Poet TS Eliot described it as “a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape.” Perhaps after years of procrastination, you will resolve to make 2022, centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the year in which you finally read the modernist masterpiece? Joyce’s stylistically challenging account of Leopold Bloom’s peregrinations around Dublin on a single day, July 16, requires application of course … and context, in the shape of a least a little knowledge about Joyce’s life and work.

A visit to the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in Newman House on Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green is a good place to start. There you can trace Joyce’s life, from cradle to grave, following in his footsteps as he moved from house to house in Dublin (he lived at numerous different addresses as the family fortunes waned) then to Paris and Trieste, view the first edition of Ulysses published by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company, Paris, and if you are a member of MoLI, you can visit the tranquil Daedalus Library, with its rich archive of material and manuscripts. Joyce’s 1902 graduation photo, taken under the tree in the garden, at Newman House, 20 years before the publication of Ulysses, is also on display. Who could have envisaged his literary future?

“Not only is this the centenary of perhaps the most important work of literary modernism, it is a celebration of one Irish writer’s enormous artistic achievement and the international impact he continues to have,” says Simon O’Connor, director of the museum. In this centenary year, MoLI has developed Ulysses100.ie, a digital platform that allows visitors to explore Joycean events taking place in Ireland and abroad. As the year progresses, events will be added from around the world, giving a full picture of the scale of the Joyce centenary.

Also at the museum, a new film installation Love, says Bloom (Feb 2 – 31 June)  has been guest-curated by writer Nuala O’Connor. The Joyces lived and moved across a war-ruptured early twentieth century Europe, their native Ireland also up-ended by division. In this immersive installation, curator Nuala O’Connor works with video artists, and some of Ireland’s leading young singers, to celebrate the Joyce family’s mutual devotion, alongside some of the music that bound them, while their world was in flux.

Visiting MoLI won’t make a Joyce scholar out of you, but it will connect you to the writer’s life and the scale of the literary impact of Ulysses.

Talking of Joyce scholars, the unexpected death in December 2021 of Frank Callanan, one of Ireland’s most esteemed experts on Joyce, was a sudden and sharp blow to many. Not only will he be sorely missed by those he was closest to, but also by the international community of Joyce scholars. Described at his funeral as “beautiful and glittering, gentle and shy, kind and generous, sensitive and proud, a man of passion and grace, a driven and joyful scholar, a divine writer”, Callanan was well known as a distinguished senior counsel and historian who came to Joyce through his love of history, in particular the period of the Land League generation of the 1880s and 1890s. His books on that period, The Parnell Split and TM Healy, transformed understanding of the politics of that era. This was the political landscape from which Joyce emerged.

In his work on Joyce, Callanan showed how embedded the writer was in the public debates of the Ireland of his time and how they shaped his fictions – including Ulysses.“In Ulysses,” his sister-in-law Emily Hourican tells us, “Leopold Bloom collects a letter from Westland Row post office and then takes a detour through All Hallow’s Church, as it was then, on Westland Row, the church where Frank married my sister, Bridget Hourican, in May 2020, in front of a tiny group of people, on a day of unbroken sunshine. It is also the church where his funeral mass took place.”

Callanan’s book on Joyce’s politics is due to be published next year by Princeton University Press. He also wrote and devised the documentary 100 Years of Ulysses, screened on RTÉ recently, and available now on the RTÉ Player. It is another brilliant insight into the book that changed the literary world and well worth watching.

Visit www.moli.ie for more information on the exhibitions mentioned. Click here for other exhibitions to see this month.