Dubliners

"The centennial of Ulysses is in 2022, and coming back to the book after a gap of some years I remember the way it makes me fall asleep somewhere in the middle of Stephen’s walk across Sandymount Strand. The first two episodes—all fine. Surprisingly easy. What’s all the fuss about? Then the book unlooses itself entirely in the mind of Dedalus and starts to dream: “He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.”

Hang on. Did Stephen actually visit his aunt’s house, or just imagine that he did? Is he still thinking of his mother’s death? There is a dead dog on the strand, and also a live dog called Tatters, and this living dog is actually quite funny, as he smells a rock and pisses on it, then pisses at an “unsmelt” rock. “The simple pleasures of the poor,” according to Stephen, but is he also taking a leak? Or is he doing something else now?

I have felt it before, the same swooning sense of complexity, the same delicious struggle not to allow my own thoughts in. The attempt to make sense, fill in blanks, tell the real from the imagined, becomes tiring the way a profound conversation is tiring, when the subject is important but not clear. It is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction. Joyce has been in our brains, playing in the place where meaning is made, and this can feel disturbing or delightful. Something has been done to the act of reading itself. It seems as though he is inviting us to write his book for him, or with him, as we go along."

read the essay by Anne Enright

llustration by Paolo Ventura