Writer and Author

Not in Praise of Bloomsday…

Today, June 16th, was Bloomsday.  If you’re not familiar with the concept, June 16th 1904 is the day when all the action in James Joyce’s opus, Ulysses is set.  Every year on that day the great and good and literary and arty gather in Dublin to retrace the route taken by Leopold Bloom on a Sunday morning at the turn of the last century.

Joyce’s book has been heralded as a classic, a work of English unparalleled in the English language.  That’s why he gets his own day.

Now this is probably the point where I should come clean.  I hate Bloomsday.  I’ve lived in Dublin too long not to get profoundly irritated by the marauding crowds of arty types and tourists that clutter up the thoroughfares with glasses of Guinness and dressed up to the nines in approximations of Edwardian dress.  If you wander through the centre of Dublin on June 16th you will find a selection of middle aged idiots acting like undergraduates and giving the book that is on more peoples “haven’t quite got round to reading” list than most others I can think of, the Rocky Horror treatment.

Bloomsday Photo by Michael Stamp all rights reserved

Let me get this straight.  Bloomsday is not just a bit of harmless playacting, it’s irritating, embarrassing and teeth clenchingly awful!  It’s the one day of the year when you get to see people who really should have more self respect, dressing up like complete idiots and hitting the bars like a back of feckless 20 somethings.

I’m aware that by saying this I sound (a) a total ignoramous and (b) rather unsure about where I fall in the whole cool young thing and old fogey scale.  For starters I have read Ulysses.  I read it years ago when I first moved up to Dublin while I was devouring anything that came from the writers that had helped to make the city famous.  I was fairly voracious in my reading in those days and didn’t always check the postal address of my chosen read.

In those days I read Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw…I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to Behan…I think I got side tracked by Lewis Carroll.  Anyway, at the time I was working on an antique stall in the George’s Street Arcade.

My boss at the time was working on a book of postcards all sent on June 16th 1904, that corresponded with the various locations in the book.  He’d written a synopsis of the book to go with the images and, knowing that 19-year-old me was keen on writing, he asked me to check it, casually throwing me a copy of Ulysses to make sure he hadn’t left anything out.

So I read Ulysses.  From cover to cover.  I quite liked Leopold Bloom but preferred his wife Molly and couldn’t stand Stephen Dedalus, who I thought and continued to think was a pretentious little git.  In terms of Joyce’s prose, while I get what he was doing from a technical point of view, it just completely leaves me cold.

I will freely admit that this could have to do with the never ending stream of postcards or my bosses synopsis but Ulysses would not appear anywhere on my list of books I would want with me if I was ever marooned on a desert island and I would be quite pissed off if it found it’s way there ahead of me.

I know that Ulysses is held up as a work of genius.  I just don’t like it.  I’m not denigrating Joyce as a writer in any way…The Dead is one of the best shorter pieces of writing I have ever read.  I just don’t like Ulysses.  I don’t like the fact that the men run the plot while the women are either leched over virgins, prostitutes or adulteresses.  I don’t like the fact that the book that is now synonymous with Dublin is arguably the least accessible.  I don’t like the fact that Bloomsday itself tends to be a rather snobby affair with pantomime overtones.

Dublin has produced many fine writers;  Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, Sean O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, George Bernard Shaw.  Writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, writers who deserve to be celebrated each year but who only get a look in for centenaries or on whims.

So I say, let’s give Bloomsday a rest.  Next year let’s have At Swim Two Birds Day to celebrate Flann O’Brien’s lunatic masterpiece.  The day could start in Grogans Pub off Georges Street and there could be cowboys in Ringsend, someone sitting up a tree proclaiming that a “pint of plain’s yer only man”, come to thing of that could the the city’s clarion call.  We could have someone dressed up as the Pooka MacPhellimey and someone or something as Finn Mac Cool.

Instead of having a day where the middle classes dress up in straw boaters and give the day over to cataloguing the eating and drinking in Joyce’s novel, lets have one where the surreal and bizzarre takes over the city. Instead of a daytrip to Sandeymount and Grafton Street, lets see the cattle corralled in Ringsend.

It might actually work.  And it would be a lot less irritating that bloody Bloomsday.

4 Comments

  1. Tim

    Very good post – if a trifle wrong-headed and mean spirited. Ulysses wasn’t written to be read by every Tom, Mick or Larry – it was written at a time of tremendous change of focus in world literature. It was written as a “stream of consciousness” which intended to capture, in an impressionistic way, a day in the life of Dublin. This is not the sort of thing the artisan scholars of the time would have easily understood and it seems this attitude still prevails. Never a truer word was spoken than the phrase “Only a true Dub understands Ulysses”…and by “true Dub” I don’t mean those bookish littérateurs on Hill 16. The fact that the work as a whole is unreadable doesn’t detract from it’s power as a work of art. Do we lambaste Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock for missing the boat on Hallmark? Is Phillip Glass less of a talent because his music isn’t as “musical” as Manilow? Ok, a lot of people like their books to be “readable”, their art to be “accessible” and their music to be “tuneful” but there’s more to experience than the narrow confines to which you would seem to have us all consigned. I myself collaborated on an Arts Council (UK) musical production of “A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man” and had the reviews been a tad kinder a lot of people would have gained tremendous kudos in the proposed “Bloom – The Musical”. Narrow thinking keeps us twiddling our thumbs on the lower slopes of Parnassus.

  2. Janina

    …or, for an idea of Dublin-as-she-once-was, try any Roddy Doyle? or maybe not, us foreigners out here would find her quite disappointing, as of late, Dublin has done a from-rags-to-riches-Cinderella turn and… not so quaint, perhaps? – well, wait and see, exciting times going on, right there, right now… enough philosophy. <-lo behold, my own version of that stream-of-consciousness my English teacher raved on about… but, why?

  3. Tim

    Thank you for your reply. It is gratifying that you have bestowed the epithet “gifted” on Joyce. This is very kind of you. However, you call Ulysses elitist. This is a gross over-simplification and a bit old hat. Just because someone with a low IQ is unable to read something does not mean that we fling the work into the bin of posterity. If that were the case then we’d all be reading Heat magazine – lots of pictures and no annoying portmanteau words to annoy the typing pool. You yourself teeter on the brink of elitism by expecting people to know who Douglas Adams is. I myself (well-read, if I may say so) had to look him up on the Internet. A mediocre “Science-Fiction” writer – give me strength! I wouldn’t mind if you brought in Nabokov, Proust, or even Ayn Rand to make a point – but “Marvin The Paranoid Android”….
    I’m sorry if this is rude – but this is important. Elitism is a dirty word – and like a lot of dirty words should be used sparingly. Joyce himself could hardly have seen himself as rarefied – his father was a Dublin Corporation worker and they lived in Bray, for God’s sake. (As an aside, Joyce was a little too fond of the “cratur” – more a pastime of the Hoi Polloi than the Elysian Scribe you would have us see him as.)
    Your assertion “Art does not always have to be accessible to all but it does when it is supposed to be representative of the city it describes” displays a sadly bourgeois attitude which does make me think, rather sadly, that you miss the point and that “representation” to someone such as yourself involves nice vases of flowers. Please don’t be too offended (and please take this in the spirit it’s meant) but Ulysses is ALL about the reconciliation of the Bohemian and the Bourgeois. It is a shame you remain resolutely in the latter category and will sit in your nice vase – flowerless.

    • Abigail

      Tim,
      Your kind of snobbism is precisely what I was talking about. Unfortunately Ulysses seems to be a book that attracts this kind of high handed, but in my opinion, ignorant comment. Not liking Ulysses has nothing to do with how well read the reader is and Joyce’s background does not necessarily have a bearing on whether or not the book he wrote has become over the years and in this city, elitist. It is Joyce readers who have made Bloomsday the middle class, middle aged farce that it is today…and you have done nothing to disprove my thesis. Kindly don’t comment again if all you are going to do it sling mud. If you have something that would further the debate feel free but otherwise goodbye.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

© 2024 Abigail Rieley

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑