Developers plan to build a retail and residential complex on the seafront that inspired James Joyce’s Ulysses. Historians, preservationists and Joyce fans are campaigning against the development — which proposes shops, apartments, restaurants and even a concert venue to be constructed along Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire, outside Dublin.
Also, the Godrevy lighthouse — made famous by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, is slated to be decommissioned by the lighthouse authority for England and Wales. Protesters argue that the change could endanger fisherman in the area. There are no known plans to dismantle the lighthouse completely.
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What would Joyce SayWhen I
What would Joyce Say
When I was in Ireland, I visited the Martello Tower, walked the Vico Road, and read on Howth the final paragraphs of Molly’s soliloquy, a.k.a. I’m very much a literary tourist and enjoy seeing the things writers wrote about. However, as a Joyce enthusiast, I really can’t share the protestors’ outrage. Joyce was an advocate of living, and all worship of the past added up for him to a sort of living death. The last thing he’d want is his home to be made into a mauseleoum. If Stephen Dedalus was trying to awake from the Nightmare of History, it seems odd that his readers should make him a memorial rather than an inspiration.