Profile 'Ulysses': It's the book that wades knee-deep in a stream of consciousness, profanity and offal, and confounds as much as it delights, writes Shane Hegarty, 100 years after the first Bloomsday
On June 16th, 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, who had first met only days previously, took the tram from Merrion Square to Lansdowne Road, where they alighted and strolled to the banks of the River Dodder. What happened next has been the source of much prurience from biographers. Suffice to say, some enjoy the impertinent suggestion that one of literature's greatest works is also one of the few to have been dedicated to the sexual treat given its author.
Two decades later, and two years after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce lay in hospital, blindfolded after an eye operation. According to biographer Richard Ellmann, friends brought him a bouquet of blue and white hydrangeas in honour of what was already being called Bloomsday. Joyce scrawled in his notebook: "To-day 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date."
We will not be allowed to forget it. Certainly not this year, which will mark 100 years since the day on which the fictional Leopold Bloom crossed Dublin to ultimately encounter Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's complex, challenging, avant-garde masterpiece. Ulysses was a gift to Nora and a novel about Dublin, but it has been embraced by the world. There is no other date in literature that is so widely marked. This year, Bloomsday will be celebrated in over 60 countries; they will scoff offal in Sydney, feast on readings in Tokyo and act out Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Buenos Aries.
But it is in Dublin, a city so meticulously reconstructed from the author's memory and his relatives' letters as he wrote from rooms in Paris, Trieste and Zurich between 1914 and 1921, that it will be most roundly celebrated. Bloomsday will last, officially at least, for five months. It will begin in April and run until the end of August. However, already there is a short-story competition and February will find public readings of Ulysses in libraries around the country. Further down the line, the 19th James Joyce Symposium will take place in Dublin in November and December.
The Bloomsday breakfast will take place two weeks before the centenary day itself, with offal served to 10,000 people on Dublin's O'Connell Street. Dublin's commuters can decide if they agree with Bloom's assertion that grilled mutton kidneys give to the palate "a fine tang of faintly scented urine". Perhaps we should have ordered lunch instead, given that Bloom munched on Gorgonzola sandwiches washed down with Burgundy.
Famously, upon its publication in 1922, Ulysses was greeted with excitement of another sort. It was never officially banned in Ireland; that was unnecessary. US customs had confiscated excerpts before the final proof was published and English customs burned the book at Folkestone. Irish customs simply added it to its blacklist.
When its original serialisation in the American journal The Little Review led to an obscenity trial, it was argued that not only was the publication too small to cause widespread offence but that the "unintelligible" narrative was a result of Joyce's glaucoma.
Copies did make it through customs, but were castigated by some of those who should have given it sanctuary. The Dublin Review denounced Ulysses as a novel in which the author "splutters hopelessly under the flood of his own vomit". It decided that it was a work possessed by "the devilish drench . . . without grammar and sense".
The Sunday Express was especially florid in its criticism: "Leprous scabrous horrors . . . all secret sewers of vice canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts . . . unclean lunacies larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies."
Even when the first Bloomsday celebration took place, on its 50th anniversary in 1954, the book was still unwelcome at the ports. Nevertheless, Flann O'Brien, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh were among the small crowd who gathered in horse-drawn carriages at Joyce's tower in Sandycove.
Kavanagh wrote: "We made our way in the Bloomsday swelter/ from the Martello tower, to the cabbies' shelter." Actually, they never made it to the cabbies' shelter by the Custom House. O'Brien was drunk before they left and they became side-tracked by several pubs that did not feature in Ulysses. O'Brien relieved himself on Sandymount Strand, although not necessarily in honour of the fictional Stephen Dedalus's identical act.
By then, though, the Joyce industry was prospering in academic circles. Kavanagh was moved to pen the pithy poem 'Who Killed James Joyce?': "I, said the commentator/ I killed James Joyce/ For my graduation/ The weapon that was used/ Was a Harvard thesis." That Ulysses intimidates the public as it tantalises academics has always presented Bloomsday with its greatest predicament. You will find the James Joyce T-shirts on the shelves of the souvenir shops, between the ones that read "Temple Bar: World Drinking Centre" and the tricolour Y-fronts. You can buy etchings of his image in slate taken from buildings that stood in Dublin during his lifetime. However, perhaps because of the peculiar language and the period dress, the digestion of unusual food and the deep obsession of the Joyceans, a book so important to the city and such a lure for the tourists, has produced a feast day that can have somewhat of a members-only feel about it.
"By the end of August, I don't expect everyone to rush out and buy the book," says Laura Weldon, co-ordinator of festival planners ReJoyce Dublin 2004, "but if everyone gets it a little bit better than ever before then we will have succeeded." There are, she admits, perceived barriers, but it is not an insoluble problem. This year is an opportunity, she says, to broaden its appeal, to present it in various ways. "When people hear it, through audiotape or a reading, it makes sense to them. Whether they have seen the movie version or heard someone talk about it. Whatever vehicle works to help it come alive."
Joyce, of course, would have expected nothing less than this year's extended festival. Nor would he have been surprised that it was voted Greatest Irish Novel in the recent Irish Times poll, greatest English-language novel in one survey and novel of the millennium in another. We are only catching up with his self-belief and may yet have some way to go. At age 16 he had challenged his parents over an Ibsen drama: "The subject of the play is genius breaking out in the home and against the home. You needn't have gone to see it. It's going to happen in your own house."
"I think that on the one hand he would be increasingly proud and chuffed that Ulysses has become so iconic," says Weldon, "but at the same time he would say that he could have told us this. And he would probably add that we haven't figured it all out yet."
You may not have time to figure it all out, but there is still a little time in which to get acquainted with Ulysses, if you have not already done so. There is a website, Ulysses for Dummies (www.bway.net/~hunger/ulysses.html), which is audaciously concise: "Lunchtime: Bloom stops in at a pub for a bite to eat." There is Sean Walsh's new, acclaimed movie version, bl,.m. There will be the RTÉ broadcast of the library readings; a chapter-by-chapter guide running on RTÉ Radio 1 for 20 weeks from February. In the Parisian James Joyce pub, the plot is retold in 12 stained-glass windows.
Of course, there is always the book . . .