Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses

Introduction

Introduction Anne Fogarty Bloomsday—16 June—has long established itself as the hallowed festival of lovers of Joyce. It is enjoyed as much because of its populist raffishness and carnivalesque dimensions as for its lofty literary pretensions. The imaginative bravado and palpable absurdity of commemorating characters and events in Ulysses that are to all intents and purposes entirely fictional add to the piquancy of this most celebrated anniversary in the literary calendar. Other writers are feted in more traditional fashion on their dates of birth, whether putative or otherwise, such as William Shakespeare on 23 April and Robert Burns on 25 January. Joyce is unique in that he is honored in tandem with his epic novel, which has managed to acquire a separate curriculum vitae and unfurling history of its own. Originally, of course, careful orchestration ensured that Ulysses appeared on Joyce’s birthday, 2 February 1922, and for several years afterwards celebrations organized by the author or his friends centered on this occasion in winter rather than on Bloomsday itself. Gradually, however, the June date took over as the arena of interest in step with the growth in stature and renown of the novel. The déjeuner Ulysse organized by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier —to mark the publication of the French translation of Ulysses by Auguste Morel, Valery Larbaud, and Stuart Gilbert and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday—took place on 27 June 1929 and represented one of the important milestones demarcating the growing weightiness of this literary work and its increasing cultural aura. The guests at this event held at the Léopold restaurant in Les Vaux-de-Cernay, a hamlet near Versailles, included Paul Valéry, Samuel Beckett, Édouard Dujardin, and Thomas McGreevey (Fitch 291). The surviving memorabilia, ranging from the menu bearing the autographs of those present to the overcrowded and alarmingly staid group photo, indicate the degree to which this was not simply a celebration but a calculated endorsement of, and 2 Anne Fogarty investment in, the cult of fame attendant on this work. Bloomsday even at this early juncture had become a hallmark of the value of Ulysses, while simultaneously functioning as a public relations exercise that served to augment the novel’s reputation. However, the anecdotes about the delayed return journey of this august group to Paris caused by the frequent stops en route for visits to pubs by Joyce, Beckett, Philippe Soupault, and others, to the disgust of the more sober members of the entourage, puncture the portentousness and uncanny prescience of this cultural celebration and endow it with an altogether more ramshackle and makeshift quality (Fitch 292). Through such admixtures of volition, marketing strategy, and happenstance , Bloomsday now functions—seemingly ineluctably—as a memorial to Joyce’s radical literary experiment. On one level, this day of public celebration punctuated more often than not by solo or group readings of sections of Ulysses and the consumption of Guinness or other appropriate Irish alcoholic products nicely acts as a distillation of Joyce’s text with its emphasis on the diurnal, the communal, and the commercial. On another level, in its aspect as figment or simulacrum, Bloomsday fittingly captures the quintessence of a novel that determinedly blurs the boundaries between book and world, plays with the resources of fictionality, and collapses the categories of truth and fiction . Moreover, even though 16 June 1904 is irrevocably fixed as the temporal setting for Ulysses, the concept of Bloomsday has proven to be remarkably pliant , portable, and adaptable. It has now become a global occasion as readings, performances, parties, and theatrical enactments are held in numerous urban centers around the world, including Szombathely (the birthplace of Rudolph Virag), Tokyo, Rome, New York, Beijing, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and a host of other venues. The marketability of Bloomsday as well as of aspects of Irishness means that Dublin is less a point of convergence for 16 June than a reconfigurable domain that can locate itself anywhere through the potent endorsement of Joyce’s language, persona, and prestige. The essays assembled in this collection, however, have tangible links with the Irish capital because they originated as papers for the Bloomsday 100 Symposium that was held in the National College of Ireland, Dublin, from 12–19 June 2004. This conference was the biggest gathering ever convened under the auspices of the International James Joyce Foundation: over six hundred papers were delivered at an event attended by in excess of eight hundred delegates. The symposium coincided with a year-long...