A Telemachus of our times

A quintessential Irishness has perceptibly survived, captured by the master, although it is slowlybutsurely being devoured by the ferocious Celtic Tiger. To find Joyce’s Dublin requires patience, and a trained eye: some parts still evoke the memory of Bloom and consorts. Sandycove on spring mornings, reached by Dart no longer tram, by the Martello Tower of milkmaid fame, bathing in the coolclear scrotumtightening sea. Or idle midday pints, in scores of tattered premises — not Davy Byrne’s: expensive, overrun, immoral — licensed to dish out famed stout to famished crowds, eloquent pulses of the dark veined city. The Cyclops experience is most common, as the gift of the gab lives on, institutionalised as craic, flowing through an expanded Nighttown of Gargantuan proportions — drink has won the struggle, defeating religion, squeezing out the Fathers Conmee of days gone by, rendering the tortured Dedalus’s extinct. Sunday is a day of rest indeed, and Bloom a prophet. 

A century on, Bloom’s footsteps still echo around the ageing metropolis, evermore faintly. Only once a year does Leopold return in full pomp, revived by swarms of loyal followers in a celebration of the banal. And then, perhaps, it is better to flee — the city loses its essence, a mockturtle mockery, buffoons and buffoonery hiding the enduring reality.