Every June 16, fans of James Joyce celebrate his famously demanding Ulysses, which takes place on this day in 1904. Jonathan Goldman assures revelers that the point of celebrating Bloomsday “is to recognize the stature of a book without necessarily comprehending it. All you need to understand is its un-understandability.” Dan Chiasson explains why the date particulary appealed to Joyce:
By setting the novel on the day his first inklings of it formed, Joyce ensured that the book would always be, whatever else it would be, a book about its own conception and growth. He had dreamed of writing “Ulysses” since at least 1904, the year two things happened:
a Dublin Jew named Alfred Hunter dusted him off after a brawl and walked him all the way home; and a beautiful barmaid, Nora Barnacle, on their first date—the first Bloomsday—slid her hand “down down inside my trousers,” as Joyce reminded her, later, in a letter, “and pulled my shirt softly aside … and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and frigged me slowly till I came off through your fingers.”
Each of these courtesies was performed by a stranger for a stranger, though Nora would become Joyce’s lifelong companion and eventual wife. Neither one was an act of specific personal connection or love. Kindness, sexual willingness, patience, forbearance, and especially “equanimity”—that beautiful word that so comforts [character Leopold] Bloom in the end, and perhaps the most important word in the novel—all exist quite independent of personal bonds and the private economies of friendship, family, and marriage. That these lovely traits exist outside of the exchange market of human frailties—that they exist at all, in fact—would have been news to Henry James or, for that matter, to Jane Austen; it is almost hard to conceive of the novel as a genre without the idea that human virtues are always tactical, and spent with the expectation of handsome returns. It may sound sappy, but for me “Ulysses” is chiefly valuable as the most moving tribute in literature to kindness.
Jason Diamond offers tips on how to celebrate the occasion “without totally embarrassing yourself”:
The first, and most important thing, of course, is drinking. If you’re an American, then congratulations — this is one of those rare instances when you can accept a pint of beer in an Irish pub with a hearty “Cheers,” and not have it sound touristy and amateurish.
What do you order? Obviously, there’s always Guinness, but consider this delicious act of sacrilege: change things up this year and drink something like Left Hand’s wonderful Milk Stout. Your beer, of course, should also be accompanied by a whiskey, and this is where you can’t accept any substitutes. No Kentucky bourbon, no scotch from Scotland: Irish whiskey only. So if somebody says they’re getting a Jameson on the rocks, you had better order the same damn thing. To be honest, you could, in theory, get away with drinking anything today — but we’d suggest is you stay away from cider, since that stuff made Bloom gassy. The most important thing is to get at least a solid two drinks in your belly before you’ll be ready for a reading from the book itself.
But James S. Murphy considers such celebrations a “travesty”:
It would be nice to think that swelling readership of Ulysses drives the Bloomsday boom, but it’s more likely that Bloomsday provides an opportunity for cultural validation that’s about as substantial as sharing an author quote on Instagram. Reading Ulysses is a slow, immersive, and ultimately private experience; Bloomsday is a social-media-ready event, where like-minded people convene to celebrate their own taste.
And yet, the silliness might not have bothered Joyce so much. If anything, the aspect of Bloomsday that would have bothered him is its holiness. Bloomsday celebrations treat Joyce too much like a saint and his book too much like a gospel to be revered first and read later, if at all. By placing Ulysses on a pedestal, we lose sight of both its vulgar origins and its power to tell us deep truths about our world and ourselves precisely by keeping the earthy and obscene aspects of ourselves in view.
Listen to Joyce fans around the world read from the book here. Recent Dish on the author here, here, and here.
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