LIBRARY NOTES
Marylin Bender Altschul
James Joyce's Dublin
Sunday, June 1, 1997
Among the many joyous rituals of the June calendar, Bloomsday on the 16th of the month is a celebration fast becoming popular beyond the particular circle of James Joyce scholars. In Dublin, literary pilgrims and urban explorers gather to honor Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's epic
Ulysses. With text in hand and preferably garbed in oddments of Edwardian style, they trace Bloom's wanderings on that single day in 1904. Though Joyce left Ireland to write in permanent exile, he said that his native city, if ever destroyed, could be reconstructed by reference to his novel. Indeed, most of the landmarks of Joyce's "dear, dirty Dublin" have survived rebellion, civil war, and the wrecking balls of real estate developers.
Starting in the early morning at the Martello Tower in suburban Sandycove, now the James Joyce Museum, local actors and visitors from far and wide read from the opening chapters of Ulysses, which are set in the fortress overlooking "the snot-green sea". Emulating Buck Mulligan, some strip for a plunge into the "scrotumtightening" depths of the Dublin Bay, where the less hardy repair to the center of the city for a robust Irish breakfast featuring Bloom's beloved "inner organs of beast and fowls." Others hire horse-drawn carriages for the ride to Glasnevin Cemetery, commemorating the episode in Ulysses of Paddy Dignam's funeral. At 1:00 p.m., Davy Byrne's pub in Duke Street serves Bloom's favorite lunch, a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of Burgandy. Across the Liffey at the Ormond Hotel, a pint of Guinness is the stimulus of choice for recalling that Bloom and his wife's lover, Blazes Boylan, just missed meeting in the bar at 4:00 p.m. The hub of Bloomsday activities through the day and into evening is the James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great George's Street, on a block of grand, eighteenth-century Georgian houses retrieved from slumhood. Joyce's nephew, Ken Monaghan, recounts the harsh facts that figured in both the writer's life and his fiction. The tearoom of the Centre is framed by the front door of Bloom's long-ago demolished residence, Number 7 Eccles Street. Behind that door in an upstairs bedroom, Molly Bloom uttered the "yes... yes...Yes" that concludes the novel. No Bloomsday is complete without a notable Irish actress reciting Molly's thirty-six page sexual reverie.
For those who can't make it to Dublin, Bloomsday can be vigorously observed in New York. Annually, there are Bloomsday readings from Joyce's Ulysses at Symphony Space on upper Broadway, and Bloomsday breakfasts and other Joycean events at Irish venues in downtown Manhattan. The New York Society Library has a comprehensive Joyce collection including audiotapes and several early editions in its rare book holdings.
|