Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
Joyce at 100
By Richard Ellmann
James Joyce thought about his centenary long before it occurred to his readers to do so. He scrawled in a notebook on Bloomsday, the day of Ulysses, in 1924, 'Today 16 of June twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date.' His Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses asks the same question as he jots down lines for a new poem, 'Who ever anywhere will read these written words?' Stephen also recalls, with a twinge, how before leaving for Paris he gave instructions that in the event of his death his epiphanies should be deposited in all the major libraries of the world, including Alexandria: 'Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years....' The library at Alexandria having been burned centuries before, chances were slim that anyone would be reading his epiphanies there at any time.
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