Calls to go on Joycean odyssey

A new generation of readers should embrace the books of Dublin writer James Joyce, his elderly nephew claimed yesterday.

As fans of Joyce celebrated Bloomsday in Dublin, 80-year-old Ken Monaghan warned that his famous uncle’s works should not just be left to university dons and students to pore over.

“I don’t think he is read much anymore. He’s not just for academics. Ordinary people should pick up works like Ulysses or Dubliners and explore them for themselves,” Mr Monaghan said in Dublin’s James Joyce Centre.

Events to mark Bloomsday taking place across the capital include walking tours, street theatre, period dress, music and traditional Ulysses fare of mutton kidneys, thick giblet soup and fried liver slices.

Bloomsday is named after Ulysses’ central character Leopold Bloom and his adventures around Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904.

The James Joyce Centre, on the only intact Georgian street on Dublin’s northside, will be in festive mood all day with walking tours.

The Balloonatics theatre company bring Joyce to the streets for the 18th year in a row. The group is re-enacting Ulysses scenes at original locations, with formal and informal readings on street corners, pubs, hotels, and walks on the trail of Leopold Bloom.

Tasty Bloomsday breakfasts were also cooked up in the south of the city.

However, fears have grown that the world-renowned festival will die unless Government funding is secured.

James Joyce Centre director Helen Monaghan said activities had to be scaled down this year due to lack of resources and due to the spend on last year’s ‘Re-Joyce’ centenary celebrations.

She said the centre was kept in business by visitors and the generosity of Joyce fans.

The Centre, opened in 1996 on North Great George’s Street, has never received public funding and survives on revenue from admission prices.

Senator David Norris, a veteran Joycean, said it had the potential to be an ‘Irish Mardi Gras’ but could vanish as devotees were unable to carry on.

“The Government is currently deciding on whether to grant us funding and there have been positive mutterings.”

Joycean tale

* James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting.

* He graduated from UCD in 1902.

* Joyce left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in 1931.

* Joyce had a string of highly-acclaimed works published, from Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and his masterpiece Ulysses in 1922. He published a collection of poems, Chamber Music, in 1907.

* As the First World War broke out, Joyce moved with his family to Zurich - and the birth of Ulysses began. The epic tale of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom and his meanderings through Dublin was first published in France after Britain and the United States banned the book. It only became legally available in 1933.

* Back in Paris in March 1923 Joyce started his second major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma. The final version was published 16 years later in 1939.

* He died of peritonitis on January 13, 1941.