Dublinesque

It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era. We find it, for instance, in the Bible, in the Aeneid. It exists in every civilization. Riba understands that in our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically. If they manage to hold this funeral in Dublin, it can’t be anything other than a great parody of the weeping of a few sensitive souls for the end of an era. The apocalyptic demands a lack of excessive seriousness. After all, ever since he was a boy he’s been sick and tired of hearing that our historical and cultural situation is uncharacteristically terrible and in a certain way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But is this really true? It seems doubtful that our “terrible” situation is so different from that of our ancestors, as many of them felt the same as we do, and as Vok puts it, if our criteria seem satisfactory to us it would have been the same for them. Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety. Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we’re all going to die together or separately. In the end, thinks Riba, the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because actually, if I look at it properly, what it offers me is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of a funeral in Dublin, that is, it offers me what I’ve been most in need of recently: something to do in the future.

If one day he were to find this much-searched-for author, this phantom, this genius, it would be difficult for such a person to improve on what’s already been said by so many others, about the rifts between the expectations of youth and the reality of one’s later years, what’s been said about the illusory nature of our choices, about how our search for success culminates in disappointment, about the present as fragile and the future as representing a need for control over old age and death. And what’s more, it will always be an annoyance, a malaise of the soul for every perceptive publisher, to have to go out in search of those phantoms, those damned authors. He’s thinking of all this now lying on a beach in front of blue water, surrounded by towels, red bathing caps, gentle waves lapping the warm yellow sand, near the center of the world. A strange beach in a corner of New York’s harbor.

Supposedly, Joyce devised him to seem like any provincial European citizen. A man without qualities. Bloom is outstripped by the two other main characters in the book: Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom. Stephen, who represents the intellect, the creative imagination, surpasses him, illuminating him from above. And Molly, who represents the body, the earth, supports him. But in the long run Bloom is neither worse nor better than either of them, as Stephen has an excess of intellectual pride, and Molly finds herself at the mercy of the flesh; Bloom, on the other hand, although lacking their robustness, has the power of humility. And what’s more, Bloom was certainly — this is certainly true today — more charming than his author.

But it was a real drag having to go out and hunt for all those writers, and on top of that never finding one who was truly great.

What logic is there in things? None really. We’re the ones who look for links between one segment of our lives and another. But this attempt to give form to that which has none, to give form to chaos, is something only good writers know how to do successfully. Luckily, Riba’s still friends with a few, although it’s also true he’s had to organize this trip to Dublin in order not to lose them. In terms of friends and creativity, he’s been in a critical situation ever since he closed his business. Deep down he misses the continuous contact with writers, such strange, ludicrous beings, so self-centered and complicated, and such idiots, most of them. Ah, writers. Yes, it’s true he misses them, although they were such a pain. All so obsessive. But it can’t be denied they’ve always amused and entertained him a lot, above all when — here he smiles maliciously — he paid them lower advances than he could have afforded and contributed to their being ever poorer. Ungrateful wretches.