Treasures: Dublin Comes to Delancey

I read from the “Ithaca” episode, toward the end of the book, and tried my stuttering best with this ruthless sentence:

He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.

I looked out at the crowd, kind faces all nodding, all whispering encouragement. All holding up Ulysses like a literary shield: See what we read? We’re smart, too. All fanning themselves with copies of the Bloomsday Herald, and shaded by the red brick Georgian architecture of Delancey Place, with its symmetrical chimneys and window trim. I realized with a start that the black-and-white photo on the front of the Herald didn’t show Delancey at all, but its identical Irish twin: Eccles Street in Dublin, where fictional Leopold Bloom himself lived.

Dublin and Philadelphia wear the same ­aging debut dress, dating to the turn of the 19th century. Dating to a day when Dublin stood as capital of the Irish kingdom, and Philadelphia stood as capital of America. Before Dublin descended, and London ascended. Before Philadelphia descended, and New York became America’s leading city.

I realized there’s no wonder, after all, that Philadelphia possesses the Ulysses manuscript. What other city could? It’s the story of the triumph of a common man making a journey through his beat-down city. It’s the first and finest incarnation of Rocky.

Recently, I proposed that theory to Barsanti, and horror flashed across his face. “Please, no,” he said.

Too late. I’ve been to Dublin, where residents give irreverent names to the statues scattered around their city. There’s Oscar Wilde, the Fag on the Crag. Molly Malone, the Tart with a Cart. And James Joyce himself, with a walking cane: the Prick with a Stick.

And here we have our own statue of Rocky at the Art Museum, captured in victory, well after his run through the Italian Market, holding up his gloved hands forever, a bronze figure on a marble cube. He is, I say, the Jock on the Block.

Later I wrote to Fergie Carey, our Bloomsday’s most natural and authoritative Ulysses reader, to ask whether I assumed too much about the book’s celebration of the ordinary man. No erudite scholar, he dashed off a confirming note:

Call me, though I am know Joycean scholar. In fact I am reading Ulysses at the rate of one page a year and usually out loud in front of a few hundred people.

Slainte,
Fergie

And so: The first inclination, when beholding the Ulysses manuscript, may be to wonder why it’s here. To wonder whether we deserve it. But it turns out there’s no better place for it in the world.

In the book, Joyce described the desire for literary immortality: “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?”

Sometimes, though, the complex and lofty epic isn’t remembered on green oval leaves, but in grammar-school notebooks. And it’s not consecrated in almighty Alexandria, but at a simple brick rowhome in Philadelphia.

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