100! Happy Bloomsday
By Jan Morris
As James Joyce fans prepare to celebrate the centenary of 'Poldy' Bloom's progress around Dublin in Ulysses, this writer examines why the epic novel continues to baffle, infuriate, impress and delight
A CENTURY ago next Wednesday, on June 16, 1904, Mr Leopold "Poldy" Bloom spent the day pottering around his native city of Dublin, and so bequeathed to the world its most celebrated peregrination - so famous that thousands of people still assiduously follow the route, and June 16 is commemorated to this day as Bloomsday.
Actually, of course, Mr Bloom meandered only through the pages of a novel, James Joyce's Ulysses, but that doesn't make him and his day's wandering any less real to countless aficionados. Whole books have reconstructed Bloomsday Dublin, and Bloom's movements have been timed to the minute. Scholars have noted every shop he passed, every pub he dropped in at, and some of the pubs have prospered by his custom ever since.
It is perfectly possible to accompany Mr Bloom without setting eyes on Dublin - plenty of route-maps are available, some even showing the manhole cover opposite his house in Eccles Street that he was obliged to avoid at the start of his day, not to mention the direction of the Glasnevin funeral cortège that he joined later in the morning. But there are thousands of readers in the world who feel the urge to walk the same pavements, prop themselves at the same bars, and a large proportion of them will be in Dublin next Wednesday, the first centennial Bloomsday.
Who called it Bloomsday? I don't think the word appears in the book itself, but as a sort of literary logo it exactly suits the cult that surrounds Ulysses. Its knowingness, its in-jokiness, its hint of the T-shirt or the anorak, its commercial potential - all express the nature of this worldwide enthusiasm, which ranges from the academic (eg, Ulysses and the
Metaphysicals: A Comparative Bibliography) to the yobbo (eg, Bloomsday Bingeing by the Liffey).
Actually the cult has two epicentres. There is Dublin, of course, of which Joyce himself said his book would be a permanent model, and there is Trieste, where he wrote much of Ulysses, and which has a school of Joyce studies and an annual Joyce symposium. Sometimes the passage of Joyceans between the two cities has a migratory air to it, as the flocks of devotees arrive in their thousands to roost temporarily at one or the other.
The author of Ulysses and the Metaphysicals is sure to be there, the man who can recite the whole of Molly Bloom's soliloquy by heart, the couple who fly in every year from Hong Kong, scores of American D Phil thesis-writers and dozens of earnest addicts, conversant with every last metaphor of the book, who remind me rather of trainspotters. If they are in Trieste they take their coffee-break at the Caffè Stella Polaris, where Joyce was a regular; if they are in Dublin, Davy Byrne's pub is the place. In Dublin the Sandymount Martello tower, where Ulysses opens, compels them one and all; in Trieste they can do the round of the Joyce family's successive uninviting apartments (itineraries obtainable at tourist offices).
Have they all read the book, cover to cover? I very much doubt it. Most people who say they have are evasive when pressed, and all who claim to have read and understood it without a crib are lying through their teeth. Far from being an "accessible" work, as publishers like to claim, much of it is immediately incomprehensible. I started to read Ulysses in 1942 and did not succeed in finishing it until 1989, by which time I had acquired Mr Harry Blamires's indispensable line-by-line commentary, The New Bloomsday Book.
For one thing Ulysses is, in my opinion, unnecessarily obscure - what's the point? For another it is often tediously ostentatious, in learning as in language. It has so many separate themes, winding and unwinding around one another, that exhausted readers may feel as though they have had one too many at Davy Byrne's - or one too few. And it intermittently purports to be related, episode by episode, to corresponding passages in Homer's Odyssey - Bloom himself being its Ulysses, miscellaneous whores and bigots representing Circe, Cyclops and the rest, and Mrs Bloom revealing herself, at the very end, as a less than immaculate Penelope.
Joyceans are inclined to be touchy if you mention the opacity of the work, because half their pleasure comes from worrying out the meanings of Ulysses, matching texts, arguing about locations and following the Dublin street maps (though Joyce sometimes mischievously confuses even them - now and then he puts a shop on the wrong side of a road, or has somebody getting off a train at Lansdowne Road when the 10am train from Bray didn't stop there . . .)
And yet . . . dear God, how often have I blessed Mr Blamires, ever since he first enabled me to read Ulysses all the way through. However maddening this book can be, however boring or ostentatious, I recognise it as one of the universal literary masterpieces. There! I have declared myself a Joycean, and as a matter of fact, when I opened one of my several editions of Ulysses today, out fell the packaging of a cake of lemon soap, bought years ago at the Sandymount Martello tower and sold in memory of the lemon-scented soap that Poldy bought for himself at Sweny's in Lincoln Place (page 69, line 510, 1986 edition). I have kept it for 17 years, and one can hardly get more Joycean than that.
Actually it was the protean nature of the book that finally convinced me of its greatness. I take nothing back about multi-themes and unconvincing Homerisms, and I still feel free to skip whenever I want to. But I marvel now at that tangle of themes which used to tire me so, because it means that the book is, so to speak, many books in one, conveying many parallel messages - and many morals, perhaps.
First and most obviously it is a book about Dublin. Lots of Dublin has disappeared since 1904, but lots hasn't, and it is still a fascination to follow that famous meander through its streets, looking out for the Ormond Hotel where the barmaid-Sirens were, or Nichols the undertakers, or hoping to buy some kidney at Dlugacz's butcher's shop (not a chance, because it is one of the few purely fictional establishments in the book). There we go, we Joycean trainspotters, with our maps in our hands and dear Mr Blamires in our capacious string bags - year after year, Bloomsday after Bloomsday, deploring still the demise of the Bath Avenue tram, rejoicing to find the coffee fragrant as ever outside Bewley's.
Then Ulysses is also the portrait of a man - some critics say the most complete portrait of a man yet written. Bloom is a very ordinary person, except that he is a Jew. He feels an outsider always. He is more sensitive than most, more confused about himself sexually and socially, and as we accompany him around the city, all through the day, we seem to glimpse every last nuance of his character, admirable and pathetic, sad and hopeful.
Ulysses is a study in jealousy, too, because during the afternoon Bloom is cuckolded, and knows it. It is a comedy, sometimes aspiring to farce. It is a poem. It is a play. It is a sort of @!#$ manual, because a multitude of @!#$ preferences and variations are observed, recalled or simply imagined; if Bloom exposes himself in many kinds of pornographic self-indulgence, Molly brings everything to a celebrated climax with eight pages of undiluted and unpunctuated literary @!#$. It is full of sorrows. It has a happy ending.
To my mind the glory of the thing is this: that we can read it how we please (if we manage to read it at all). I choose to find in it an elementary lesson in morality, because I believe that at its core there lies a parable of goodness. "Poldy" Bloom is as fallible a man as ever lived, a lascivious daydreamer, but he is good at the heart, and my favourite passage in the whole work concerns his passing over O'Connell Bridge at about 11 on Bloomsday morning. As he walks he scrumples up a piece of paper and throws it over the parapet, wondering if the seagulls fluttering around will think it edible. Of course they don't, but a few moments later Poldy feels sorry for those birds, feels ashamed to have tried to deceive them, and buying a couple of Banbury cakes from a nearby stall (price 1d), he crumbles them, returns to the bridge and makes recompense to the gulls.
One could not be basically bad and do that: and my own grand lesson of Ulysses is that you can be an idler and a lecher, the most pretentious of writers, the most pedantic of scholars, the silliest of literary groupies, the drunkest of louts down at Temple Bar next Wednesday night, and still be as kind a man as Leopold Bloom.
Originally Posted by Lokasenna
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