Memory Ireland: Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory

11. Commemorating Ulysses, the Bloomsday Centenary, and the Irish Citizenship Referendum

172 11 Commemorating Ulysses, the Bloomsday Centenary, and the Irish Citizenship Referendum JA SON K I NG Before coming to Dublin, Bosnian immigrant Selma Harrington “hardly knew anything about Ireland except for the Troubles, and James Joyce [who] was compulsory in school literature: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a bit of Ulysses . . . That said,” she adds, “the Irish people I met abroad were open-minded, cosmopolitan. Living here [in Dublin], I am finding other sides to the mentality” (quoted in Knight 2001, 67). In Roddy Doyle’s short story “Home to Harlem,” his protagonist Declan claims to feel “like Bloom” when he is stigmatized for not being “Irish enough” or “less Irish” than others because he is black (Doyle 2007, 212–13). Like many immigrants and cultural commentators in Ireland today, Harrington and Doyle implicitly link the memory of James Joyce with an ideal of Irish cosmopolitanism and open-mindedness that they perceive to be increasingly under threat. Bisi Adigun, for instance, the Nigerian-Irish choreographer of the Bloomsday Centenary’s “Parable of the Plums” street theater performance, wondered on the occasion of the birth of his “mixed-race daughter” in Holles Street maternity hospital in 2003 whether she would ever be considered “equally Irish as other children born on the same day” (2005, 27). The question was highly topical, as it was ostensibly the master of Holles Street hospital who instigated the acrimonious debate about whether the Irish-born children of immigrants should receive Irish citizenship (Irish Examiner, May 28, 2004), the automatic entitlement to which was rescinded by a vast majority in the Commemorating Ulysses 173 Citizenship referendum on June 11, 2004. Almost exactly a century earlier, Holles Street hospital had provided the setting for the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visited Mina Purefoy in the late stages of labor. In the century between the day of the birth of Mina Purefoy’s child and Bloom’s celebrated confrontation with the Citizen, and the public commemoration of the Bloomsday Centenary, the definition of Irish nationality had not expanded but constricted. The confluence of the Citizenship referendum and the Bloomsday Centenary brought together two high-profile events that sought to redefine the meaning of Irishness in ways that worked at cross-purposes with one another, and pitted the memory of Joyce against new restrictions on fertility that he had championed as a force for cultural rejuvenation in the “Oxen of the Sun.” In the aftermath of the Citizenship referendum, Joyce’s critique of “crimes . . . against fecundity” (SL 138–39) in Ulysses has acquired new resonances that reinforce his image as an advocate of social diversity in Irish cultural memory. Joyce’s association of the act of childbearing with a proliferation of cultural perspectives and narrative styles at the end of “Oxen of the Sun” is emblematic of a positive ideal of Irish multiculturalism that is inscribed in his legacy: one that contrasts markedly with the contemporary moment in which empathy for immigrant mothers is in conspicuously short supply. As Joyce remarked in his famous letter to Frank Budgen, the underlying metaphorical conceit in “Oxen of the Sun” equates “the natural stages of development in the embryo” with the gestation of an English literary tradition that ultimately implodes into a “frightful jumble of pidgin English, . . . Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel” (ibid., 139): the stylings of a culturally diverse society, in other words, as the fruit of his conception. In Joyce’s imagination, Holles Street hospital was a site of cultural diversity rather than a locus of racial anxiety. Rereading Ulysses in light of the Citizenship referendum opens up a portal of memory through which contemporary discourses of immigrant exploitation, threats to service provision, and the erosion of national identity can be contested against the backdrop of Joycean commemoration. More broadly speaking, my intention is to consider the ways in which both cultural theorists and immigrants have invoked Joyce’s characters as exemplars of Irish multicultural ideals, as well as the manner in which 174 Jason King Leopold Bloom has come to epitomize the place of the immigrant in Irish cultural memory. In a historical context, Cormac Ó Gráda has argued that the acculturation of the Jewish community in early twentieth-century Ireland exemplifies a “successful experiment in multiculturalism” but that “multicultural Bloom” himself is “a historically implausible character (2006, 7). For Joyce, Bloom...