When a fan asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, Joyce laughed and said "no – that hand has done a lot of other things as well".ĭeclan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin. But he never took his extraordinary celebration of the ordinary over-seriously.
"If Ulysses isn't fit to read." replied its author, "then life isn't fit to live". His favourite aunt was so upset that she had her presentation copy removed from her home. Joyce offers the stream-of-consciousness of an ordinary citizen as prelude to nothing more portentous than the drinking of a cup of tea. The soliloquists of Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century novel were aristocrats considering ultimate questions of death or suicide.
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In recording the dailiest day possible, Joyce teaches us much about the world: how to cope with grief and loss how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke how to be frank about death in the age of its denial how to walk and think at the same time how to purge sex of possessiveness how the way people eat food can tell us who they really are.īefore Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking. At its climax the ad-canvasser Bloom invites the poet Dedalus home with him for conversation and cocoa. The book is also unusual in the history of modernism for its suggestion that there need be no conflict between bohemian and bourgeois. Bloomsday may now be, in part, a lament for a time when Dublin was still felt to be an intimate city – civic, knowable, viable. Far from seeing "street people" as a problem, he sees them as the very basis of civilisation. It is this very openness to serendipity which allows Joyce to renew his styles and themes with each succeeding episode. The characters enjoy the possibilities afforded by the streets of random, unexpected meetings. Although Ulysses is a book of privacies and subjectivities, a remarkable number of its scenes are set in public space – library, museum, bar, cemetery, and, most of all, the street. That celebration may be an attempt by Dubliners to reassert a lost sense of community, a poignant repossession of streets through which on other days of the year they hurry from one private experience to another. It is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city. They re-enact scenes in Eccles Street, Ormond Quay and Sandycove's Martello Tower. There were no inverted commas around the quotation in that instance.Įvery year hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book – Stephen with his cane, Leopold wearing his bowler hat, Molly in her petticoats – as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. On 16 June 2004, when 10,000 Bloomsday breakfasts were served on Dublin streets to mark the great centenary, a spray-painter went to work and wrote "Bloom is a Cod" on a building-site wall. As if the case with all emergent religions, the cult of James Joyce – known jocularly as The Feast of Saint Jam Juice in Dublin – has spawned its own loyal opposition. Many of the surrealists who lived near Joyce in Paris had also grown up as Catholics – but their displaced religion was filled with edicts, dogmas and excommunications, while he by contrast appropriated the more celebratory rituals of Catholicism. As with so many cults, it has its routes of pilgrimage, special foods, ritual observances and priestly decoders of the sacred text. When Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus sit down together at day's end over coffee and a bread-roll, neither man says "do this in memory of me", yet every year the cult grows. Like the prelates of the Catholic church, Joyce was perhaps cunning in setting aside a single day (16 June, or Bloomsday, the day in 1904 the book takes place) on which to celebrate a feast.
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