Bloomsday

On 16 June 1904, a young Dublin advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom left his house at 7 Eccles Street, bought a kidney for his breakfast, attended a funeral, wandered the streets and pubs of the city, and finally came home in the small hours to his wife Molly, whose unpunctuated thoughts close the book with the word “Yes”. Leopold Bloom never existed; he is the invention of James Joyce, and the day is the single day on which the whole vast action of Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday is the annual celebration, held every 16 June, of that fictional day — the only literary festival built around a date inside a novel — and each year Dublin, and readers from Tokyo to Trieste, retrace Bloom’s footsteps, eat what he ate and read Joyce aloud in the streets.

Why the Sixteenth of June

Joyce did not choose the date at random, and its private meaning is one of the most romantic facts in modern literature. The 16th of June 1904 was the day of his first proper outing with Nora Barnacle, the Galway chambermaid who would become his lifelong companion and eventually his wife. The two had arranged to meet a few days earlier but Nora had not appeared; when they did walk out together, on the 16th, it was to the suburb of Ringsend, and Joyce always treated that day as the true beginning of his adult life and his love for her. By setting the entire novel on that date he encoded a private tribute into the most public of his works, fixing forever the day Nora first walked with him.

The name “Bloomsday” comes from the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and Joyce himself used the term in his lifetime, referring in a 1924 letter to a correspondent marking “Bloom’s day”. He did not live to see it become a festival, but he plainly relished the idea that a fictional Thursday might acquire a life of its own.

Ulysses and Its Day

Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company, after being serialised in an American magazine and prosecuted for obscenity. It maps the wanderings of three Dubliners — Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus — across the eighteen hours of a single ordinary day, and it does so in prose of extraordinary ambition, each of its eighteen episodes shadowing a book of Homer’s Odyssey. Bloom is the modern Ulysses, an unheroic Jewish everyman making his small odyssey around Dublin; Stephen is Telemachus, the son in search of a father; Molly, in bed, is Penelope. The correspondences are exact enough that readers can follow Bloom’s route on a map and stand at the actual doorways, pubs and beaches the novel names.

That geographical precision is what makes Bloomsday possible. Joyce boasted that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from his book, and the claim is barely an exaggeration; the addresses are real, the shops were real, the funeral route to Glasnevin Cemetery is walkable to this day. Celebrants can therefore do something impossible with almost any other novel — inhabit its setting in real time, hour by hour, on the very date it describes.

The eighteen episodes are keyed to places and to hours of the clock alike, so that a reader can, in principle, be at the Martello tower at eight in the morning where the book opens, in Davy Byrne’s at lunchtime where Bloom eats, on Sandymount Strand at the hour Bloom watches Gerty MacDowell, and at the maternity hospital in the evening, each scene falling at roughly the time the novel assigns it. Joyce even mapped each episode to an organ of the body, an art, a colour and a symbol, a private scheme he set down in charts he shared with early critics, so the day is layered with correspondences far beyond its street plan.

The History of the Celebration

The first true Bloomsday was kept in 1954, the fiftieth anniversary of the fictional day. A small party of Irish writers and hangers-on, among them the novelist Flann O’Brien (writing as Brian O’Nolan), the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the critic and Joyce scholar John Ryan and Joyce’s cousin Tom Joyce, hired two horse-drawn cabs of the kind used in the novel’s funeral scene and set out to travel Bloom’s route around the city. The pilgrimage was fuelled by a good deal of drink, dissolved into disorder well before its planned end, and never reached its destination, but it was captured on film and established the template. John Ryan later preserved the actual door of 7 Eccles Street, salvaged when the house was demolished, and it survives as a relic.

The celebration grew slowly through the following decades, taking firmer shape under the auspices of the James Joyce Cultural Centre in Dublin, founded in 1996 in a Georgian house on North Great George’s Street. An earlier milestone came in 1982, the centenary of Joyce’s birth, when Irish national radio broadcast a marathon dramatised reading of the whole of Ulysses running some thirty hours, an act of public commemoration that helped fix the day in the national imagination. By the centenary of the fictional day in 2004 — “ReJoyce Dublin 2004” — Bloomsday had become a week-long civic festival, and a free open-air breakfast served that year on O’Connell Street reportedly fed some ten thousand people. What began as a drunken jaunt by a handful of literary Dubliners had become an international institution.

The irony that Dublin should so lavishly celebrate the book is not lost on anyone who knows Joyce’s history with the city. He left Ireland in 1904, the very year the novel is set, and spent the rest of his life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, writing obsessively about a home he would not return to. Ulysses was banned as obscene in the United States until 1934 and was effectively unavailable in Ireland for decades, its author regarded with suspicion by the Catholic establishment he had skewered. That the same city now dresses in Edwardian costume to honour him each June is a reconciliation Joyce did not live to witness.

How It Is Celebrated

The day characteristically begins with a Joycean breakfast, echoing Bloom’s own relish for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls” — grilled kidneys, sausages, and the accompaniments the novel describes. Enthusiasts dress in Edwardian costume, the men in straw boaters and dark suits, the women in long skirts and hats, and gather at sites named in the book: the Martello tower at Sandycove, where the novel opens and which now houses a James Joyce museum; Davy Byrne’s “moral pub” on Duke Street, where Bloom lunches on a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy; Sweny’s Pharmacy on Lincoln Place, where Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap, and which now survives largely as a Joycean shrine selling that same soap. Marathon public readings of the text, sometimes running the whole day and night, are staged in bookshops, theatres and on the street, and dramatised excerpts are performed in the open air.

Beyond Dublin the festival has spread across the world. It is kept in New York, Paris, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Trieste — where Joyce lived for years and taught English — and Szombathely in Hungary, the notional birthplace of Bloom’s father. Devotees hold readings, stage performances and eat gorgonzola sandwiches in dozens of cities, making Bloomsday one of the few literary anniversaries to have become genuinely global.

Fun Facts

The soap that Bloom carries in his pocket through much of the novel, the lemon-scented bar from Sweny’s, is still sold at the shop to visitors on Bloomsday and throughout the year. The novel’s final episode, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, runs to some 22,000 words with almost no punctuation and is often read aloud in its entirety on the day. Nora Barnacle, whose first walk with Joyce the date commemorates, reputedly never read Ulysses all the way through. And the phrase “the ineluctable modality of the visible”, which trips off the tongues of Joyceans on Bloomsday, is Stephen Dedalus’s, delivered as he walks with his eyes shut along Sandymount Strand testing whether the world is still there.

A Closing Reflection

It says something about the reach of a great novel that a made-up Thursday can outlast the real Thursdays around it, and that thousands of people will rise early to eat a fictional man’s breakfast more than a century after he failed to exist. Bloomsday works because Joyce did the near-impossible: he made an ordinary day — no war, no coronation, no catastrophe, just a man buying soap and grieving and going home — feel worth the total attention of art. That is the quiet argument underneath the boaters and the readings, that any single day, examined closely enough, contains everything. Where Shrove Tuesday and Lunar New Year mark thresholds the whole world crosses together, Bloomsday honours the opposite idea — that one obscure life, on one unremarkable date, can be made to hold a universe, if someone only cares to look.