This June 16 is the 115th anniversary of "Bloomsday" (June 16, 1904), that fictional day in the groundbreaking novel "Ulysses" by Irish writer Jame Joyce (1882-1941). Written between 1914-1922, with its setting in Joyce's native Dublin, it is long (almost 1,100 pages) but lively, and famously known for its liberties with the norms of grammar.
True to its reputation, the work can mystify the unsuspecting reader, but the magic that the Irishman works with the English language is its own reward. You should feel no remorse to admit that Ulysses is one of the treasures of world literature that you've never read. So allow me to offer just a sampling of my own experience with the big book, suited to the casual reader, not to the Joyce scholars among us.
If you seek a conventional "plot" in Ulysses, it's not to be found. The novel contains 18 episodes between which there are few bridges. Each episode, though, presents a theme and can be enjoyed as a "short story" of its own. Joyce was fascinated as a youth by the Odyssey, Homer's 8th century, B.C., Greek epic poem. Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus, the hero in Homer's epic.
June 16 is a day in the life of the three protagonists in the novel: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly Bloom. There are countless other personalities, but they play supporting roles to these three. The day proceeds in temporal sequence, from early morning to midnight. Strangely, though, time seems suspended as you are escorted by Joyce through pre-World War I Dublin.
The author plumbs the minds of Stephen, Leopold and Molly, their dreams, desires and demons. The rules of grammar and syntax are abandoned in various places, some of the text having no punctuation. The final episode, "Penelope," Molly Bloom's splendid soliloquy, is 72 pages without a comma or period.
The novel's first episode, "Telemachus," introduces the young Stephen Dedalus, a writer, poet and teacher. It is morning at Martello Tower in Sandycove, on the Dublin outskirts, overlooking the sea. We have seen Stephen before, in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Joyce's early autobiographical work. Martello Tower is now a Joyce museum, containing many of the letters and personal effects of Ireland's native son.
We make the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom in the fourth episode, "Calypso." Leopold is in the kitchen at their home on 7 Eccles Street, preparing his scrumptious breakfast, fried kidneys: "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes."
Bloom is a Jew of middle-age, kindly, long-suffering, yearning for an elusive happiness. Joyce portrays Bloom as his modern Odysseus, a wanderer, not through ancient Greece, but through 1904 Dublin. Joyce confided to his friend Frank Budgen: "I am now writing a book based on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssey, that is to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent time and all my hero's wanderings take no more than eighteen hours."
Bloom is the husband of an unfaithful wife, and he knows it. His silent pain over a deceased son and the flirtatious Molly weigh on his mind. Said to be one of the most examined characters in literature, you come to admire Bloom. He is a Jew in a Catholic city, and gallantly faces the religious bigotry of his day.
Joyce is our guide to the rowdy Dublin taverns. The debates in the public houses such as Barney Kiernan's are about pressing matters: politics, religion, horse-racing, and the "Irish question." The establishment's self-appointed nationalist, "the citizen," instigates the arguments, but is chastised by the regulars. "Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ's sake and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would."
The ubiquitous Bloom is never far out of sight. If the man is flawed, it is his passivity. "He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied."
Odysseus endured the perils of his 10-year journey home from Troy to Ithaca - fearsome brutes, beguiling nymphs, storms on the "wine-dark sea". In his own odyssey, Leopold Bloom faces the "ordinariness" of daily life, which Joyce suggests requires endurance as well.
June 16, an uneventful day in 1904, is regarded by James Joyce as momentous a day as in a Homeric poem.
Brian Kingston is a retired U.S. government attorney, a graduate of Holy Cross College, and a resident of Natick.
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