An article published in the Sydney Morning Herald, sometime in 1982
From Selwyn Parker in Dublin
James Joyce left Dublin in 1902 and returned only twice for brief visits, the last of them 30 years before his death in Zurich in 1941.
He was reviled even in his absence. His books were banned, not only in Ireland but in Britain and America. [The topic of Ulysses being banned in Ireland has already been discussed on the j-joyce list, and the conclusion was that Ulysses has NEVER been banned in Ireland. Is this an urban myth associated with Joyce?]. The man and his works were denounced from the pulpits.
Rarely has a native son of Ireland been so derided. Yet Dublin is embarking this week on an orgy of tributes to the writer of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Joycean scholars from all over the world [Maybe som of those scholars are on this mailing list?] have poured into Dublin some of them painstakingly retracing everystep over old flagstones of Leopold Bloom's 18 extraordinary hours before he returned at night to his wife, Molly, in Ulysses. It was this series of misadventures which produced the name "Bloomsday" - June 16.
Usually only a few intellectuals celebrate Bloomsday but this year - the 100th anniversary of Joyce's birth - the day has expanded into Bloomsweek. A startled diarist in the Irish Times noted: "Whole new waves of academics are storming our shores with Falklands fervour ... how he would have savoured the irony of it all - once the leader of the literary banned in holy Ireland, he is now a much appreciated booster of our flagging tourism fortunes."
The majority of scholars come from American and, yes, Japan. But there's even a Lebanese professor, Suheil Bushrui, who presides over his owen Joyce exhibition. An eighth international Joyce symposium is busy exploring new insights in Ulysses, a book that has already become an industry for academics.
Theatrical Dublin is equally agog. A star of the Abbery Theatre, Siobhann McKenna, is playing Here Are Ladies (all of them characters from Joyce's books) and All Joyce (a collection of the great man's prose and poetry), Fionnuala Flanagan, another Abbery actress, has responded with James Joyce's Women. The Irish Shakespearean company, not to be outdone is playing Dear Dirty Dublin which is a tribute of sorts to the rather raffish, shabby, down-at-heel city which Joyce knew. (Although a committed expatriate who lived in Rome, Trieste, Paris and Zurich, Joyce never wrote a single lineabout any other place except Dublin.)
Official Dublin, after totally ignoring the man who did more than anybody to put the city on the world map, is trying to put the city on the world map, is trying to make amends. President Paddy Hillery opened the Joyce symposium. The post office issued a stamp in his honour. [Does anyone have this stamp in their collection...I'd love to scan it for inclusion on my web page!]. They are even going to name a bridge after him, and put up a statue in St Stephen's Green, the city's most famous park. [Has this been done yet?]
Various dignitaries also trooped off to the Galway home of Nora Barnacale, the uneducated but vivacious woman who was Joyce's life-long companion (they married only 10 years before his death). Down in Galway they still tell the story of one earnest academic who was introduced to a pair of old crones, former acquaintainces of Nora Barnacle, in a tumble-down Galway pub. The American switched on his tape-recorder and asked for a comment. Laying down her pint, one of thenm said: "Ah, the Barnacle girl. Didn't she run off to Dublin and come to no good? Married a Jimeen Joyce who did a bit of writin' or somethin'."
The city fathers have busily fixed up plaques to various houses in Dublin where Joyce lived. Since there are at least 19, that's proved an expensive task. But Joyce's unsettled childhood - his father, sometime tax official John Stanislaus, steadily came down in the world and moved accordingly - was Dublin's gain.
Joyce always claimed that if Dublin was destroyed it could berebuilt in detail from his books. His belated rehabilitation is no more than he deserves.
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Joyce/dublin82.htm