Bloomsday and the Religion of James Joyce's Ulysses

All of us become pilgrims at one time or another, even though we may not give ourselves the name.

H. Richard Niebuhr

P. J., who presides over Dublin's dusty shop Sweny's, has read James Joyce's Ulysses fifty-one times in six different languages. Over a dark pint of Guinness, with the mist from the glass melting on his fingertips, P. J. speaks about the lines from the book that are making his pulse race that minute. He doesn't try to persuade you of their sacredness or its genius. He just smiles slightly, revealing coffee-stained and wayward teeth, and nods as he cites whole paragraphs. P. J. loves Joyce. To P. J., Sweny's, the shop where Leopold Bloom bought lemon soap for his wife Molly in Joyce's epic, is an invaluable relic of Joyce's Dublin, and he would do anything to protect its legacy. Even as rent steadily increases, P. J. continues to sell bars of lemon soap in the chemist's shop, now cluttered with old photographs, various editions of Ulysses, and hundreds of small glass bottles. P. J. says with a wry smile, "the soap cleans the body while the book corrupts the mind."

Every year on 16 June, the same date that marked Leopold Bloom's walk around Dublin in 1904, a host of literary pilgrims visits the city to pay tribute to Joyce. Sweny's was a sacred stop on the tour for people I met last Bloomsday, people who came from Australia, Japan, Bosnia, South Korea, the United States, Germany, Spain, Argentina, England, France, and Switzerland.

In the Catholic tradition of pilgrimage, a location that is considered sacred is often referred to as a "thin place," a location where the space between heaven and earth wanes and becomes rarefied or thin. Such places typically mark the site of a saint's ascension, a miraculous act, or some epiphanic moment. In other religions, places may be considered sacred because they have been saturated with meaning by God. What might a thin place be in a conversation about literary pilgrimage? Perhaps where the distance between an author's imagination and a reader's lived reality narrows and eventually collapses. And where the human being who generated meaning in the place—the author, the artist, the genius—begins to acquire divine status. Joyce certainly seems to assume deific qualities every year on Bloomsday as devotees travel to Dublin and re-enact the events from Bloom's life, visit the places he walked, and read excerpts of Ulysses aloud.

Two summers ago, I attended the Bloomsday festival, which is primarily organized by the James Joyce Center on Dublin's North Great George's Street. Deirdre Ellis-King, the chair of the board of the James Joyce Center, notes that the center is committed to providing "different points of entry" into the text, be it "music and song, drama, costume, or food." The entry points Ellis-King referred to are visible throughout Dublin on Bloomsday. As I walked down North Great George's Street, people were dressed for the trends of 1904—most men sported black top hats and carried walking sticks, while women donned petticoats, lace gloves, and parasols. One man even tipped his hat, saluted me, and said with a melancholic tinge, "what a shame, poor fellow, Paddy Dignam," referencing the character whose funeral in Ulysses occurs on 16 June.

When I arrived at Davy Byrne's, a central pub in the novel, I witnessed a joyful uproar of Irish anthems and songs from the book. There were productions of Ulysses all over Dublin, from the Abbey's adaptation of the entire epic to the Bewley Café's staged reading of Molly Bloom's monologue, and her famed finale, "and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." There were pub crawls across Dublin, not to mention food tours that took visitors down Bloom's bizarre trajectory of consumption, from kidneys for breakfast to gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy for lunch. All these events were meant to challenge the notion that...