(Deirdre Mulrooney’s article appeared in The Irish Times, 6/21.)
James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was a remarkable dancer – something that has been buried in her troubled historye
Lucia Joyce, born to James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste in 1907, has captured the imagination of many writers and artists as tragic muse. Film-makers, dramatists and novelists have projected everything from Mills & Boon-style narratives where the real protagonists are famous male writers – Samuel Beckett, one of Joyce’s many boyfriends; and her father – for whom she is just a bridge, to unfounded stories of incest and child abuse, to comic-strip extravaganzas.
How did Lucia get to be such a supine, empty space? Apart from Carol Loeb Shloss’s groundbreaking and controversial 2003, biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, you don’t hear much about the facts of Joyce the dancer, who once declared in exasperation, “C’est moi qui est l’artiste,” or “It’s me who’s the artist.” I’m most intrigued by Lucia Joyce the artist in her own right, of whom the Paris Times remarked, in 1928: “When she reaches her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father.”
With her impressive avant-garde dance training, Joyce would have had a lot to contribute to the Abbey Theatre Ballets
