A Tale of Joyce Statues and Wanderlust

When James Joyce stretched the stream of consciousness beyond known limits in Finnegans Wake, he knew people would be upset. Enough patience had been shed with Ulysses -let's face it, it is quite cryptic. He knew he'd be loved or hated, freed from the intransigent limbo of indifference. And what better hope may the poet secretly treasure than being precisely crowned with the laurels of love and hate. He probably also suspected that his disrespect for conventional form, if not more than typically modernist but at least boldly Irish, would make more than one victim reader suspect that James Joyce may in fact be, well, one of the paramount authors of his time. Allow for the fireworks and laudatory speeches to roll in then. But little did he hunch, however, the fate of becoming a universal cast for random guys wandering by streets and benches around the world.


Okay, it would have been hard to guess. Throughout history leaders have been sculpted riding horses, philosophers sitting in pensive postures, and war heroes killing some kind of beast (mythological beasts preferred to avoid animal rights trouble). But how do you depict James Joyce? Two things come to mind: he was blind, and he drank his life away. In fact, no depiction could have been more faithfully accurate than him galloping a good old pint of Guinness across the table, gladly inviting viewers to join for the 37th one. Alright, so he better be blind at least, add the stereotypical glasses and a walking cane. Looking at the sky or at a non-existing horizon preferred:



(how else could he have crossed the street incognito?)


This sketch of a statue alone is enough to gain some trace of conspicuousness. Or at least you are guaranteed that if one day you are lost and handsomely clueless in a random city, you will most likely meet with a random James Joyce statue who is just as lost and clueless. I speak from experience, from at least four different random cities in four countries spanning two continents.

One day you are lost in Trieste, cross the Gran Canale (by the Orthodox church) and before you could ask for orientation there he is:

crossing the street just as clueless as you are.

Some time later in a random place in Croatia, the coastal town of Pula, you take the wrong shortcut (or those tourist-hating locals mislead you), and around the corner timelessly trapped in an unnamed cafe the paramount author of his time is there

inexplicably waiting for the time to figure out where to go next.

Dubliners had to catch up with the tradition, of course, and so a second Joyce monument meets you in the city when you are trying to figure out your way towards St. Patrick's cathedral:


now this is the definitive Joyce, off with the hat and a little more focused, necessarily greenish and sitting like the universal citizen in a random bench. This was indeed the one they chose for the not-so-random city of Zurich:


There is no secret to these scattered sculptures. Famous writers get plenty of statues, in many places, and James Joyce was indeed heavily stricken by wanderlust.

But another realization comes along: Joyce spent his life in (almost) rigorous self-exile from Ireland, yet remained locally-based, Dublin-based, in all of his novels. Joyce has been widely regarded as cosmopolitan par excellence but at the same time the iconic Irish local writer by trade. Might this duality somehow transform him into a symbol for the universal wanderer?

Joyce knew what was right: you may base some sentimental aesthetics on the homeland, but you inhabit the world as one sole yet diverse country. Patriotism then becomes naturally a hopeless folly, and local traditions a beautiful but imprisoning realm to be wary of. So seem to tell us Joyce the Dubliner, the Triestino, the coffee man from Pula or even the Swiss and the Parisian Joyce, who incessantly confirm and abandon multiple traditions in arbitrary places.

Not surprisingly, but decidedly endearingly, when a fake city built in the Disney world in Orlando seeks out to legitimize itself as a cosmopolitan locale, they had to include the respective Joyce statue:


quietly lost sitting by the bench, waiting to meet you.

The Importance of the Man with Bowler Hat and Umbrella

Most people underestimate the importance of the man with bowler hat and umbrella. So many distorted versions are taking place out there, right now, that the true man with umbrella and bowler hat might never see the shining light of truth again.

First of all, the requirements are very specific. He must be wearing a tuxedo, a black one. No white stripes or funny pants, please. Obviously, he must be wearing a bowler hat. Black, appropriately curved, sizes vary (a little). Magician-hat versions are a rip-off. Then there is the issue of the umbrella. It also has to be black, and it needs to cover the entire figure. No red or multi-colored umbrella monkey business. Then the man also needs to be only a silhouette looked from behind. You can't see the front, that's the whole point, gentlemen. There is debate about whether it needs to be a plain black silhouette, on the other hand. Finally, this is the most important part: it cannot be raining. I know, how could it.

These two winners to the left are the best prototypes.

Second of all, there are a million twisted myths about the man with bowler hat and umbrella out there. Some have it that the first one was Rene Magritte himself. This is a common misconception. He did all sorts of things with umbrellas. And painted at least a hundred men with bowler hats -in fact, you could say he invented the Man with Bowler Hat theme- but were they ever holding an umbrella? were they? No folks, Magritte was careful enough not to get mixed up here.

In fact, the myth must arise from this picture (of over a hundred flying men with bowler hats, none of them is wearing an umbrella -that's a briefcase!):


You can actually see the mystery falling down on your screen here. Then our regular fellow will say that it was probably Chaplin. As in, if it had a bowler hat and an umbrella, then it was probably Chaplin, or that other guy with a fat friend in the black and white movies.

No folks, they showed their faces and did not have a tuxedo.. so officially out of contest. It wasn't the Italian Toto, either --it was raining!

So where did the man come from? We cannot know, but we have some clues of where he's going. In the past decades it has been earning a living with American IT companies:


And some have even added a fellow child, for good company:

But these might be just the children of the man with bowler hat and umbrella. Cases have been known of claims to the lineage everywhere around the world, in fact. Introducing the African man with hat and umbrella:

the Chinese one:

the New York one:

and even the Mexican one:

What does the man with umbrella and bowler hat tell us? Does it mean anything or is it just there? The surrealists were quick to find inspiration as a symbol for mankind:

Even van Gogh gave it a try with his pencil, but he definitely got the wrong hat:

For filmmakers, the potential to 'show' the man with bowler hat and umbrella was clear, but in the end they had to show the face. A new wave of artists are now picking up the theme, and some of the modern men with bowler hat and umbrella are simply fascinating:

some of them break the rules but are equally fascinating:

The emotional load of the man with bowler hat and umbrella is infinitely tendering. Strangely enough, to some of us it inspires heart-rending solitude, introspection, while to others it represents hope, the certainty of the unbound possibilities of the future.

Are some of these meanings even close to what the man with bowler hat and umbrella has to say?

And most importantly, who is the man with bowler hat and umbrella?? That is the point.