Moochin Photoman
Rachel
This is not Nora Barnacle. She may not even look like Nora—I don’t know and I won’t search out a photo of her to find out, because this is how Nora should have looked. A strong-featured face, intelligent with an afterthought sort of beauty that’s more compelling than the studied kind. This is a face to inspire novels.
In June of 1904 Nora Barnacle, a baker’s daughter from Galway working as a chambermaid in Finn’s Hotel in Dublin, met James Joyce and thereby sparked some 265,000 words of dense and sparkling prose—widely acknowledged as the most brilliant novel that nobody reads. Four short months after she met Joyce, Nora, wearing a borrowed coat, boarded a ship for France. She didn’t tell her parents, she didn’t notify her employer at the hotel, she just left that priest-ridden island for the life of a writer’s mistress in Paris. She stayed with Joyce 37 years, and if the years weren’t all happy they were, at least, legendary.
Now Nora Barnacle is immortal in the form of Molly Bloom, center of the Ulysses constellation, immortal for saying yes. …and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
This is not Nora Barnacle. But it could be and don’t you wish she was?
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
