Why the Irish are so proud of Bloomsday

The Irish celebrated Bloomsday on June 16 honouring James Joyce’s unique publication Ulysses.

It’s a rare day dedicated to a work of art, now evolving into a week’s festivities, although it generally doesn’t pull in the masses – yet. Ireland is working on that. It lures in an audience familiar with Joyce’s not-easy-to-read work, but is not relaxation reading for the average Dubliner like myself, around whose city it’s based.

However, related events are reaching a wider audience. Ireland is renowned for its writers and love of a good yarn, but Ulysses is more than mere reading. It requires commitment and concentration, given the breadth of references to its time and character insights – adroit and humorous, that its scholars know are related to real people and places in Joyce’s Dublin, some thinly disguised but historically traceable.

Joyce was studying medicine in Paris but returned to Dublin in 1903 because his mother was dying of cancer. In 1904 he met an imposing woman on a Dublin street, and on June 16 they had their first date. Ulysses is a tribute to that date. Some of the traits he admired in that woman – Nora Barnacle – are present in the famous character of Molly Bloom.

Although he was intellectually and socially Nora’s superior, her humour and her practical side engaged him. From Galway in Ireland’s far west, Nora was working as a chambermaid in a Dublin hotel. I admire Joyce, not for the author intellectuals have knowledge of and admiration for, but for the man’s courage at a time when class differentiation meant sticking to your own upper levels via matrimony, for choosing a woman that some still, who gather to honour him, would not consider an ideal partner for a person of higher education and literary standing.

Not cut out for a life in medicine, Joyce was destined to become a legend of literature; Nora shared his good and hard times and bore him two children. His now revered story written in his own inimitable style was light years ahead of its detractors, and he and his work were reviled in some quarters. Yet he paved the path for brave Irish authors to follow.

Then, the Irish state and the Roman Catholic church were in agreement regarding the moral codes imposed on Catholic citizens. Ireland was not alone at that time in allowing religious clergy to exert undue influence in governance. The two entities ruling the lives of the Irish faithful held them in a morality grasp, denied (unnatural) contraception, yet encouraged large families many couldn’t afford. If family size indicated anything, it showed the Irish were highly sexed.

Even more modern writers who tackled any form of sexual honesty also suffered. In Living, Philippa Tracey reviewed Amongst Women by another unique Irish mind, John McGahern, who worked as a primary school teacher but whose writing caused him to lose his job. Edna O’Brien, now regarded as one of the finest writers of her generation, also met with revulsion and abuse, her books were actually burned in her hometown. But when someone is compelled to write and express life with all its complications and messy sexual underlayers, criticism will not, cannot stop the flow.

These writers carried on to deserved fame, their work now hailed internationally. A prototype vanguard opening a fissure in censorship narrow-mindedness though which, today’s Irish writers freely thrive.

Apart from his literary excellence, Joyce was a natural man of natural appetites. His intimate letters to Nora, now open to the world of curious eyes, shows he enjoyed sex, he even had names for her farts. Joyce, with his ever-troublesome eyes and nerdy look, so loved this striking, working-class woman that everything about her was precious, dear to him.

If you read no other part of Ulysses, read Molly’s soliloquy. Joyce, the physical man, is sometimes overshadowed by the desire to present his creative genius. That inner awareness of human nature he nurtured and stored to use, of how ordinary people really acted and felt, was the foundation for the most famous book in the world: emotion and intellect working in lived, well-read collaboration.