Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

In honour of Ireland's first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce's remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de la flâneuristicisme and spiritual home of the Lettrist International and Situationism. The coach from Beauvais brought us, in the first acte gratuit of the day, to the portals of the James Joyce Pub, an omen, some of us imagined, a portending portal, if you will, a benevolent Delphic, nay, Homeric, augur signifying the Immortals' blessing on our adventure. Others amongst us pointed out that the bus always stops here.

The Guinness Brewery

Not, strictly speaking, the Ulyssean starting point, and thanks to the four Thermoses of room-temperature red wine we had packed and the ready availability of imbibing establishments for which Paris is renowned, Bloom's original path as described in the book soon became more of a drunkard's stagger, although we endeavoured to reach as many points of interest as we could, regardless of their chronological order in the text. Nonetheless, in many ways the Guinness Brewery constitutes a suitable starting point for our day out. "A Visit to Guinness' Brewery" is an essay topic suggested in Finnegans Wake, and as Joyce once observed, Dubh Linn, the uncorrupted name of Ireland's capital, means "black pool," identifying a subconscious motivation for the consumption of this darkest and foulest of beers by the unsuspecting natives. The brewery is thus an oneiric spring, the city's fount from which all life and death bubbles forth, dark and laden with original sin, much like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Metaphorically, then, the Brewery evokes not just Dublin's alcohol-sodden Viking past but also Holles Street Hospital, setting for Joyce's Oxen and the Sun scene in Ulysses, and the place where modern-day Dubliners give birth to their own Fleurs du mal.

The tower you see in the picture gives visitors a 360-degree view of the entire city of Dublin. It also marks the precise location of the Marquis de Sade's liberation after the Brewery was stormed in 1789. In those days, the citizens of Dublin had the wit to make former inmates members of their parliament. Today's Dubliners can't even manage to do the reverse.

We were taken on a tour of the Brewery (you can see the building behind), but we were forcibly ejected at the end of the tour when we demanded our free pints of Guinness. So much for Irish hospitality.

The Phoenix Park

Ah yes, the phoenix, mythological bird ripe for all sorts of linguistic jiggery-pokery but never much good for cooking. We were surprised upon our arrival to see how literally the parks department has taken the name, the park's fields being liberally covered over with what at first sight looked to be ashes. Closer examination revealed it to be sand, however, much to the delight of our pro-Situ members always on the lookout for the beach beneath the cobbles. A couple of the capital's young bucks were engaged in what we took to be some kind of religious rite involving clubs and a round projectile. Could this be the fabled "hurling," the Irishman's national sport? If so where was the vomit and blood? Or polo, perhaps? Our map indicated that there were polo grounds around here somewhere. Or were they simply two strapping Irish lads revelling in their own strength and vigour, frolicking gamely in the sunshine on the ersatz beach, their own Sandymount Strand, while lusty onlookers furtively masturbated behind the rocks? Who can say? More than one of us on encountering this scene thought immediately of Albert Camus and his love of outdoor life on the beaches of Algeria. A Joycean link here too: So struck was he by the structure and plot of Ulysses that Camus sketched out the plan for a novel about Bloom's mother, culminating with her death at the hands of her son on June 15th, 1904. The fact that Bloom makes no reference in Ulysses to the murder of his mother for the entirety of the next day transforms this Everyman into the archetypal modern-day psychopath, an Outsider not merely by virtue of his Jewishness, but by virtue also of his lack of fellow-feeling, the affectless, blasé personality incarnate, to use Simmel's categorisation.

Of course, we know what happened next. Bloom became Meursault, the Outsider who kills an Arab for kicks. The opening line of that book?: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

La Peste is better, anyway.

Mountjoy Prison

To inmates, "The Joy." To the screws, "The Mount." To the locals, "Mounters," "Joyo," "Priso," "Ountjoyp." Home to de Sade in his senility and madness, to Behan in his cups, to several popes (frocked, defrocked and unfrocked), and, a surprise to many, quite a few little old ladies, some of whom just love the place and keep coming back simply because they enjoy the company and the warmth, others amongst them who cannot help but come back because they are so thoroughly institutionalized they cannot cope with life on the outside. Sartre once said, ridiculously, that every man is free, even in prison. What he forgot to add is that even outside a prison's walls, a man can carry a prison inside his head. The former inmates of this particular asylum are frequently damaged in this way. Once the madness acquired in this particular building gets under your skin, it can require decades of re-education, beatings, and waterboarding to flush it out of you.

There is no truth to the rumour, incidentally, that the cells are so crowded that inmates develop hunchbacks. Though critics are yet to determine why Behan wrote about an old triangle instead of the bells, the bells.

Holles Street Hospital

The setting of the Oxen and the Sun portion of the novel and the site of the Guillotine during the Revolution, here it is that Ireland's monstrous beauties are born. As Baudelaire, described by Walter Benjamin as the master expositor of modernity, once said, "the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil." Molly Bloom's "Yes, yes, I said, yes," thus becomes an affirmation of evil, a declaration of nihilism that encapsulates the modernist spirit. It is fucking that leads to creation, to birth. Baudelaire's evil flowers are his poems, while Joyce generates Ulysses by fucking with language. The Revolution itself gave birth to Modernity, to Saint-Simonism, Comtean Positivism, the ontological rupture between subject and object, knower and known, mind and body. It is no coincidence to those astute enough to notice that the executioner's tool of choice during the Revolution was the Guillotine, not because of its purported humaneness or its symbolic representation of progress, but because it enacted the literal separation of body and mind. The Guillotine is Descartes' Cogito put to the task of social cleansing. And, in the same stroke, it is a symbol of rebirth, a cutting of the umbilical cord between parent and child, the birth of a new nation, a new society, out of the death pangs of the old.

A happy confluence of birth and death, then, echoing not just the Guinness Brewery where we began our day's outing, but also Glasnevin Cemetery, where I fear we shall all end up, whether it be by accident or design or misreading of the map while langered.

Part the Second to Follow.