Joyce, Yeats, and the impact of Literature on Dublin

While in Dublin last week, I discovered the city is currently the UNESCO City of Literature.  Normally I have little time for such accolades; (London)derry in Northern Ireland will imminently become the EU City of Culture, and even as a fan of Northern Irish literature that seems an awful stretch.  Yet walking around the Irish capital, it is clear that Dublin has a remarkable literary heritage for a relatively small European capital.

The range of literary links is exhaustive.  The Chester Beatty Library contains an enormous collection of ancient manuscripts, predominantly from the Middle and Far East.  Trinity College holds the magnificant Book of Kells (pictured).  Jonathan Swift was Dean of the bizarre Gothic structure of St Patrick's Cathedral, while the 19th Century saw the births of Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, to name but a few.

Yet it was the early decades of the twentieth century which produced the two most famous Dublin figures: James Joyce and WB Yeats.  Joyce's Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the twentieth century, Yeats won a Nobel Prize, and along the way Ireland followed the United States of America in becoming the second ex-colonial nation, achieving independence in 1922.  Both men were obviously influenced by these monumental events, but the difference between their responses highlights two very different ideas of literature.

Review: Dublin by Edward Rutherford

On one level, Edward Rutherfurd’s Dublin succeeds as a collection of well-executed, if somewhat conventional narratives, linked together slightly tenuously by the inter-generational connections between the characters.  On another level it raises some really challenging questions about how we view history.

First the stories.  The book, like Rutherfurd’s other works, follows an episodic structure.  Each section is set in a different time period of Dublin’s history, from the pre-Christian era through to the Reformation.  The same family’s appear in each episode to give a further sense of continuity, but other than that each episode is almost completely distinct.  As mentioned, the stories themselves rarely depart from very conventional plotlines. We have star-crossed lovers, ongoing mistakenly-held grudges, treachery, smuggling and more.  Each episode is granted only a couple of hundred pages and increasingly they encompass a wide range of characters, so logistical limitations are clearly a factor in the complexity of plotlines.