The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Abstract

Dublin, claimed Augustine Martin in 1984, is ‘the most famous city in literary history, with the possible exception of Troy’.³ But which Dublin? It seems clear that Martin had not just a specific place but also a specific time in mind when he made his claim — the early twentieth-century town made famous in the work of James Joyce. It is true that the great writer ’s work has certainly come to represent one dominant image of the city, both within Ireland and abroad. Joyce’s Dublin was a composite of the various layers which had contributed to the emergence of the modern city up to the late nineteenth century — Viking trading town, colonial buttress, Georgian capital, industrial slum and, in the words of Declan Kiberd, ‘a classic example of a periphery­dominated-centre’.⁴ The literary city represented by Joyce, however, is but one moment in the cultural history of a complex, living entity moving in time as well as in space. Even as Martin was writing, new ‘Dublins’ were emerging — post-industrial sprawl, misplanned conurbation, heroin capital of Europe — a spatial organization incorporating a wide range of diverse and amorphous micro-communities: self-conscious bourgeoisie, increasingly internationalized working class, criminal cadre schooled on Hollywood. In 1984 the city was in the process of becoming, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, ‘a frontier town, on the edge of Europe, on the edge of the Irish nation, on the edge of itself’.⁵

The city historically constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically. It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for an estheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque. Even for those who seek to understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the urban remains in a state of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality […]. There cannot be a going back (towards the traditional city), nor a headlong flight, towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. […] The past, the present, the possible cannot be separated.’

Henri Lefebvre

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: ‘It is all useless, if the last landing-place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.’

And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’²

Italo Calvino