Today is Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, whose action takes place on June 16th, 1904. It’s called Bloomsday because the main character in the book is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad salesman who lives on the north side of Dublin. Bloom is introduced in the fourth chapter of Ulysses; he eats breakfast and serves his wife breakfast in bed.
Bloom doesn’t have much work to do on June 16th, so he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing errands. In the morning, he leaves his house on 7 Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn’t know very well. In the afternoon, he eats a cheese sandwich, feeds some gulls in the Liffey, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son; he muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is planning to cheat on him that afternoon at his house, and he spends a lot of time thinking about the days when his marriage was happier.
In the evening, Bloom wanders around the red-light district of Dublin, and eventually meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is drunk, so Bloom takes him home with him and offers to let him spend the night. They stand outside looking at the stars for a while, and then Stephen goes home and Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife. While he sleeps, she meditates on her life and marriage.
It doesn't sound like much when you summarize the plot but it stands as unquestionably the greatest novel of the 20th century and one of the greatest of any century. The simple plot serves an extraordinary and various play with language.
The story is partly inspired by GIambattista Vico, who believed that history was cyclical, and everything old is new again. So Ulysses is structured as a modern parallel to Homer's Odyssey, but with the heroic replaced by the quotidian.
The different sections of the novel parallel the incidents of the Odyssey. For instance, the Oxen of the Sun episode takes place in a hospital where a baby is being born, and is written in a series of styles that parallel the development of English writing styles, beginning with prehistoric grunts, and progressing through the styles of identifiable authors throughout history. So in addition to being about the birth of a child, it is also about the birth of language. Bloom's visit to the red light district parallels the Circe episode in Homer and is written in the style of a surreal play.
While Joyce did not invent stream of consciousness, his use of it in Ulysses made it A Thing. paving the way for other writers like Virginia Woolf. It also made Ulysses the subject of a ban for obscenity. After all, people think about sex, so sex is part of the consciousness stream of several characters, especially Molly Bloom.
Because of the sexual thoughts, no commercial publisher would touch it. The first edition was printed by a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. Picking up a copy and smuggling it back into the US became a popular activity for American tourists. Eventually, Random House acquired the US rights and brought a civil case for the right to publish it unexpurgated.
The case United States vs. One Book Called Ulysses is a landmark in First Amendment law, and opened the door for importation of a wide variety of serious literature, unbowdlerized.
Joyce chose June 16, 1904, as the date for his novel because it was on that day that he went on his first date with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle.
He gave the first printed copy of Ulysses to Nora, but she tried to sell it to a friend visiting from Dublin. She only read 27 pages of the book, including the title page. She once asked Joyce, “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?”
On June 16, 1924, the 20th anniversary of Bloomsday, Joyce wrote in his notebook, “Twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date?” Today, it is a national holiday in Ireland, and hundreds of people carrying copies of the book are rushing around Dublin to visit all the locations in the order described. It takes slightly more than one day.
Back in the days when I thought I was smart, I scored well enough on the SAT verbal to exempt the mandatory composition classes at Georgia Tech and replace them with more interesting ones. I took one in 18th century literature and another about Joyce. I found both of them, but especially the Joyce class, so interesting that I started reading things other than science fiction. The professor for that class died a week into the semester so it was taken over by a guy who pretty much invented it on the fly and was heavy on discussion.
A few years later, when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I was close enough to Canada to listen to Canadian radio. On Bloomsday in 1982, Radio Eirann broadcast a dramatic reading of Ulysses, the whole thing in one day. It was simulcast on the CBC and I listened to most of it (I had to go to class every now and again). It was a remarkable thing. With actors taking on the various characters, sound effects and a soundtrack, it sat somewhere between an audiobook and a radio drama.
The performance was subsequently public domained by RTE, and anyone who wants can download it and listen on the Internet Archive. Don't try to cram it all into today. But do listen to it a chapter at a time and see what one of history's greatest authors greatest book is all about.
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