Last year it was a satellite link-up with other groups around the globe. This year, after a breakfast of kidneys and tea, the Buenos Aires James Joyce Society will have an all-day reading of the whole of Ulysses, Joyce's mammoth work. They always say it's a book to be read aloud, if at all. Anyone with a smattering of English can come along, if only for the Bailey's Irish Cream and Guinness Cake served afterwards. There'll be republican songs and plenty of laughter as veterans, kids, the Irish ambassador and any waif or stray willing to read a page or two of pregnant prose are made welcome. It's like a second St Patrick's Day, only more cerebral.
It may seem odd that a city some 9,000 miles from Dublin will today join the Bloomsday celebrations, when Joyce's admirers remember his famously difficult work. But the Irish get around. They began arriving in Argentina in about 1825; some were landowners, others were escaping poverty and dreaming of a new start. The eventual result was an Irish-Argentine community with its own jumbled identity: they speak Spanish and English with an Irish lilt, and even Gaelic; they read Borges and Beckett with equal incomprehension, and wash down elaborate barbecues with imported stout and Jameson's whiskey. There are Irish schools, radio shows and a newspaper and, once a year, an uneven game of hurling in a very English town called Hurlingham.
So is the Joyce gathering simply a case of the sons of exiles tapping into the old country? "Not really," says Mike Geraghty, who runs the Buenos Aires Joyce society. "It's not about Ireland or Irishness. Joyce is a universal figure and he appeals to all kinds of people. We have psychoanalysts who enjoy the symbolism, a music teacher who likes the sound, and Joyceans who love decoding all the possible meanings. There's a bookseller who's been reading Joyce for 40 years and he still doesn't understand him. Joyce is also a good laugh. If the Irish come on Bloomsday, it's for a jar, not for Joyce."
Outside literary circles, a jar is what Ireland is most famous for. The Irish in Buenos Aires now also have their own pubs, and it is here that locals of Latin stock are discovering their own essential Irishness. It goes beyond the local partiality to "the inner organs of beasts and fowls, giblet soup, nutty gizzards", which Joyce's Bloom so loved for the faint taste of urine they left on his palate.
The Irish pub movement began in 1973, when Down Town [ Matacute;] as opened. The owner, Eamon Horam, wanted to "show people here that there weren't only pubs in England. Because, unlike the English, the Irish settled in the country and married the natives, so they didn't stand out like the English or other groups". Horam had been in New York and San Francisco, where third-generation descendants like himself popped down to the pub for a beer after work. "I wanted a cosy place, where people were not just clients, but regulars. The wives would come here once a month too. We had pub meals for lunch and called time religiously at half past ten." This in a city where people go out at midnight for a coffee. Horam served pints to Rod Stewart and Jack and Bobby Charlton in 1978, when Argentina hosted the World Cup, as his was the only place designed with foreigners in mind.
Then came the Druid In (the missing "n" prevents the name exceeding the number seven, magic for Celts) and The Shamrock. While the former is modelled on the standard pub lounge, the latter is simply a fashionable bar that uses the famous symbol and an adman's image of Irish warmth. The place is packed with young women keen to meet gringos and practise their English. As they don't consume much, they are charged a $7 fee, redeemable in drinks, while heavy-drinking foreigners, usually men, are waved through free of charge. The owner, Jack Murphy, describes the place as "the biggest dating agency in Latin America".
The definitive version arrived only last year when a consortium backed by Guinness opened The Kilkenny. This theme-park pub has the words The Irish Pub pasted on its signs outside just so nobody is confused about its function. The interior, brought in containers from Ireland, is similarly unsubtle: barrels, snugs, a fake stove, rustics' heads on the toilet doors, harp symbols and lots of fake wood. These are the pubs you see all over Europe, but this export from the fashionable New Ireland is a novelty here, and locals, ignoring the allusions to rural harmony, make as much noise as possible learning to sink pints of Guinness, brewed in Chile from Andean streams. A talented local band called Urban Soul play at weekends on a small stage in the corner.
Not everyone is impressed by these reconstructions. Writing in the local English language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, under the headline, The Commodification of Irishness, Cork-born Brian Daughton argued that "cod Irish pubs play on bogus myths of Irishness and Ireland. The stereotyping is reductionist and of a limited tonal range."
It's not all beer and bustle, though. There is also a boom in Celtic folklore and music, with kilt-clad local bands like Amergin, The Shepherds, Bran and Kells playing harps and penny whistles to slapping, clapping audiences of young Argentines reared on pop and rock. Latin America, with its own complex folk traditions, might seem the last place you'd expect to hear reels, jigs, and misty, mournful Celtic music, but there is actually a regular scene here.
Manuel Castro, an Argentine bagpiper turned promoter, is the president of the Celtic League of Argentina and has been a force behind the revival. He believes that end-of-century Celtic culture is a response to certain needs: "First comes the music, then the history and the suffering of the people, and then the philosophy, which brings man closer to nature and to himself. There is for Celts an almost excessive love of freedom, based on tribes or clans, not empires or nations. I'm first a Celt and then an Argentine."
There are inter esting parallels between Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's most influential author. What Joyce called "the uncreated conscience of my race" was, for Borges, the sense of "myth" lacked by a young nation. Both laboured to provide their countrymen with vivid accounts of the national psyche and both have been exploited by the marketers. All the talk of the Celtic tiger and a new businesslike attitude in Ireland means everything is saleable, exportable. The Bloomsday event is a genuine act of homage, but in every bogus pub Joyce and other Irish literati are to be found framed amid the frosted glass and faux oak beams.
Joyce himself poked fun at Ireland's sense of itself as a place of legends, cosy hearths and songs of loss and regret. Ulysses is a study in complexity, a testimony to the multiple meanings words, things and events can have - the Ireland and the Irish people it portrays are shifting concepts, wide open to interpretation, vividly local yet universally valid. Hence the hundreds of Joyce societies, and the continued reading of the hardest book this century.
As for the export version, Joyce would probably have laughed at both the businessmen and the fiddlers. Ireland: The Argentine Experience could be described as a complex postmodern tapestry of nostalgia and reconstruction, as a society and culture are theme-parked and sold off. Aidan Gallaghan, a history teacher from Limerick who has lived in Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, had only one brief comment: "It's all a load of bollocks," he said. "Utter bollocks!"
