Exhibit provides insightful portrait of Joyce's life

In Ireland, literature is considered a form of diplomacy. When articulating the country's place in the world, its officials are as likely to cite a poet as a politician. So it is not surprising that the driving force behind an exhibition on the life and work of James Joyce is the Irish government's diplomatic arm. The Boston Public Library is the 31st stop on a worldwide tour of the exhibit, which was timed to commemorate the centenary of what Joyce followers call Bloomsday -- June 16, 1904 -- the day on which his masterpiece, "Ulysses," takes place.

"International Joyce" consists of a series of 22 panels recounting Joyce's life and work in words and photos. The project was prepared by the Cultural Division of the Irish government's Department of Foreign Affairs, written by Michael Barsanti, the associate director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (which houses the handwritten manuscript of "Ulysses"), and overseen by Declan Kiberd, the University College Dublin professor and author of "Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation."

"Joyce was a seminal influence, not only on modern literature, but on modern thought," says Isolde Moylan, Ireland's consul general in Boston, who helped organize the exhibit in Boston. The centenary of Bloomsday, she added, "seemed the right time to celebrate Joyce and to help educate people about who he was and why and how he wrote what he wrote."

The exhibition kicked off in Berlin last April and has been seen on virtually every continent. After Boston, it may have as many as 15 more stops, Moylan said. "International Joyce" examines Joyce's family, his love/hate relationship with Ireland in general and Dublin in particular, and his fascination with the story of Odysseus, the meandering Greek warrior. Ulysses, it turns out, was the Roman name for the same character.

"In `Ulysses,' Joyce made Odysseus into an average man, and Odysseus' epic struggles into the small trials of an average day," one panel notes.

"Ulysses" has been hailed by many critics as the greatest novel of the 20th century, but it's seen by many ordinary readers as thick and impenetrable. The exhibition, however, is a lot more accessible than, say, "Finnegan's Wake," Joyce's last book, which to some made Ulysses seem positively pedestrian. The panels recount Joyce's love of his wife, Nora Barnacle, their nomadic lifestyle, and his moving from Dublin to Trieste to Rome to Zurich to Paris, where he and his family stayed until 1940, when the rise of the Third Reich led him to return to Zurich in neutral Switzerland -- note, not neutral Ireland.

Some of the information in the exhibit may be revealing even to Joyce fans, such as the fact that he endured at least 25 operations on his eyes from 1917 to 1930 -- that makes his literary achievements seem even more incredible in an age before word processors.

If "International Joyce" explicitly conveys the transient life of the artist as both a young and old man, it more subtly hints at a sadness, a melancholy inherent in his self-imposed exile, a feeling best experienced far from the BPL, at his grave in the Fluntern cemetery on the hilly outskirts of Zurich.

"Perhaps the most important legacy of Joyce's work," the exhibit's final panel concludes, "is the way his stylistic innovation was tied to a reverence for, and a need to represent honestly, common human experience."

International Joyce is at the Rabb Auditorium lobby through Oct. 15.