Some writers have written so vividly about the cities they lived in that even
their names are associated with those very cities. James Joyce with Dublin is one of
them. In his acclaimed, post-modernist work, Ulysses, Joyce recounts a single day of
two of the most famous characters in literature, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus,
in Dublin, June 16, 1904, interspersed with numerous encyclopedic knowledge,
literary, historical, and cultural references, puns, puzzles, lists, recipes, etc. Ulysses is
also an extremely deep naturalistic work. Actual and current events, historical
references, newspaper reports, space, environment, and object depictions in the
narration are meticulously researched by Joyce, so much that he said, “If Dublin one
day suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
Via his stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce enables the reader to experience the
entire fabric of the city in almost all five senses, hand-in-hand with the Irish
protagonists, Bloom and Dedalus. The underlying reason is the importance he attributes
to the concept of “experience/intuition” and the feeling of “here and now.” Thus even
the simplest details become indispensable in Joyce’s Dublin. The influences and
connections awakened in the characters’ consciousness through the symbols they
encounter in the city turn Joyce’s Dublin into a landscape of meanings. This is perhaps
one of the most accurate psychological interpretations of the city-human relationship.
No writer has described how a city dweller experiences his surroundings better than
Joyce has in Ulysses. Perhaps the only way for an architect to experience Dublin and
the buildings of that city is to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, André Malraux, Cimabue, Dublin, Franz
Kafka, Giotto, Here and now, Istanbul, James Joyce, Leopold Bloom, London,
Nationalism and religion, Naturalism, Paris, St. Stephens, Stephen Dedalus,
Stream of consciousness, Trieste, Ulysses, Zurich.
