DUBLIN – He is nothing less than this city’s gift to the world.
Eighty-three years after his death, novelist James Joyce continues to be revered worldwide, a genius whose literary style made him a supremely influential writer of the 20th century.
His acclaimed works, including Ulysses, Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, center on Dublin and have shared the Irish capital with the world, his works translated into innumerable languages. The many public dedications to Joyce in Dublin – multiple sculptures and a street named after him, for instance – and the collection of Joyce memorabilia available to visitors speak to the reverence still held for him.
Perhaps the only Dubliner more famously connected to this city (arguably) once called himself “an annoying fan” of Joyce’s.
“Were he still with us, I would be buying him drinks and then spilling them on him, offering to clean up the mess, pay the bill, drive him home and be ignored,” U2 frontman Bono said of Joyce in 2013.
And thus, as Georgia Tech and Florida State meet in Joyce’s city Saturday, the question must absolutely be asked – were he still with us, would Joyce have supported the Yellow Jackets or Seminoles?
To find an answer, I ventured to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, though not before warning two center assistants in an email that I was about to subject them to “perhaps the most vapid intellectual exercise of your life.”
The center is located in a redbrick townhouse on an inclined street near the city’s hub (in Ulysses, a character lives at that address). It is worth a visit for anyone interested in learning more about Joyce. The comments in the center’s guest book from past visitors, written in many different languages, speak to the impact of the exhibits on Joyce lovers.
As, surprisingly, the center had decided against a display dedicated to how Joyce might have aligned himself for the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, I turned to center assistant Josh Newman, a 34-year-old Joyce scholar from Buffalo, New York, a man whose knowledge of Joyce and patience for answering idiotic questions about the literary giant are both estimable.
Let’s start with Joyce’s engagement with sports. As a child, he ran track, played cricket and liked to row, ride his bicycle and take long walks. As an adult, he watched rugby. As an expatriate in Paris, he watched the Irish national rugby team play several games and had an in-depth knowledge of the team.
Newman said he wondered, though, if his support of the team stemmed more from a love of country than the actual sport.
“I don’t think he really was an avid attendee of sports games,” Newman said. “He did (go to the rugby matches in Paris), but outside of that, he liked going to opera more, musicals and stuff like that.”
Newman also wondered what he would have thought of the emphasis and resources that American colleges devote to intercollegiate athletics, sometimes at the expense of their academic mission.
While prefacing it as speculation, Newman said that “I don’t think he would have approved of the massive amounts of money and attention that college football has, and college sports.”
In other words, while Joyce may have authored one of the seminal works of the 20th century, he might have been a total drag at tailgate parties.
From there, Newman and I proceeded into the meat of my quest. Would Joyce have joined with the Seminoles’ chopping throngs or done the Budweiser bob, the tradition that Tech fans honor between the third and fourth quarters?
Said Newman, “I don’t think he would attend this game if he were around.”
Yay!
We ventured on. To his great credit, if my host checked his watch, he did so surreptitiously.
Without a dog in the fight – Joyce did his collegiate studies at University College Dublin, which really should have gone all in and named itself “The Institute of University College Dublin” – I wondered if he would have identified himself more with a party school (no offense intended to FSU graduates, a proud assemblage that includes my financial adviser, who served Bobby Bowden when he waited tables at an Olive Garden in Tallahassee, Florida) or an institute so rigorous that its alumni like to say they “got out” rather than “graduated”?
Newman assigned a point for Tech, calling Joyce “a very studious person” who loved learning for its own sake.
“Going to a party school, well, it didn’t exist in Ireland,” said Newman, a graduate of the University at Buffalo. “I don’t think it (still) does. Not like Florida State.”
Dang.
Joyce also thought of himself as an underdog, Newman said. He grew up lower middle class, struggled financially and was raised in the Catholic faith in a world run by Protestants.
Another point for Tech, which as of Friday was a 10.5- or 11-point underdog to the defending ACC champions.
And what would he have thought of the presence of an Irishman – punter David Shanahan – on the Tech roster? While his views of Dublin and Ireland were often critical, deriding them as backward and too conservative, Joyce still had a heart for his city and country. While living abroad, he liked to connect with fellow Irish expatriates.
“I’m sure he would like that part, absolutely,” Newman said.
Lastly, the very first page of Finnegans Wake, improbably, makes mention of Laurens County in a stream-of-conscious barrage. Its county seat, of course, is Dublin. Newman recalled a letter that Joyce wrote to an assistant asking her for examples of other cities named Dublin, which perhaps was the inspiration for the inclusion of the Middle Georgia county in the novel. Tech fans also know Laurens to be the home of the late Jackets star Demaryius Thomas.
So there you have it. Dress Joyce in white and gold.
“If someone put a gun to his head and forced him to choose and to support a team, because of those reasons, it would be Georgia Tech,” Newman said. “But ultimately, I really don’t think he would have cared that much.”
Back in Tallahassee, we can only assume a professor in the FSU English department has been rendered indignant by the verdict and is probably muttering to herself:
“Typical Georgia Tech fan.”
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