Time: Fifteen minutes later.
Style: As theatrical as in the Meeting House Square and maybe more gloomy than festive, although things could change at any moment.
Place: The Catholic cemetery of Glasnevin. A million people are buried here. Founded by Daniel O’Connell, it is eerie at this time in the evening. There are many patriotic monuments, decorated with national symbols or personalized with sports paraphernalia and old toys. Curious towers on the walls, which were used to look out for grave robbers who worked for surgeons at the end of the nineteenth century.
Characters: Riba, Javier, Nietzky, Ricardo, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Bev, and Walter Dew.
Action: Outside the gates to the place, Riba becomes emotional when he sees the iron railings. They’re the same ones Joyce names in chapter six. Are they really railings or a line from Ulysses? Faced with this dilemma, Riba is lost for a long time, and after a powerful mental journey, his gaze ends up returning to the cemetery gates. “The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.”
“The same poplars,” Amalia whispers. They cross the threshold of the main gates and the eight of them walk through the terrifying cemetery, which looks like it’s come straight out of the Dracula film Riba saw this morning. All that’s missing is some artificial fog and for Paddy Dignam’s corpse to rise up from the grave. Riba continues to remember: “Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.”
Ravages of death, ravages of the Rotunda.
An unexpected, inspired tirade from Ricardo when they’re already a few yards inside the cemetery. He says he’s had a sudden revelation and understood everything all at once. He now sees how pertinent the funeral for the Gutenberg age is, for we mustn’t lose sight of how much Joyce loved wordplay.
“And I don’t know if you’ve realized that Bloomsday,” he says, “sounds like Doomsday. And the long day Ulysses takes place on is nothing less than that.”
In the end, Ricardo says, Joyce’s book is a sort of universal synthesis, a summary of time; a book designed to make a few anecdotal gestures signal an epic, an odyssey in the most literal sense of the word. That’s why whoever had the idea for a requiem had the greatest idea of all.
They walk slowly down the main path in Glasnevin and come to a beautiful lilac tree, which Ricardo photographs after explaining to them all, with unnecessary solemnity, that he’s almost certain it appears in Ulysses toward the end of the cemetery scene. Nietzky thinks the tree is the same color as the lilacs at the Rotunda, which he takes to represent Death, and talks — without the others really understanding him — about the beauty of the Rotunda’s lilacs, as if there had to be a logical and purely commonsensical relationship between the lilacs and Dublin’s maternity hospital. Riba comes to the conclusion that young Nietzky is talking for the sake of talking and has had a lot to drink again, besides.
Oblivious to his status as a fallen angel, Nietzky reflects aloud on the disparity between the length of men’s lives and that of lilacs and other trees. Julia Piera yawns, and then her gaze wanders to a mother and daughter in mourning, standing by a grave, the girl’s face streaked with dirt and tears. The mother with a long face, pale and bloodless. Mother and daughter, a hideous pair as if plucked from a drama from another century, as if they’d stepped out of a period film about life in the Rotunda.
And Ricardo, totally oblivious to this, makes questionable macabre jokes. Minutes later, in the middle of an argument in overly raised voices about the gloomy beauty of the place and the by now hackneyed lilac tree, Bev asks for everyone’s attention so they can observe how the cawing of the crows blends with their argumentative visitors’ shouts.
There are crows, but no one’s heard them cawing. A brief silence. A pause. The wind. “You will see my ghost after death.” Ricardo finds this phrase, lifted from Ulysses, carved onto a gravestone beside one of the smaller paths, in the Murray family crypt. Another photo opportunity, obviously. “How wonderful the Murrays are,” someone says. More group portraits. Now everyone squeezes around the tomb of the Joycean family. A cemetery worker wields Ricardo’s camera as if he were a great photographic artist and gives them all orders to pose with more style. When the session is over, someone realizes they’ve been walking around for quite some time now and still haven’t gone into the chapel at the end of the cemetery, the place where the brief and sad funeral for Dignam the drunk was held. This seems like the ideal place for the funereal words for the Gutenberg age, and actually for everything, for the world in general.
Javier asks how they’re going to make sure the requiem is a work of art. They all look thoughtful. Then the laconic Walter speaks up. He offers to recite the prayer. It will be a short piece, he says, very artistic, thanks precisely to its brevity and depth. Everyone looks at Walter, they all stare incredulously at him and carry on walking along the path that leads to the chapel. A laconic man’s words can always have an artistic side, Riba thinks. “It’s a prayer for writers,” Walter says, with an unnecessarily doleful air. And he tells them it was composed by Samuel Johnson, on the day he signed a contract to write the first complete dictionary of the English language.
Then repeats what he’s just said, in English, despite it not being at all necessary. Walter has a great involuntary sense of humor. At the same time, it’s surprising that even before intoning the funeral prayer, he’s said so much already, even a few unnecessary words. What a waste, Riba thinks. Another long pause. Everyone’s gaze drifts to a bench, the last one on the left shortly before going into the chapel. Two men who look like tramps have just sat down there, two guys who are remarkably pale. “Two stiffs who’ve come out to get some fresh air,” Ricardo says, as if his flowery Polynesian shirt made him feel more alive than anyone else. Laughter.
A gentle evening breeze moves the lilac tree. Actually, Johnson was praying for himself, Walter clarifies. And he says it so naturally it’s as if Johnson were simply one of them. No one in the group has heard of this prayer before. In any case they all think it’s a good idea to use a prayer of Johnson’s to intone a funeral hymn. After all, Walter says, Dr. Johnson is the only person in the world to have dedicated a genuinely brilliant essay to the theme of epitaphs. He himself specialized in them for a while, writing them in verse and giving them to the best tombs in London. So Dr. Johnson seems like the ideal person for this epitaph for the Gutenberg age, Walter says.
Everyone is delighted that Dr. Johnson’s writers’ prayer is the one that will be used as an epitaph for the print age. Everyone that is except Riba, who at the last minute discovers that, as hard as he tries, he can’t identify at all with writers, against whom he actually bears a certain grudge, because when it comes down to it, they’re the involuntary cause of this sorrow that at times reappears in the middle of his recurring nightmare about the cage and God. Deep down, Riba fears that this writers’ prayer is pursuing him and making him regret what he stopped doing, his brain forever pierced by his publisher’s sorrow, by that intimate hydra gnawing away at him.
The wind moves the lilac tree again.
And what’s more, Riba thinks, they’re taking this ceremony too seriously. They don’t realize that the apocalyptic is now, but it was already there back in the mists of time and will still be there when we have gone. A very informal man or feeling is what’s apocalyptic, and doesn’t deserve so much respect. The important thing is not that the print age is foundering. The serious thing is that I am foundering.