|
In his essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, Jean Baudrillard
refers to a story by Borges in which the Empire’s cartographers spend
years drawing up a map so detailed that in the end it covers exactly the
territory of the Empire, and imperial decline is plotted by the fraying
of the map until only a few shreds remain. If we were to revive the fable
today in our media-dominated world, Baudrillard suggests, the map would
have engendered the Empire, and ‘it would be the territory whose
shreds are slowly rotting across the map’.
Reading, or perhaps consulting is a better word, James Joyce’s Dublin,
one is reminded irresistibly both of Borges’s conceit and of Baudrillard’s
dystopian variation on it. The book, a second revision of the original,
1975 edition, aims, according to the preface to the 1981 edition—please,
do try to concentrate—‘to provide some aids, both visual and
in the form of catalogues raisonnés, towards a better understanding
of how Ulysses works, and of how it looks and feels when one has related
it in detail to those documentary, factual sources which Joyce knew so
well. This pious statement of intent could as well be taken as a more
mildly expressed version of what Baudrillard calls ‘the cartographer’s
mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory’.
And in fact the authors, Gunn, Hart and Beck—a trio of names which
sounds distractingly like the nucleus of a football team— seem to
give an oblique nod of acknowledgment toward the extremism of their joint
venture when they say of Thom’s Directory and, indeed, of Ulysses
itself, that it gives an initial impression ‘of having been put together
with a meticulosity bordering if not on the insane then certainly on the
obsessive compulsive’.
The question that immediately arises is, at whom is James Joyce’s
Dublin aimed? It is a work of finical, if not quite ‘obsessive compulsive’,
scholarship, beautifully designed and laid out—the publishers, Thames
& Hudson, are to be congratulated, as always, on their attention to
production values—and no doubt it will be an invaluable tool for
countless jobbing labourers in the Joyce Industry. However, it contains
far more detailed plotting of the topology and chronology of Ulysses than
surely even the most enthusiastic of common readers could wish for. This
is an observation only, and not a criticism. Joyce scholars are a much
maligned species, some of them deservedly so, but it was on ‘the
professors’ that Joyce pinned his hopes of immortality, and so far
they have done him proud in the posterity stakes. Without the scholarly
‘squirrels’, as Gore Vidal disdainfully dubs them, we would
still be ignorant of much of the subtlety and intricate beauty of Joyce’s
divinely engineered masterpiece.
Much has been made of Joyce’s boast that if Dublin were to be destroyed
in some catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, using his work
as a model. It is, of course, a hollow boast, as a moment’s reflection
will show. A book, even a book as minutely detailed as Ulysses, is built
not of bricks but of words, and words, even James Joyce’s words,
are at best an approximate take on physical reality. Yet Joyce, an Aristotelian
to the tips of his nerves, had absolute faith in the creative and recreative
powers of language. In a telling epigraph to James Joyce’s Dublin,
Arthur Power quotes Joyce as setting out his essential aesthetic in far
more plain and concrete terms than Stephen Dedalus could ever have managed:
‘In realism,’ Joyce stated, ‘you are down to facts on which
the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into
a pulp . . . In Ulysses I tried to keep to the facts’.
As the authors point out in their first chapter, aptly entitled ‘Applied
Thomism’, Joyce felt that he was lacking in creative imagination
and therefore ‘prized memory above all other human faculties’.
One of the main reasons, apart from his disdain of the place, that Joyce
for most of his life resolutely stayed away from Dublin was that he dared
not risk contaminating the remembered city in his head, the site and source
of all his work, with the spatial and temporal actuality of the living
metropolis (Yeats was instrumental in having him invited to the opening
ceremony of the first Tailteann Games: picture Joyce on the reviewing
stand, most likely drunk as a lord, squinting with his good eye at the
massed ranks of de Valera’s gosoons and colleens marching past).
Joyce’s realism was a realism of the mind, and whatever his misgivings
about his imaginative powers, the Dublin he created—and it was an
act of creation, not of remembering, pace Gunn et alii —is a vast,
detailed and wholly tangible figment of the imagination.
 Yet
no writer in the history of imaginative literature, with the possible
exception of Flaubert, was as meticulous as Joyce in attention to the
real, to the concrete, to the detail. Daunted though the common reader
might be by the profusion of maps and models and lists—though not
by the photographs, which while scarce and mostly much too small are wonderfully
evocative —James Joyce’s Dublin does serve as a reminder of
Joyce’s extraordinary organisational skills, as well as his cunning
and playfulness in manipulating the vast mass of material out of which
Ulysses is fashioned. Particularly clarifying and illuminating are the
many pages the authors devote to the more fiendishly convoluted sections
such as Wandering Rocks, Circe and Sirens.
  Those
who think that by now there is really nothing new of a general nature
to be said about Ulysses will be struck by the authors’ suggestion
that in his ‘blue book of Eccles’ it was Joyce’s aim ‘to
rewrite Thom’s while rewriting the Odyssey’. There have been
stranger hypotheses—a scholarly study I borrowed from Wexford Library
when I was an adolescent and before I had got my hands on a copy of Ulysses
led me to the belief that in his book Joyce had written an extended gloss
on the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Stephen as Holmes and Bloom as Dr
Watson—and certainly Joyce made an equal obsession of Dublin and
its documents. Still, the Thom’s thesis aside, Gunn, Hart and Beck
in general maintain an admirably unassuming attitude to their labours
of love, summed up in their observation that ‘While nothing, or almost
nothing, [in Ulysses] is incomprehensible without a knowledge of Dublin,
everything, or almost everything, acquires a significant new dimension
when local facts are explored. While those facts have their own small
interest, they are, of course, of negligible importance in comparison
with the book’s powerful evocation of the emotional and moral problems
of ordinary human life’.
The Empire is intact, the map unfrayed.
John Banville’s most recent novel is Shroud
2002
|
