“Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.”

June 16, 2015 5:16 AM

The Romantic True Story Behind James Joyce’s Bloomsday [TIME]

The day June 16, 1904, was a big one in the romantic life of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyces’ Ulysses, at least inside his head. In celebration of that day, and Bloom’s fictional perambulations around Dublin during the course of it, James Joyce fans mark the date each year as “Bloomsday.” It is, as TIME explained in 1982, “a sacred date on the calendar of all Joyceans.”

Related:
- Eileen Battersby details five good reasons to dive into a truly great work of fiction. [Irish Times]

1. Episode 6, Hades: Probably one of the finest sequences in literature – a group of decent Dubliners set off to pay their respects to Paddy Dignam who has gone and died. There is a great deal of banter as the mourners make their way; one of them, Leopold Bloom, whom we have already met is thinking about his dead son, his late father, his late father’s dog . . .
2. Episode 12, Cyclops: An unnamed narrator acting as a compere reports on events in the pub culminating in The Citizen’s demented rant to which Bloom offers a spirited counter attack.
3. Episode 4, Calypso: Turn back to the early pages and watch Bloom preparing breakfast, feeding the cat, visiting the privy and all the while, his thoughts ramble randomly. At about the same time, in Sandycove, another part of Dublin, Stephen Dedalus is beginning his day, badly; it’s not easy being an artist.
4. Episode 10, Wandering Rocks: Virtuoso free-fall as 19 random characters move through the city and the day.
5. Episode 17: Ithaca: One of the major themes, the search for a son, the search for a father culminates in the sharing of coca, Joyce’s response to Homer’s nectar, at Bloom’s house where he plays host to the weary Stephen; both are exhausted. It is late and upstairs Molly is in bed.

- A collection of Ulysses quotes for Bloomsday, please. [The Guardian]
- Ulysses Lands [TIME]
- Ulysses ebook. [Project Gutenberg]
- Ulysses public domain audiobook. [LibriVox]
- The text of Joseph Collins's 1922 New York Times review of Ulysses. [New York Times]
- Joycean Fun: Bloomsday in Dublin [National Geographic]

Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously. Previously.

posted by Fizz (22 comments total)

May all your modalities be ineluctable! Happy Bloomsday one and all!
posted by Fizz at 5:16 AM on June 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

And it's my birthday.
posted by dng at 5:28 AM on June 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

The guy who taught me about Ulysses claimed it was the only book he read anymore. I can believe it!
posted by Drexen at 6:09 AM on June 16, 2015

yes you should yes you will Yes
posted by chavenet at 6:39 AM on June 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

While the relationship between Joyce and Nora was undoubtedly a match that had its share of romance and lasted their entire lives, the Time magazine categorization of their date as "going for a walk" is heavily bowdlerized, since it culminated in a hand job.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:42 AM on June 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

There's a Bloomsday group - in full period costume and including a harpist - setting up for a program in the library where I work as I type.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:11 AM on June 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I have a soft spot for Joyce, but it's hard for me to conjure lovey, romantic feelings about James and Nora's relationship given what he was into.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:25 AM on June 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

In some ways it was a clever move by Joyce to set the book on a single specific day because in some ways it enabled the annual commemoration that we have now, just like there seem to now be annual retrospectives, oral histories and think pieces about the film Groundhog Day every 2nd February.

It still needed someone to actually start retracing Bloom and Dedalus' footsteps - enter noted members of the inebriati Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh (and the lesser known Anthony Cronin) in 1954 - fifty years to the day from when the book is set - to film themselves falling ossified around Dublin, although not making it to the end due to an acute shortage of sobriety.
posted by kersplunk at 7:39 AM on June 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I have a soft spot for Joyce, but it's hard for me to conjure lovey, romantic feelings about James and Nora's relationship given what he was into.

I really don't think it's necessary to kink-shame James Joyce. It shouldn't surprise anyone who's read the book that the author of Ulysses was preoccupied with sex. As are we all.
posted by mr_roboto at 7:59 AM on June 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

I really don't think it's necessary to kink-shame James Joyce.

That's fair. My intent wasn't to kink-shame, and in fact I think Ulysses has some of the better portrayals of sex in the history of literature.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:22 AM on June 16, 2015

Probably also in some of the "Previously"s, but this blog (NSFW text!) has a nice grouping of the letters at the bottom.

Great stuff.
posted by auggy at 8:45 AM on June 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Raise up your Guiness if you had a kidney for breakfast.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:07 AM on June 16, 2015

Happy Bloomsday to all!

And I confess that I'm disappointed in Kate Beaton's reaction to the Joyce-Barnacle letters.
posted by the sobsister at 9:34 AM on June 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Happy Bloomsday! In commemoration I made a web machine which speaks random lines of dialog from Ulysses. (Works best in OSX Safari.)
posted by moonmilk at 9:43 AM on June 16, 2015

Omphalos!
posted by gorgor_balabala at 10:07 AM on June 16, 2015

Glen Weldon's #bloomtweets

Took Molly breakfast. Pork kidneys (nom nom nom!) com odore suavitatis ascendat. She’s cheating on me anyhoo time for a poop.

Wuz scoping out this hot chick, but a tram got in the way because: God. Amirite LOL??????? Oo, lemon soap.

Paddy D’s funeral was totes bummer :(!!!! But you know et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, ROFL. Whoa nice coat, dude!
posted by dnash at 11:18 AM on June 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

I really don't think it's necessary to kink-shame James Joyce.

Seriously now, maybe we have been desensitized by the internets and all, but can someone point me to the outrageous parts? I skimmed through a few of the letters, and I'm not getting anything else than standard get-your-freak-on readings - putting it down on paper is probably the kinkiest part.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:52 PM on June 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Shame? Not so much. Joyce's dirty letters are fucking awesome.
posted by atoxyl at 3:08 PM on June 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ulysses graphic novel
posted by betweenthebars at 4:59 PM on June 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't know how but I think I never managed to link there from here before, hey how about that. Bloomsday greetings to/from pseudopodium!

A blockquote? Well alright then

But while in the midst of serializing those carefully cross-wired diagrams of sub-sub-trivia across Ulysses, he began to immerse them in pointedly redundant anti-reality effects. "Cyclops" may be scrupulous about something, but whatever it is ain't "meanness." And after his increasingly bouncing babes were carted to the printshop and carted back again, he would improvise riffs across the proofsheets, snatching any chance to strengthen the scribbly cross-hatched fabric of the book or merely to, like the god of creation, wake up bleary-eyed and say Fuck me what was I doing last night?

&c
posted by hap_hazard at 8:14 PM on June 16, 2015

I said nope I won't No.
posted by Violet Hour at 12:28 AM on June 17, 2015

Seriously now, maybe we have been desensitized by the internets and all, but can someone point me to the outrageous parts?

I'm not going to quote, but there's a lot of explicit scatalogical stuff in there. It's not quite in 2 Girls 1 Cup territory, but it's certainly getting there.
posted by mr_roboto at 1:52 PM on June 17, 2015