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.
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.
