Home late without a middle name and reluctant to brave the cold in search of a stranger, I resort to the internet. I decide to google famous people born on this day. I have a choice between the pop star Shakira and James Joyce. I settle on James Joyce (and by accident his wife Nora).
Had he not suffered from a perforated ulcer, James Joyce would have been 130 today (he was fond of his birthday and published both A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ulysses on the 2nd February). His middle names are generally recorded as Augustine Aloysius but should you go back to his birth certificate you will find it registered in the female form. Why this should be is unclear. Possibly a misspelling. In Ulysses, Joyce makes use of this peculiarity by referring to "the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom".
Stranger still appears to be the choice of Nora's parents. Did her registrar suffer a slip-of-the-pen too? However, research shows that it was not uncommon in Catholic countries for people to be given a saint's name of the opposite sex and the husband of the Virgin Mary and earthly father of Jesus Christ is as good as any. Sadly, they clearly both felt funny about their gender-bending middle names and got rid of them on any official documents when they moved to Switzerland.
Perhaps they should have just swapped.
(Shakira's middle name, and indeed her last, remain a mystery.)
No comments:
Post a Comment