(Yes Bloomsday is technically June 16 but linear time is a bourgeois conceit anyway)

Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, (read Joyce’s extremely NSFW but hilarious letters to his wife here) and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.

Ulysses is the quintessential modernist novel, taking place during a single day of two men traveling around Dublin in early 20th century Ireland. Through its stream of consciousness writing and crazy stylistic components, Joyce touches on a number of subjects, including the state of Irish nationalism and the crushed Irish spirit languishing under the English and the Catholic Church, relations between men and women, the cacophony of sounds and sights in an urban environment that seems to encompass the entire world, shitting and then wiping your ass with the newspaper you were just reading, and the total impossibility of escaping from history.

One line I particularly like is “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” which to me sounds very reminiscent of Marx’s famous proclamation that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Ulysses is a joy to read, and has been (imo) vastly overanalysed by scholars the world over attempted to pry every bit of meaning out of a work that is certainly overstuffed with meaning, but is overall an attempt at fun experimentation in literature. Ulysses is meant to be enjoyed first, analysed second. If the book at all sounds interesting to you, I would recommend giving it a go. Know that you don’t need to understand everything (or even 30%!) to have a good time. It took a few rereads before I really got a lot of what the book was trying to do.

Literature is not supposed to be this big pretentious thing, it’s supposed to be universal and enjoyable and liberatory. Ulysses is the perfect example of that spirit: the book is about Leopold Bloom, who’s just an everyday sort of guy. His wife is fucking other men, he likes talking to people and eating sandwiches, and who doesn’t love a nice masturbation session on the beach? But in making Bloom the main character, and the book taking course over one day, Joyce shows that even the most banal and ordinary of days can be something that is indicative of the human spirit towards life, something extraordinary because life itself is extraordinary. It’s a liberatory novel that celebrates the everyday, the here and now, and it’s totally worth reading.

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  • keatsta [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Happy to see Ulysses celebrated. It's my favorite book. For a long time I had a "bounty" for anyone to read it. I thought that most people would find it way too intimidating to even consider, so I wanted to entice people to give it a try. I figured maybe 1% of people who tried it would actually end up loving it, and I wanted that 1% of people to not miss that chance.

    The amount started at $40, then went up to $100 and $250 before anyone actually finished the book and claimed it. It was a friend of a friend who was sorta curious about it and strapped for cash at the time. He ended up really sinking into it.

    I'm dating that guy now :) I dunno if I would have gotten as close to him if it wasn't for my stupid Ulysses bounty.

    Thanks Joyce!

    As for the book itself, it certainly isn't for everyone, but for the right sort of nerdy/romantic/manic/perverse weirdo, almost nothing else in any medium comes close to it. It teaches you to find the deep literary enchantment of everyday life. It isn't naive, it digs deeply into the social complexes of its time, but it celebrates the small joys too. It reminds me that even though we are in hellworld, things are unimaginably layered and complex and detailed within that hellworld, and that there is meaning if you dive into them.

    I completely forgot it was Bloomsday today, the Bloomsday 100 years after publication even. Some fan I am! But coincidentally I wore my Ulysses shirt today (I'm insufferable) and had an appropriately varied and moving day (therapy session where I cried a lot, dinner with my mom, then we watched Everything Everywhere All At Once and cried a lot, then witnessed a strange situation with a person who had gotten totally naked in front of a church in the middle of some sort of manic episode on the way to dropping my mom off at the train). But really every day is just as rich.