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16th

June, 2004

S p o t l i g h t

Bloomsday: A Century 

by Pádraig Belton

In some sense, modern literature began a hundred years ago today.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: 

-- Introibo ad altare Dei. 

In the world of text, of Molly Bloom's sensuous, doubting, ultimately affirmingsoliloquy (I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used ), of Stephen Daedalus's monologue walkingalong the beach which stretches in Sandycove from Martello tower to DunLaoghaire (Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more,thought through my eyes), this was the day Stephen and Leopold wanderedthroughout the city Joyce himself had fled (using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning ), enacting a modernOdyssey, and eventually finding one another briefly (and in Bella Cohen'sbrothel) as father-seeking son meeting son-seeking father. In the other, non-textual world, the world of breakfasts made of 'the inner organs of beasts andfowls' and 'grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine', 16 June 1904 was the day when the artist, as a youngman, fell in love with rustic Galway girl Nora Barnacle. And he wouldimmortalise the day for her.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: 

-- Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!  

Joyce is not quite Stephen - the worlds of language and sausages don'tcorrespond quite that neatly - but both come together in places. Daedaluswas, after all, Joyce's early pen name as a student at Clongowes, and in amore real sense, Joyce was the real Daedalus, the architect who created the

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Labyrinth for the minotaur at Crete, and then showed his son Icarus to fly toescape it. After painfully observing his son's death, Daedalus is exiled toSicily - undoubtedly, one supposes, to be the crafter of novels. And as far ashow well the artificer of the century's most intricate, Labyrinthine text didsucceed when he went to 'encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscienceof my race'- well, go this morning to O'Connell Street to see how Joyce'smyth of Dublin has been received by that city's people, and si monumentumrequiris, circumspice.

In the Celtic calendar, there is a day called Samhain when, after oneagricultural cycle has ended in harvest and before the next one has begun,two years are joined together - but imperfectly, and in the crack betweenthem, it was possible to pass between the world of men and the world of theSidhe, the faeries. Bloomsday is such a day, when the world of sausages

and the world of Bloom and Daedalus come together - imperfectly, but for amoment it's somehow more possible to pass between them. And benefitfrom the reconciliation, in the world of faeries, myth, and divine jesuiticalartificers, between Stephen's intellect, Bloom's corporeality, and Molly'ssensuality, and between the father who forever sought a son and the son whoforever sought his father.

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yesI will Yes. 

Is the book really as grand as all that to-do happening in O'Connell Streetthis morning suggests? Oh Yes yes yes it is, yes.

Pádraig Belton is completing a doctorate at Trinity College, Oxford.