Today is June 16. What is special about today’s date? It’s Bloomsday, of course.
To know Bloomsday, you have to know Ulysses, the literary masterpiece by James Joyce. The entire novel takes place during the course of one day: June 16, 1904.
I grew up knowing Ulysses (pub. 1922) as the world’s greatest novel without actually reading it. My father was a literature fanatic, and Ulysses was his absolute favorite novel. He often, with a photographic memory, recited passages from it out of the blue, for seemingly no reason at all.
My father was such a fan of Ulysses that when I was 5 he named our family dog “Kinch.” If you’ve read Chapter One, you may recall “stately, plump” Buck Mulligan saying, to Stephen Dedalus:
God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.
Mulligan calls Stephen Daedalus “Kinch,” after the knife blade. Why? Because of his sharp wit? His honed analytical ability? Those are the sort of questions literary scholars ponder.
Admittedly, though I would like to be, I am not a literary scholar. Despite my father’s raving of the novel, I never started to really read Ulysses until I was much older, as it was much too imposing.
A few years ago, my father passed away. He was 81. And though he had not set eyes upon the pages of Ulysses in decades, he continued quoting the novel until right before his death.
The more I examine and read portions of Ulysses (with the hope of a separate volume of annotations, of course), the more I understand why my father quoted its passages for seemingly no reason at all.
As such, I am now able to share with you Three Reasons Why You — and I —Should Read Ulysses.
1. Ulysses is a work of art.
The first is because the writing is in itself a work of beauty. It is poetry embedded in prose. My father recited Ulysses in the same way an art-lover may admire Van Gogh’s Starry Night again and again. It was pleasing to the ear and senses.
For example, have you heard how Joyce describes “the moon” in Ulysses? It’s not just a MOON, but a woman. He writes:
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
2. Ulysses is incredibly complex.
Reason number 2 why you should love Ulysses is its complexity.
A multitude of meanings are interwoven in the words and phrasing. Ulysses has so many layers of complexity that annotated volumes have been written on its numerous references and allusions.
Perhaps this is why so many high school and university courses have taught the novel. At Yale, for example, a course was offered studying Ulysses in relation to Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Odyssey is particularly intertwined within Ulysses, each chapter of which is inspired by a corresponding chapter of the Greek masterpiece — all included in a single day’s wondering through Dublin.
2. Ulysses is Dublin.
This brings me the third reason why Ulysses is an amazing novel. DUBLIN. If you are a fan of Dublin, as am I, you must love Ulysses. If you are not a fan of Dublin, you don’t yet know Dublin.
Next time you visit Dublin, you may want to take in a James Joyce walking tour. Joyce was born in Dublin. Ulysses takes place in Dublin, and Dublin loves Joyce. You can see the statue of Joyce across from the old General Post Office and visit the James Joyce Centre, a museum dedicated to Joyce. You can see famous places from the novel, including Sweny’s Pharmacy, which is now a quaint bookshop maintained by Joyce-loving volunteers.
Until your next trip to Dublin, however, enjoy a pot of tea or pint of Guinness at your favorite local Irish pub and bring with you a copy of Ulysses. Especially do so on June 16 — or, as it is called, Bloomsday, named for Ulysses’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who, as Joyce describes:
ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Today, especially, today, appreciate Ulysses for its beauty —
Happy Bloomsday.
