June 16th can mean only one thing for literary lovers around the world: Bloomsday. This marks the date that James Joyce’s most enigmatic and provocative novel, Ulysses, is set.
On this day, academics and professionals mingle and exchange esoteric quips alongside other non-academic fans. This mixture of expertise and fanboyism makes for an anomalous literary gathering. New York City fans usually pull out all the stops: 20th century period-themed festivities and readings from the indelible internal monologue of Molly Bloom as she has an orgasm. As a result of the pandemic, Bloomsday will look quite different this June. However, Ulysses lovers can not and will not let this literary holiday and its beloved traditions slip through the cracks this year.
James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who pioneered ground-breaking writing styles and was known for his genius, complexity, and provocative content. It’s ironic Joyce is celebrated on Bloomsday though he infamously disliked the idea of being memorialized. In addition to Ulysses, he published a multitude of works. His most famous include: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake. From a young age, Joyce showed remarkable intelligence alongside a gift for writing and passion for literature. He spent his free time devouring Aquinas, Dante, and Aristotle, and grew up to speak 17 languages including Arabic, Greek, and Sanskrit. Yet, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In 1922, his landmark novel Ulysses was published. This has been dubbed as one of the most revered texts in the modern literary canon. This modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, follows the story of three main characters: struggling artist Stephen Dedalus, Jewish advertisement man Leopold Bloom, and his wife Molly Bloom. The story recounts a single day in Dublin set on June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle had their first date. The three main characters serve as modern versions of Telemachus, Penelope, and Odysseus. The novel is also structured into “episodes” that correspond with particular events in The Odyssey. This work of fiction pegged Joyce as a literary celebrity because of his advanced use of interior monologue and perfected stream-of-consciousness literary technique.
While his prose contributes to the fame of the novel, its notorious controversy helps as well. Ulysses was met with approbation by Joyce’s modernist associates such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound. Simultaneously, it was slapped with anti-obscenity laws, and ridiculed by The United Kingdom and America. Ulysses was banned in the U.S. and considered contraband for over a decade until the famous obscenity court case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses in 1933 lifted the ban.
The UK also banned the novel until the mid-1930s for its explicit sexuality and graphic depiction of bodily functions. It represents a major cultural shift for society when a novel that was once described by a critic as “full of the filthiest blasphemies” is now a classic with an international holiday.
Joyce remains eternal through his writing and brilliance. With a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat of an egomaniac, Joyce famously noted about Ulysses that “I’ve put so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries, arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”
When discussing Joyce, Upper school English teacher Gregory Grene shared a deeply insightful critique: “I think he’s absolutely brilliant, no question, but he’s also flawed. I think his writing suggests that he didn’t always distinguish between brilliant and self-indulgent. He wrote, and re-wrote, to an incredible extent. But it feels like he was pretty resistant to editing. I think Finnegans Wake is a monument to self-indulgence, and there are significant stretches of Ulysses that are too. He can fall into a kind of safe place of mocking rather than creating; he makes fun of his immediate precursors/fellow writers without recognizing how profound an influence they were, and how remarkable their originality was. I’m thinking in particular of Synge and Yeats, and even Lady Gregory, who between them created something utterly new in their synthesis of Irish myth and national consciousness, whereas by the time he gets to Ulysses and beyond, on occasion Joyce can feel like he’s treading along a path innovated by Laurence Sterne, the 18th-century Irish writer who to an extent pioneered the Joycean metafictional foregrounding of the authorial voice. At times I miss the sheer imagination of Joyce’s forebears; I get his claim that he produces something more real, that the fantastic is reserved for journalism, but I miss the creative exuberance and élan of Fielding, Austen or Eliot.”
Keeping the whole man in mind, one must be wary of the culturally constructed pedestal that Joyce sits on. Bloomsday celebrations are often criticized for their saint-like worship of Joyce and how the stigma around Ulysses is revered first and comprehended later. The celebrity and cultural capital of Joyce’s “brand” takes its form on Bloomsday. This year, without all the pomp and circumstance, fans have the time to rediscover Joyce’s prose through a more private and immersive experience. Perhaps quarantine is the best thing that’s ever happened to Bloomsday. June 16th, 2020 could be more fulfilling than that instagram pictures of bar hopping from one Irish pub to another, dressed up in a heavily pleated early 20th century dress. So sit down and soak up his writing, watch the performances and continue to engage in discourse.
