The meaning of nowhere

Cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, colourful – in a word a 'Europiccola' – Aoife Carrigy is lured to Trieste by the magic of James Joyce

Trieste is not an obvious destination of choice. For those of you who are wondering, it's in northern Italy, a fact that comes as news to 70 per cent of Italians (who, in a recent poll, couldn't identify which European country it belonged to). It was Molly Bloom who first suggested to me that I visit the place. In his positioning of her soliloquy, Joyce gave Molly the last word in what was to become the seminal novel of the twentieth century. Or at least he almost did. Molly's 60-page-long internal monologue, whose hypnotic rhythms climax in her ecstatically affirmative "yes I said yes I will Yes", is in fact followed by these further, final words: Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921. This invocation of the three home-from-homes in which Ulysses was written points to their significance for the writer, and stirred in this reader a curiosity to know more of the relationship between place and page.

Just over a hundred years ago, the young James Joyce, who would eventually become one of this nation's greatest cultural exports, decided that "no one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland", and for the sake of his personal and artistic integrity, chose a life of voluntary exile from the city he was to spend the rest of his days writing of. Spurred by the desire to "fly by the nets" of language, religion and nationality, Joyce traded the limits of his Dublin life for the opportunity of exploring a more plural identity that the cities of continental Europe seemed to offer. Chasing an elusive teaching post, his journey took him deeper into the "tarry easty" than he had expected – through London, past Paris, Zurich and Ljubljana and on to the city of Trieste, the backdrop against which he would write Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his play Exiles and many early chapters of Ulysses.

Later he would question why destiny had chosen Trieste for him. It was not love at first sight: "I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages," he declared of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Trieste was still the key strategic seaport. His brother may have dismissed its influence – "Trieste did not give Jim anything" – but John McCourt, an Irishman living in today's Trieste and one of the key figures responsible for its annual Joyce summer school and recently-opened Museo Joyce, convincingly argues otherwise in The Years Of Bloom, his evocative account of Joyce's years here and the influence they had on the man and his works.

To understand what Trieste offered Joyce, one must understand clearly where Trieste is. Described by Dante as the 'end of Italy', this Adriatic port is nestled 100 miles east of Venice in a region bordered today by Austria and Slovenia and their neighbours Switzerland, Hungary and Croatia. Its strategic geographical positioning as 'la porta d'Oriente', the gateway to the Orient that lay south and east of here, led the Austro-Hungarian empire to redevelop it from a small mediaeval town into a thriving handsome multi-cultural port. The local dialect Triestino is a testament to the cosmopolitan nature of the city in its nineteenth-century heyday; mixing elements of Italian dialects with Armenian, English, Spanish, Turkish, Sicilian, Maltese, German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech and Greek, it was the hybrid creation of 'el gran mismas dela gente per le strade' (the great coming and going of the people in the streets).

In 1909, a visiting Viennese playwright remarked that he felt he was "nowhere at all"; in the early twentieth century, Trieste was 'nowhere', in the sense of being no one place, but rather, many places in one, or as Joyce would dub it, a "Europiccola". In his interaction with his students and his immersion in the vibrant cultural life of the city, Joyce placed himself at the centre of this cross-roads. A far cry then from the 'paralysis' of Dublin, although this city on the sea surrounded by mountains with its six hundred watering-holes and its tug-of-war between irredentist subjects and imperialist rulers evoked obvious echoes. Here, 'Jimmy the chapel-goer' (who regularly frequented the city's many places of worship) could observe a multitude of languages, religions and nationalities while remaining, through his own foreignness, free to fly by their nets.

These nets were soon to tighten however, and having spent 11 out of the 16 years between 1904 and 1920 in Trieste, Joyce eventually departed. WW1 saw the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and of Trieste into Italian hands. It would change hands five times in the twentieth century, being juggled between Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and Tito's Yugoslavia before the Allies finally delivered it back to Italy in 1954, minus its surrounding hinterland. However, if post-WWI Italy had no real use for it as a port, the resulting decline, which saw massive emigration, was later compounded by its peripheral positioning in the post-WWII redrafting of political borders in Europe.

As Frederico Pacorini, a leading local businessman, has explained, "the geographic centrality of Trieste was nullified by the borders" and with no new influx of people, trade or investment, Trieste fell victim to economic paralysis. The crossroads had become a cul-de-sac at the end of the Western world.

This port city, defined by the routes that passed through it and by the exchanges that took place on those routes, was no longer McCourt's "oriental workshop" in which the epic Ulysses could be born, but an end-of-the-line town that inspired travel-writer Jan Morris's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.

Trieste has been, as Morris puts it, "obliged to accept whatever history decided for it", and twentieth century history has not been kind. Recent decades have seen a change of fortune, however, with the fall of the Iron Curtain that had overshadowed the hinterland for so long and the latest redrawing of Europe's borders allowing Trieste regain a more strategic positioning. Ricardo Illy, former mayor and current President of the region, is optimistic about Trieste's role as a "gateway to the new Europe", seeing a return once more "from the periphery to a port at the centre of Europe, on the border between old and new Europe".

Certainly for today's budget flights generation of Irish travellers, Trieste's main attraction lies in its proximity to harder to reach destinations in neighbouring Slovenia and Croatia, but as this haunting old port and its illustrious ghosts are continuing to prove, this is a gateway worth lingering in.

?More www.jamesjoyce.ie. Trieste Joyce School, 26 June-2 July 2005