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.