Bloomsday Background

What is Bloomsday?

On June 16, 1904, James Joyce first went walking, in Dublin, with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

Years later, Ulysses was published. Ulysses, of course, an 800 page book, takes place all in one day. And what day does it take place on? June 16. Clearly, Joyce saw meeting Nora as a seminal event and he said that on that day “she made a man of me”. I’m not sure if it has been nailed down, without a shadow of a doubt, what happened on that day. But everyone (all biographers, I mean) agrees that something sexual happened on June 16, 1904. You can tell from how Joyce talked about that day later.

At that time, of course, there was nowhere to go in Dublin, for a “date”. You didn’t “date”. It was a rigid Catholic country, with rigid separations of the sexes. James Joyce wanted freedom, yearned for a free and open life – where men and women could live together and actually “touch one another” – He meant more than sex.

He considered it one of the greatest blessings in his life that he ran into Nora one day on the streets of Dublin.

Nora was basically running away from her Galway past (and the boy she had loved who had died – Joyce used that as his plot for the exquisite The Dead). Nora was working as a waitress in Finn’s Hotel.

Joyce met Nora on the street, on June 10, and asked if he could meet her.

Eventually, after a blow-off or two, Nora agreed. The two of them walked through the streets of Dublin, on June 16, 1904.

And 3 months later, in September of 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled Ireland – He got a job teaching in a Berlitz school on the continent somewhere – and she decided to come with. They fled Ireland without getting married, leaving a wake of scandal (and debt) behind them.

And except for one or two visits, they never returned to Ireland.

They lived in Trieste, and had two children – Giorgio and Lucia.

They got hitched, officially, in 1931.

They remained steadfastly devoted (albeit in a stormy Irish-passion kind of way) to one another for the rest of their lives.

Ulysses – considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century – is James Joyce’s tribute to Nora Barnacle, the wild Galway girl who took a risk on this nearly-blind always-poor writer, the Galway girl who threw away respectability to take on a life with him.

In a way, she saved him. It is hard to imagine him writing Ulysses without Nora.

She was the catalyst, the inspiration. He said often that he only knew one woman, he could only write about one woman. Nora, to him, represented the mystery of ALL women – and through studying her character, and stealing the experiences from her own life, and how she would express them – he was able to delve into the relationship between the sexes in this grandly universal way.

I don’t want to say that Nora is the REASON for Joyce’s genius, because I don’t believe that at all. Joyce was a genius, regardless.

But she ended up being the galvanizing force, the illuminating candle in the darkness – from which he would begin to write his best and his most personal work.

Without Nora confessing to him her old and painful love affair with the boy who had died (after standing beneath her window in the rain) – James Joyce never would have written The Dead – which I believe (and obviously I’m not alone) is the greatest short story ever written.

The Dubliners is a very interesting book – because in it, you can see Joyce’s development as a writer. The Dubliners is a series of short stories, all taking place (duh) in Dublin. It was considered very scandalous at the time. The book told the truth about Ireland, about Dublin – about the kind of life it offered its people (its young men, in particular). I’ve read it tons of times, but the most interesting way to read the book is to read it from start to finish – first story to last story. Don’t skip around.

The Dead is the last story.

And that’s where Joyce’s genius, in my opinion, suddenly floods out of him.

The rest of the book is filled with great snippets of writing, interesting images, Irish humor – but it’s kind of bitchy, it’s a book of gossip – it is a book meant to HURT. Joyce wanted to hurt Ireland – he wanted to force them to look in the mirror, and see themselves. This is his motivation with 95% of the stories in Dubliners. And that’s cool, a lot of the best books in the world have been written out of rage, out of a desire for revenge, as an “I’ll show them”…

Most of the book has that tone.

And then in The Dead … suddenly … like a magician … in one motion – Joyce draws back the curtain, and there you see what is behind all the bitchiness. You see tenderness, ineffable tenderness, unbearable loss, and a sweet sweet (bittersweet) love. Oh, how he loves Dublin, oh how he loves Ireland, and Dubliners … how he loves it all … and yet … he cannot live there, he cannot live in Ireland. He could not have lived there without experiencing a kind of soul-death.

However – he never could write about anything else. All of his books are about Ireland, and he wrote not one of them on his native soil.

So.

There’s a bit of background for you.

Ulysses – an encyclopedic book which takes place on one day – June 16, 1904 – and takes place on the streets of Dublin (to a microscopic level … you actually could construct a map, just from how Joyce writes about the city) – It’s a book of redemption (it begins with a character shaving at his mirror, and intoning something in Latin – which is the beginning of the mass) – and it ends with the 60-page-long unpunctuated interior monologue of Molly Bloom, adulterous lonely wife of the lead character …

Reading Ulysses – under my father’s tutelage – was, hands down, the most exciting reading experience I have ever had in my life.

Truly life-changing.

And so … Bloomsday approaches …

James Joyce: this is my thanks to you.