What is Bloomsday Buffalo?
by Laurance Shine
Also see Bloomsdays Past & Present by Sam Slote

  What is Bloomsday? It's easier to say what it's not. It's not academic, for instance, and it's not for literary snobs, although they're welcome to join in too as long as they keep their noses down. Like the book it celebrates, Ulysses (1922), the greatest novel of our times and of our manners, Bloomsday is a universal phenomenon with a particular history.

In cities around the world on this day, citizens and subjects are gathering to conjure from the depths of the century the day of June 16th, 1904, and the troubled city of Dublin, Ireland. Some of those cities, such as Toronto and Sydney, have turned Bloomsday into a week-long midsummer Carnival, complete with re-enactments of scenes at graveyards, in pubs, along beaches, with period dress, 1904 beer prices and dishes that suit the palate of a middle-aging, unhappily married commercial traveler (e.g., fried pork kidneys). Because now we are in all cities, in the company of Everyman and his relatives and enemies. Bloomsday is named after the doubtful hero of this living fiction, Leopold Bloom, a knight of infinite doubt, the commercial traveler as Everyman and Noman.

Like the Greek hero Odysseus, Bloom is a survivor, canny and prudent. He's both Jewish and Irish, or neither (his mother is a Higgins). He is also exiled from his home on this June day while a usurper visits his wife Molly Bloom (I said it was a novel). Maybe his exile has lasted the ten years since the death of his only son Rudy led to the cessation of sexual relations with his wife. So he's in search of a son, in search of a lost fatherhood, in search of a home. In the middle of this modern quandary of loss he finds on this day a kind of son in the grieving, melancholy, poor, and brilliant Stephen Dedalus, the black-clad figure of a younger James Joyce mourning the recent death of his mother.

The end of all journeys is to meet oneself and see for the first time. The communion of sonless father and motherless son is consummated late at night in Bloom's house in Eccles Street, "as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct, the creature cocoa." They talk and they part ways and, with "envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity," he joins his wife Molly in bed, his head at the opposite end to hers, kisses her rump, narrates a kind of history of the day, and falls asleep, "the childman weary, the manchild in the womb."

Womb? Weary?
He rests. He has travelled..

    - Laurence Shine