JAMES Joyce once said that he was more interested in the street names of Dublin than in the riddle of the universe.
While allowances must be made for a certain amount of expatriate hyperbole, it is clear from a reading of Ulysses that the names of shops, businesses, pubs and public buildings have been catalogued with loving precision by the author, who famously wrote his novel with a copy of Thom's Dublin Directory of 1904 by his side.
Attempts to visualise the streets and buildings inhabited by his peripatetic characters, however, rapidly come unstuck. Joyce, in Ulysses, rarely describes the physical fabric of the city; he assumes an intimacy with it and leaves the background vague. This is less of a snapshot of the city on June 16th, 1904, than a soundscape, with the euphonius litany of names substituting for visual detail. Through his inventory of names, like a Homeric catalogue, he creates the city anew, so that it lives in our minds aurally and metaphorically, but not visually.
Sounds, tastes, sensations, fleeting thoughts, names, advertising slogans and snatches of song are registered by the interior monologues of Leopold Bloom but his free wheel in curiosity does not embrace an interest in architecture. And nor, it seems, does Joyce's.
While there is a lot more description of streets and houses in the stories in Dubliners than in Ulysses, it tends to be evocative and emotionally charged. In its emphasis on drabness, shadow, enclosure and claustrophobia, it amplifies the theme and spirit of these stories, written as Joyce said, in a style of "scrupulous meanness". So we have the "brown imperturbable faces" of the houses of North Richmond Street (Arahy), the "gaunt, spectral houses" of Henrietta Street, the "dull inelegance" of Capel Street, the "poor stunted houses" of the lower quays (A Little Cloud).
The deconstructivist architect, Bernard Tschumi, designer of a series of follies at La Villette, Paris, has hailed Finnegans Wake as one of the greatest works of 20th century architecture. Admittedly, its hermetic composition and dense language could have been specially invented for poststructuralist followers of the semiotician, Jacques Derrida, who are philosophically opposed to making distinctions between words on the page and the world outside their window.
Joyce was certainly fascinated by structure and form and meticulously plotted the spatial and temporal shifts of the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses with a compass, map, set square and ruler. But his adoption of the skeleton of Homer's Odyssey as the epic foundation of his novel was looser and more fitful than many annotators would wish. Joyce's use of the word "architect" may be understood as "creator/artificer" or, in the sense favoured by his mentors, Pound and Eliot: "craftsman", or in the literal Greek meaning: "masterbuilder", which also links him with his great hero, Ibsen.
It is the life of his native city, rather than its built environment, that Joyce is primarily concerned with, despite his claim that Dublin could be reconstructed from the pages of Ulysses. Perhaps, if it were struck by an earthquake, Joyce's work could assist in the identification of the excavated remains, as The Iliad guided Schliemann at the buried site of Troy. But Dublin still stands not as a museum or theme park but rather a living, Changing city.
MUCH has altered since Joyce's day, inevitably, and many landmarks from Ulysses have disappeared. Most notoriously, the fic~tional home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, No 7 Eccles Street, was demolished in the 1970s to make way, for an extension to the Mater hospital. The offices of the Freeman's Journal in Prince's Street (North), ~~where Bloom worked, have gone, as has Bella Cohen's brothel on Lower Tyrone Street and the entire red light district of Monto, in which the "Circe" episode takes place.
Buildings with Joycean associations which are currently under threat include No 5 South Leinster Street (home of the United Irish man, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, ancestor of the character Richard in Joyce's play, Exiles), one of a group, of buildings due to be demolished to make way for the proposed Clare Street wing of the National Gallery. No 2 Millbourne Avenue, Drumcondra, where the Joyce family lived for a period when Joyce attended Belvedere College, is due to make way for an apartment development, as is No 8 Little Britain Street, a late Georgian house which, with No's 9 and 10, comprised Barney Kiernan's pub, from which Bloom was ejected by the Citizen in famous "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses.
Since literary association alone is not currently a criterion for the listing of buildings for preservation, it is hardly surprising that developers in the above cases are unaware of or unconcerned about, the houses background. Even when buildings have been listed for architectural or historical reasons, this does not automatically offer protection from neglect and~ decay.
Such wa~~s the fate of No 15 Usher's Ireland, "the dark, gaunt house in which The Dead, the best known story from Dubliners, is set. Although parts of the building have been destroyed by fire and it was derelict for some years, planning permission has just been granted to Heritage Properties to restore what remains of the house to its 1904 condition. Not, one hopes, to become another Joyce museum, since there~ are already two excellent ones, in North Great George's Street and the Martello Tower, Sandycove, run by Ken Monaghan and Robert Nicholson, respectively.
The pressure exerted on the older, building stock in the city by the current property boom is, of course, a serious issue. But if one walks along the streets mentioned in Joyce's work, as so many visitors to the city do, what becomes apparent is how much of his Dublin still remains. The Georgian streetscape of the north inner city evoked in Portrait Of The Artist and Ulysses is largely unchanged; many pubs and institutional buildings are in situ, on Hardwicke Street the boarding house building from The Boarding House (Dubliners) still stands, as does Oldhausen's butchers on Talbot Street and Sweny's chemist on Lincoln Place, both visited by Bloom.
IT'S hard not to pause in the middle of this checklist of correspondences to wonder whether devotees make similar pilgrimages around the other cities of literary Modernism Dublin's Berlin, Bely's St Petersburg, Baudelaire's, Paris, Svevo's Trieste, the London of Woolf and T.S. Eliot - retracing, footsteps and reverentially clutching the texts. It seems unlikely, some~how. So why does Joyceanism give rise to this strain of pedantic literalism?
The interests of the tourist indus~try are one factor, certainly. Since the reinvigoration of Bloomsday for Joyce's centenary in 1982, its potential to become a second St Patrick's Day, with better weather, has become apparent. And there will always be people, some Joycean specialists among them, who seem determined to make Joyce seem boring or to turn reading his work into an off putting, joyless chore.
But there is another reason why readers doggedly knock on the doors of "Joycean Dublin", searching for keys to Ulysses and receiving dusty answers. Like a raconteur endlessly telling stories to keep intimacy at bay, Joyce, even after 700 pages, remains unknowable, effacing himself behind the polyphony of the novel and its impersonal rhetorical displays. Likewise, just as we are becoming used to the idiosyncrasies of Stephen and Bloom's streams of consciousness, they disappear into the Byzantine edifice of the text, leaving only fleeting glimpses.
Doors slam in our face and we are reminded that these are fictional ~characters, after all, and that despite all attempts at fetishism, Ulysses cannot be the sacred text of a secular there isn't even an absolutely reliable first text of the novel, nothing is sure, or fixed, especially identity, either of person or place. Joyce's Dublin defies mapping and tracking, it exists only in his work, as his unique construct, his singular endeavour to build, in Stephen Dedalus's words, "eternity's mansions out of time's ruins".
