The jolly procession, gaily dressed and merrily inebriated with pints of Guinness, meanders like a voluptuous river across Dublin’s streets. Many of us are attired in Edwardian costumes, cocking hats, rustling silk gowns — bosom revealing and long flowing. We start at Martello Tower Sandycove, will go on to Sandymount beach and Davy Byrne’s pub, the National Library, Ormond Hotel and No. 7 Eccles Street. Carrying tattered copies of Ulysses , thousands of Joyce aficionados will re-live a day in the life of Leopold Bloom — the wandering hero of the epic novel. Clocking close to a thousand pages, James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece chronicles the journey and rendezvous of this Dublin character in one single day — June 16, 1904. It is estimated that Bloom covered 18 miles of Dublin in his wanderings — on foot, in tram and in horse driven carriage. Most of the landmarks described in Ulysses are still intact.
Joyce’s city
Dublin as a city is immortalised in Ulysses . Yet this was a city Joyce was “sick, sick, sick of” — “the city of failure, rancour and unhappiness”. Never respected or published in Ireland, Joyce’s dislike for Dublin was matched by vituperative criticism of the novel by his countrymen who described him as “a lunatic pervert who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine”. Joyce, a writer in exile, spending most of his years in Paris, Trieste and Zurich, never did really get away from Dublin in spirit, though he never ever returned to Ireland.
Yet today, Joyce is hailed in Ireland as one of the greatest writers of the 20 Century and “Joyce industry” works overtime to popularise his works. Come Bloomsday, the James Joyce Centre dedicated to the great author, Irish Writers Museum, many other literary organisations, Guinness, Davy Byrne and a number of pubs vie with each other to recreate Leopold Bloom’s odyssey. The day is marked with colourful pageantry and revelry, songs, dance and drink, theatrical enactments, seminars and symposiums.
An interesting part of Bloomsday celebration is “offal” breakfast with grilled sheep kidney and fried liver since Bloom relished “eating the inner organs of beasts and fowls’’. When we actually enter the pub, most of us rush towards breakfast cereals and milk and Denny’s sausages — food for the fainthearted.
However, it is the read aloud sessions that steal the show. Some of the passages are accessible to the listener. The city is reconstructed, its smells and sounds captured, the rhythm of life felt palpably in Joyce’s forensically detailed Dublin. The sonorous prose very often rises to great poetic heights.
But many others are dense. While we stand and listen attentively to a reading from the chapter — “Nestor”, the reader’s words flowing in perfect intonation — “Glorious pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed the Planters’ covenant. The black North and true blue bible.” We shake our heads and try to hide our puzzled expressions behind fake smiles.
Ulysses is considered one of the most significant literary works of the 20 Century but few attempt to read it or go beyond a chapter or two. Over pints of Guinness, both the Irish and non-Irish revellers admit to daunting difficulties they encounter in “chaosmos” that Ulysses is. Most of us find it labyrinthine and cerebral, and unable to decipher the welter of allusions to elements both Irish or ancient history. The prose is experimental, unpatterned alternation between objective narrative and stream of consciousness techniques confounds the reader completely.
In the meantime another reader has begun reciting the following passage:
“A *lex eterna* stays about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.”
Perhaps one should attempt to decipher meanings with the help of a guide book.
Over our gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy, the three Marys — Mary Kennedy, Mary Mackenna and Mary Carroll whom I have befriended share their experience in a Joyce study group last year, “to learn what is Homeric or heroic about an ordinary ad salesman’s journey from one end of city to the other”. They began with “Joyce for dummies” in comic form and moved to Harry Blamire’s — ‘The new Bloomsday book’ which dealt with the difficulties chapter by chapter. The group seems to have gained maximum clarity with “Ulysses and us” by a renowned scholar Declan Kiberd, a professor in University College Dublin. According to him, the deeper meaning of the novel is found in the encounters that Bloom has with different characters in lower middle class Dublin.
Key moment
Most important is his rendezvous with Stephen Daedalus — Joyce’s self conscious younger Bohemian self and Bloom is, in contrast, an adman, cuckold, a part assimilated Jew — a perpetual outsider. One is practical minded and sharp observer of goings-on around him, the other is cerebral and myopic. “Their convergence in the small hours of the morning is the key moment in the novel.” Bloom’s kindness and equanimity offers a new model of heroism. It is this heroic quality in him, which finally leads Molly Bloom in her punctuationless soliloquy at the end of the novel to affirm her undying love for her husband — “Yes I said I will yes.”
My first Bloomsday in Ireland comes to an end on this happy note of affirmation of life and human love and a deeper appreciation of the heroic in the ordinary everyday life.
