out of joint about the boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up and down in front of her window.”
5. “W. E. Wylie who was racing in the bicycle races in Trinity college university.”
6. “But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes and besides they were both of a size too he and she and that was why Edy Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn’t go and ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.”
7. “His right hand holds a bicycle pump.”
8. “He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand.”
9. “Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes.”
10. “He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low’s place of business where she had remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.”
11. “of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete”
12. “pretending to read out the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he didnt know what to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money”
13. “can Milly come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night”

QED

Actually, I am rather willing (Is there such a thing?) to accept that writer's claim, especially after stumbling over this:

Jim Joyce, eh?  Well, even if he'd used a less-obvious pseudonym, all of those critics and professors and commentators he wanted to keep busy would have found him out sooner or later, don't you think?  ;-)

This Ride Includes A Currant Bun

Now here's a reason to go to Dublin this weekend:

Alice Coughlan of The Wonderland Theatre Company is leading a guided tour of the streets, pubs and historic buildings in which the stories of James Joyce's Dubliners are set.

The ride is one of the many events taking place from now through Sunday to commemorate Bloomsday.  If you've read Joyce--or some earlier posts on this blog--or simply paid attention to your English teachers or professors every once in a while (ha, ha), you know that his most iconic work, Ulysses, takes place on 16 June 1904.  

Now even if The Wonderland Theatre Company is absolutely wonderful (Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if they are!), I'm not sure that they could do a guided tour of everything recounted in Ulysses.  Actually, I'm not sure that anybody should try to depict anything in it:  It's somewhere in that space between dreams that are so real and reality that is so vivid, so intense, that it seems like a dream.  Also, although it's been called a novel, I think it's more like an epic which can no more be turned into a movie than Song of Myself can be.  

But doing a bicycle tour based on Dubliners isn't the "next best thing" or a "default choice."  I have long felt that the best tour guides (at least, the best I've experienced) are storytellers:  They provide lively, illuminating narratives of the place you are visiting.  Sometimes I can remember those stories even better than the physical details of the place!

And what better vehicle, if you will, for leading the reader/listener/audience through such a story than a bicycle?

Hey, I could be tempted to go on WTC's Bloomsbury ride just for this:   "Tickets include a currant bun with the boys of An Encounter at Dublin Port."  

Now, even though I've done a fair amount of riding in a skirt--sometimes with heels--I think it would be a challenge to ride in that green dress Ms. Coughlan (at least, I assume it's her) is wearing.  Even more of a challenge would be looking as good as she does in it!  

Fun Fact:  Given the stream-of-consciousness style of Ulysses, it's easy to believe that he picked the date on which it is set--16 June 1904--at random.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that it's what I thought, for a long time.  However, it is, in fact, the date on which he met Nora Barnacle, who would become his wife.

Another Fun Fact:  Darina Laracy Silone, the wife of Italian writer Ignazio Silone, asked Nora for her opinion of Andre Gide.  And she got it, all right. "When you've been married to the greatest writer in the world," Nora intoned, "you don't remember all the little fellows."

Bloomsday Bike Rides

Today is Bloomsday.

If you don't know what that means, you never read James Joyce's Ulysses.  Don't worry, though, I won't castigate you. 

(All right, I know there are other words I could've used.  But I get a cheap thrill out of "castigate", especially now that I am a woman.)

The events in what some have called the greatest novel of the 20th Century all take place on one day:  16 June 1904.  That, in and of itself, is as ironic as anything in the book, which almost nobody ever reads in one day.

I won't try to summarize the book here:  I'm not sure that such a thing is possible.  I won't even do a song and dance to convince you that you should read the book and love it.  All I'll say is that reading it is an experience like no other. 

 

To me, it reads like an encyclopedia of a person's subconscious mind.  There is almost any kind of event, instruction or wordplay anyone could imagine.  Yes, there are even references to bicycles and cycling, including this description of a race in Episode 10, a.k.a. Wandering Rocks:

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College Library.

As with much else in Ulysses, this seems to have had a basis in real life.  Or, at any rate, Joyce seems to have taken the names of the riders from a Daily Telegraph account:

The Evening Telegraph for 16th June 1904 reports the order of finish: ‘Half-Mile Bicycle Handicap – J. A. Jackson, 10 yds., 1; W.H.T. Gahan, sch., 2. Also completed – T.W. Fitzgerald, 30; A. Henderson, 50. Time 1 min. 16 secs. Second heat – W.E. Wylie, 20 yds., 1; A. Munro, 35 yds., 2. Also completed – T.C. Furlong, sch. Won by three lengths. Time, 1 min. 17 secs’ (p. 3, col. i).

 

Apparently, Joyce ordered the riders according to the result of the half-mile final, not the heat.  But no matter.  No one reads Ulysses to learn the results of races that took place over a century ago.  Rather, the race is part of what happened--or, more precisely, streamed through the narrator's consciousness--on that day.

 

It makes even more sense that that race, and other references to cycling, were included in Ulysses when you realize that Joyce himself was a keen cyclist. One August day in 1912, he and his wife-to-be Nora pedaled from Galway to Clifden, a round-trip of 160 kilometers (100 miles).  They did other long rides, and he did some more by himself.  Given the conditions of Irish roads and bicycle technology at the time--and Joyce's poor eyesight and other physical ailments--I'd say they did pretty well.

 

I'll close this post with another Ulysses excerpt, this from Episode 17, a.k.a. Ithaca:

 

What facilities of transit were desirable?

When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their respective intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).

 

Finnegan's Ride

Way back in the snows of antiquity, I read James Joyce's Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.  Call me a philistine, but I haven't touched any of them since.  Not that I wouldn't; I just don't feel the urge to do so.  

Plus, I really think Ulysses--all 800 or so pages--has to be read in one sitting.  I am reminded of that after tuning into WBAI, the local Pacifica radio station, for its annual Bloomsday reading of the book.

Ulysses is a stream of consciousness (or a collection of the world's longest run-on sentences) that describes a single day--16 June 1904.  

One thing I might do some year soon, if I have the money and time, is to go to a Bloomsday bicycle rally in Dublin.  If nothing else, the sight of all of those people, attired in the vetements of the period and riding delivery bikes, riding from pub to pub in through the streets of Dublin.