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Although American academia was especially prominent among the massed scholarship arriving in Dublin for Bloomsday Week and the
VIII
International James Joyce Symposium in order to get their heads down over a susurrating mass of learned papers, this question of the disestablishment of English is, of course, not an American problem. The American language had something exponential built into it from the start, although the chances are that American will harden its arteries somewhat if the United States dons the mantle of world leadership with too much enthusiasm. All the same, there is nothing culturally troubling about Joyce for Americans. There is for me. Troubling and consoling.

I do believe that, had Joyce opted for a career as a singer, as Nora wished, I, for one, as a writer in post-imperialist Britain, would not even have had the possibility of a language, for Joyce it was who showed how one could tell the story of whatever it is that is going to happen next. Not that he would have cared. Whatever it was he thought he was up to, it certainly wasn't making it easier for the British to explain their past and their future to themselves. He wasn't doing it for
our
sakes, he made
that
clear.

Nevertheless, he carved out a once-and-future language, restoring both the simplicity it had lost and imparting a complexity. The language of the heart and the imagination and the daily round and the dream had been systematically deformed by a couple of centuries of use as the rhetorical top-dressing of crude power. Joyce Irished, he Europeanised, he decolonialised English: he tailored it to fit this century, he drove a giant wedge between English Literature and literature in the English language and, in doing so, he made me (forgive this personal note) free. Free not to do as he did, but free to treat the Word not as if it were holy but in the knowledge that it is always profane. He is in himself the antithesis of the Great Tradition. You could also say, he detached fiction from one particular ideological base, and his
work has still not yet begun to bear its true fruit. The centenarian still seems avant-garde.

‘The value of the book is its new style,' he said of
Ulysses
to a friend in Paris.

And another thing . . . Poet of the upper-working and lower-middle classes as he was – that is, of the artistically most despised and rejected, poet of those exiled from poetry – he never succumbed to the delusion that people who do not say complicated things do not have complicated thoughts. Hence, the stream-of-consciousness technique, to bring that inner life into the open. It's simple. Just as, when you hear Joyce read aloud in the rhythms of Irish, it, too, all falls into place.

That is what Radio Telefis Eirann did, for Bloomsday. RTE broadcast
Ulysses
, read aloud, from early morning on 16 June till the next day. All over the city, transistors fed it to the air. RTE propose to sell cassettes of this mammoth and inspired occasion for the sum of
£
1,000 each, which would have gladdened Joyce's heart of a balked entrepreneur. (He set up the first cinema in Dublin, the Volta, in 1909, with Triestine money. It failed. RTE's project, with a market of American universities, will probably succeed.)

‘History is a trap from which I am trying to escape,' said Stephen Daedalus. The Bloomsday of 1982 takes place in the capital city of the Republic of Ireland. It is a country which Bloom Joyce, the wandering Irishman, would find amazing. A state reception was held for him in Dublin Castle, and this reception turned out to be the very kind of riotous party Joyce adored. American Express offered the city the Bloomsday present of Joyce's head in bronze; the President himself, Dr Patrick Hillery, unveiled it. (Nobody thought to gratify Joyce's gleeful and malicious ghost by slipping say, an item of ladies' underwear under the veil and, indeed, it would have marred the dignity of the occasion.) Bloomsday was celebrated with such stylish and imaginative joyousness it seemed a pity the old boy missed it.

But the old city is pulling itself down. Freed at last from that ‘hemiplegia of the will' which Joyce diagnosed as his country's most significant malady in a letter to his brother in 1903, Dublin, all bustle, thrust, traffic-jams, and businessmen concluding suave deals, is no longer the city I remember from even twenty years
ago, which, then, pickled in the sour brine of poverty, was sufficiently like the city of the book to make you blink.

Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.

The squares, the terraces, the grand parades, going, going, deserted, weed-grown, the city of the Raj, waiting for the demolition men, gone. The city seethes with gossip, rumour, and speculation about the activities of property speculators. Up go the mirror-clad slabs of office-blocks; Ireland has at last followed Joyce into Europe.

Everything has changed. If 16 June was Bloomsday, 26 June was Gay Pride Day. In the personal column of the magazine,
In Dublin
, the ‘Legion of Mary' finds itself at hazard of alphabetical listing, nudging against ‘Lesbian Line'. Decorating each street corner, exquisitely spiked and studded Irish punks have, overnight, discovered Style. The city, the country, whose inhabitants once seemed to leap with one bound from babyhood to middle age now seethes with the youngest population in Europe who have a look in their eyes that suggests they will not be easily satisfied. One doubts both the old sow's appetite for
this
farrow and her ability to digest it.

But nobody lives at 7, Eccles Street, anymore. The house where the imaginary Blooms never lived is now a tumbledown shell. Its door graces the Bailey Bar, in Duke Street. Before this abandoned house, however, at three in the afternoon of Bloomsday, a facsimile of Molly Bloom disposed herself upon a makeshift bed while Blazes Boylan made his way towards her and her husband pottered pooterishly round the town. Because this is what Dublin did for Bloomsday: it peopled the streets of the city with the beings of the book: the Word made Flesh, in fact.

For one hour, just one hour, up they all popped, in costume, large as life, and even ‘William Humble, Earl of Dudley, and Lady Dudley, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Hesseltine' riding out from the viceregal lodge in a cavalcade of carriages and antique horseless carriages. And exquisite children in pinafores and sunbonnets and ladies in tight bloomers on tricycles and blind men and one-legged sailors and look it up in your Bodley Head edition, the ‘Wandering Rocks' episode in
Ulysses
(pages 280, 328), this slice of teeming 1904 Dublin life rendered as street theatre, like a marvellous hallucination. Nothing could have been more perfect, as the city adopted Bloomsday and revisited its own
vanishing past with a tourist's eager curiosity and the devotion of a trustee.

These are, perhaps, the last few years when Joyce's fictional blueprints of Dublin will correspond at all to the real outlines of the city. Dublin appears, the final tribute, to be ‘fixing' the city of the book as perfect fiction by tidying away the real thing so that Joyce's Dublin can gloriously survive as its own monument, the book which is the city, the metaphysical city of the word, while whatever it is that happens next gets on with it.

Jorge Luis Borges at the Bloomsday banquet, proposing the toast to Joyce and Ireland (‘since for me they are inseparable'), opined that, one day, ‘as with all great books',
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
would become books for children. One day, one fine day, one universal Bloomsday, when, perhaps, the metaphysics depart from the book and it becomes life, again.

(1982)

1
. From the essay, ‘Readers respond to Rousseau', in Robert Darnton,
The Great Cat Massacre
(London: Allen Lane, 1984).

A review of Milorad Pavic,
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
, trans. Christina Privicevic-Zoric (London: Hamish Hamilton),
London Review of Books
, 1989.

A review of Milorad Pavic,
Landscape Painted with Tea
, trans. Christina Privicevic-Zoric (London: Hamish Hamilton),
The Independent on Sunday
, 1991.

A review of
Irish Folk Tales
, ed. Henry Glassie (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) and
Arab Folktales
, trans. and ed. Inea Bushnaq (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books),
Guardian
, 1987.

A review of Danilo Kis,
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux),
New York Times Book Review
, 1989.

A review of John Berger,
Pig Earth
(London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative),
New Society
, 1979.

A review of John Berger,
Once in Europa
(New York: Pantheon Books),
Washington Post
, 1989.

A review of
The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
, trans. and ed. Donald Ward (London: Millington Books),
Guardian
, 1981.

A review of Georges Bataille,
Story of the Eye
(London: Marion Boyars),
New Society
, 1979.

A review of William Burroughs,
The Western Lands
(London: Picador),
Guardian
, 1988.

A review of William Burroughs,
Ah Pook is Here
(London: John Calder),
Guardian
, 1979.

A review of J. G. Ballard,
Empire of the Sun
(London: Victor Gollancz),
Time Out
, 1984.

Written as the Introduction to Walter de la Mare,
Memoirs of a Midget
(Oxford University Press, 1982).

First published in
Harpers & Queen
, 1978.

A review of Ann Barr and Paul Levy,
The Official Foodie Handbook
(London: Ebury Press), Elizabeth David,
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
(London: Hale), and Alice Waters,
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
, Foreword by Jane Grigson (London: Chatto & Windus),
London Review of Books
, 1984, with subsequent correspondence,
London Review of Books
, 1985.

A review of Redcliffe Salaman,
The History and Social Influence of the Potato
, ed. J. G. Hawkes (Cambridge University Press),
London Review of Books
, 1986.

A review of
Food in Vogue: Six Decades of Cooking and Entertaining
, ed. Barbara Tims (London: Harrap),
New Society
, 1977.

A review of Elizabeth David,
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
(London: Penguin Books),
New Society
, 1987.

A review of Patience Gray,
Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia
(London: Prospect Books),
London Review of Books
, 1987.

A review of Hanif Kureishi,
The Buddha of Suburbia
(London: Faber & Faber),
Guardian
, 1990.

A
review of Ian Jack,
Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain 1977–86
(London: Secker & Warburg), Beryl Bainbridge,
Forever England: North and South
(London: Duckworth/BBC Books), and
Norma Dolby's Diary: An Account of the Great Miners' Strike
(London: Verso),
Guardian
, 1987.

A review of Michael Moorcock,
Mother London
(London: Secker & Warburg),
Guardian
, 1988.

A review of Iain Sinclair,
Downriver
(London: Paladin),
London Review of Books
, 1991, and letter from the author.

A review of Robert Coover,
A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Rember This
(London: Heinemann),
Guardian
, 1987.

A review of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson,
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Styles to 1960
(London: Routledge), Paul F. Boller jr and Ronald L. Davis,
Hollywood Anecdotes
(Basingstoke: Macmillan), and
Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book
, ed. Danny Peary (New York: Fireside),
Guardian
, 1988.

A review of Edmund White,
The Beautiful Room is Empty
(London: Picador),
Guardian
, 1988.

A review of Paul Theroux,
My Secret History
(London: Hamish Hamilton),
Guardian
, 1989.