Remembrances of Times I Tried and Failed to Read Ulysses: The Dublin
Writers Museum
Today, our group took an audio tour of the Dublin Writers Museum. The
main part of the museum is two rooms, one devoted to early Irish
writers, the other devoted to later Irish writers up to about the
1980s. One of the most interesting things about the descriptions of
writers and their lives in the museum was that it made it clear that
these men and women did not create in a vacuum, they were a community
that influenced and built off one another. Admittedly, a community
that Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh, thought was pretentious
and petty. When James Joyce had a falling out with Irish poet Oliver
Gogarty, he based unpleasant Ulysses character Buck Mulligan on
Gogarty. This strikes me as a very Taylor Swift kind of thing to do
and it maybe doesn’t help the image of the literary community in
Ireland. However, this group is also responsible for the creation of
Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and the museum draws a connection from
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (which has recently been modernized into a
web series set in a fictional gothic university) to Bram Stoker’s
Dracula. They also indicate that Oscar Wilde was a major influence on
novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett. So, I’m a fan. Some of the
writers seemed to be a part of a distinctly Irish literary tradition:
WB Yeats, Lady Gregory, and James Joyce for example are very much
rooted in that setting. However, writers like Jonathan Swift, Bram
Stoker, and Oscar Wilde are a part of different literary canons and it
was interesting to learn about their Irish roots