Bloomsday is June 16, and it’s named for Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser who walks around Dublin on that date in 1904 doing almost nothing of consequence. Joyce chose the date because it was the day he first walked out with Nora Barnacle, who became his wife. He built a seven-hundred-page novel on the calendar square of a first date, which is either enormously romantic or a piece of private joke-making at the reader’s expense, and with Joyce both are usually true.
Bloomsday is my favorite literary holiday, and I don’t care that plenty of the people in straw hats never finished the book. A city throwing a party for a novel about an ordinary man’s ordinary day makes me glad literature still has a public life. The people who sneer at the half-readers have missed the point of the whole event.
People mark it in Dublin and elsewhere by walking the routes, eating what the characters eat, and reading passages aloud. It’s been observed since the 1950s and it’s now a tourist economy.
It’s a wonderful oddity. There’s no comparable holiday for any other novel. Nobody walks Raskolnikov’s route through St Petersburg on a fixed date in costume, and no city has built a tourist economy on a book most visitors haven’t finished.
Part of the reason is that Ulysses is unusually walkable. Joyce set it in one city on one day and was obsessive about the geography, reportedly saying that Dublin could be rebuilt from the book if it were destroyed. That makes the novel a map as much as a story, and a map invites you to follow it.
The rest of the reason is that a difficult book generates devotion in a way an easy one doesn’t. People who get through it want the fact acknowledged, and an annual public occasion is how that happens.
The date has a private origin that’s now public property. June 16, 1904 was the day Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway working at a Dublin hotel. They stayed together for the rest of his life.
So Joyce built the most exhaustively annotated novel in English on the calendar square of a first date, and every reader who has ever struggled through it has been walking around inside a private joke about a man’s love life. That makes me like Joyce a good deal more than his reputation for coldness suggests I should.
The first Bloomsday came in 1954, the fiftieth anniversary, when a small group of Irish writers set out to travel the route of the novel by horse-drawn cab.
They didn’t finish. They got as far as a pub and stopped there. That’s more faithful to the book than completing the circuit would have been.
It grew from that into what it’s now: readings, costumes, organized walks, Bloomsday breakfasts, and a heavy contribution to Dublin’s tourist economy from a novel the city’s establishment spent decades being embarrassed by.
Joyce himself never lived in Ireland again after 1912. The city he reconstructed street by street he’d left permanently, and he wrote it from Trieste, Zurich and Paris using directories and letters home to check the details.
Why is Ulysses so hard?
Because the difficulty is the argument. The premise is that one ordinary day in one ordinary man’s life contains as much as the Odyssey. To make that claim persuasive instead of merely stated, Joyce had to render consciousness at a resolution nobody had attempted: the half-thoughts, the digressions, the songs stuck in a head, the physical sensations interrupting the reasoning.
Real consciousness isn’t orderly. Rendering it accurately produces prose that’s not orderly either, and a reader trained on sentences that carry the plot forward will find that maddening. I’ll defend the difficulty here, grudgingly. There are stretches of Ulysses that wear me out. They wear me out for a reason, though, and I’ll take a book that’s hard because its subject demanded it over a dozen that are easy because nobody tried.
Then there’s the second layer. Joyce wrote each section in a different style, and some of them are parodies of specific historical tones. One episode is staged as a play script. One is written as a catechism of questions and answers. One reproduces the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon onward in the space of a chapter.
None of that is decoration. The argument is that the form should suit the moment being described, and that a single voice across a whole novel is a convention instead of a necessity.
What did Ulysses change about the novel?
Three things that are now so standard nobody credits them. Interior monologue as the primary mode. Novels before it reported thought. Ulysses puts the reader inside the flow of it, without punctuation marking where reporting ends and thinking begins, and the close third person that dominates modern fiction descends from that. The ordinary as sufficient subject. A day with no war, no crime and no crisis wasn’t obvious material for a major novel. Almost all literary fiction since is written on the assumption that it is, and that assumption starts here.
Structure as meaning. The idea that a book’s architecture is itself a statement, instead of a container for content, is now taken for granted in serious fiction and it wasn’t before.
You can dislike the novel entirely and still be reading its consequences in nearly everything published since.
Who is Leopold Bloom, and why did Joyce choose him?
The choice of protagonist is the argument in miniature.
Bloom sells advertising space. He’s Jewish in a city that’s overwhelmingly Catholic. It makes him a permanent slight outsider without ever making him a victim in the way a lesser novel would. He’s middle-aged, unathletic, kind in small ways, and aware that his wife is meeting another man that afternoon and choosing not to prevent it.
Joyce could have made his modern Odysseus a soldier, a politician or an artist. Making him an advertising canvasser who’s humiliated at home is the book’s claim: that heroism, if the word means anything, is a matter of getting through an ordinary day without becoming cruel.
Bloom is decent under pressure that never lets up and never becomes dramatic. That’s far harder to write than a hero facing a crisis, because there’s no external event to carry the reader, and it’s the reason the character has lasted.
Bloom is a favorite of mine, and he’s the reason I’d tell anyone to push through the rough patches. A man humiliated at home who chooses kindness anyway is more of a hero to me than any warrior in Homer. Writers who think a protagonist needs a sword or a gun should spend a day with him.
The other reason is his interiority. We know what he thinks about food, money, his dead son, his daughter, his body, his failures. Very few characters in fiction are known that thoroughly, and none were before him.
What is the Odyssey structure doing in Ulysses?
Each episode corresponds to an episode in Homer, and the correspondences aren’t always obvious.
A funeral stands in for the descent to the underworld. A newspaper office stands in for the cave of the winds. A hostile man in a pub stands in for the Cyclops. Joyce circulated a scheme mapping the parallels. That’s how anybody knows the full set.
The question worth asking is what the parallels earn, because a reader who misses all of them still gets the novel. The answer is that the structure is doing the argument silently. If a Dublin funeral maps onto a descent to the dead, then the ordinary isn’t smaller than the epic, it’s the same thing at a different scale.
Stating that claim in a sentence would be a thesis. Building it into the architecture makes the reader feel it whether or not they can name it.
That’s a technique available at much smaller scale. A story shaped like something the reader already knows has meaning the prose never has to state, and the shape says it for you.
What did the Ulysses obscenity trial change?
It was banned, seized and burned before most people could read it. Serialization in an American magazine led to a conviction for obscenity in 1921, and the book couldn’t be legally published in the United States until a 1933 ruling found it wasn’t pornographic. Customs confiscated copies. The Paris edition, published by a bookshop owner because no conventional publisher would touch it, was smuggled in.
The 1933 decision is worth knowing about beyond the book. The judge established that a work should be judged as a whole and by its effect on an ordinary reader, instead of by isolated passages. That’s the standard that opened the door for most of what followed in twentieth-century publishing.
That ruling matters to every writer working today, whether they’ve read Joyce or not. Censors who judge a book by its worst page have done enormous damage, and I’m grateful to the judge who told them to read the entire book.
A novel almost nobody finishes changed what everybody else was allowed to write.
How should you read Ulysses?
The standard advice is to grind through from page one. That’s why most attempts end around page eighty.
That advice has driven more readers away from Joyce than the book itself ever did, and it makes me cross. Nobody forces through a poetry collection cover to cover as a test of character, and Ulysses deserves the same freedom. A better approach is to stop treating it as a novel to be completed and start treating it as a collection of episodes with wildly different rules. Read one. If it defeats you, read a different one. They’re not sequential in the way a plot is, because there’s barely a plot.
Start with the early Bloom episodes. They’re the most conventionally readable and where the interior monologue is at its clearest. The famous final section is famous because it’s unpunctuated, and it’s also more readable than its reputation once you stop looking for the punctuation. Reading it aloud helps enormously. That’s the actual reason Bloomsday involves public readings. Joyce wrote for the ear and a great deal that looks impenetrable resolves when it’s spoken.
And there’s no obligation to finish. A book that took seven years to write and is designed to be reread doesn’t require a single triumphant pass.
What can a writer take from Ulysses?
Four things, none of which require writing anything like it. Let the form suit the moment. A chapter about exhaustion can be written in exhausted prose. Most novels use one tone throughout because that’s the convention. Trust the ordinary. Joyce showed that a day of errands contains enough, and every domestic novel since has been living off that permission. If your material seems too small, the problem is nearly always resolution instead of scale. Write for the ear. Prose that works aloud works on the page. Prose that only works silently is frequently hiding a rhythm problem. Difficulty must be justified. This is the caution, and it outweighs the encouragement. Ulysses is difficult because the subject required it. Difficulty adopted as a style, without a subject demanding it, produces the enormous quantity of unreadable imitation that followed and that nobody reads at all.
How should you mark Bloomsday?
Read one episode aloud. That’s the entire tradition and it works.
If Ulysses is too much, Dubliners is the same author at his most accessible, fifteen short stories in plain prose, and the final one is among the best things written in English. Anyone who thinks they can’t read Joyce should try that before concluding it.
If you write, do the exercise. Take a scene and write a page of your character’s interior monologue with no filtering: the digressions, the half-noticed sounds, the thing they keep returning to. Then cut ninety percent and keep the residue. That residue is what interior monologue is for, and almost nobody arrives at it without writing the unusable version first.
Mark the day however you like, and don’t let anybody make you feel small for not finishing. Joyce wrote a book about getting through one ordinary day with your decency intact, and a reader who reads one episode aloud and enjoys it has honored him better than any scholar arguing in the footnotes.
For other writers whose days are worth marking I’ve written about Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway, and the fiction that lasts is collected in a literary journey through timeless stories.