Celebrating Bloomsday

Fans of James Joyce descend on Dublin each year to commemorate a single day, Thursday 16^th June 1904, the date in which Ulysses was set. It also commemorates Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, later to be his wife. Ulysses was an ambitious undertaking, in which Joyce juxtaposed the ordinary with the extraordinary. The narrative captures the thoughts and experiences of Leopold Bloom as he progresses around the city over one very long day, using the model of the Ulysses legend. The three main characters are Leopold Bloom (based on Ulysses), Stephen Dedalus, a brooding young writer who appeared in the earlier semi-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Leopold’s unfaithful wife Molly, very loosely based on Penelope and thought to be inspired by Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle. 

Joyce was writing at a particular time, nearing the end of three hundred years of colonialism. Irish intellectuals were searching for an identity distinct from empire, a way for Irish people to express themselves. Suppression of the traditional way of life and loss of the native language had created a sense of dislocation. Irish people were, ‘everywhere and nowhere, scattered across the earth and yet feeling like strangers in their own land’ (Kibberd 1995: 328). The Irish language had become a symbol of inferiority, but English did not offer an adequate means of expression. To quote Stephen Dedalus, ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine …I cannot speak these words without an unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar to him will always be for me an acquired speech …My soul frets in the shadow of his language’. (Joyce 1916: 274.) 

Joyce’s position is more ambiguous than some contemporaries. He feels the impact of colonialism but is ambivalent at best about participating in a national project. He wanted to create a new writing form, appropriate to people’s experience. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Joyce explored the growing consciousness of Stephen, using first person narrative. In Ulysses he used the technique of mythical realism, combining mythical stories with mundane ordinary events. He rejected the notion of the linear progress of history, and used overlapping chronology, giving different perspectives and incorporating different, diverse voices. Thoughts wander, leaping to conclusions, or dwelling on memories, bypassing conventional, chronological storytelling. The style also adapts to the character: Stephen’s thoughts are philosophical, while Leopold Bloom’s are more prosaic and grounded and Molly’s soliloquy of thoughts at the end of the day is without punctuation, as she lies reminiscing on the bed next to her husband. 

The Hiberno-English dialect and explicit, bawdy language was controversial at the time, causing bafflement and outrage. Ulysses was eventually published in 1922 but was banned in the United States and United Kingdom and for many years was read only by scholars. The first known Bloomsday celebration was in Dublin in 1954, when a small group of literary friends, including the poet Patrick Kavanagh, marked the fiftieth anniversary with a tour of the landmarks mentioned in the novel, retracing the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, role-playing scenes along the way. Their journey, a blend of highbrow literary appreciation and lowbrow revelry, ended early and in drunken disarray.

Celebrations were muted until 1982, the centenary of Joyce’s birth, when RTE (Radio Telefis Eireann) transmitted a continuous 30 hour dramatic performance of the entire text of the novel. By the late 1980s Bloomsday was an established annual event, with a five month festival from April to August 2004. Now, the day is celebrated around the world and Dublin hosts a week long festival with events throughout the city, from readings and dramatisations, to city tours and pub crawls, starting with a breakfast of ‘grilled mutton kidneys’. Many enthusiasts dress in Edwardian costume, sporting the straw boater as worn by Joyce or the iconic bowler hat worn by Leopold Bloom. Intellectuals and revellers mingle: the bawdy and the profound are both represented.

Perhaps this is an appropriate way to commemorate a novel that gave voice to the ordinary. Joyce wrote about a particular place at a particular time but as he said, ‘In the particular is contained the universal.’ Bloomsday is an annual reminder of an iconic text and an opportunity to inspire new generations to read and listen to the words. 

Dymphna Crowe

Joyce, James. (1914) Dubliners, Penguin.

Joyce, James. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, B W Huebsch US.

Joyce, James. (1922) Ulysses, Paris.

Joyce, James. (1922) Finnegans Wake, Faber and Faber.

Kibberd, D. (1995) Inventing Ireland, Vintage.

Clips from a BBC production of Ulysses

An interactive map of James Joyce's Dublin from June 16, 1904, the date on which the novel Ulysses (1922) is set.