A Day in the Life

Following James Joyce's heroic everyman, the original Modernist Flâneur...

Nota Bene: Happy Bloomsday to one and to all!

As faithful (and unfaithful) readers well know, today – June 16th – marks the annual celebration upon which dedicated Joyceheads base their yearly calendar: The day around which Joyce’s famous everyman and the original Modern Flâneur, Leopold Bloom, traversed his beloved Dublin, turning the storied city into a setting for his classically inspired modernist epic, Ulysses.

A year ago today, your peripatetic correspondent made the pilgrimage to Ireland’s literary capital to fête the 100th anniversary of the publication of Joyce’s magnum opus. What follows is a pithy recounting of that happy occasion, including a smattering of pictures from a couple of the must-visit spots along the way. Please enjoy…

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
~ James Joyce, Ulysses

Joel Bowman, recalling quiet days along the Liffey…

We took a fourth floor walk-up right on the River Liffey, in Dublin’s historic Temple Bar. One bedroom, a sitting area and a closet kitchenette, the space was perfect for our party of three; Dear Daughter, Wifey and Me (a tricolon diminuens in the familial chain of command). 

Besides the bedroom window, a writing table looked down over the ageless waters – long ago named An Ruirthech, meaning “fast (or strong) runner,” but which is sometimes translated, after that poetical Irish fashion, as “the stampeding one.” From my perch in the smoothed wooden chair, watching the river rush beneath the Ha’penny Bridge, I wondered what life was like, one hundred years ago, when Dublin’s favorite son, (on his 40th birthday, no less) saw his epic Ulysses unleashed into a newly Modern world. 

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s epic, a retelling of Homer’s classic tale, in which the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, condenses a decade of heroic, Odyssean adventure into the quotidian, everyman experiences of a single day wandering (dare we say “flâneuring”) Dublin, on June 16, 1904. A funeral, a visit to the chemist, a queer repast at the moral pub; it was through such commonplace moments, a day in the life of Bloom, that Joyce sought to convey something far deeper, omnipresent, even eternal. 

“In the particular,” Joyce famously wrote, “is contained the universal.”

The day itself, known among Joyceheads as Bloomsday, is celebrated every year in Irish pubs, theaters, libraries, book stores and reading rooms around the world, in cities great and small, countries near and not so. 

We had journeyed, long-suffering ladies and I, from the other side of the world, flown from faraway Buenos Aires, to commemorate this special, centennial event in its original setting. We wanted to walk the cobblestone streets, to imbibe the slate gray atmosphere, to hear the musical lilt in the bars and restaurants, to know the heart of the place. We decided to begin our pilgrimage at the heart of the action, Davy Byrne’s “moral pub”…

(“He entered Davy Byrnes. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat, stands a drink now and then. But in a leap year once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.” From Joyce’s Ulysses. Photo Credit: Dear Daughter.) 

Of course, there’s only one thing for the abiding Joycehead to consume in Davy Byrne’s fine establishment… one thing he, in fact, must consume. Call it the “ineluctable modality of the gustable.” 

That is, after the peripatetic Leopold Bloom himself, a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass (ok, we shared a bottle…) of burgundy.

“(A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?” From Joyce’s Ulysses.)

From our merry feast we made our way first to Hodges Figgis & Co., a delightful bookseller located a stone’s pitch from Davy’s moral pub, to purchase a centennial edition of Joyce’s masterwork. (Note the nod to the original color and the gilt display window of a bookstore actually mentioned in the book itself. ¡Que meta!)

(‘She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write.’ From Joyce’s Ulysses.)

Turquoise tome under arm, we ambled along Lienster Street, past the stores and cafés and pubs facing Trinity’s College Park, on to Sweny’s Pharmacy, where Bloom himself purchased for his famous lemon soap and wife Molly’s special lotion. 

(“He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the cool wrapped soap in his left hand.” From Joyce’s Ulysses.)

Boasting the “only intact Victorian shop interior left in the city,” to enter Sweny’s is to take a step back in time, to see the world of Joyce/Bloom as it might have been 100 years ago and more. No longer a trading business, Sweny’s is now (since 2009) a James Joyce Heritage Center, crammed with books and assorted memorabilia, and managed entirely by volunteers. (You can pick up a block of Bloom’s lemon soap – or simply make a donation – at their website, here.)

In pouring Homer’s epic decade into a single, mundane day, and setting in place of that “man of twists and turns” a common, though profoundly “everyman,” Joyce appeared to simultaneously compress and expand both time and space, to peer through the utterly banal and glimpse the universal, to traverse a whole world in a single city, to encapsulate the human condition in all its filth and transcendent glory, and to leave us with a timeless classic that, with each passing Bloomsday, only grows in stature.

“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”

~ James Joyce, Ulysses

Join us again next time for more literary reveries and unhurried strolls around the great cities of the world…

Regards,

Joel Bowman

P.S. As with all things Joycean, the date on which Ulysses is set is significant; it was on June 16, 1904, that Joyce himself “stepped out” with Nora Barnacle, future wife and love of his life, for a stroll around the city. Doff of the straw boater to ol’ Joyce then, a truly modernist flâneur. 

P.P.S. Did you catch our own humble offering to the literary gods earlier this week, dear reader? Our second novel, Night Drew Her Sable Cloak was published earlier this very week. You can grab a hardback copy on The River of No Returns (Amazon), right here…

Or, if you’re inclined to the digital realm, why not become a Modern Flâneur Member here and download BOTH our novels in either PDF or ePUB versions, here…