Another Bloomsday dawns on Friday next, June 16th. Like the prelates of the Catholic Church, James Joyce was cunning in setting aside a particular day of the year on which to celebrate a feast., writes Declan Kiberd
When Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus sit down together over coffee and a bun, at the climax of Ulysses, neither says "Do this in memory of me" - yet every year the cult grows. Sometimes, Bloomsday can seem like what the Irish have now instead of religion.
On Friday, Dubs will dress as Stephen, Leopold, Molly, as if to assert their willingness to become one with characters of the great book. It is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modern literature, whether by Proust, Kafka or Robert Musil, having such an effect on the life of Paris, Prague or Vienna.
Ulysses set out to change the world, by celebrating the life of ordinary men and women, and capturing the pulse of a city.
If Joyce were to return on Bloomsday 2006, he would doubtless enjoy the drinks and japes, but might sadly see in them an attempt by Dubliners to reassert a lost sense of community.
Bloomsday now is a lament for a lost Dublin and for a time when the city was felt to be more intimate, knowable and viable. Although Ulysses is famous for tracing the inner thoughts and feelings of its characters, it is nonetheless set mainly in public space - beach, cemetery, library, bar, restaurant, newspaper office, hospital and, above all, the streets. Bloom and his friends are "street people", but far from seeing "street people" as a dire problem, Joyce viewed them as the very basis of a civilisation.
That civilisation was the civic bourgeoisie, which created public libraries and social democracy. Ulysses is an epic elegy for that culture. Bloom has no son and his name will die with him. Like the bourgeois, Bloom sees wealth as carrying social obligations, to neighbours, fellow-citizens, even the nation. So he doesn't just help a blind boy cross the street or donate beyond his means to the funeral fund of a man he scarcely knew. He also frets about how to improve transport in Dublin; how to combat cruelty to animals; and it's even suggested that he gave the idea for Sinn Féin to Arthur Griffith.
He is amusing too and tries to figure out a way of crossing Dublin without passing a pub. Joyce celebrates the idea of circulation, of random meetings by walkers in city streets. It is the unexpected nature of many of these meetings which allows him to renew and vary his styles in each episode.
By 1922, when the book appeared, Joyce sensed that the civic bourgeoisie, the highest point of European civilisation, was already doomed. It would be replaced by a middle class which lacked the same generosity or social vision. Instead of devoting itself to the creation of industry or ideas, that middle class would equate freedom with the freedom to consume. It would in time relentlessly privatise everything from State services to beaches, from cemeteries to medical care. The bourgeois culture of pub, cafe and public library of the early 20th century produced the essay, social welfare and Ulysses. The world of today's middle class can generate only the quality assessment, the government report and the specialist monograph. A humble small-ad canvasser like Bloom could understand Hamlet and try to invent labour-saving gadgets. The final meeting between him and Stephen is a recognition that there need be no conflict between bourgeois and bohemian, business and art, practice and theory.
Joyce, after all had himself been in business, opening Dublin's first movie house. His book is, among other things, a self-help manual in which a practical older man teaches an over-abstract youth how to survive in the world.
That world is gone. The chances of an ad-man meeting a poet in Dublin by night are very low, and the chances of the poet accepting an invitation to go back to his home for cocoa are probably nil. The random meetings of disparate types have been replaced by the strictly choreographed movements of daytime consumers in a suburban shopping mall.
Democracy is no longer defined as the sharing by all in a common culture, but is now mistaken for openness of access to this or that elite grouping.
No longer is it felt, as Joyce felt that clever waiters or smart cloakroom attendants can understand Ulysses, but rather it is believed that anyone trained in the proper way might aspire, in due time, to become one of the paid "experts" who do such things.
The bourgeoisie worked for the dissemination of a shared culture across the whole of society. The contemporary middle class is far less ambitious. It aims only at the inclusion of its bright children in the dominant structure rather than at the transformation of social relations, a transformation dreamed of by Joyce and the radicals of his day.
The world so brilliantly captured by Joyce is gone - but those who take to the streets on Friday, to reassert ownership of the book as well as the thoroughfares, are reminding us all of what was and of what might still be.