Happy Bloomsday! Too Bad James Joyce Would Have Hated This

Joyce infamously disliked the idea of being memorialized

By Kat Eschner
smithsonian.com
an hour ago

June 16, 1904: a date that will live on in lit-nerdiness.

That’s the date on which James Joyce’s perhaps most baffling and most complex novel, Ulysses, is set–all 732 pages of it. And it’s that day which is observed by eager Joyce fans each year on Bloomsday, a literary holiday whose modern incarnation James Joyce would have had no time for.

“Set in an uncommonly warm Dublin, on June 16th, 1904, {Ulysses} is an odyssey of the ordinary,” writes Eileen Battersby for the Irish Times. The novel follows a 16-hour day in the life of several characters in Dublin, notably Leopold Bloom, “a mild, if opinionated pacifist” in Battersby’s words. Readers wander the city with these characters, attend a burial, visit a newspaper office, and observe a variety of indecent hijinks that include a clandestine encounter and a visit to a brothel.

From its first page onwards, Ulysses is a difficult read. Structured into “episodes” that correspond with events in The Odyssey, it’s hard for many people to parse. It is worth reading, according to many book aficionados, and James S. Murphy writes for Vanity Fair that it has “power to tell us deep truths about our world and ourselves.” But it’s more than likely that many Bloomsdayers are there for the cultural cachet of the celebration, not the indecent, hard-to-parse, brilliant novel behind it.
....

Kat Eschner is a freelance journalist based in Toronto who focuses on technology, culture and ethics. She recently graduated from the master’s program in journalism at Ryerson University, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Spring 2016 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Read more from this author | Follow @KatEschner