16 June 1904 (Bloomsday) was the date of Leopold Bloom's adventures in Ulysses. Its centenary will be celebrated all over the world - and not least in James Joyce's home city. Brenda Maddox will be there
As the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday approaches, you might be tempted to cry, "Call the whole thing off!" Dublin's celebration of the day recorded in James Joyce's Ulysses lasts five months this year, and seems rather absurd. Joyce believed that nobody with any self-respect stays in Ireland. He left at the earliest opportunity and called his country the "afterthought of Europe", "the old sow that eats her farrow" and "a priest-ridden land".
Joyce, born in Dublin in 1882, emigrated in 1904, eventually settling in Trieste, and after a bitter visit to Ireland in 1912 never returned there, not even to see his dying father. World-famous after Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922, he refused Yeats's invitation to join the Free State's new Irish Academy of Letters in 1932. He resolutely remained a British subject until his death in Zurich in January 1941 at the age of 58. In Ireland, his name was long anathema. His Dublin sisters hoped nobody would associate them with "that" Joyce.
Theocratic Ireland is dead and gone. Dublin is now a place of gleaming glass towers, malls, sushi bars, gay pride and rock stars. Ulysses is on the school curriculum and Joyce is acknowledged as probably the greatest of the many great writers Ireland has produced. He was also the most European, as shown by the last three words in Ulysses - "Trieste, Zurich, Paris" (the cities where it was written). Besides, when did Dublin ever turn its back on a party?
The audacity of Ulysses, apart from its stream-of-consciousness technique, is its hour-by-hour account of a single day. It chronicles the odyssey on 16 June 1904 of an ordinary man, a seller of newspaper advertising, a Dublin Jew called Leopold Bloom. And as the late critic Hugh Kenner noted, "a day in June is a very long day at 53 north latitude". Bloom is Joyce's Ulysses, or Odysseus, wandering the limits of his known world until he meets his Telemachus - his spiritual son, Stephen Dedalus, a James Joyce lookalike down to the canvas shoes.
For some years, Bloomsday has been celebrated throughout the world with marathon readings of Ulysses on the radio or at meetings of Joyce societies. It has become a festive day in Dublin, an Edwardian orgy of fancy dress, horse-drawn carriages and many stops at pubs. This year being the centenary, the national celebration kicked off on 2 February, Joyce's birthday. Festivities in the big week will begin with a free breakfast for ten thousand on O'Connell Street on Sunday. (The menu will be offal. Bloom, unless you've forgotten, starts his day with a breakfast of grilled kidney.) This will be followed by a civic reception at Dublin City Hall, the premiere of a film called Bloom, the biggest art exhibition on Joycean themes ever held, lots of street theatre and Joyce supplements in the newspapers. The week's finale will be a huge river pageant on the Liffey.
Few of the tourists will have a clue why Joyce commemorated that particular day. But Joyceans (people who know better than to put an apostrophe into Finnegans Wake) know that 16 June 1904 was the day Joyce first "walked out" with Nora Barnacle; when, as he wrote to her, "you made me a man". Nora seems to have granted him the first sexual favour for which he had not paid. His astonishment, followed by lifelong love, at this sign of woman's frank sexuality resulted in the most famous female character in 20th-century fiction: Leopold's wife, Molly Bloom.
What would Joyce have made of all these celebrations? The question is irrelevant: you might as well ask what Mozart would have thought of global warming. More to the point is the mystery of the fascination of the man, which goes far beyond that of his work.
I believe the answer lies in his overweening self-confidence and Irish charm. This shines out of the photograph, taken in Dublin in his early twenties, in which, cloth cap on head, canvas-shod feet wide apart, hands in pockets, he looks coolly at the camera. Asked what he was thinking when his friend Constantine Curran took the picture, Joyce replied: "I was wondering would he lend me five shillings." Even then, Joyce, penniless, prospect-less, knew he would become the greatest writer in the world.
For Joyce scholars, the main business of the week will be the 19th International James Joyce Symposium - a biennial event but, this year, the biggest ever. Nearly 600 delegates have registered.
I attended my first Joyce international symposium in Frankfurt in 1984, when I began research on a biography of Nora Joyce. I was warned about the terrible Joyceans ready to attack any intruder who dared stray on to their sacred patch. How wrong this was. Within two days, I found I had joined the best club in the world. Wherever you go, Vancouver or Santiago, there is a Joycean ready to take you out for a drink and a laugh. Joyceans laugh a lot, especially the clever subspecies, the Finnegans Wake specialists, who call themselves "Wakers" (pun intended).
Morris Beja, pillar of the International James Joyce Foundation and academic co-ordinator of this year's event with Anne Fogarty of University College Dublin, summed up the Joyceans' spirit. "We're used to dividing the world into two categories: what's relevant to James Joyce and what isn't - and the second category seems to get smaller all the time."
The marvel of Joyce's work is that all human life is there. Apart from the usual "feminism" and "post-colonialism", this year there are papers on Joyce and the menstrual cycle, thermodynamics, gene-splicing, shit, J Edgar Hoover, Palestine, the rhetoric of perversion, Britishness, and the future of psychoanalysis. More discursive are "Why reading Ulysses makes life more interesting", "The performance of Jewish mercantilism in Ulysses" and "the reprocessing of trash in Ulysses".
The list of participants and papers shows not only that every aspect of human endeavour is relevant to Joyce, but also that the Joyce nation is moving eastward. Delegates will come from Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea and India, and there will be papers on the Japanese and Korean translations of Finnegans Wake.
Some papers will be wise, some silly; the ensuing discussions will be combative. All I know is that, this month in Dublin, when the first academic rises to declare, "I gotta kind of a statement and a two-part question", I would not be anywhere else in the world.
The 19th International James Joyce Symposium will take place from 12-19 June at the National College of Ireland, Dublin. For further information on Bloomsday 2004 and for tickets, visit www.rejoycedublin.com
Brenda Maddox is the author of Nora: a biography of Nora Joyce (Penguin)
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