Bloomsdays Past and Present
by Sam Slote < Back

The first celebration of Bloomsday - June 16, the day James Joyce's Ulysses takes place - was a bit late: June 27, 1929. The event was a luncheon to commemorate both Bloomsday and the publication of the French translation of Ulysses earlier that year. It was an overly proper affair; Samuel Beckett, then just a young writer, seems to be the only person who enjoyed the luncheon as he spent most of the occasion drunk.

Fortunately, now Bloomsday festivities are no longer quite so formal. Bloomsday is an occasion of much celebration for Joyce enthusiasts, whether professional academics or not, the world over. The biannual International James Joyce Symposium is held on or near this date (this year it will be in Trieste, a city Joyce lived in for over ten years). Besides the academic gatherings, many cities all over the world hold their own Bloomsday festivities, which include readings from Joyce's book as well as, with the more ambitious celebrations, carnivalesque re-enactments of various scenes. Ulysses is apparently one of those few books that maintains both "intellectual credibility" and popular appeal (well, of a sort - I doubt however that Ulysses Action Figures will be making an appearance any time soon).

Ulysses, among many other things, celebrates the travails of Leopold Bloom, a relatively ordinary man who comes to the aid of Stephen Dedalus, a young man with artistic leanings who is going through a bit of a tough spell in his life (Stephen is, roughly, a fictionalized portrait of Joyce as a young man). Just as Joyce celebrates Bloom in Ulysses, Bloomsday is a celebration of Ulysses, a double celebration then. Ulysses takes an ordinary man and makes him a hero, with kindness being the heroic ideal of the modern age. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is subjected to the most detailed scrutiny any fictional character has ever undergone. We see Bloom defecate, fart, masturbate, urinate, but, above all else, we see him think. Bloom has a remarkable ability to empathize. When we first see him as he is preparing breakfast he tries to imagine how his cat perceives him. At first he thinks that he must seem like a giant to her, but then he corrects himself when he realizes how high the cat can jump. This level of empathy and humility stands in stark contrast to Stephens sullen solipsism.

Each chapter or episode of Ulysses is written in a different style. But through all its exercise of styles, Ulysses never loses sight of the humanity of its protagonists. Bloom might, on occasion, seem like a clown, but he is a decent man. One of the enduing strengths of Ulysses is how its complicated style enhances ones appreciation of Bloom's decency. For all the talk about the difficulty of Ulysses, it is actually a fairly simple book. To be sure, it is a very intricate and learned book: the profusion of styles and the quantity of allusions to Dublin street topography, Irish history, Shakespeare, Aristotle, and so on makes it seem somewhat inaccessible to many readers. However, all these difficulties are really just epiphenomena to Ulysses, they are not central. In short, Ulysses is about the lives of a few people in Dublin in 1904, but the experiences these people undergo, which are largely mundane, reflect the trials, tribulations, infidelities, missed opportunities, unfulfilled promises, odd coincidences, small satisfactions, and pleasant joys we all aspire to.

Responding to some criticism of Ulysses, and there was a lot when it was first published, Joyce said that if Ulysses isn't worth reading, then life isn't worth living. Joyce once famously said that he put so many riddles in his works that they would keep the professors busy for three centuries. The ever-proliferating list of specialized books on Joyce certainly bears witness to this pronouncement. But it is not the riddles that explain Ulysses popularity. Ulysses has appeal to more than those who feel compelled to explain, for example, the "ineluctable modality of the visible" that Stephen contemplates in the third episode. Ulysses is about life. This may sound trite, and it is trite, but then so is life. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen proclaims that the goal of the artist is "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." In Ulysses Joyce does just that; everyday experience becomes something more while still remaining, well, everyday. That is what is celebrated on Bloomsday: life and the art that James Joyce made out of it. Bloomsday, then, is not about scholars and their work, it is about the joys of reading, specifically the joys of reading Ulysses.

— Sam Slote