On the other side of the bridge

The Venetian Grand Canal is ubiquitous but this one is not.

This is the Grand Canal of Trieste and look who is walking over the via Roma bridge!

Joyce lived in Trieste during WWI and wrote a fair chunk of Ulysses here. Indeed, Ulysses ends with a gesture towards the compositional itinerary of the book which includes Trieste: 'Trieste-Zurich Paris, 1914-1921.' This final epigram doesn’t accurately describe or even condense the compositional history of Ulysses; in spite of this, I’ve been determined to visit Trieste for almost a decade. Researching Joyce for my thesis, I read enough about his stint here in Trieste to motivate me finally to drag myself here on the way to Istanbul. Italo Svevo, author of the incomparable Zeno’s Conscience also lived in Trieste and if that were not a sufficient literary draw, Duino Castle is situated about fifteen kilometres around the Gulf of Trieste. Il Castello di Duino is where Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, poems which I love more than I can possibly express on a blog.

The first article published by a young Virginia Woolf concerned her visit to Bramley Parsonage, home of the Bronte sisters. She uneasily considered the uneasy matter of literary pilgrimage and the utility of visiting places in which great works were written, in which great authors lived. The question of whether it is necessary or not to visit Bramley Parsonage in order to understand Wuthering Heights (or, indeed, Trieste to understand Ulysses and Duino to understand the Duino Elegies) abridges Anglo-American literary theory in the twentieth century. How should we use biographical material and compositional history to understand a literary text? How does the empirical, the subjective, the historical, the geographical, bear upon the literary and the intellectual? OK. Do you want to break into small groups to work through the question or deal with it as a large group? Anyone? Any thoughts?

My PhD argued that Modernist texts, like Ulysses, which ally themselves with the mechanical innovations of the twentieth century should be read as printed books, as textual objects which come into being only when they have been published. Following this logic, Trieste represents a moment in the pre-history of Ulysses, just before disparate sheets of manuscript and typescript turned into a sheaf of galley proofs and obscenity suits. Accordingly, such a pilgrimage should not officially contribute to a reading of the book.

What am I doing in Trieste then, apart from taking the less than obvious route to Istanbul? Despite being a little dubious about the scholarly utility of too much bio-geo-psychographical information about authors, I didn’t work on Joyce for years without developing some curiosity about his homes and haunts. I shudder at the kind of literary tourism which takes large gawping groups on tour through an author’s house in quest of an exact locus of inspiration. Part of that shudder is plain old elitism but most of it is scepticism about the accessibility and even definition of such moments. The Trieste that Joyce lived in was part of a different Europe; the late nineteenth century civic and mercantile buildings which now look Old would have been flashy and new before WWI.

Idle wandering around Trieste or Duino or Bramley Parsonage makes for an unofficial, unscholarly, speculative kind of criticism: I climb the hill behind Trieste to look into the San Guisto Cathedral and the majestic sweep of the Gulf of Trieste captures my attention, interrupting my efforts to remember whether San Guisto or San Apollinaire figure in Ulysses. Hellas surges in via the Adriatic and the tide washes away just as fast as I walk past the nineteenth century silliness that is the Trieste Lapidario, a walled garden in which large stones of antiquity are displayed. The Joyce and Svevo museums were both shut for refurbishment so there was no chance to examine the official relics. Oh look, there’s a bar. And how about these pigeons desecrating the angels in the middle of the Piazza D’Unità D’Italia? Plotting random points on fantastical theoretical trajectories on the ‘Blue Book of Eccles’ only to abandon the journey over a drink and start another one is terrifically exciting. Doing so with no compunction to transform the musings into an integrated theory, a learned article, a witty anecdote and a grant application is a liberty and a joy I could have barely imagined a year ago.

In the last week I’ve swooned past the house where Byron lived in Venice, I’ve sat on Rilke’s balcony at Duino Castle and I’ve sauntered and sashayed right on through Joyce’s Trieste and I’m still not quite sure what to do with these sites of literary apart from enjoy them and the weird process of reflection they provoke. Rest assured, mavens of Modernism, there will be no official ficto-critical recapitulation of this journey to Trieste. Of greater concern to the general populace should be the future stream of anecdote, wind, and creaky memory which will undoubtedly overcome my best defences. To this unpleasant scenario, I can only offer as remedy the oft-cited aphorism which is also the title to the novel of which the title of this blog is the first line.

Post scriptum: If this seems like an impossibly long post, please bear in mind just how much longer it could have been.