James Joyce’s words haunt Dublin. It doesn’t need his bones

When James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, the Irish government’s chief diplomat in Switzerland contacted the secretary of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin to inform him of the news. “Please wire details about Joyce’s death,” responded the secretary. “If possible find out if he died a Catholic? Express sympathy with Mrs Joyce and explain inability to attend funeral.”

Consequently, no official representative of the Irish state was present at the burial of one of the century’s most significant cultural figures, and probably the most celebrated Irishman in history.

Joyce’s relationship with his country was famously vexed. He left for good in his early 20s, driven out – “exiled”, as he himself liked to put it – by its spiritual impoverishment, its relentless oppression of those who tried to live and think beyond its parochial norms. Ulysses was never officially banned in Ireland for the simple reason that no bookseller was reckless enough to attempt getting it through customs. And yet for all the world-encircling magnitude of his genius, the universality of his themes, it was Ireland, and specifically Dublin, that remained the inexhaustible subject of his work. When he was asked toward the end of his life whether he would ever consider returning to the place, he answered: “Have I ever left it?”

This question of return has lately been raised again, in the form of two Dublin city councillors, Dermot Lacey and Paddy McCartan, proposing a motion to seek the repatriation of his remains in time for the centenary of Ulysses’s publication in 2022. There is no evidence that Joyce himself ever expressed a desire to be buried in the country of his birth, but the councillors cited an apparent effort by his widow Nora in the late 1940s to have his remains returned to Dublin. “The benefit of this,” said Lacey, “is that you’re honouring someone’s last wishes.” But of course the honouring of Nora’s wishes – evidence for which, as the Joyce scholar Sam Slote pointed out in the Irish Times, is not all that compelling – was hardly the true motivation for digging up her husband’s earthly remains and sticking them on the next Ryanair flight out of Zurich. “I’m not going to be cynical about bones,” Lacey said, before immediately going on to be quite cynical about bones: “I think it’s something Joycean lovers would appreciate. I don’t want to calculate something like this in shillings and pence but I don’t think it would do any harm. I think it would do some good.”

There is a distasteful irony to this whole idea. Joyce could neither live nor work in the Ireland of his time – a suffocating theocracy that foreclosed every possibility of freedom: intellectual, sexual and existential. “Do you know what Ireland is?” as Stephen Dedalus puts it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” A century after the publication of Ulysses, capitalism – which has since supplanted Catholicism as Ireland’s officially professed faith – has come to see the value of Joyce and his work, and he has taken his place in the pantheon of Irish brands, as a sort of Arthur Guinness of literary modernism. The old sow wants the bones of her farrow back, because there is still some meat to gnaw on.

Not that it seems particularly likely to happen. As Fritz Senn, director of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, has pointed out, in the absence of any compelling evidence that this is what Joyce would have wanted, there is little incentive for the Swiss to give up his body: “I think there would certainly be some resistance because, after all, Joyce is one of the major tourist attractions that people come to see. Many people go to his grave so there would be an issue.” It’s also worth remembering that any plan to remove the body from the family plot would first have to be approved by the writer’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, a literary executor so legendarily unaccommodating that he once informed a performance artist that he’d infringed on copyright by merely memorising passages of Finnegans Wake.

If Dublin city council were to somehow pass the resolution, and then somehow convince the Irish government to seek the repatriation of Joyce’s body, and if the Irish government in turn were to somehow convince the Swiss authorities to relinquish it from their soil, what would happen? What would happen, we can be confident, is that Joyce’s body would become one more tourist trap in a city that is essentially a gigantic tax loophole filled with tourists in expensive raingear and homeless bodies in sleeping bags. What would happen is that it would become one more way for Dublin to present itself as a literary mecca, while in reality transitioning into a cultural wasteland where creative spaces are closing down to make way for more hotels, where artists can’t afford to live due to a brutal and unregulated rental market – one presided over by a ruling party, Fine Gael, many of whose parliamentary members are also landlords.

What would happen is that Joyce’s bones would bring more tourists to a city that, were he alive today, he would still have to leave because he couldn’t afford to live in it. And what would furthermore happen, I may as well warn you now, is that I would personally dig up those bones in the dead of night, haul them into eternity along Sandymount strand, and heave them into the snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea.

Related: Bid to repatriate James Joyce's remains ahead of Ulysses centenary

The fact, in any case, is that to remove those bones from Zurich and put them in the ground beneath Dublin would be in some fundamental sense a meaningless gesture. Joyce’s presence in this city is already radically overdetermined, overbearing in its intimacy and immanence. If you care about his actual work, as opposed to the subsidiary revenue streams it might represent, Dublin is entirely inseparable from Joyce. I am writing this, for instance, in the National Library, where one of the chapters of Ulysses is set, and although I work here almost every day, it’s impossible for me to walk through the front entrance, where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom passed each other without acknowledgment on the afternoon of 16 June 1904, and not experience a small ectoplasmic frisson.

The same is true of countless places I, as a Dubliner, encounter every day, such as the large Georgian house on the quays I walk by with my son on the way to school, a house that is abandoned and crumbling like so many other buildings in a city in the throes of a housing crisis, and which happens to be where the short story The Dead is set.

Even in his absence, there is no getting away from Joyce. The whole city of Dublin is haunted by his words. Let Zurich keep his bones.

• Mark O’Connell is a writer based in Dublin and author of To Be a Machine