Bloomsday: June 16
James Joyce's Ulysses has a reputation as one of the most challenging novels to read and understand. Yet every year on June 16 readers around the world celebrate the book on a literary holiday known as Bloomsday. Bloomsday gets its name from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, whose action occurs on June 16, 1904. Bloomsday is an annual tribute to Ulysses, which is far-reaching, complex and encyclopedic. By extension to the whole world of books, Bloomsday is really a celebration of reading. If you enjoy reading books, then Bloomsday is your day. It is a secular holiday, a day of literary obligation, the High Holy Day of the modernist literati.
In the opinion of many, James Joyce was the greatest literary genius of the 20th century. His output was small in quantity of titles – the short stories of Dubliners and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, an impenetrable anti-novel that exceeds even Ulysses in its complexity. These are books whose depth of feeling, range of reference and understanding of the human condition place them in the handful of essential works of literature. Janet Flanner, a New Yorker correspondent, wrote, "The publication of Ulysses in 1922 was indubitably the most exciting, important, historic single literary event of the Paris expatriate literary colony. It burst over us, young in Paris, like an explosion in print whose words and phrases fell upon is like a gift of tongues. Joyce's Ulysses [was] part of the library of our minds."
Ulysses is a comic novel with much to teach us about the arts of reading in its departure from the norms of what a novel is. For those about to tackle Ulysses here are some helpful hints. First, on the narrative level, the novel is about a typical day in Dublin, Ireland focusing on three characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. Through the technique of interior monologue the reader enters Bloom's mind to experience his thought process, the pathos of his emotions, and his curiosity about the world as well as all the lapses that make one human. Next, each of the book's 18 episodes has a set of symbolic correspondences to Homer's Odyssey, a time of day, a location in Dublin, an organ of the body, a representative color, an art, a unifying symbol, and a stylistic technique. Finally, Ulysses is jam-packed with fragments of poetry, drama, music, newspaper headlines, advertisements and experiments with language. Joyce also incorporated real people and events into the story that intrude in the dramatic unfolding of Leopold Bloom's travels through Dublin. One of those events tangentially involves the history of New Rochelle.
On June 15, 1904 the steamship General Slocum caught fire in the East River of New York City, leading to the death of most of its passengers. Over 1,000 people died, a disaster noted several times in Ulysses in action that took place the next day on June 16. In the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses we find: "He passed Grogan's the tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate for people to die like that, unprepared." While the General Slocum was not heading toward New Rochelle on that fateful day, the maritime disaster led to the economic decline of "Starin's Glen Island," a tourist destination of New Rochelle that was then enormously popular.
What does this snippet of history buried in Ulysses teach us? There are many symbolic overtones too numerous to parse here, but the
outstanding fact is that such detail of history is a node of meaning in a network of language that enriches the whole reading experience. In Ulysses there are so many "luminous details" that it takes several readings to savor the enjoyment of connecting them all. In this, Ulysses was uniquely designed to be re-read – our enjoyment expands with each new reading. For some, this might be too much to take. After all, Joyce once commented that he required of his readers nothing less than that they devote their entire lives to reading his works. On the other hand, Joyce considered literature a perpetual affirmation of the human spirit. This is what we must require of all literature and art. But in this case, if asked what Ulysses is "about," one would have to reply: Ulysses is about reading Ulysses.
Happy Bloomsday!
June 1, 2020 / David Rose / New Rochelle Public Library Archives
