Whose Dublin Is It Anyway? Joyce, Doyle, and the City

Abstract

Every year, Bloomsday is celebrated as a literary pilgrimage that reasserts Joyce’s ownership of Dublin. The fact that Joyce left Dublin and only wrote about the city from memory while abroad seems to make little difference. The centenaries of the writing and publication of Dubliners have been commemorated by The New Dubliners (edited by Oona Frawley in 2005) and Dubliners 100 (edited by Thomas Martin in 2014). Though these collections offer different portrayals of Dublin in the twenty-first century, both pay homage to Joyce and his legacy and reference themselves, if only by their titles, as reiterations of Dubliners.

Toronto’s The Globe and Mail describes Roddy Doyle’s short story collection Bullfighting as ‘probably the finest collection of Irish short stories since James Joyce’s Dubliners.’ When asked if The Deportees and Bullfighting are modern versions of Dubliners, Roddy Doyle is quick to disagree: ‘No, I don’t. … You see, the problem is it’s almost as if Joyce invented Dublin and everybody has to then be judged against Joyce and of course, he didn’t.’

Roddy Doyle’s insider and present-day version of Dublin does not measure itself against Dubliners or Joyce. Rather his short story collections The Deportees and Bullfighting stand on their own as time capsules of life in Dublin in the twenty-first century. By writing about the city on his own terms, Doyle liberates Dublin and its writers from the tyranny of one author’s masterful but static view of a city that he wilfully abandoned, but still controls beyond space and time, much like an absentee landlord who is still collecting his rent.