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The Economist
Bloomsday
An unforgettable odyssey
Is the fuss over James Joyce's Ulysses greater than the book?
THE date is as well known to students of English literature as the beginning of the first world war is to military historians: June 16th 1904 is “Bloomsday”, the 24 hours into which James Joyce compressed the wanderings of a Jewish Dubliner—a decent, lustful, advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom. He is the principal figure in “Ulysses”, a sprawling, difficult novel that marked the start of the modern movement in English literature. Its adoption of an original style known as “stream of consciousness” made it one of the seminal works of the 20th century.
Bloomsday has been celebrated by devoted readers of Joyce all over the world for 50 years or so. In Dublin in particular it is regarded as a splendid excuse for a party, beginning at breakfast and often ending in drunken gloom and rancour, just like the book. The breakfast is significant: Bloom's first scene starts with the purchase from a butcher (and the subsequent cooking and consumption) of a pork kidney, a “moist, tender gland”, price threepence.
To celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday, 10,000 tourists and local people—everyone is welcome—will breakfast on Dublin's O'Connell Street in three sittings. Their breakfast is being sponsored by Denny, whose sausages (so the book says) nestled next to Bloom's kidney on the butcher's slab. The firm is to provide breakfast rolls filled with sausage, bacon, black pudding and hash browns. But no kidneys, of any variety; no drink either.
This mass devotion to James Joyce is a fine example of a spreading trend in tourism in which a dead author becomes a lure for living admirers and the merely curious. Laura Weldon, who runs “ReJoyce Dublin 2004”, the official organiser of a five-month-long celebration of Bloom's busy day, says the idea is “to give the masterpiece back to the people in intelligent, but accessible ways.” A late-night light show on the banks of the River Liffey will project images of Joyce; and Joseph Strick's film of “Ulysses” will have an open-air screening. There will be a concert, exhibitions, readings and guided walks. It is “a unique, high-quality cultural tourism experience,” says John O'Donoghue, Ireland's minister of tourism. An international symposium will consider more recondite areas of Joyce's work—“The Menippean Strain in Ulysses”, for instance.
A large majority of the breakfast celebrants will not have read the book, and a free breakfast might not be enough to get them started. Plenty of readers are familiar with the first line (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather...”), but few get past the first 50 pages. Roddy Doyle, a popular Irish writer, created a small furore earlier this year when he denounced Ulysses as over-rated and over-long. “It could have done with a good editor,” he boldly declared.
Other Dublin writers sympathise. John Banville, a distinguished Irish novelist, thinks that Mr Doyle expressed a more general exasperation with the Joyce myth. Joyce is a peculiar sort of icon. He was an exile who was born in Dublin but left for the continent, never to return, after the page proofs of his first book, “Dubliners”, were deliberately destroyed by a printer in 1912. “Ulysses” was written mostly in Trieste and Zurich. As Mr Banville says, Joyce's Dublin, drawn from his own unhappy memories, is grim, grey and paralysed. Joyce would probably have had a good laugh at his Irish apotheosis.
Is “Ulysses” as great as its reputation suggests? Some of its 18 episodes are so bizarre that they might have been written in a secret code, but the narrative becomes compelling; the language is sharp and brilliantly coloured. Reading it is hard work, but the book is not inaccessible. It helps, though, to have a good guide.
Some think the best way to approach it is back to front, starting with the silent monologue of Molly Bloom, Leopold's wife, and then turning back to Bloom's catechism in the penultimate episode. Mrs Bloom's thoughts stream powerfully through her consciousness for 25,000 unspoken words, without any punctuation at all. In her soliloquy she contemplates Bloom's flawed character, their unhappy marriage, her lovers, men's frailty and women's vulnerability. Her memories are saturated with eroticism.
The very end of the book is almost as well-known as the beginning: “I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” A great book? Yes it is Yes.